The Last Centurion Read online

  Worse, like the Spanish Flu and for reasons that are still being studied, it hit the "prime" population harder. That is, the young and old tended to get the pneumonia but if they shook that off (which if there was health care was normally possible with antibiotics) they survived.

  People in "prime ages" went through all that, (if they didn't die of pneumonia) felt better for a couple of days, relapsed and then died.

  Mortality amongst prime population, 15–55, was twenty percent higher than among peripheral population, the young and the old.

  So, let's see, in that one meeting the Prez ignored the Plan and chose the wrong group to focus on immunizing.

  Don't get me wrong. I care for all living beings except slow drivers in the left-hand lane, terrorists and pedophiles. And I'd have loved to be able to save all those youngsters and old folks. Well . . . Sort of. The youngsters, certainly.

  Face facts. I loved my dad and he wasn't even in the "old" category. But old people, retired people that wander around playing shuffleboard . . .

  We were looking at surviving. Not prospering. Not becoming better. Surviving. The advisors knew how lethal H5N1 was. Destroy a certain percentage of any society and it crumbles. The models based on wars and previous famines and pestilence was twenty percent. At that point, the society devolves to survival level. (At least that was the model. We found out how robust some societies were and how weak others. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

  But of that twenty percent, old people don't matter. They're done. Even if they have the desire to rebuild, they don't have the strength or stamina. They're smart, they're wise, sure. (The good ones.) But they can't rebuild a society. They're the past. If you have to sacrifice any group in a survival situation, The. Old. Go. First. Cold survival logic is like that. Not nice, but survival logic isn't.

  Sigh. "Women and children first" would have been the right call. Why? Because they matter. Children are the future of any society. Immunize the kids first? Hell, yeah. Forget that they're less susceptible. They're going to take care of the survivors in the survivor's old age. If they make it.

  Children are important.

  But . . .

  Kids can't rebuild a society. I don't care what you've seen or read in a science fiction story, they just can't. They don't have the experience; they don't, yet, have the strength that is going to be needed. Most of them would, eventually, become of reproductive age. If they survived.

  Look, mortality from H5N1 dropped with age to about seven then picked up again. Say that it was even more lethal than it was and killed off everyone in the middle.

  You'd have a planet filled with oldsters and children.

  Think they're going to get factories going again? That they can run farms?

  Think again.

  You'd better have that functional middle or the kids are going to starve and the oldsters are going to starve and die off and nobody's going to remember or care what the fuck the Mona Lisa was or why she was smiling like that. Kids growing up scavenging in the ruins. Read "A Boy and His Dog." But don't believe the end; there's nothing a teenage boy won't do for pussy.

  Women? I'm just a sexist, right?

  Not if you're looking at survival. Look, it's logic most people don't like but here it is:

  Once upon a time the whole human population of the world got wiped out except about forty-four reproductive aged females. (Based on DNA data. Look it up.) How many males doesn't matter. As long as there was one, we're good. He'd be busy but we're good. Nobody knows or cares how many males were in that group that eventually grew to six billion and change. All that mattered were forty-four females.

  Sad but true, women have babies. Males have more utility than just sperm, don't get me wrong. But when you're talking about something as tight as bird flu, women matter much more. "Reproductive age" women.

  Everything that Warrick was, though, prevented her from even thinking about that. Warrick was the ball-buster's ball-buster. I am woman hear me roar. You'd think she'd have made sure the immunizations went to women first for that very reason, but she couldn't even survive that logic.

  The worst part, the absolute worst part, was that even if the distro had worked it was going to be going to one group that wasn't going to be of use in the immediate aftermath and a group that wasn't of any true functionality at all.

  So the Director of the CDC demurred. He was about the only male in the room, so he was ignored. So he pointed out that there were others that were missing from the meeting. Notably, the Commander of USAMRIID and NIH, both of whom were missing.

  Another meeting was called. Both USAMRIID and NIH were in the more or less DC area so it assembled that evening. The second meeting, according to testimony from the DCDC, CUSAMRIID and the DNIH (three males in a meeting chaired by and filled with female ball-busters) was "acrimonious." Neither the National Science Advisor (a former patent lawyer) nor the Surgeon General (an MD specializing in "women's historical medicine" whatever the fuck that means) would disagree with the three actual, you know, specialists in fighting plagues. On the other hand, they also did not support them. And the President, from her vast store of experience trying to take the medical industry apart like a chicken, Knew that children and old farts were the Most Vulnerable and Had To Be Protected.

  Well, yeah, gee. Nice sentiment. The only problem being that we weren't dealing with the common fucking COLD lady!

  She also didn't listen to reason on the subject of the other two sentences. Go figure. Men had testicles and therefore were Wrong.

  Just before WWI started the kaiser sent a message to the king of England, who was some sort of cousin, saying something like "War is now inevitable." He was still bargaining, but from the POV of "we're going to kick your ass unless you surrender now." But that's not really the point.

