They were still going to the stores every morning to try and purchase more supplies, but the stores were running very low on everything. It was beginning to look more and more like a communist country as far as shopping went. Drew and LeBron would wake up early every day and go with their dad to stand outside the loading dock at Publix. If a truck showed up, they’d each be given their allotment of whatever was in it for whatever the government mandated price for it was.
Getting up at five in the morning every day to stand in line hoping to slide your credit card for a sack of potatoes or a can of yams wasn’t super exciting. It was much better than the alternative of starving to death though. They left their mom and Yue with weapons and instructions to call them if anyone approached the house aggressively. They’d boarded up all the windows in the back and prepped the front to be able to cover those up quickly as well. They hadn’t done it yet as they didn’t want their home to stand out. After having seen countless videos of the infected in the surge stage diving headfirst through windows to get at victims the boards seemed like a great idea.
“How long until it makes it over here do you think?” Drew asked.
LeBron looked thoughtful. None of them were naïve enough to think that the government would miraculously become efficient enough to actually do what they said they were going to do. There was a good deal of hope that the short gestation time for the disease would keep it from being transmitted across the ocean. There were no recorded cases of someone catching the disease and not going crazy. That made it very unlikely someone would try to sneak an infected person along with them across the ocean or across the border.
“The governments actually doing a pretty good job so far. They shut down the travel and the borders fast enough to shield us. It’s only going to take a handful of cases over here to spread it to the whole continent.” LeBron said.
“You know that the rich connected people from other countries are still getting in. Our soldiers are still going out and coming back. Someone’s going to make a mistake. I trust the plot line of every zombie movie ever made way more than I trust the morons in the government.” Drew said.
That was pretty much the consensus among everyone that eventually the disease would make its way over the pond to them. Until then they did their best to try and heed the lessons learned by the Africans, Europeans and Asians. Large walls went up or were reinforced around military bases. Stadium lighting was being installed as fast as it could be manufactured. Unfortunately, a good deal of the lighting needed was manufactured in China. It turned out pretty much everything was either produced in China or had a piece or part that was made in China. Stuff wasn’t made in the USA now so much as it was assembled in the USA.
China had gone down fast. Any country with a tightly packed population had gone down fast so it was to be expected. However, China went down extra fast since they hadn’t warned their citizens. No one had time to prepare in any meaningful way. There were pockets who’d managed to escape the first wave of death. Those people faced very long odds in surviving for very long with the millions of crawlers coming at them nightly. The infected had an uncanny ability to sniff out where people were hiding.
“Did you find any more videos on the crawlers?” Drew asked.
LeBron shook his head and sat down on the couch to keep searching. He finally found a clip he hadn’t seen before. He cast it up on the TV so him and Drew could watch it together. All they’d seen in the past had been the videos of shapes running past in the dark. Occasionally you’d see them leaping over garbage cans or up onto porches. They’d gotten the ‘crawlers’ nickname since they moved on all fours. Even walking in those awkward poses, they were able to move way faster than most people.
The clip he found was from a military style infrared camera. The person videoing was standing on a balcony a good ten stories above the street he was recording. Down on the dark street the crawlers were streaming by in the hundreds. Their bodies appearing on the infrared camera like a river of molten lava flowing swiftly by. The camera being used to make the recording didn’t have any microphones to capture sound. Judging from all the other reports they’d heard it was safe to assume that the group passing down below was doing so way more quietly than could be considered natural.
“It’ll probably be some country like China or Russia that drops off a couple of the infected in Alaska or South America somewhere. They’ll want to share the love. Otherwise when this ends the United States could easily take over the planet.” LeBron said thinking back to what one of the anchors on one of the cable news shows had brought up as a talking point. This infection was destroying countries more thoroughly than a cold war nuclear exchange would have. In a nuclear war the concept of mutually assured destruction was very well known. It’s how the communist regimes of the world would be thinking now.
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