Chapter 1: A Couple Days on the Farm

"This is Radio Scott, back on the air after a brief absence of ... well, it's been a while. We have no idea if anyone is listening, but we'll try to broadcast at our previous times. Since we were the only broadcaster before, we doubt there's anyone else out there able to transmit. As you've no doubt guessed, the plague, or more accurately 'plagues' which we've taken to collectively calling 'The Great Death', have devastated the country and, we assume, the entire world.

As far as we can tell it's struck most animal species. We've got dead animals of all sorts around here, and of the farm animals we'd picked up to last us through the winter, all that's left are two chickens, both hens. The only other critter that survived was a single wild rabbit, and luckily it's pregnant. It's not much to start restocking with, but it's a start. We can't eat them since they'll become breeding stock, assuming we can find any more, and we won't eat any eggs until we're sure they aren't sick, but we consider ourselves lucky to have even that much.

It's also reached into the plant world, but only affecting certain species. The pine trees that the modern world has come to rely on are mostly gone at this point. What's more, it seems the soft wood trees were more heavily damaged. I don't know whether it's safe to burn these dead trees or not, so be careful using them.

Weeds seem to have had no problem as our property already needs a lot of work, but we can only assume that certain types have survived while others haven't. Grasses have done well, so any animals that have survived should be able to fend for themselves. We're assuming that most carnivores have been wiped out, since they have likely been feeding on the diseased carcasses. Again, we'll have to determine which farm plants have survived. For now, be cautious of fruits you find on the vine, and try to focus on vegetables that grow underground, like potatoes, carrots and beets.

We have no reports of the world yet, and haven't even managed to explore our own town, so if you have access to a ham radio, please call us so we can report on what's happened. We plan on conducting some surveys to see what's survived and what hasn't, so we'll be focusing on that for the next few broadcasts.

For those of you who don't know, it appears the plagues were caused by the meteor storm we suffered a few ... a short time ago. It seems they were from some planet with a healthy aquatic environment, which we imagine was destroyed by a cataclysmic event, freezing solid when exposed to the near absolute cold of outer space and preserving the microbial life forms. When they entered the Earth's atmosphere, these ice balls broke free from the meteoroids, rapidly melting and releasing the alien life into our air.

Since these microbes were alien to our planet it took them time to adjust, and we can only imagine that the vast majority of them died, but those that survived proved to be very robust. As they struggled to adapt to the Earth's environment, they learned how to acclimate to whatever life form they encountered, and each time they crossed species they became stronger and more adaptable.

We personally counted four separate diseases that we could identify from the symptoms alone, and we know that there were at least two that were detected in various labs. However there were probably more, as viruses can't be detected without an electron microscope, which are not readily available.

If you've survived the sicknesses you still need to be careful, as you've likely only survived a single strain. You'll also need to start preparing for what's going to come next. It looks like the vaporized meteors produced a significant cooling, so we're preparing for a very extreme winter. You'll need to harvest any leftover crops you can find, canning, drying or preparing them so they'll last – not just this coming year, but for the next several years after that.

Anyone that has access to seeds, surviving livestock or foodstuffs, be cautious with it, but don't hoard it either. We need to survive, and we'll need each other if we're going to do that. For now, assume we have a barter economy. Find anything useful you can, and be prepared to trade a portion of it either for other items or for goodwill.

What's more, let's try not to kill each other, folks. We realize you'll need to arm yourselves for protection, but try not to hurt anyone if you can avoid it. Each person you shoot is one more survivor you cut out of the gene pool we'll need for humanity to recover. However, like animals that have learned to feed on man, you need to treat anyone who kills other humans as a future danger both to yourself and to other survivors. Don't let anyone you capture attacking innocent people walk away to do it again. Theft can be forgiven, as it can help those without options survive, but murder is punishable by death.

That's all for now. We hope to have more information after we explore a little more. We'll also begin adding details on how to prepare for the coming winter. We'll try to broadcast every day at the same time on this same station, channel 100.0, so we'll be easy to locate. If you want to reach us, try using the Ham radio Citizen's band frequency of 27.005 MHz immediately after our FM broadcasts finish for best results. We'll monitor the radio at other times, but that's the best time to reach us.

Tune in again for our six PM broadcast, and stay safe."

After finishing her broadcast, Alice sat back and considered everything that had led up to the present. It had been a very hard several weeks. What had started out as a simple weekend trip to spend the weekend with her father at his country house had turned disastrous when a meteor storm started up, wiping out nearly everything in its path before continuing on, sweeping westward and affecting most of the world.