  The point is, as of the end of that second meeting, a biological disaster in the U.S. was inevitable.

  Most people in the U.S. don't realize how important getting the right President is. Sure, the Prez gets blamed for a lot of things that he or she can't control. The Prez does not control the stock market or the Federal Reserve. But the reality is that the Founding Fathers, having no real previous experience of democracy or a republic and having lived under a monarchy their whole fucking lives, created a temporary king to run the country. They were, at heart, monarchists. They just didn't like the current one and didn't want to make it hereditary. (Don't get me started on Bush, Warrick, Bush, Warrick. But from history it's a very bad sign.)

  So every four years we elect a king. Since people like consistency, we tend to elect the same king as many times as we can get away with. (See previous paragraph.) And the king, especially in any sort of emergency, has a lot of power. They don't always, or even most of the time, have enough to fix things right away. But they've got a lot of power.

  Including the power to totally screw things up.

  Everybody in the room that had the power to change the President's idea of a fucking plan also worked for the bitch. Legally, they were required to follow her orders. They could argue, they could recommend but that was like talking to the Great Wall of China. She knew what was Right and what was Good and the people arguing against her had Dicks and they were Wrong.

  For the kids reading this, this is a very important point. When you choose your king, forget most of the reasons you think you should vote for the king. Mostly, the king can't do much about the economy but ruin it. They can't make you richer or smarter (although they can manage the reverse). If you want one suggestion, think about all the contingencies under which that king (or queen in this case) may hold your lives in his or her hands. And choose wisely. About half the U.S. population chose unwisely. (48.2%. It was one of those elections.)

  Quite a few of them died. Every person who voted for Warrick deserved it.

  Chapter Four

  They Always Forget

  the Emergency

  Patient Zero, USA, was in Chicago. What the fuck?

  Definitions. Pat
ient Zero. The first detected case of a disease. Generally, that required lots of investigation as the disease was tracked back.

  In this case, Ching Mao Pong was easy to find. Just follow the screaming.

  But Chicago? What the fuck?

  Most of the epidemiologists who were scattering out to try to stop things had headed for the West Coast. Why? Most immigration and movement from China came from that direction. And it wasn't just China anymore. H5N1 was breaking out all over Southeast Asia. Some of it being spread by bird movement but more from people movement. The Chinese had little tendrils all over Asia and people were following those tendrils trying to escape the Plague.

  Outside of China the first reports, by a few minutes, were from Thailand. Then, within a day, every single country in Southeast Asia except Vietnam (which right up until it turned into a wasteland didn't admit any cases) reported cases.

  All of them tried containment. But it was impossible to contain. None of them had the sort of health system that the U.S. did, they were physically connected to China, they had birds migrating from China that carried the Plague, none of which we had, and we couldn't contain it. (Maybe we could have. If, possibly. If wishes were fishes . . . )

  There was the Plan. Called the Epidemiological Emergency Response Plan (with the unfortunate acronym EERP, which sounds like someone who has just had a very bad practical joke played on them); it had several parts. It probably wouldn't have worked because what every Emergency Plan leaves out is the fucking emergency.

  Example: Hurricane Katrina. Okay, okay, most of the shit about it was urban legend. There were not tens of thousands of dead. There were no riots or rapes in the Superdome and people were neither starving nor "out of water." They were being rationed, which the fuckers that were complaining thought was starving, but that's not the same thing. But let's look at the evacuation Plan.

  Okay, Nagin was a total fuck-up and never even tried to initiate it. He'd never looked at it, despite a fucking hurricane being headed for his city which, by the way, was below sea level. So calling him a fuck-up is insulting fuck-ups. But there was a Plan.

  The Plan was to use school and city buses to evacuate all those who were "transportation challenged." Whether Nagin used it or not was sort of a moot point, though. People had forgotten little details. Such as, there was no emergency call list for the drivers.

  In any group that does emergency response, from the military to cops and even including child services, there is a call list. Generally it's a call tree. Person at the top gets a call. He or she calls three people, then starts getting ready to head in. Those people call two or three people lower than them and start getting ready. Assuming more or less equal transportation distances, the bosses get to work first, which helps in most cases.

  There was no such phone tree for bus drivers. So there was no real way for anyone to get ahold of them in an emergency.

  Oops.

  Drivers had never been told that they were supposed to drive people out in an emergency. So they weren't exactly sitting by the phone if there had been a phone tree. They had jobs and cars. They were packing to leave or already gone.

  And that was the last point. The order to get out was sent out before any thought was given at all to the "transportation challenged" plan and even the evacuation order was more of a bow to reality; the roads out of New Orleans were packed (by among other things the bus drivers) when it was given.

  People who develop emergency plans always seem to leave out the emergency.

  But the EERP wasn't a bad Plan as such things went.

  The first part was the Emergency Vaccination Distribution Plan. Spread the vaccine to health providers. At the same time, spread it to emergency services personnel and the military including National Guard. As time permits, go to nationwide forced immunization if it got that bad.

