Poppers

“Stay in the house at night and lock the door behind you” he said. Good advice any parent would give their child. Don’t talk to strangers and don’t hitchhike were a couple others my dad used to say.

That was a long time ago….

Before the virus

Before the change

Before humans were an endangered species

The year was 2056. Over the past thirty years, one virus after another has ravaged the earth’s population. 

Nipah virus took twenty million to their graves in the 2030’s. They said it was fruit bats that were the source of the contagion. It spread to humans, patient zero was in Africa. It caused encephalitis, swelling of the brain. Not a nice way to go.  

The 2040’s saw a return of the Ebola virus. Except this strain was extra hard to contain unlike past ones. Fifteen million souls punched their existence ticket. Hemorrhagic fever, bleeding to death internally, another horrible way to leave this plane of existence. Those two were tame in comparison to Disease X.

March 2056. News reports across southeast Asia talk about a new unnamed virus. It was highly contagious, and no cure was found. It spread through contact with bodily fluids: blood, saliva, semen; faster than it could be contained. The world’s population at the time was fifteen billion. Two years after the first outbreak, there were three billion humans, twelve billion infected. You see they didn’t die per se, they changed. We were outnumbered four infected for every human. We called them poppers. The name came from one of the symptoms of Disease X, a sudden and irreversible hardening of the joints followed by rapid sudden spasms. The spasms sent the appendages of the afflicted splayed out into an x pattern. The poppers could be heard from quite a distance as they moved herd-like towards some unknown destination. Thousands of ankles, knees, hips cracking and snapping like dry brush under footfall on a warm summer’s eve. That wasn’t the only reason we called them poppers. The second reason was the blood vessels. The infected had an earlier symptom, broken blood vessels in their eyes. It didn’t seem like much to worry about, like something you would get from blowing your nose too hard. How wrong we were.

Ten days after onset of the virus, the vessels would explode sending infected blood spewing out at anyone close. Blindness followed. Next was the brain. The infected would twitch and jump as each vessel in their brain burst. Blood poured out of their eyes, nasal cavities, and mouths. Yet somehow, they lived. Well, if you can call it that. Their human side died, something else took over. It always reminded me of Jiffy Pop. The foil expanding, kernels popping from the heat of the stovetop, steam rising from the freshly opened package. I'll never eat popcorn again.

That night my dad said those words to me doesn’t seem that long ago. It’s been five years now. I’m the only surviving member of my family. I was eleven when it happened, when Disease X came to our doorstep. I’m sixteen now, I think. We don’t have calendars, clocks, or other instruments for recording the passage of time anymore. The setting sun sinking low on the western horizon, the moon rising to the east, the changing of the seasons are my timekeepers now. 

Everything has been abandoned. The cities were the first to see the spread of the contagion. Within two weeks, every major city in the United States, Canada, and Mexico had hordes of poppers roaming the streets. The uninfected fled to the countryside like rats off of a sinking ship. Highways became parking lots as millions tried to leave at the same time. It was a recipe for disaster. The smart ones took backroads or left their cars and ventured off on foot. All it took was for one small child, already infected, but not showing symptoms. His name was Timothy Watson, ten years old, blond hair and blue eyes. That is until he turned. He had a slight fever, and his mother Anna told him to rest in the back of the car. The traffic will move soon Timmy, then we can get to safety. It never happened. Timmy infected his mother and in turn a thousand people just on that ten mile stretch of blacktop became those …things.  

Every town, city, village, burb greater than one hundred people in the entire world became literal ghost towns. There wasn’t even time to board up the windows to the restaurants, shopping centers, home improvement mega stores, and so on and so forth. It was like time stood still. At least for other major disasters you were given some prior warning. Tornado alerts, hurricane warnings, the local weatherman telling you about the impending rainstorm, snowstorm, tornado or forest fire. There was no weatherman for Disease X. The CDC utterly failed. By the time they knew what was happening, it was too late. The television stations, radio channels, and the internet were eerily silent. Governments all over the globe went into lockdown protocols. Only the highest-level clearance staff made the cut. Bunkered military compounds became the arks for the survival of the human race. Virologists were given access after passing numerous screenings and a week-long isolation in quarantine. Any sign of Disease X was met with immediate removal from the facility and from the land of the living. A bullet to the back of the head was the only cure they had found so far. Bodies were sealed in body bags and removed by a hazmat team. For fear that burning the bodies would make more of the virus airborne, the corpses were deposited into large mass graves. Bulldozers and backhoes became commonplace work vehicles, hazmat yellow was all the rage this season, personnel thinned, one by one, ark after ark fell to the plague.  

Modern civilization with its nonstop pace, technology woven into our daily life, and self-worth based on our social media likes disappeared. Homes, office buildings, and warehouses became either sanctuary or prison, depending on your point of view. Poppers didn’t much care for dwellings as they formed up into larger and larger packs, roaming almost nonstop. They didn’t seem to sleep or eat. Scientists hoped that Disease X would peter out as the older infected died off, then the newer ones, leaving only the untouched and immune. Yet, the packs became herds, the herds became swarms. Besides the cracking of hardened joints, these popper swarms produced another sound. The infected could be heard from miles away by their murmurous humming. Whether it was language or something else entirely, no one knew. The scientists were dead. The governments were dead. The world was dead. Only the few remained, the survivors of a lost world. The countless many and their incessant buzzing became the soundtrack of this new land. Hope and faith died quick deaths. Common sense and ingenuity kept you alive for one more day, one more night on this hell on earth.

Sadie Montgomery and her band of merry men merely existed, survived, clung to life in the first few days and weeks as the first pandemic wave reached bubonic levels. Each had a harrowing tale of near death or escape from the poppers. Joey Sargent had been working the register at the 7-11, supplementing his minimum wage with the two packs of smokes he liberated nightly. When a bleary-eyed customer started twitching while swiping his debit card, he thought damn this guy is having a seizure. He grabbed the phone, pressing nine, one, pop. Blood sprayed directly into his eyes, his mouth, all over his face. The elderly gentleman named Harvey became something else. The loaded twelve gauge under the counter put an end to his suffering. Reports of some new disease had Joey freaking out. I’m gonna become one of those, those …his thoughts trailed off. No amount of showers, mouthwash, antibacterial soap or wipes could be enough. His hands and face scrubbed pink and raw. He waited for the end. It didn’t come. Sadie did. She found him living in that 7-11, barricaded from the world, waiting to die. 

Sadie had been at the annual father daughter dance at her local middle school. She always loved spending time with her dad. He worked in the city, long late days at some financial institution, crunching numbers. She didn’t really know what his job was, just that she missed him. The dance was always their day, their special day. They would go out to breakfast in the morning, gorging on flapjacks, warm and sweet, topped with strawberries and whipped cream. He would put on his finest suit, the fancy one with the pinstripes. She got a new dress, taffeta and hot pink. Her mother curled her hair, the belle of the ball. Except this time, chaos rained down in a sanguinary shower of erupting eyeballs. She was eleven.  

Their ragtag clique formed over the course of those two weeks. Jenny Palmer was found at the Westside Mall, Juan Soto at the local YMCA, Drake Bennett collected from JFK Memorial High, Kevin Wong and Kiki Washington rescued at Westside Community College. There were seven in total now. Seven, a lucky number.