The Oasis of Filth
My Chronicle of the RL2013 Outbreak
A Novel
Part One
Keith Soares
Bufflegoat Books
© Copyright 2013 Keith Soares. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-0-9899483-3-3
Original publication date July 4, 2013
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Special thanks to my wife, Layla, for giving me the time and feedback to actually do this. Additional thanks to Jeff Yeatman for his copious notes on expanding this world, and to Susan Gd. G. Clutter for pointing out a rather indigestible error.
Edited by Christopher Durso.
Also from Keith Soares
☄
The Oasis of Filth
Part 1: The Oasis of Filth
Part 2: The Hopeless Pastures
Part 3: From Blood Reborn
The Fingers of the Colossus (Ten Short Stories)
[Forthcoming]
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
About the Author
1
“Noah, you have leprosy,” I said to the poor kid as he sat there, nervously sweating despite the coolness of the day. Noah Parker, just 14 years old. I wish I could have saved that poor kid. But more than that, I wish I had understood what I was looking at. He was the first one I ever saw. But obviously not the last.
Some people say, “How could you be so blind?” I tell them the truth. We weren’t blind. We saw everything. We just didn’t understand.
You know, as obvious as something might be, if you’ve never seen it before — never contemplated the possibility that something universally believed to be fiction might actually be true — then how can you possibly be prepared to accept it, even if it’s sitting in your own office, chewing gum, wearing a green and white Wildcats high school football jersey? Or at least that’s what I tell myself. After all this time, when you’ve seen the things that I have, if you don’t tell yourself something to keep going, you’ll just give up. I’m not quite ready for all that.
Not that I have much choice. Time is not on my side. Noah Parker got the bad news in my office almost 11 years ago. At the time, I was a 52-year-old family practice doctor in central Maryland. I made a good living, and most of the community looked up to me — the guy who made them feel better. Things change. Noah died 18 days later. It’s amazing what the mind can recall and what it can forget. Whatever tragedies I went through yesterday — and I’m sure there were some — are all but forgotten in the blur of repetition and the daily effort to keep moving on. But this I remember clearly: In the fall of 2013, Noah Parker walked into my office with a few skin lesions. He told me it started as one, and he ignored it — he couldn’t remember, but he thought it might have been from cutting himself while mowing the lawn. That specific lesion was tiny but looked ragged, like it had been torn or bitten. When the third lesion appeared, he was worried. He told his parents once he had six, and came to see me the next day.
I missed the forest, but I saw the trees. Leprosy. Before I went to medical school, I wanted to just go somewhere — get away. I knew the next several years of my life would be devoted to the singular cause of graduating and working toward my own practice. So before all that, I traveled to India for escape. My parents told me to be careful, watch out for this or that. For several years already, I’d been a solo backpacker, staying in tiny, rundown hostels every place I had visited, so I assured them that I could do it there, too. In India, with the seed of a medical education about to grow in my mind, I was confronted first hand with leprosy. Aimlessly backpacking, I stumbled across a leper colony, and curiosity took over. I talked to the one doctor I could find there. His English was excellent. He told me how they tickled the faces of young children to detect where they could no longer feel. He showed me what the skin lesions looked like. He told me the cycle of treatment; the isolation he said was required. I ended up looking into leprosy briefly during my freshman year. I learned, most importantly, that it had been cured. Nonetheless, some places like India kept alive the culture of the leper colony. I dug into it pretty deeply for a time. But like most random things, after a while the interest waned.
Then, here was this kid in my office. And it clicked: This looks familiar. I dug up information as fast as I could. But in the end, it was just instinct and experience. I know most doctors in the United States, even more experienced ones, would have totally missed it. But I knew: leprosy. When I told Noah, his eyes almost bugged out of his head. His parents were aghast. They blurted the obligatory comments. Was I sure? How was this possible? I told them that I could be wrong, but I’d seen it before, up close. And I told them that leprosy was completely curable. To me, the physician, that felt like a weight lifted off my shoulders; I could actually do something for this kid. Then I looked at his parents. They were shell-shocked. I might as well have told them their son was dying within the hour. The idea that their own flesh and blood had something so horrific as leprosy stunned them beyond words. Noah’s mother, who looked like she was clinging to her youth with every fiber, wearing tight jeans and a fashionable yellow top, seemed to age 15 years as she crumbled into her husband’s arms. Noah’s father, for that matter, had lost his normal ruddy complexion and jovial nature. His eyes glassed over, shining empty above his dark navy sport jacket and white shirt worn with no tie. I stared. Could I be wrong? Did I just send an entire family into a downward spiral on a whim? No, I got it right, I thought to myself. Noah had leprosy.
In the end, it didn’t really matter. Because what I missed were the other things. The flu-like symptoms, the anxiety. I was so proud of myself for being able to recognize leprosy that I completely missed it. The kid also had rabies.