It had wiped out the communication satellites in outer space, slowing most communications. The meteors that fell on the Earth, while uniformly small, effectively wiped out the exposed power and communications networks of the entire world. Any wire, telephone pole, relay station or transformer exposed were likely to have been hit somewhere along the line, and the entire country lost both its communications and electricity at the same time. All the single points of failure the interconnected modern world had developed, all managed to fail at the same time. While it could recover from any single failure, it couldn't cope with that many occurring at once.

While the deaths from the initial storm seemed modest, mainly because no one ever got any official reports of the dead, the troubles the meteors caused were widespread. They damaged cars, buildings and infrastructure indiscriminately, leaving useless hulks of abandoned cars lying across the roads, while the many potholes created by tiny meteors rendered most of the roads impassable. There had been reports of widespread fires in the dry areas to the west, but it had rained enough locally to prevent that particular problem.

As the power companies got to work trying to reestablish electricity, most of the rest of society simply fell apart. People were willing to work, but their inability to get there kept most places closed, and the lack of electricity meant they couldn't do anything even if they did make it in. City and State workers mostly refused to work without guarantees that they were going to be paid, and that belief seemed justified, as most governmental agencies simply stopped functioning. Private businesses, with most of their employees unable to reach work, simply shut down until conditions improved.

No word was heard from the Federal government in DC for a couple of weeks, and the few people that came to work found themselves without much to do. Instead, David and the people he'd managed to collect around him began taking on the roles the government had previously played in maintaining order in the surrounding community.

The federal government finally revealed what had happened to it. It seems the President and most of the leading governmental elite still remaining in DC had flown directly into the path of the storm and had all been killed. Trying to cobble together a functioning government, they picked a relatively minor official who was terrified of the job ahead of him, so he relied on another minor Pentagon official, who led him to institute martial law, closing the banks and establishing restrictions meant to preserve their delicate hold on power rather than trying to help anyone. That had ultimately resulted in armed attacks by the military against nearby cities that had only ended when a surviving nuclear sub had shown up in DC and lobbed a few well-placed rounds near the Pentagon.

The efforts to restore power also failed as several unexplained diseases began cropping up, wiping out the few people willing to work, and plant after plant ended up either closing down or failing due to damages suffered earlier.

Riots broke out in many communities over food shortages, but most people were pretty reasonable about it, assuming that someone would set everything right if they waited long enough. However, as more people got sick and help never arrived, that positive outlook soon turned sour.

They'd finally figured out that the meteors contained multiple minute life forms – both microbial and viral – trapped in the frozen water surrounding them. As they entered the atmosphere the ice broke off, melting from the heat of reentry, releasing the alien microbial life into the atmosphere. It was assumed the vast majority of those alien life forms died out, but the few which survived had actually thrived.

It took several weeks, but once they found hosts to support them, there were no preexisting defense mechanisms to resist them. Several different diseases became endemic, even though most doctors couldn't differentiate them. What's more, as devastating as the diseases were, they rapidly mutated, crossing inter-species barriers quickly and easily, crossing from humans to deer to other animals.

Alice and David Scott, along with the people they gathered around them, had fared better than most. Thanks to David's attention to detail in building his little hideaway tucked into the side of a mountain, it had escaped physical damage. They'd maintained their electricity thanks to a wind turbine on top of the hill over their heads, and their elevation and remoteness kept the spreading plagues away from their door.

However, those benefits proved short lived. The diseases arrived with additional people, and they surmised the sources of the diseases were now airborne as well, meaning that there was no way to avoid them. Everyone in the house had gotten sick, one by one, with the death rate rising as the diseases had time to adapt; acting faster and killing quicker.

Both Alice and her father had thought they were the last to die, but they'd managed to awaken an untold amount of time later, exhausted, famished, dehydrated and weak. They didn't know why they'd been spared when no one else had, but David was sure it was due to some genetic fluke giving them an edge that no one else had seemed to enjoy.

Now they appeared to be alone in the world, and David had announced his plans to try to find anyone else still alive, and to help them adapt to the continuing complications he saw rapidly approaching as most of the conveniences of modern life had been stripped, and it looked like the weather was going to turn much colder due to the soot the burning meteors had left in the atmosphere.

There was one thing that Alice was sure of, even given how horrible things had gotten. She was glad her father had been one of the survivors, because if anyone could figure out how to survive, it would be him.

