Grants Pass Read online

  “It seems obvious from the breadth and speed of the outbreaks that they were also released deliberately, although no terrorist groups have so far claimed responsibility.”

  ****

  Walton Makes Address on California Earthquake

  The Washington Times

  President Walton made an address to the nation early this morning, rallying the public to increase relief efforts across the country.

  In the President’s address, he said the earthquake that hit California yesterday would serve to stiffen the spine of all Americans in their effort to overcome the challenges placed before them.

  “While Los Angeles may not be part of the continental United States any more, the city and its people will live on in the hearts and minds of all Americans, for all time,” the President said.

  “In this darkest of hours, it is our duty to rise up against the massive difficulties placed in our path.”

  The death toll from the earthquake may never be confirmed, but local disaster relief authorities have estimated it in the hundreds of thousands.

  “Most of the city has been flattened. Parts of it are just gone. Just…gone into the ocean. I can’t even begin to describe it,” an unnamed spokesman from the Los Angeles Fire Department said.

  Thankfully, large numbers of the city’s population had already been evacuated in the effort to contain the Super Flu and SVHF outbreaks in the metro area…

  ****

  La Super Influenza

  La Vanguardia

  El Servicio Nacional de la Salud emitió algunas cifras hoy confirmando la muerte del número de muertos producidos por la Super influenza en Barcelona. Esta cifra en Barcelona ha llegado a 100 000.

  El caso inicial en Barcelona se reportó durante los últimos días de la semana pasada.

  La cuota de muertos en Madrid, donde se cree que fue el inicio donde esto comenzó, se reporta en los miles ya.

  Se considera que el virus llegó al país a través del Aeropuerto Internacional de Barajas de Madrid.

  El Rey Felipe ha tomado control, después de que las muertes el Vice-Presidente y del Presidente fueron publicadas.

  ****

  Radio Announcement

  This is the BBC World Service.

  Fighting has broken out across Northern Ireland following the British army’s declaration of a total quarantine yesterday afternoon.

  Elements of the New IRA along with groups of armed civilians attempted to storm army blockades at ports and airports in Derry and Belfast, but military sources say the attacks were turned back.

  The Prime Minister is due to enact further emergency powers tomorrow, which will include full martial law over the British Isles and a suspension of parliament.

  In other news…

  ****

  Invasion du Canada

  Quebec Post

  Tous les contacts ont été perdus avec les stations de control de la frontière de Edmunston ā Cornwell. Le gouvernement a admis que un grand nombre de refuges (lesquels sont armés) ont inondé les frontières.

  La police a calculé que le nombre de refuges ont contribué avec l’épuisement du systēme de la Santé de l’Ámérique avec 1.2 millions.

  L’armée a envoyé 3 bataillons ā la frontière, mais les troupes ne vont pas arriver jusqu'à demain...

  ****

  Radio Announcement

  This is…this is the BBC World Service.

  Following the death of the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and head of the opposition, the Queen has announced the dissolution of parliament, and urged all healthy Britons to co-ordin- [Sound of coughing.] To co-ordinate…

  I can’t do this anymore. God, forgive me. No James, I can’t. Just turn it off.

  [Quiet, rough-voiced singing]

  God save our gracious Queen,

  Long live our noble Queen,

  God save the Queen.

  Send her victorious,

  Happy and glorious,

  Long to reign over us…

  [Coughing.]

  Oh Lucy. Oh Lucy…

  [Broadcast fades out into static].

  ****

  Ham Radio

  “And the Lord spoke unto Moses; say unto Aaron, take thy rod, and stretch out thine hand upon the waters of Egypt, upon their streams, upon their rivers, and upon their ponds, and upon all their pools of water, that they may become blood; and that there may be blood throughout all the land of Egypt.”

  And Aaron did so as the Lord commanded, and so he has done again! The judgement of the Lord has fallen upon this world of sinners, and the unclean shall be washed away; the adulterers, the homosexuals, the heathens, the worshipers of false idols.

