68
Los Angeles was the worst casualty of the diseases unleashed by the explosion. Other cities such as Saint Louis, Chicago, New York, Cincinnati, and Baltimore were affected, but only several thousand died in each. Los Angeles was different. For some unknown reason, the movie city was literally decimated.
The Robert and Lois Eddington family had lived in Anaheim, a part of the Los Angeles basin for several generations. Now that their town was under the disease curfew, they stayed mostly at home surviving on canned goods. The stores were empty of shoppers, but were crammed with shelved food and no one to buy it. Likely as not the electricity would have stopped anyway when they brought their groceries to the cashier for a check out. In the early days of the pandemic, violence over these blackouts had occurred so frequently that police had to be stationed close by. They were called into constant action the moment the lights went out, and they stayed on the job until they died which for many of them didn’t take that long.
So far, the Eddingtons had escaped the deadly disease, and they planned to stay that way until the coast was clear. They refused to take their mail for fear the letters and magazines might be infected with one of the diseases going around. Whenever they went outside, they wore gloves for protection and sometimes face masks.
They never touched their faces with their fingers anymore. Life had deteriorated for them entirely with the exception that they weren’t sick. The ones that were ill generally died. A few survived, but not many. The Eddingtons figured how these new diseases were most likely designed in military labs to kill nearly everyone. Besides, the medical community had been wiped out. Doctors and nurses were no more. They had passed away caring for the ill as had happened many times during human history. Doctors were always on the front line, and that meant they were dead ringers for every new disease as it came down the pike taking everyone down with it including them. For most practicing physicians, disease was a professional hazard.
“It seems very quiet out there,” Robert said, “as though the epidemics may have run their course.”
“Well, we aren’t going out to find out,” Lois replied, “because all we are going to find is the disease itself, and they think it is going to kill us as it did to a lot of Los Angeles.”
“I wonder how we are going to get out of here.”
“We aren’t,” Lois said. “If we stick our heads out, we are dead.”
“True. Besides, we have food enough to last quite a while.”
“You really don’t think there’s anyone out there, do you, Robert?” Lois asked.
“Of course not,” he said. “We are still sitting ducks for any virus going around now. We are just going to have to hunker down and wait for nature to take its course.”
“That’s right.”
The lights flickered.
“There it goes again.”
Robert cranked the emergency radio. One or two stations were on the air. That was it. The gaggle of media had gone the way of the dodo bird.
The familiar announcer was still on the job, saying to them over the air waves how, “The virus continues to rage through the city and its environs. Hospitals and physicians are as rare as hen’s teeth. If you find one, it’s probably infected, and it probably doesn’t have one doctor left alive to treat you. Best to stay inside. We at KBST-AM are hunkered down. The building has a stench of death to it. I don’t need to tell you what that means. Most of you already know. Men have come through and taken bodies away, but the odor remains. We think they’ve missed some. I don’t know why I’m alive, and my co-workers are not alive and haven’t been alive for several days. All of them are gone to a better place now. Los Angeles has always been described as a form of heaven due to its perfect climate. However, there’s another heaven above that is even better, or so they say. No one knows, because no one ever came back. I guess I have a strong immune system, and my dead co-workers didn’t. Who knows why some live and most don’t. In show business, it’s those who persist the longest that win. I guess that’s me. Sad to say.
“The entire plague is a mystery to me. I have been sick several times, but I made it. Maybe others have survived out there. I know one thing. The freeways are clogged with cars and vans filled with the dead. A sea of flies is all over them enjoying very much the deadly festivities. It’s like fly city out there on the roads, and there’s no way out of the city on those streets, because they are blocked with cars. If you want a car, just break the window, and use a screwdriver to break the steering wheel key lock so that you can start it without the keys. I tried it. Half of the time, I broke the entire steering wheel, cheap metal shaft and all. Every other car, however, and you are in business. Remember, its not stealing if everyone is dead. Besides folks, this is an emergency. We get to do these things now. All the cops are dead. All the pretty waitresses are dead. Even the endless gays are dead now. No one is left, but you and me, and I’m not certain of you, either. I guess there’s some of you out there listening. I have no way of knowing. It’s just an assumption on my part. It might even be a fantasy of mine. Whatever. Society is finished. It’s just a graveyard now. Beautiful L.A. is not a city at all. Bodies line the streets and front yards. The cars themselves are the closest to coffins that you can find. There’s nothing quite as gruesome as a four person family rotting in their driveway. Some of us prefer to die in bed. Some to die in our cars. At least in a locked car we are safe from birds and little animals that will nibble us away bit by bit.