2
Leprosy and rabies in one kid. What an unlucky bastard, right? Well, of course, you must be familiar with the story. But maybe you don’t know the details. It wasn’t just Noah. It was happening in lots of places, all over the world in fact. Again, were we blind? No. Nothing we believed prepared us for something to swoop in so quickly from so many places. It was like a coordinated attack, but there was no general, no army, no battlefield. Every soldier in this attack operated independently. The only cohesion came from the fact that it all happened at the same time. I was focused on the case of Noah, who was getting rapidly worse, with other symptoms I didn’t understand. It wasn’t until five days later, when Noah lashed out, that I realized my hubris had made me miss the signs.
That fifth day, Noah bit my nurse, Terry Rawlins, on the arm. Tore skin off in his madness. What the hell would make him do that? That’s when I realized this wasn’t just leprosy. After I’d sedated Noah, had him transferred to a hospital for round-the-clock care, and was done patching up Terry, I started to analyze the other symptoms I was seeing. But give me no credit. That night, I turned on the news just to take a mental break. And there I saw it. Doctors in Georgia had identified three cases of people with leprosy and rabies, and were reporting that somehow these conditions had become intertwined within the patients — like they happened together. It was such a medical mystery that it appeared at the end of the newscast — not a top story of concern, but an aftertho
ught, to make the audience scratch their heads and have something bizarre to talk about over dinner.
I sat upright in my chair. That explained the other symptoms! Noah definitely had rabies, too. I dialed into the office and looked up his records, then called his parents. After the briefest of pleasantries, I asked, “Was Noah bitten by an animal recently, like a raccoon? Has he been to Georgia recently?” But the answer to both questions was no. Regardless, I told the parents how I believed Noah’s other symptoms may stem from rabies. They were incredulous. How could their son — their own son, living in America in the 21st century — have both leprosy and rabies? They must have thought I was a complete quack. But there was no time for that, rabies doesn’t wait. I called the hospital and spoke to Noah’s attending physician. He was skeptical. Even after I told him of the cases in Georgia, he found it hard to believe that there was any relation or truth to it.
It wasn’t until the next morning that the attending physician started to believe. Noah — fitful from a night of almost no sleep — tore into a rage and tried to break free of his straps, simply from the sight of an orderly bringing in water. Treatment was ordered. It was too late. Terry Rawlins went mad, too. She lasted seven weeks in restraints, with researchers focused on her 24 hours a day.
Soon after, reports came out of Maine, Arizona, Utah. Then from overseas. Patients were cropping up all over with a combination of leprosy and rabies. Doctors tried — unsuccessfully — to treat one or the other, to remove at least part of the problem. Nothing took. Lesions, fever, increasing anxiety, lack of sensation in nerve endings, flattened nose, thickening skin, dementia, rage. All the classic symptoms of leprosy and rabies, combined. And patients got worse, all of them. Restrained and fed through tubes, they could last a really long time, although many died horribly. Or were killed. Sometimes it was quick, like Noah Parker, but sometimes it went on for many, many months before the end.
They called the disease RL2013, a not-terribly-clever nod to rabies, leprosy, and the year of discovery. We mostly called it the disease, or just it. We still do. “Stay away from him, he’s got it,” or “That baby has the disease.” We called the infected by another name. Given the symptoms, the physical changes, the mental changes, the bloodlust. The fact that what they had was contagious as hell. These people — people you may have known, may have loved — became deformed, raging lunatics. They weren’t some sort of undead monster, they had no magical powers, and you could kill one as easy as you could kill anybody else. But it spread like wildfire, and God help you if one bit you: There was no cure. So despite our best attempts to rationalize the hell around us, we had to admit it was true.
Zombies walked among us. And they were winning.
3
For more than 10 years, we lived in fear. But the funny thing was, it wasn’t really fear of the zombies. It was fear of dirt, and what came with it. The government pulled in the walls of the cities — cities were the only things left with any infrastructure — and inside those walls was where we lived, in giant compounds. Well, we called it pulling in the walls as a cultural reference, but in truth they had to make the walls. The society that once was home to the freest, proudest people on Earth remade itself along quasi-feudal lines, with pockets of citizens huddled together, struggling through totalitarian rule. Because it kept them safe.
I made it to Washington, DC, and I got inside the walls. Others did the same in New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Some cities fell apart or were overrun. I heard an estimate that about 30 million Americans lived in the cities, which seemed like a lot — but just doing the math from where we started, that meant more than 300 million people were still outside. Even as contagious as the disease was and how fast it could kill, there must have been a lot of people struggling for their lives in what used to be the United States. As well as a lot of zombies. And a lot of dead. God only knew what the numbers looked like everywhere else in the world.