  All across this land, the three plagues are performing the will of God as the sword of Azrael. Repent, sinners, for the time of the Lord’s judgement is at hand! For too long you have mocked the word of the Lord. Repent, sinners! The wrath of a vengeful God is upon your backs!

  Reverend Robert Whitlock

  ****

  Radio Announcement

  Todos están muertos.

  Todos están muertos.

  Todos …. En el río.

  Todos están muertos ¿Qué puedo hacer? . ¿Qué puedo hacer?

  Lucía dijo, vamos al norte

  Antes de morir, dijo que deberían ir al norte.

  Hay un pueblo, dijo en el pasado de Grant. La gente iba ahí.

  ¿Hay alguien más vivo?...Por favor… ¿Hay alguien ahí? Por favor.

  The Survivors

  14 months since Kayley’s post…

  An Unkindness of Ravens

  Stephanie Gunn

  Ravens mourn their dead. I didn’t know that, before. I always thought that ravens were solitary animals. I don’t know where I got that idea. Maybe in school. I’ll never get to find out now. Now, there is no school, no New York, no world.

  Now all I hear is the mourning song of the ravens, and in my head is the line from Poe’s poem: Quoth the raven, nevermore.

  Back in June, when it started, we thought they were just aberrations, the effects of global warming. The hurricanes, the droughts. The earth gone crazy. But then the plagues came, the Black Death, the hemorrhagic fever. And then the super flu. Rob told us that it was the end of days, thrusting a moldy New Age tome in our faces. We laughed at him, of course.

  We stopped laughing when the plagues hit New York.

  This is my city, for all that I was born on the other side of the country. I came here ten years ago, drawn by Broadway, the television shows and movies. I was going to be a model, an actress, a star.

  I think you can guess where I ended up, even if you can’t see my thigh-high boots and miniskirts.

  I’m not ashamed of it. I made good money, sharing an apartment in a good building with another one of Rob’s girls, Renee. Life was easy.

  I was working the night it started here. A Japanese businessman. He’d been a customer of Renee’s, but she had called in sick. I’d been happy to step in for her, borrowing one of her Versace gowns for the night.

  The dress had been discarded on the floor, the champagne popped when he started to cough. This deep, rasping cough that went on and on until he was coughing ropey strands of mucus and blood.

  It was at this point that I blanked out. It’s something I’ve done for as long as I can remember. When I’m with a particularly repulsive client, my brain just switches off, and I go through the motions on autopilot.

  When I came back to myself it was to find the bed littered with the pillaged remains of the mini-bar. Even the chocolate bars had fallen prey, and a crumpled cigarette packet was on the nightstand, for all that I had given up years ago.

  It seems so insane now that I thought that renewed habit was the worst of my problems.

  I returned home to find Renee gone, and Rob seated in the living room. I had blanked out again on the trip, but found myself unlocking the door with a bottle of bourbon and carton of cigarettes under one arm.

  Rob fixed me with bleary eyes
as I entered. “Renee’s dead,” he said, his voice flat.

  I dropped the bottle of bourbon, the cigarettes following to splash into the puddle. “What?”

  He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “It was the flu. Just the flu,” he said. “But, at the hospital, there were people everywhere. With the flu. Dying from the flu. There were bodies in the corridor, on the lawn out front.”

  I pulled the cigarettes from the bourbon puddle. “People don’t die from the flu.”

  He strode across the room and seized my arms. “They do from this flu,” he said, his eyes wild. “People are dying. There are corpses out in the street. They’re dying of the flu.” His fingers tightened on me hard enough to bruise. “The goddamn flu.”

  He began to cough.

  That’s when I tuned out again. I don’t know how much time passed in that fugue state, but I know that when I came back to myself again, Rob was dead. It must have been days. He lay on Renee’s bed, fetid fluids staining the silk coverlet. His eyes were still open, bloodshot and staring.