  Simultaneous with that, call up all the National Guard and Reserves. Mobilize all active units to full combat status. If necessary, start a "staged redeployment" of the rest of the military world-wide.

  Second step, shut down the country. It's called "zone quarantine." Close all the borders, not only between the U.S. and other countries but internally. Preferably, close it down to county level where possible. International travel shuts down first. Planes coming from other places are turned back. U.S. citizens and residents can enter the country but go into quarantine, not home. This would probably start before the first vaccine shipped. It was planned (there's that word again) to be total "primary" quarantine in three days. I think that's optimistic, but we'll give it that just for shits and giggles.

  When, not if, you have outbreaks you start "ring immunization." That is, when you find someone who has the flu you ensure immunization status of everyone they've come into contact with or anyone they could have come into contact with. You do not ask for permission; unless they can prove they're immunized, you stick them with a damned needle whether they like it or not. You go through the whole neighborhood the person lives in, you go to the stores they've visited, you stick everyone at their workplace. You stick people that just sort of knew them in school or that they sort of remember from seeing across a bar.

  There are leakers. Always. You find them and do the same thing, hopefully quicker. You broadcast that such and such a person had the flu and beg people to go to a doctor and get checked. And anyone who has been in contact with those people

  You hit that motherfucker with a full fucking court press.

  You don't open up the borders, any of them, until you've killed the son of a bitch.

  Fuck the economy. Fuck anything. Shut the fuck down until your population is safe. They can't buy trinkets or gas or groceries if they're mostly dead.

  Nothing. Else. Matters.

  There were some plans for this we knew were going to work. 9/11 had proven we could ground aircraft at will. We'd called up the National Guard enough times to know exactly its predictable response rate. Deploying troops internally had been done enough that most units could do it in their sleep.

  Distribution? Ring immunization? Zone quarantine? Nobody had tried it, ever, in a Western country. We'd never had to, not really.

  As it turned out, we never did, not really. Oh, the words were spouted, but . . .

  "Forced immunization is not an option."

  That's not really what the bitch said. Look, Presidents get paid to, among other things, handle emergencies. And there are supposed to be emergency drills. Yes, it's a busy job and not every contingency can be covered. But mass epidemic was a scheduled drill. (Congressional Testimony On H5N1 Spiral Event.) One that the President was supposed to attend.

  Seemed she was meeting with, irony of ironies, some Chinese businessmen the day the drill was scheduled. And despite being a lawyer, apparently never took the time to even RTFM (read the fucking manual).

  So when the meeting finally came around where the Secretary of Homeland Security was explaining the full EERP, it went, apparently, something like this:

  "Mass requisite innoculation program . . ."

  "You mean forcing people to take the drugs?"

  "Yes, Mrs. President."

  "That is not an option."

  Now, you can't go to school these days without a measles shot. And four or five more, some of which have some good clinical studies showing they are a. not very useful and b. very very fucking nasty. But unless you can prove, with a doctor's test, that you are allergic or something, you can't go to school without the shot.

  But . . . well . . . politics.

  Look, there are "freedom uber alles" wack-jobs on both sides of the political spectrum. There are the guys who feel very very strongly that the Constitution entitles them to owning an M-1 Abrams with full load. (Okay, okay, that would be me. Love and hate those fuckers depending on if I'm cranking one or killing one, done both . . . ) And Don't Tread On Me and Pry My Gun From My Cold Dead Fingers. Also "If I don't want to take a fucking shot, I'm not going to take a fucking shot. And anybody who tries to give me that devil
poison, or fluoride, is going to get blasted by my Mark-Four-One Blaster with Puring Optical Sights that I whack off on every single day! End the slavery that is government! With no government, things would be perfect!"

  Blah, blah. Libertarians with a capital L and hand me that rifle, buddy. Ask one some time if their utopia has building inspectors. Or, you know, how much it looks like, say, Somalia. Or Detroit after the Plague.

  Okay, that's the nuts. Let's take a look at the fruits.

  "End the cycle of violence. Eating animals is murder." "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." "Don't poison your body with pesticides and hormones. My body, my choice . . . "

  Guess which side contributed about 15% of Warrick's core supporters. Not to mention:

  "The Southwestern U.S. was once Mexico's and shall be again!"

  And I did mention Chinese businessmen?

  Warrick had a whole team of people, working in the very crowded and space short for really important shit White House, that did nothing but monitor blogs. Oh, not the "Pry it from my cold dead hands" blogs; the other guys. In that, she was politically nearly as smart as her husband and a bit more techno-savvy. Her team of nerds were mostly members of the blogs and occasionally passed on juicy news, thus increasing the importance of their most crucial supporting blogs. But more importantly they kept the pulse of the fruits.

  And the fruits were not going to be forced to accept innoculations. Some of them were screaming for them, others were explaining how a diet of honey and organic herbs would prevent any flu. AIDS in Africa, after all, was a plot by the free-market world to kill off the black-man, blah, blah . . .

  "Forced immunization is not an option."