the hell out of here. I’m going where I’ll be safe.” But where will you be safe? Go north, your instincts tell you. “America will help me. They’ve got the best medicines. The best health care. Go north.”
And did they go north?
You bet.
What must have been three quarters of the fucking entire South American continent walked out of their houses and headed north. You can imagine millions choking roads in cars, buses and tractors as they drive northward. Jesus, just look through your mind’s eye. People who are desperate with terror get hungry and thirsty and tired. Cars break down. They beg lifts. They steal cars. They kill the people in the next car for a bag of apples because they’re so hungry. Highways turn into stinking mortuaries with thousands of corpses rotting at the roadside. Flies swarm so thick in the air they become a black fog through which car lights can’t penetrate.
Flies. Shit-filled ditches. Corpses going rotten in the sun. What does that spread?
Disease.
What do the people infected with Gantose fear?
Disease!
So in terror they move faster. They infect country after country as these refugees pour north.
As I said earlier, Nature likes to play tricks. Remember years ago, when there was that panic about a flesh eating tropical disease? And how scientists said it would rampage across the world? Then (red faces all around) they realized it couldn’t spread naturally outside the tropics. Well, the Gantose bug wound up being cut from the same cloth.
The plague ran northward like a tidal wave. Then north of the Panama Canal when you hit the drier territories of Mexico suddenly there were no new cases. OK, so a few people came down with it, but these had contracted the disease in places like Brazil and Peru. They’d incubated the disease as they’d grabbed a flight north. What’s more, they didn’t infect Mexicans. Those South Americans who reached the States, even though they went down with the screaming meanies whenever they saw a hospital or an ambulance, didn’t pass the bug on to a single American.
There was a race issue here. One prominent medical expert announced that it was all a question of blood. That most of the South American population had a little native Indian blood in them; maybe a dash of Inca or Aztec, I don’t know. This professor guy was frozen out of his university post pretty quickly. But there were many who believed him. They used it as an excuse to exclude anyone with a Hispanic face from restaurants and bars. Even those whose grandparents were born here.
The bottom line was that all those months ago the disease appeared to have run out of gas. Those infected with Gantose even stopped going into a mindless panic when someone sneezed across the street. But you can’t dum p hell knows how many million people into Mexico without the place exploding at the seams. Massive global aid programs worked for a while, but there were still too many people to feed. Distribution networks collapsed. Even though grain piled mountain high at ports it didn’t reach the refugees deeper inland. Hunger drove them farther north, as far as the U.S. border with its walls and fences to keep illegal immigrants out. There, as the saying goes, the irresistible force met the immovable object.
Here’s another cutting. It contains an interview with one of the American patrol guards on the Mexican border the day of the Breakout. “It’s all gone to hell. But how can you stop them? There must have been a million men, women and children. And there were kids holding babies in their arms.” The harrowing memories were enough to render the man’sface ugly, and he’d just lit his third cigarette in the ten minutes I’d been speaking with him. “They tore the border fence apart with their bare hands… I mean, what am I supposed to do? Shoot them? Shoot kids and babies, for Chrissakes. All we could do was climb on top of our cruiser as they came by. They weren’t people; they were a whole flood. So we just hung on to the roof light and watched them pour by.”
The flood that engulfed America began that dry-asa-bone May morning. “Refugees sometimes turn into invading armies,” prophesied one commentator, but millions of Americans contributed food parcels and volunteered to help avert a humanitarian disaster. We, as a nation, labored to do the right thing.
Soon every state accepted a given number of refugees. And that flood kept coming. Empty hostels, hotels, army camps, redundant cruise liners were crammed to capacity. You could visit your local supermarket one day, everything normal. The next day you drove into the parking lot and there’d be five hundred Brazilians living in a shanty town of cardboard boxes. It got like that in the city parks. Tents made of sticks and carrier bags became home to millions nationwide. Of course they were all hungry. They all needed clean water. Medicines. Clothes. Shoes. And, goddam, we did do the right thing. We did our best to feed them. But there were too many. These half-starved bastards-and I don’t mean that in an insulting way, believe me-filled the streets begging for food. They weren’t violent or intimidating or anything. Of course, hardly any spoke English, and it seemed the only word they did learn was bread. So you’d walk downtown and there would be beautiful young Brazilian women or Mexican women (helluva lot of Mexicans seemed to get carried with the northward flow) and they’re all holding out their hands; they’ve got beautiful brown eyes that overflow with pleading, and they’re all saying one word as you pass:
“Bread.”
“Bread.”
“Bread.”
You might give them every penny in your pocket and still know you hadn’t done enough. Because between you and Blockbuster, or Barnes amp; Noble, or McDonald’s, or wherever the fuck you were going, is another ten thousand people all saying this one stupid word as you pass. Bread, bread, bread, bread…
And you find you start getting angry with them, because deep down you’re angry with yourself. It’s human nature to help a person who comes to you for help. Only you can’t do it. You can’t help them all. And this one word comes in a soft pulsing chant as you walk on by.
Bread
Bread
Bread
Bread-bread-bread-bread-bread-bread…
As one refugee stops saying it the next starts. Bread, bread, bread…
Shit. After that you couldn’t swallow a piece of bread without it sticking in your throat like a stone.
It wasn’t long before the people from South of the Border who became our sudden guests got a new name. Forget refugees. Or the “displaced.” Or even “victims.” They became bread bandits. I don’t think the name started on TV or radio. It was probably some word-of-mouth thing. A kid called a refugee a “bread bandit” one day. Within a week or so the name had spread. It wasn’t intended to be cruel, but it seemed apt. So it stuck. We still use it today. I’ve killed bread bandits.
Diseases often develop in cycles. Good old syphilis is the classic example. It takes years to run its course. Mostly it might disappear for ten years or more and the infected person has no symptoms, nothing. Then back it comes out of the great blue yonder. The sufferer suddenly finds pus squirting from his ears. His hair falls out. His skin gets all blistered and a dirty great crust of scabs forms on his face. Madness gathers up his wits and hurls them from the window.
The funkily named Gantose Syndrome was something like that. When experts told us the condition had run its course what seemed to have happened was that the Gantose bug merely submerged itself into the bones and muscle tissues of the victims, where it mutated into something even more sinister. After the first real heat wave of the year that was enough to knock an elephant off its feet Gantose 2 flared up again.
Here’s another headline: tet! USA
This explains everything in the word. Like the surprise attack by the communists in Vietnam, in what were supposed to be safe cities hundreds of miles away from the front line, so America was torched. I mean literally torched. On Sunday, June 1, refugees ran amok in towns and cities across the whole of the U.S.
Afterward, there were all kinds of theories. That it had been a coordinated attack. That the bread bandits all had little radios with them, that the order was broadcast in code and WHAM! They rioted in their millions, turning over cars, looting stores, burning houses, killing American men, women and children with their bare hands.
It wasn’t quite like that. Everyone agrees now it was that bug in their blood. It burrowed into their brains and made them do that. Just like a man with rabies’ll jump from a window rather than permit a glass of water to come near him. But why did it all happen on that Sunday? The doctor here in Sullivan will tell you it was the heat wave that fired up the dormant bug, pushing it into its next phase of the condition.