  That’s when I got really scared. I ran from the apartment to the elevators, and punched the button hard enough to crack the plastic face. The first doors to open revealed a group of elderly people clustered on the floor of the cab, all dead. A rat was gnawing leisurely on the neck of the closest woman, whiskers beaded with blood.

  My stomach heaved, but nothing came up but thin, acrid bile that tasted of ash. Thankfully, the next elevator was empty.

  The electricity flickered halfway to the street, bringing the elevator to a screeching halt. It swayed from side to side in the shaft, metal clanging on metal like the ringing of a church bell. After a long moment it started again, shuddering its way down.

  The lobby of the building was empty, but someone had covered the walls with hundreds of pages of paper. When I moved closer, I saw that each page was identical. As I took one down, the electricity flickered again, the hole I had created suddenly an abyss. I turned and fled from the building, holding the paper like a talisman.

  The area immediately outside was empty, a small pool of captured sunlight; the warmth baking into my shoulders bared by the thin straps of the tank top I wore. I was also wearing an ancient pair of jeans, the fabric little more than threads at the knees. On my feet were Renee’s black stiletto Gucci heels.

  The paper I had taken from the lobby wall was crammed with tiny print. Several pieces were on the flu, as well as newspaper clippings on the plagues worldwide. At the bottom was a journal article, written by a girl named Kayley the previous May. In it she outlined a sketchy plan to meet in Grants Pass if the end of the world ever eventuated.

  I folded the paper carefully and tucked it into the pocket of my jeans. It was then that I noticed the complete and utter silence.

  For me, New York has always meant noise. The ever-present music of traffic, yelling voices, the thump of bass from the clubs. Today, there was none of that. Just the eerie, flat silence that crowded at my ears, pressing against the hollow of my throat, close as a lover.

  I ran then, heedless of the stiff leather scraping at my heels, the screaming of my calf muscles. I blanked in and out as I ran.

  Lines of cabs still neatly parked in their lanes as though waiting for a change of lights, their drivers still behind the wheel, faces swollen with the putrid gases of death.

  Black.

  A woman sprawled on the sidewalk, her hands reaching out for a nearby newspaper stand, now empty. Her fingers were heavy with gold rings; her lacquered nails the color of blood.

  Black.

  A group of children huddled around the still form of a dog. Their limbs were locked over the matted fur, stiff and blue. I tried not to see the ragged holes in the dog’s sides where the children’s teeth had been.

  Black. Black. Black.

  I stopped at an abandoned newsstand and helped myself to a chocolate bar, digging change out of my pocket to leave on the counter. No newspapers were left. I walked down the street, looking upwards at the buildings to try to orient myself. I didn’t want to look down at the sidewalk or street anymore. When my feet nudged against something solid, I felt my way around without looking. I focused instead on the taste of the chocolate, the rich creamy sweetness. It was warm, half melting in the packet.

  It hit me then that it was summer; that the dead would putrefy rapidly in the heat. Suddenly the chocolate tasted rancid, and I tossed it away half eaten in a trashcan.

  My sense of direction clicked in then. I was only a few blocks away from Central Park. I walked them quickly, eager for the refuge of the park. I passed a hot dog vendor on the way. A hot dog, complete with mustard and ketchup, sat on top of the stand. Next to the food, a large black bird eyed me before dipping its beak to the sausage, tearing away a shred of pink, gristly meat. I shooed the bird and took a bottle of water from the cart. I didn’t leave any change this time.

  Strangely, the park was almost empty. I passed only a few corpses, splayed out as though sunbathing. Their eyes had dried to opalescent pools in the bright sunlight, lending them the aspect of surprise, as though death had snuck up behind them. Gotcha.

  I swigged from the already warm water as I walked, feeling a thin sweat break out on my forehead. The sky above was completely clear, a gorgeous summer day. A month ago, there would have been dozens of people sunbathing here.