“Am I being gruesome? Yes. I am being gruesome. I am a reporter. It’s my job to report truthfully what I see. Folks, it ain’t pretty out there. Let me tell you, death is not pretty. This is like the black plague way back in the middle ages, and we are all rapidly becoming the body taker in this Monty Python masterpiece that we all play our bit part in.
“I want to just walk through Los Angeles with a Radio Flyer wagon. I want to pull my little red wagon down the streets of L.A. right now and shout out, ‘Bring out your dead! Body man! Bring out your dead!’ Just like in Monty Python.
“Trouble is this. My Radio Flyer wagon won’t hold one of these fat Los Angeles sluts with their huge GMO corn hips and their corn syrup legs with those ugly as hell swollen ankles. Besides, where would I take them? I’ve thought about it. I could drag them out of their homes and stack them on a lawn for someone else to move them the next step. That step is most likely to the next god forsaken dump down the line wherever it leads us. Anyway. Who cares? We are all finished. Taking the bodies out would be useless. It would not help a thing. So I have decided to just leave them in their cars and their homes and not to go near them. I am afraid their diseases will infect me the same way they did to them. And I am a chickenshit like all the rest of you.
“I have learned not to get involved, because I have seen my friends try to help, and then they get all sweaty, start vomiting, and the next thing I know they are dead, too, because what goes around comes around. But I don’t know for sure. All I know is that they disappeared, and I can no longer find them, so I figure they went home and died in their beds among familiar surroundings. But that is only if they left here soon enough not to get stuck on the clogged freeway. There, they can do nothing but die in their cars and become the subject matter of those huge flesh eating horseflies that I see everywhere there’s a body and an open window to a world of hurt.
“This city has become what I call the palace of the flies. We are the people of putrefaction, the receptacles of maggots whose ripened bodies support the offspring of the horse flies. They swarm inside us in a mass movement of swirling larva, all white and clean.
“I read in a military manual that I can eat maggots. They are the perfect food. At battle’s end, the wounded knights survived by eating their buddies’ maggots. They just reached into their body wounds and pulled out a handful. The maggots also were good for cleaning their battle wounds. These maggots will eat only the diseased flesh and leave the healthy part so it can be healed. In all of the filth and the flies, are we reduced in t
he end to finding the maggots inside our fellow men and eating them to sustain ourselves? Is that next? Surviving merely on maggots?
“There I go again. I am becoming gruesome. My life has become a filthy thing, because all of us have come around to our sickening mortality. In the stench of our end game, we have come to the realization of what we are, and it isn’t pretty in the least, is it? You know the answer. It is as ugly as it gets. To present a healthy picture of our plague-filled existences, we have to lie about the very world we live in. Not lying is now completely politically incorrect. Only those who lie and say that things are perfectly fine are politically correct. The rest of us are assholes like me.
“I am a sorry person. My family is dead. My friends and associates have passed to the dark side. I have been cursed like you who are still alive out there and listening to my voice. The two of us are cursed, because we didn’t do the decent thing. We didn’t die in the streets and become the cannon fodder of food for giant flies.
“My batteries are low. I have to stop for awhile. In an hour, the generator will refill them. Then, I’ll be back. Hang in there, folks. And, remember this. The horror continues. Over and out.”
He clicked off and went to the roof where he started the generator and wondered how much longer he had to live. He figured he’d eventually come down with something lurking out there and pass away. Then, his journey would be over.
The Eddington’s stopped cranking their emergency radio. They’d try again in an hour.
“What’s for dinner?” Robert asked.
“Beans of some sort. Maybe a little bit of canned meat.”
“Sound’s good, dear. Better than maggots, in my opinion.”
“It might get down to that, Robert.”
“I know it might. I just don’t want to think about it is all.”
“I understand.”