because I watched ER.
Nicole wept as she gripped me tight, the deep sobs reverberated throughout both our bodies. The movement was causing me quite a bit of pain, which I was doing my best to squash down. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the Doc unobtrusively working his way closer and closer to my bedside. Nicole kept her final secret to herself. That was fine with me. We all carry certain things we don't want the rest of the world to know, problem was hers was going to reveal itself no matter what she did or did not say.
She pulled herself up so we could see eye to eye, which was still difficult due to the copious amounts of tears being spilled. The big bad ass Marine side of me would like to say they were all hers or even mostly hers but this water works display was a joint effort.
'Nicole I know this won't help now and most likely won't make any sense, but in The End we WILL be all together.' I told her. I wanted to finish with. 'Once I take Eliza's head and slowly feed it through a wood chipper.' Sounded good in my head, got the feeling Nicole wouldn't appreciate it nearly as much.
'I love you Dad.' She said squeezing me tighter.
The Doc couldn't take it anymore. He gently placed his hands on her shoulders. 'Miss, we really need to let your dad rest. If anything else happens to him, I don't know that there will be enough left to sew back together.'
Justin led his sister out and I would imagine to their quarters. Nicole had always been a very petite girl. Somehow she looked even more diminished, like her soul was wrung out. I know mine was.
'Mike you should get some sleep.' The Doc told me.
'Doc I'm sick of sleeping.'
'I can see your point, but the more rest you have the quicker your body will heal.'
'First things first Doc.'
He stopped what he was doing to look at me.
'Where am I and what is going on?' I asked him.
'Well I guess a few more minutes won't make a difference,' as he pulled up a chair. 'Where would you like me to start?'
'I was thinking maybe the Mesozoic era.' I said smart-assedly.
'The beginning it is.' The Doc said immediately picking up on my sarcasm. 'First off you are on an impromptu military base called Camp Custer in Indiana that abuts up against the great lakes, Lake Michigan to be specific.'
It was nice to have someone recognize my acrimony.
'The newscasters had one thing right, it did start with a flu shot. When the vice president died from complications arising from the H1N1 Influenza strain, the administration, in an effort to squash public panic, pushed researchers and vaccine developers past their breaking point. Safety measures were cut or completely ignored. Tests on the vaccine's effectiveness were never validated. Most likely the tests weren't even conducted. I'm not going to go into what specifically went wrong, microbiology is not my area, suffice it to say that something went completely awry.'
'You think.' I grunted. 'Did you say Custer?'
He nodded with a weak smile. 'The vaccine they were inoculating everyone with was a live strain, something they haven't done in over thirty years because of the inherent danger this type of dose can cause. Obviously nothing on this level, but the live strains of vaccines used to cause upwards of a 7% infection rate. Meaning...'
'Meaning that out of every 100 people given the shot to prevent the flu, seven actually got the flu.'
'Exactly.' The Doc nodded. 'Those were great odds back in the day, but as we learned more about how to combat the influenza virus, it was discovered that the success rate with 'dead' vaccines was much larger. Odds of actually getting the flu from a flu shot were infinitesimally small. So much so it was widely believed that the people who actually got sick already had the virus within them.'
'Why the live vaccine then Doc?'
'Time, Mike. It would have taken another 3 to 4 weeks to adapt the 'dead' viral agent. The country was already on the verge of a pandemic. Thousands were getting sick daily. Hundreds, if not thousands of deaths were imminent. Schools, businesses, hell even government buildings were shutting down to prevent the spread of the virus. All of the president's admonishments that the flu was not as bad as the media was making it seem went down the drain the very minute the VP died. Vaccination producing facilities began to work around the clock to get enough doses out there, and even with those extraordinary measures it wasn't going to be nearly enough.'
I could not get the image of small vials of zombieism heading down an assembly line. An innocuous clear liquid in a small bottle with a cap especially designed for the insertion of a needle. If I had not been laid off my family and I would have been first in line to accept the deadly shot. 'There were no tests?' I asked angrily.
'Well maybe I spoke too soon. In a gesture of 'Goodwill,' the Doctor said with air quotes. 'The good old US government sent crates and crates of the newly fashioned immunization to third world countries around the globe.'
'Bastards. They might as well have been giving smallpox laced blankets to the Yup'ik.'
The Doc looked at me a little funny. 'I knew you were a smart man Mike, I didn't know that you were educated also.'
'There are a lot of things about me Doc that might confound you but my knowledge of that has more to do with my fear of conspiracies than book learning.'
'I see.' The Doc said looking off into the distance as he assimilated this new information.
'So didn't the scientists get a clue that maybe the vaccination wasn't so good when Peruvians began to walk around eating their relatives?'
'They would have, had they waited. Within a day or two of shipping out the crates they began the roll out the first shots to area hospitals.'
'Are you kidding me? So being the assholes that we are, we use whole nations as our guinea pigs and then don't even have the follow through to see the results?'
'It gets worse Mike.'
'How is that even possible?'
'I could probably get shot just for telling you, but it's not like you're going to be able to go to the media with this information.' The Doc looked back to the door as if expecting Big Brother to be standing there, they weren't, so he continued. 'There is every indication that the higher ups within the government knew the shots were tainted.'
The look of shock nearly froze my features into place.
'No, no wait. It's not that they were trying to take down civilization as we knew it. I guess it was more of inaction that may have doomed our species. Just as the first few people in the states were coming down with the infection, the boxes of shots began to make their way ashore all around the globe. In typical government fashion, this new development of death and reanimation was immediately covered up. In its defense the government tried their best to quickly and quietly retrieve the shots. But with vague directions, hospitals and caregivers were reluctant to give their hard won shots back. They immediately began to dose as many people as was possible before government representatives could get there to retrieve the stock. What's infinitely worse is that once the U.S. realized it could not contain the shots within their own borders they didn't act to save any other country.'
'They figured if we were going down then we were taking as many people with us as possible.'
'Quite.' The Doctor said resignedly.
'But you said third world countries, Doc. Is there anywhere that is zombie free?' I asked hopefully.
'We have satellite communication with most countries that are still people populated.' He pulled his hand across his face. 'It seems we lose contact with a handful every week as they go dark.'
Going dark could mean a lot of things. Possibly running out of power, burnt out diodes, laryngitis, bad case of the hiccups might keep someone from broadcasting.
'Australia seems to be the least infected, but it really is only a matter of time.'
'An exponential disaster, one becomes two, two becomes four, and so on.'
'And so on.' The Doc repeated sadly.
'How much of humanity is left Doc?' Where do you go, what do you do, when hope is gone?
'In the states, maybe 5% aren’t zombies yet. The rest of the world, well they're lagging behind like usual but are coming on fast, they may have upwards of 15% of their populations still alive.'
