Desperate Remedies

When the birds all started dying, that’s when it began. Of course we didn’t know that at the time, but looking back now it’s easy to see that was the first sign. We just didn’t know what we were looking at. What it meant. I remember getting the phone call on a Sunday morning when I was at home, sleeping in late.

“Hey Jordan, have you been outside yet today? Just wondering if you are seeing what I’m seeing here. This is…pretty disturbing.”

After a brief conversation I hung up the phone, put on my sneakers and went out for a jog. It was hard to make sense of it all at first. 

The bodies of dead birds were scattered all around. They weren’t literally everywhere - there were places that remained mostly clear of the carcasses in my neighborhood - but I couldn’t run more than 10 yards before noticing more of them here and there. Some in the street. Some in the fields. I saw a few sprawled out on parked cars, lawns and rooftops. Then I saw a family of three cleaning up a small flock beneath a large tree in their front yard. I didn’t run for more than a few blocks before returning to my place to call Dan back.

“Yeah man, it’s happening here too. What do you think it might be?”

Dan chuckled briefly, sardonically. “Avian flu?”

“You’re not serious, right? All at once like this?”

“No, I’m not. But I don’t have a better answer. Do you?”

We talked for a little while, fruitlessly speculating, and agreed to meet at the lab the next morning. We both arrived with a number of local samples collected and bagged with our gloved hands but we didn’t learn much over the following days and weeks. I was just a business guy after all and although Dan was a trained scientist with some knowledge of virology he was only 27 years old - we had been roommates as undergrads together at Columbia - but it didn’t matter much in the end. The test results yielded very little for us to work with anyway. Virtually nothing at all.

Then the leaves all started turning. It was the strangest thing. June in New England is a season of verdant growth. Everything is in bloom. It was the start of summer but I remember how the leaves on the trees all began to turn reddish-brown in a span of just a few days and then they started to fall. The grass came next, and even the weeds followed. Before the end of June the Massachusetts landscape looked much like it did in January, sallow and dead but without the ice and snow. 

That was when the days started growing shorter. Not in the usual fashion. Not gradually, as they always do after the summer solstice, but very rapidly. By the week after the 4th of July the sun wasn’t rising until sometime close to 8:30 am and it was setting before 6:00 pm. It got darker from there in numerous different ways but I remember the first real signs of panic arose when the grocery markets first started shutting down. It all happened pretty fast.

Well folks, we’re not exactly sure what to report here as we aren’t receiving a whole lot of verifiable information, but we keep hearing about “supply chain disruptions” affecting food deliveries at the wholesale level. Apparently, many of the farms in this nation, and elsewhere, are simply no longer able to make shipments as usual for various reasons. Naturally we are all hoping that this is just a short-term problem but we are hearing very little of substance from government officials and the agriculture industry in general so we are left to assume that…

I turned the car radio off. Anyone who couldn’t read the writing on the wall by that point was simply deluding themselves. I was on my way back to Cambridge and just praying that I could make it there safely. I had my father’s old Smith & Wesson .38 tucked under my driver’s seat but I doubted it would be all that helpful in a real pinch. Just six bullets. I remember passing by a Costco outlet that was burning and it had clearly been heavily looted judging by the broken glass and various other debris strewn about the parking lot. No one was coming to put out the flames. It was just burning, casting a thick column of greasy smoke up into the winter-gray iron sky above. 

Well before I reached Cambridge the streets became clogged with abandoned cars, so I had to park mine in a residential area and walk the last three or four miles to the lab. I remember nervously thinking that I would surely have to use the .38 before I got there but I saw surprisingly few people out on the streets along my way, at least not in my direct path. (People were very much avoiding direct contact with one another by that point and face masks were back in wide use.) I did, however, smell people, and plenty of them. For the first time I clearly smelled the stench of death. The rank odor of human decay. I also saw plenty of bodies. More and more as I went, many of them decomposing inside of cars abandoned along the roads. Living out in the suburbs had mostly spared me from the sight of that reality until then, at least in such large numbers.