Inside the walls, everything had to be clean. Only by completely sterilizing our environment could we hope to one day overcome the epidemic. That’s what the laws said. People were taken away simply for not keeping themselves and their homes and their streets clean. The government said this is why we still had outbreaks. If everyone could work together, keep every inch of the city free from grime or mildew or fungus, we could avoid additional infections. I understood their frustrations, to some degree — after more than 10 years, you’d think we could have solved this. But my experience as a doctor made me question this policy. I knew that some amount of cleanliness was useful to ward off infection, but I also knew that scrubbing a floor wouldn’t save you from your neighbor coughing in your face. But always there were stories of some family, some person, some group home, where cleanliness was ignored, the filth built up, and then another outbreak occurred. The talk-show hosts shook their heads and reported on another self-induced tragedy. If only this family had kept to the law, kept their home clean, they wouldn’t have become infected. Just the other night, there was a story about two parents and their young daughter. A neighbor went to check on them after not seeing anyone for about a week. When the neighbor entered the unlocked apartment, she found piles of detritus and blooms of mildew. In seconds, she was attacked by the father in a rabid rage and bitten repeatedly. When the authorities got there, they shot and killed the entire family. The neighbor died that evening.
“God has forsaken us!”
“It’s the wrath of God, punishing our sins!”
“There is no God!”
“It is the End of Days!”
A lot of people had a lot of ideas about why it all happened. And a lot of those ideas involved God. I didn’t know, and wasn’t sure how much it mattered. Was there a God, and was that God allowing this to happen? Or maybe God was asleep at the wheel. Maybe it was a test. Or maybe mankind wasn’t God’s favorite after all.
On the odd occasion that I would tell my story, it didn’t help. Many people who heard it compared my Noah — Noah Parker — to the Biblical Noah. But where that Noah rescued all creatures great and small from the flood, Noah Parker, people would tell me, started a flood to drown us all. It didn’t matter to the zealots that Noah Parker wasn’t the only case. This thing, this disease, appeared all at once in many places. Maybe that actually was a sign of divine intervention. Did the first single-cell organisms manifest in one and only one place? Or did they appear on Earth at a certain time, all over the globe, when the time was right? Could it be that the process of creating new life or new disease was simply following a schedule?
Everything was smaller, more compact. To allow a city to hold more people than it was ever intended for, everyone had to give something up. Houses and apartments were subdivided, methodically, mercilessly, to the smallest possible space that a person or family needed to live. At the same time, almost every sort of personal possession was taken away, so the boxes we lived in weren’t just small but spartan. Families were given larger spaces to fit their size, but a single guy like me? I could cook on my stove and flush my toilet all while lying in my bed.
Clothes became a lot simpler. That was something I didn’t mind too much. The whole idea of designer clothing became obsolete. There was some variation, but for the most part the government wasn’t interested in a fashion show. They ran factories that produced workable, simple clothing. Solid colors, synthetic fabrics. Most people had four or five sets for warm weather, another four or five for cold. We cleaned them all the time, both so that we wouldn’t run out and to maintain cleanliness. Even the idea of dressing up disappeared; there were no more suits, ties, ball gowns. In a way, with our flat-colored, synthetic clothing, we looked like we’d stepped out of a silly science-fiction movie, or that we were all on our way to the gym.
All our cell phones were confiscated at the very start. But there were communications between the cities, we knew that. The old wired and wireless methods still seemed to work, although only the government was allowed to use them. I assumed thi
s meant that there were people who worked outside the walls, maintaining the connections and the infrastructure, but I never saw them myself or met anyone who did it. All the news we got came from the government, and that was very little. We had TV and radio, one channel each. The radio station played a lot of classical music, with occasional weather updates. TV wasn’t much better. In between news reports on the latest zombie extermination — really thinly veiled threats about keeping clean — they played old movies and shows, mostly black and white, repeated often. It was bizarre to see dapper men in suits and ladies in fancy dresses, jet-setting around a world that no longer existed, or dancing in bright, hugely choreographed routines that parodied our gray, regimented lives. I guess they figured we needed some sort of entertainment. It was so alien, this stylized murk of black and white, that it could have been imported from another planet. Broadcasts would end each night at 11 p.m. with a reminder of the basic rules of cleanliness and stern statements about following government laws.
We always tried to stick to ourselves, stick to small groups. It was a lot safer. The more people you interacted with, the more likely one of them would end up infected. Even the hint of a rumor about infection brought the authorities in droves. Many people felt that turning in their neighbors might convey some extra benefit to them or their family. Backstabbing was commonplace. As for the government, its officers were covered head to toe in pristine white hazmat suits, and swooped in like anonymous destroyers, took what they wanted — who they wanted — and left without a word, without a trace. And always they found evidence of some lack of cleanliness to point to as the culprit. How could they not? Who could keep every speck of their lives spotless at all times?
So that was why we lived in fear. Life is naturally messy. But we did all we could to get rid of the mess. Any sudden discovery of mold in a dark corner was enough to give a person heart palpitations as they rushed to scrub every nook before word got out. In fear — fear of the zombies, fear of the dirt, fear of the government, fear of each other — people would do a lot of crazy things. A neighbor might turn you in if he noticed something he deemed unusual, like you wringing out a mop more than a few times. And sometimes, people would turn you in just because they didn’t like you or they wanted something you had. When the government came to get you, there was no reasoning with them, no argument. You just went away.