"Keep your rifle handy," David reminded his daughter, Alice, as they climbed out of their SUV at the Jacob's farm, one of the local farms that grew produce for the local market. Since they weren't large enough to sell their goods to the larger produce dealers, they instead specialized in growing organic crops. David wasn't as interested in that at the moment, instead he wanted to know what crops survived the Great Death that had killed everyone off. What's more, he wanted to save any unharvested plants that might otherwise rot on the ground.

"I'm pretty sure the plague killed off most of the carnivores, since anything that feeds on dead or sick animals has likely died, but that still leaves plenty of omnivores that may react strangely after what they've experienced lately."

"Yeah, like the way humans have been responding the last ... since we last ventured out," Alice responded, not wanting to recount what had happened during their last conflict with others. Having lost both her mother and best friend to those conflicts they still unnerved her, even though she felt prepared for whatever they encountered.

They watched their surroundings as they approached. About all they could see on the way in was that the corn crops looked to have been decimated, but that was about all they could observe easily. What they did notice though, was just how quiet everything was. Despite the sound of the leaves blowing in the gentle wind, there were no other sounds. No children playing, no birds singing, no trucks passing on the nearby road, no jets passing overhead. Instead an eerie silence hung ever everything, accentuated by the isolated sounds of the breeze, calling out just how silent the world they were in now really was. There was no way to mistake just how alone they were.

"Martha, James!" David called out, wanting to warn the owners before they showed up bearing guns. However he received no response in return, and the stark contrast between David's yell and the silence around them struck them as overly harsh, causing them both to recoil hearing it.

"Dad, if the carnivores are dead, won't that screw up the ecosystem?" Alice asked, filling in the renewed silence following her father's inquiry.

"Yeah, it will, honey. While it will allow the other animals to recover more quickly, there won't be anything to prevent them from quickly overpopulating the environment. In a few years things are going to be nuts."

"Yeah, like they're perfectly normal now," Alice smirked.

They'd reached the door by then, so they halted their conversation while David loudly knocked on the door. When no one responded he tried the door. Finding it open, he entered and they split up, checking out the house. David took the upstairs, where he knew the bedrooms were, while Alice took the downstairs where she could check on the kitchen supplies.

Entering the master bedroom, David took in the silent silhouette lying in the bed, surrounded by the frozen tableau undisturbed by the passage of time. There was a layer of dust over everything, but nothing else had been disturbed for some time. When he peeled back the twisted covers, he discovered the long dead form of Martha Jacob, and he assumed she must have already buried James before she succumbed. Since she'd been lying in their bed for so long, he knew they'd have to carry her and the bed out, disposing of it after they buried the body.

"Dad, James is down here in the den," Alice called out.

"OK, Martha's up here. I'll come down and help you get James out, then we'll come back for Martha."

While it was obvious that Martha had died from the Great Death, looking gaunt and bearing the telltale pox on her flesh, James didn't bear the obvious signs of it. He still had the marks of the disease on his flesh, but it didn't look like it had progressed as far. So David guessed that the strain of the disease had set off his heart problems, saving him the agonizing end that eventually took his wife. However they could both imagine her waiting for him, crying out in her pain for him to return to comfort her in her last hours. There was no escaping it, no matter how dispassionately you attempted to handle such scenes, each one made your heart ache.

It took a while, but they got the two bodies out, and David managed to start up one of the Jacob's tractors to dig a quick pit to bury the bodies in. They did so, and stood silently over their makeshift grave without saying anything, Alice simply crossing herself. Neither thought anything they could say would make much of a difference. However that wasn't it for the bodies yet.

There were three dead cats inside the house they buried with the owners of the farm, but after that they went to check on the various farm animals. This farm kept chickens, a few pigs and a couple of lambs. What they found was anything but encouraging. The Jacob's family dogs were found dead in the garage, and another was found under the house where it had apparently curled up to die. The henhouse looked like it had been decimated, with dead chickens everywhere. They didn't know how long the eggs had been unprotected, so they chucked all of them as well.

"Dad, I think I've found something here," Alice announced as she worked her way through the pile of dead chickens, handing them to her father who dumped them into the wheelbarrow they were using to carry them to the burial pit.

Curious, David looked over Alice's shoulder. There, covered by other chicken carcasses, lay a feeble, thin, disheveled rooster which twitched pathetically.

"Lift it carefully, the Jacob's water is off due to their lack of electricity, but I'll give it some water from my bottle," he told Alice.

As Alice lifted the poor animal up, David dribbled a few drops of water into the animal's beak, which it seemed to try desperately to swallow. He maintained a very slow trickle of water, only allowing it to access a small amount at a time, and it seemed to calm somewhat as it got the water it desired.