In the lab, Dan and I sat down together with a fresh pot of coffee. His Research Assistant, a PhD candidate named Vanessa, was the only other person there at the time. She was more or less stranded since the campus shut down and she had nowhere else to go. Dan took mercy on her and gave her a meaningless make-work assignment before we began so she wouldn’t have to be part of our conversation.

“The blood sample results stopped coming back over a week ago. We weren’t learning much at all anyway. I’m really not sure where we go from here.”

I stared at him and took a sip of my coffee. It was bitter. I was used to having it with a splash of fresh milk or cream.

“Canada,” I said, quietly.

“I’m sorry. What?”

“We go to Canada from here, I think.”

“What’s in Canada? Things are no different there.”

I looked at him solemnly a moment longer and took another small sip of my coffee before I replied.

“Lower population density. Don’t think Montreal or Toronto. Think Yellowknife.” I stared at him, watching the wheels turn as he considered my suggestion.

“And then what?”

I just shrugged.

A few hours later the three of us - Dan, Vanessa and myself - were all in my car, taking a highly improvised and circuitous route north out of the Boston metro area. At one point someone took a shot at us. We got lucky. The rear window was shattered, and it was obviously frightening, but no one was hurt. I remember wondering how long it would take us to find an open hospital if things had gone just a few inches differently. But we were lucky.

Once we got a bit farther outside of the city we stayed lucky, and passage on the roads generally got easier with fewer and fewer obstructions as we went. We could see the line of abandoned cars that had been roughly blasted off towards the side of the highway by large snowplow trucks or perhaps some convoy of military vehicles built for road-clearing purposes. We didn't know, and didn't really care, but we were grateful. At one point we passed a large dairy farm and saw a field full of dead cattle lying in the weak light of the mid-afternoon sun. It stank horrendously and we rolled up all the car windows.

Along the way we also saw numerous other vehicles moving in various directions, but no one wanted to stop and talk. Neither did we. When we reached Middlebury a family in a large white pickup truck pulled up alongside us but when we looked at them the man behind the wheel quickly brandished a large handgun and kept on moving. After that we tried to pick the most remote and least crowded roadways possible as we made our way north towards the border. My trunk was full of ramen noodle packs, granola bars, bottled water and whatever else we could scavenge from the lab before we left. I also had my hunting rifle, fishing gear and some camping equipment crammed in back there. Dan noted that it had not rained in over a month.

We were all worried. About different things. About the same things. We didn’t talk for a while. We listened to the radio to pass the time. There were still a few stations broadcasting in that area, playing news reports that mostly repeated all of the same things that we had already heard, some of them simply running on an automatic replay loop.

At first, about a month earlier, they said that it originally came out of Asia, but soon there were rumors suggesting that there was a breach at the CDC, and shortly after that there were more rumors saying that it was released intentionally and yet more rumors followed, some saying that it wasn’t the CDC at all but rather an Islamic revolutionary group calling itself “The Hand of Allah” out of Karachi, Pakistan. But it was clearly all just pure speculation and bullshit. Something to talk about while you buried your loved ones and huddled up somewhere waiting for death to find you. 

The truth is that when “The Pale Horse”, as it came to be known, spread across America and all around the world it all happened so fast that the media never had the time to properly investigate and report the story before most of the human population had succumbed to it, and journalists were obviously no more immune than anyone else. The newspapers that might have told the story stopped appearing on doorsteps and the news channels, websites and social media apps went dark right along with them. In the end, it didn’t really matter. Those who survived - that curiously resistant little sliver of the population to which I myself apparently belong -really didn’t have the means nor the desire to talk about it amongst themselves in any organized fashion. It quickly devolved into "every man for himself" time, as I suppose we always knew that it eventually would. The origins were unknowable and essentially irrelevant anyway.