  I came across another of the black birds after a few more minutes of walking. This one was perched on a small rise in the lawn, gazing steadily at me as I approached. It didn’t move when I moved close, not even when I attempted to shoo it. When I looked over the rise, I saw why.

  They were a family, united by rigor mortis into a single unit. The baby was wearing denim overalls, unsexed. The father was dressed in full army regalia, camouflage useless against death. Letters embroidered on his breast spelled his name: Brown. Their eyes were all gone, ragged crimson holes left in their place.

  It hit me like a soft blow to the midsection, standing there looking down at the Browns. This was it. The world was at an end, and I was left, somehow immune to the plagues. And except for the bird still staring at me, I was alone.

  I lay down on the grass next to Mrs. Brown, curled an arm around her waist. Her flesh was hard beneath my touch, feeling more like stone than muscle and skin. I closed my eyes. Prayed the lord my soul to take.

  When I woke again, the air was cooler, the sun a dim orange eye sinking beneath the buildings. The bird was still there, watching. But now it had been joined by three others, all arrayed in a neat line along the ridge, all gazing down on me. Were they ravens? Crows? I didn’t recall ever seeing anything but the ubiquitous pigeons in the park before. The pigeons were all gone, leaving only these black birds. The lines from Poe’s poem rolled through my head, and I knew. They were ravens.

  A series of shots echoed across the park, unnaturally loud in the stillness. I scrambled to my feet and was running towards the sound when another volley of shots sounded. I didn’t care if it was a madman. It was someone alive.

  I found him near the edge of the park, blood still pumping in arcs from the hideous wound that had consumed most of his face. Surrounding him were at least a dozen ravens, all dead. The closest was still bleeding, its thick blood blending with that of its murderer.

  As I watched, a group of ravens spiraled down from the sky to form a circle around the fallen birds. As one, they began to vocalize, the noises coming from their throats rising and falling like song. Were they mourning?

  “A group of them is called an unkindness,” a voice said from behind me.

  I whirled around, blood hammering in my ears. Sitting on a park bench was a man who appeared kin to the mourning birds. His hair was long, as black and glossy as their feathers. He had skin paler than anyone I had ever seen, tracings of blue veins mapping his life. His eyes were fixed on me as intently as the raven’s had been, a deep sapphire; the color of the sky at dusk.

  He lifted himself off the bench with a dangerous, feral grace, his steps eating up t
he distance between us with disconcerting rapidity. He was wearing brand new combat boots and a pair of black jeans slung low on his slim hips. His chest was bare but for a tattoo, its ink faded, obscuring what it had originally been.

  “He was going around shooting the ravens,” he said, gesturing to the corpse in the middle of the circle of mourning birds. “He must have reached his target or something, because he turned his gun on himself.” He slipped through the ravens, who shifted slightly to allow him passage, though they didn’t break their song. He knelt down and began to pry the gun from the dead man’s fingers.

  “You can’t do that!” I protested.

  He worked the gun free and wiped it on the man’s shirt, tucking it into his waistband before pillaging the corpse’s pockets for ammunition. “Why not? He doesn’t need it anymore.” He slipped back through the circle of ravens again. “There’s no law that says only the good guys survived.”

  I found that I couldn’t look away from the gun, this murder pressed against his pale flesh. “Have you seen anyone else alive?” I asked.

  He shrugged, muscles sliding smoothly under his skin. “There was a baby in the building I was in, crying. But the door to the apartment was locked and reinforced, and I couldn’t break in.” He was quiet for a moment, rubbing his fingers against the stubble on his chin. “There must be others, but I haven’t seen them.”

  His accent was strange to my ears. “Where are you from?”

  His lips curved in a half-smile. “That obvious, is it?” He laughed. It was a harsh noise when juxtaposed against the song of the still-mourning ravens. “I’m Australian. I saved up my money for a few years to be able to come here. I’m a songwriter, thought I could make it here.”