"It still feels hot," Alice observed.

"It's probably still infected," David observed. "It may or may not live as a result, but at least this will give it a chance. If we take it with us we'll have to keep it separated from the other animals, since we don't want to contaminate the others, but any animals we can save would make a lot of difference."

"It doesn't seem that hot. I think it still has a fever, but I suspect it's already over the worst."

"It would be a major coup if you're right. Since we already have two hens, this will allow us to potentially breed some plague resistant chickens. Let's see if we can find a box to put it in. It's still sick enough we don't have to worry about it getting out, and that will help ensure it doesn't contaminate the car seats."

Even though he tried to prepare Alice for the worst, David knew that if the animal was strong enough to move around and respond on its own that it was probably already mostly recovered. The same thing had happened to both Alice and him, and he knew the fever would pass in only a short time.

Once they got the rooster settled, Alice wandered off, finding some chicken feed which it ate, even though it couldn't manage much. She finally left it in the truck, returning to her father.

After cleaning out the chicken coop, they removed the three dead lambs and then examined the pigs, which were a bigger problem since they were too heavy to easily lift into the wheelbarrow. The farm clearly had some tackle for lifting the large animals, but David, being unfamiliar with the equipment, was unsure how to maneuver it to where the animals had died. Out of desperation, David finally tied a chain to the tractor and dragged the animals one by one to the burial pit.

He'd gotten the first two out of the way, and Alice was trying to get the others ready before David returned, when she noticed a small plaintive cry. Looking around, she finally located the source of the call coming from under the body of a mid-sized pig carcass. Grabbing a spare two-by-four, she shifted one animal while probing under it until she found a small piglet. Its calls had been hidden by its larger brethren and its call were so weak it hardly sounded like a piggish grunt, sounding more like a cat's plaintive cry.

Alice managed to get the animal loose with some work. It was, as expected, not in very good shape. It too looked scrawny, weak and exhausted, bearing the tell-tale sunken look of something too weak to either eat or drink for several long days. Following her father's lead, she used her own water bottle to dribble small amounts of water into its mouth, then when it began responding she started pouring a small but constant stream into its mouth, which it hungrily lapped up.

"What do you have there?" David asked when he returned to find her cradling something in her arms.

"It's a baby pig. Somehow it survived all this time under its mother. It's weak but it's responding. I'll need to find something for it to eat. It may be old enough to eat solid foods, but milk would be the best thing for it."

"That may be, but there's no way for us to lay our hands on any. We froze several cartons of it at home to last us, but we didn't think about bringing any here. I'll check inside. It's possible they may have some canned condensed milk inside which may have survived, but even that's going to be a stretch. Frankly, anything you can get it to eat would help."

"This one doesn't seem to have a fever, and it also doesn't have the convulsions the rooster had. I think it's a survivor like us."

"You know, for finding only two survivors, that's actually incredibly lucky. Considering how many people have died, we were lucky to have found any animals surviving here."

"Still, as we've seen, they get awfully big. Do we have enough food to raise one, especially if there's no hope of finding it a mate eventually?" Alice asked plaintively, not asking the obvious question aloud.

"If nothing else, we can always eat it later if we need to, but right now any animals we can save, we should, just because it makes sense to try to save as much life as we can. Again, these animals potentially represent those that have beaten the odds, so they may provide a weapon to producing resistance in other animals. It's worth taking care of. After all, they can eat our scraps. That's how farmers used to feed them years ago, and it looks like the Jacobs left plenty of pig chow behind as well. If you can feed it some kind of mush it should be fine."

"I think I'll call this one Jacob," Alice decided. "And it's only partly because we found them on the Jacobs' farm. We're laying out the future of his species in his lap, just as God laid out Jacob's people's future before him in the Old Testament. I think I'll call the rooster Lucky, for obvious reasons."

"Yeah, I just hope he's lucky enough to earn the name," David commented, noticing the smaller animal was female as Alice continued to treat it. "You do realize that naming animals isn't the best thing in the world if we aren't keeping them as pets. If we end up having to eat them, it could prove traumatic if you've grown too attached to them."

"But I thought you just said we were trying to save these animals for the future of their species?" Alice asked, confused by his contradictory comments.

"I'm just keeping our options open. If we can, we'll try to keep them alive, but it's very possible these are too sick, and Lucky might not live long even under the best of circumstances. If things get tough for us in terms of finding food, we may have to decide on saving ourselves rather than trying to preserve pigs that may not have survived elsewhere."