When it all started I had just relocated from New York City to the Boston suburbs only a year earlier to pursue a job offer that Dan helped me land with a big biotech company bearing a prestigious name that you would quickly recognize from the time before the outbreak. Looking back, it’s funny how proud I was to be adding that company name to my resume, as if the Senior Financial Analyst position that had been offered to me was somehow emblematic of my overall worth as a person. It all seemed to matter so much at the time.

It soon became clear that the skills I had gained growing up as an outdoor enthusiast were far more valuable than anything I had learned after Columbia during my time in business school at NYU pursuing my MBA. My father was an avid hunter and fisherman and we spent many of our summer weekends out on lakes and streams, fishing for trout, bass and occasionally walleyes, pike and muskies. And when the weather turned cold in the fall, we were out tracking deer and bagging ducks in the woods of upstate New York. In the end, these outdoor survival skills clearly outweighed my ability to calculate net present values or the coefficient of determination in a regression analysis model. Worthless knowledge. Wasted time.

Dan died first and I buried him, as best as I could, somewhere near Barton, Vermont. Few of our friends and family members ever really knew about us, and that seemed so pointless and silly in hindsight. Like it ever mattered. What a joke. Vanessa couldn't help or even stand by my side during the burial. She stayed in the car with a burning fever the whole time and passed away less than two hours later. I did my best for her in a stretch of woods just south of the Canadian border. I didn’t have a shovel. I just had to improvise with both of them. It wasn't easy.

I never saw any zombies or anything like that. There was nothing supernatural about any of it. It was simply death and desolation, everywhere. I just drove and drove, through an increasingly bleak and barren landscape, and I ate whatever food I had at hand and whatever I could scavenge along the way. Finding gas was easy enough. I had a hose and I knew how to siphon. There were plenty of cars stranded on the roads and I had a bandana to shield my nostrils from the smells coming from what was inside them. Eventually I just abandoned my little car and upgraded to a better vehicle. I did this numerous times along the way.

It was a very, very long and lonely drive but now I’m here, on the upper outskirts of Yellowknife, above the Great Slave Lake in the Canadian Northwest Territories, where all paved roads heading north come to an end. I will be on foot from here on now. No more need for this borrowed Range Rover. Along the way I had nothing but time to think about everything. How this all started. Why it happened. A global human population of eight billion plus and growing every single day? An over-reliance on fossil fuels and factory farming and any number of different things that denude, pollute and destroy this earth that we all call home, rendering it increasingly uninhabitable year after year? Perhaps this was simply like a dog shaking off its fleas. Nature’s final and perfectly indifferent solution to shedding itself of its most ruinous and deadly parasites.

Desperate times. Desperate remedies. The more I considered this thought the more it made sense.

Anyway, I still have some food supplies and some bottled water that should last for a while, and I have my fishing and hunting and camping gear. But it seems like most of the fish are laying dead beside the banks of the streams now and it’s much easier to find the rotted remains of once-edible game in the woods than it is to spot a live buck, even way up here. I’m not really sure what I might be able to find when the time of true desperation arrives. I try not to think about that too much. Whatever happens will happen, and as long as I have just one bullet left in my dad’s old Smith & Wesson revolver I should be able to solve all of my remaining problems at any moment in time. I keep it close, mainly for this reason.

I thought it would be different here maybe. I guess I just didn’t know what else to do or where else to go. I guess this is where it will all come to an end at some point and I guess I will probably never know why. But it’s dinner time now. Time to cook up some ramen and maybe treat myself to half of a granola bar. And who knows? Maybe I will get lucky and catch a healthy rainbow trout in the stream tomorrow morning. Some fresh protein would be really nice. Maybe that will happen. It’s nice to think that it’s still possible anyway.

It’s all just maybe now. There’s really nothing left but maybe. I have accepted that at this point. Maybe this was all just meant to be.

THE END