"Oh, then I guess I'll be OK. I mean, after what we've been through, I can understand what's necessary for survival. But if it's all the same to you, I think I'll keep the names. It makes me work harder to keep them going if I can think of them as individuals rather than just two animals."

"OK, you'd better lay it down and give it some of that feed while I get busy getting rid of the rest of these. I'm still anxious to check on how the plants here have survived."

What he found when they managed to get out and examine them was better than they'd expected. As they'd observed on the way in, the corn had been wiped out, apparently having been infected by a variant of the plagues which seemed to demonstrate the diseases were actually viruses, attacking the victim species' DNA. "By cracking the DNA, it's easier for it to cross from one species to another, but because the plants are so different from animals, it's still a harder barrier to cross," David explained to his daughter.

"So why do you think it only affected the corn?"

"I really don't know. Maybe it has to do with the way it transmits material to its cells, maybe it's due to how plants accepts outside elements, relying on bees and other airborne pollen to fertilize it, or it could be something else entirely. Frankly, we should probably burn the entire field to prevent this crop from cross infecting anything else, but I don't trust lighting such a large source of dry material. It could easily get away from us.

"Besides, burning it would pass the infected material to every other plant nearby. What we need is to pick each infected plant and bury it in a separate refuse area where it won't infect anything else, but we simply don't have the time or manpower for that."

"I suspect anything it would infect has already been infected," Alice suggested. "Have you noticed how there are no insects around? Not only the buzzing insects like gnats and mosquitoes, either. I tried examining the ground looking for any signs of them, but I can hardly find anything. What do you think happened to them?"

"I don't know. They serve a vital niche in the Earth's ecosystem, as they generally recycle the dead, thus I'd assume they were more directly exposed to the viruses than other animals, just as the carnivores were."

"I've noticed certain weeds seem to have died out, and one of the plants from their private garden, though I'm not sure what it was," Alice observed. "I bagged it so we can identify it later. But otherwise not much was affected. So what do we do about all these plants?"

"Well, we need to maintain them and store as much as we can. However, since we can't easily take over the farm, our best bet is to take cuttings to try to grow them in our own garden and greenhouse. We'll also have to try to find any seeds they had that we can use in the future. While I hate to take everything on the off chance anyone else survived and needs something to eat, we should take as much as what's already ripe so it doesn't go to waste. Likewise, we should take the seeds with us to ensure they're saved. If someone else were to come in and lay claim here, they may not know enough to save them."

"Couldn't we just let the spinach die out?" Alice asked playfully. "Personally, I could stand a life without that vile plant."

"Nope, the more things we have in the future, the better it will be for everything. Even if we choose not to eat it, it's still better for other animals to eat. Why don't you search for the seeds in the house while I start taking a series of cuttings. When you're done, you can start picking any ripe fruits or vegetables we can use. This is turning into a much bigger project than I'd planned, and we're already going to be getting home late."

The trip back, like the trip out, was interesting. The streets were unoccupied, but that doesn't mean they were empty. Surprisingly, the streets no longer contained the many dead bodies stacked along the curb, which David attributed to the fact that people had probably been too sick to deposit anyone else on the streets. As for the people falling over on the side of the road, he figured that people had been too sick to venture out, no matter how dire their situations were.

What there were, though, were hundreds of animal carcasses. Birds seemingly dropped from the sky, mice and rats fled their underground lairs for unknowable reasons to die on the streets. There were also the occasional woodland animals, seeing as they were in a fairly remote region. David doubted they'd have been as likely to venture into the heavily populated and well-travelled areas. Still, there were plenty of small animal carcasses.

David and Alice picked up what they could of these animals, but they realized they couldn't spend all their time doing it, as there were simply too many. They'd get what they could, but it would take a long time before they'd get the region cleared of them.

David stopped by the police station once again, even though they'd stopped by on the way out, on the off chance they might find some sign of someone, but they didn't see anyone. The door was firmly locked, showing that no one had died inside, instead choosing to close up when they'd finally abandoned it, but that left no clue whether they'd survived or not. David scrawled a note and stuck it to the door.

If anyone is alive, contact me.

David

P.S. I'll be by periodically, so if you don't know where I am, just leave a note here.

After that he checked around back. There weren't any new burial pits dug, even though both the tractor and the pickup the boys had used to collect bodies remained there.

"You know, we can at least pick up the dead animals from here, making it look a little more hospitable," he suggested. "If anyone passes by and sees that it's been taken care of, they'll be more likely to investigate. That is, if anyone happens by."