The Last Centurion Page 6

Ring immunization?

  "Forced immunization is not an option."

  So there goes ring immunization being any effect at all.

  Then there was sealing the borders.

  Look, I've worked at sealing borders. It ain't easy. You basically have to station people, in groups so they don't get overrun, at close and regular intervals. And you can't be nice to those who are attempting to cross. Not if you really want a sealed border. Part of the military plan for sealing the border with our southern neighbor included shoot-to-kill orders for runners. If they did not stop, they got shot. Ditto people attempting to cross internally. If the car or truck or whatever wasn't willing to stop, light them up.

  "Force is not an option. Closing internal borders is not an option."

  Okay, can we at least cut off international travel?

  Actually . . . no. Persons who were from "affected" countries were to be quarantined, nicely and for no more than three days. "Affected" countries were countries which had declared themselves to be "widely and endemically infected" by H5N1.

  Look, China, which is now about a quarter of its pre-Plague population and five countries and change in a fourteen-way internecine war, never declared themselves "widely and endemically infected."

  We didn't cut off international travel. Everyone else cut off international travel from us.

  Of course, by then it was too late. There were still planes flying to and from Hong Kong after it had basically ceased to function. They stopped because they couldn't be sure of getting refueled. And they were flying straight from Hong Kong, which was in direct contact with the Mainland, to LAX and San Francisco and Seattle. People would be held for a couple of days in isolation, board another plane and fly on. Some of them to Europe which cut off travel from us before we came close to shutting down from anyone.

  Frankly, the only reason it didn't break out faster was people ignoring their orders. Sure, the guys sitting in the room with the Prez arguing till they were blue in the face had to send down suicidal orders. Didn't mean that the guys and gals in the field obeyed them.

  Quarantine in L.A. was heavy until things started to break down in California. Ditto Seattle. Not so much in San Fransisco which is probably one of the reasons they got hit pretty quick. And hard. Lord forgive those fags, they got hit hard.

  Then there were the big order breakers. People still have a hard time codifying the response. It depends on who's writing about it. "Pseudo-secessionists" is one term. "Knee-jerk reactionaries" was a term used at the time along with "racists" (never quite understood that one unless they were talking about Mexican immigrants), "fascists," etc. Big litany of "you're bad people."

  Hawaii was the big winner in the "racist/fascist/reactionary" category. Okay, Hawaiians are racists. If you're not native Hawaiian there are laws saying you can't have certain jobs. There are Natives and there are "haoles." But, strangely enough, nobody was calling them that. In fact, despite their actions at the time, nobody was quite sure how to respond.

  Lemme explain. The news media was filled with liberals. They might not like what the Hawaiians did but, hey, they're our little brown brothers! (Hawaiians, like Samoans and for similar reasons, tend to be motherfucking big little brown brothers. But it's pretty hard to get a liberal off their mental grooves.) Conservatives by and large thought they were about the only smart people in the nation and wished they were in Hawaii.

  Basically, Hawaii cut itself off. No planes were permitted to land to do more than refuel or get fixed if they needed it. Then "hie-away with you! No fucking lei for your ass! Aloha!" Ditto boats from outside Hawaiian waters. They'd give them some food and fuel if they had it but then get the fuck out of here.

  They shut down internal travel as well and required documentation of immunization. And the immunizations that got sent to them a. arrived slower than on the mainland and they could see the Prez's order was fucked up and b. were packed for air-travel so they kept for long enough for everyone to get the fucking clue.

  Hawaii came through the whole damned thing with nothing but a major depression. Racist fuckers. Smart racist fuckers, I'll give you.

  Then there were the ones that did get called racists and fascists and all the rest; the L states.

  I put it that way because it wasn't exactly the states of the Confederacy. Tennessee was a border state in the War Against Slavery. And there were some that weren't near the Old South like Wyoming.

  Why the L states?

  Way back in the 2000 election a map came out of the vote patterns. Back then we'd call it the "red and blue" states. Red states went for Bush, blue states went for Al "I Invented The Internet" Gore.

  I always hated the "red/blue" divide. I'm military. Red forces are the bad guys. I'm not a bad guy and I'm a red stater.

  But if you look at the map, it's a big fucking L for the red states. Southeast, then up through the midwest with a bit on either side in the southwest and northeast.

  Fly-over country. The Dust Bowl. Hell, the Bible Belt.

  Not all of them were "reactionary." Missouri followed the President's orders to the letter. See St. Louis.

  Others, however, had a different opinion. I call it "disorganized civil disobedience." They waited for the Prez to announce the Plan, heard the New Plan and went "Oh, hell no!"

  A lot of them got some or most of the immunization plan right. When reports from Mississippi started coming in of shipments of vaccine and nowhere to store them the word went down, from the governor, not the state director of Health, that they should store them anywhere. Get cops to help if necessary.

  Short example. County Health in Jefferson County, Mississippi, got a bunch of styrofoam boxes from FedEx marked "Vital Medical Material: Refrigerate." They didn't require a truckload, fortunately for them.

  The director of County Health, a nice old lady I caught on the news one time talking about her response, called the only store in town, Piggly Wiggly, and told them she had a big problem. Piggly Wiggly dumped out enough room in their storage room for all the boxes.

  Atlanta? Screwed the pooch. Ditto Mobile, Birmingham, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Savannah . . . The list is long.

  Small towns? Small counties? Small cities even? Better than 50% by current estimate "presented optimal or near optimal distribution response." They reacted, adapted and overcame.

  Okay, call it "red/blue" if you wish. Red got it about 50% right. Blue? About 7%.

  The response expanded from that. "Forced immunization is not an option." Yeah, right, tell it to the people of Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. There were areas where forced immunization wasn't an option, mostly the big cities, due to lack of vaccine. But the order went out and damn the President or the media wailers. School kids were immunized production line style in every state. Smart or not, those governors went for "children first" at the very least. Overtime paramedics, EMTs, cops, nurses, whoever had a clue about sticking a needle, visited work-places. It didn't last long; things went to hell too fast. But the order went out and the process started.

  The President actually ordered the National Guard in those states to be used to stop the forced immunizations. Even when they were as a part of ring immunization responses. (CDC was just outside Atlanta and the guys and gals left there tried. Lord they tried . . . )

  The term here wasn't really mutiny. Okay, it was mutiny. But by then things were going to hell in a handbasket and everyone knew it. Obeying the increasingly shrill bitch at 1600 was the last thing on anyone's mind.

  That would be about early April. But that was more than a month after Patient Zero when the Prez finally ordered "staged redeployment" and I got left holding the shit end of the stick. And then there was the whole "Emergency Powers Act" fiasco.

  Patient Zero was in Chicago.

  Why Chicago you ask. Well, since plenty of people have answered and I obsess on questions like that these days I'll repeat.

  Ching Mao Pong had been a peasant as a child. He grew up in central China and became on
e of the large class of "undocumented workers" who moved into the coastal areas as common laborers. Apparently at some point he convinced a Chinese smuggler, what is called a "snake-head," to get him to the U.S.

  How Ching Mao Pong became infected is unsure. All that is known is that he was loaded by the snake-head, along with fifteen others, into a cargo container bound for the States. Its destination was Chicago where an accomplice snake-head would open it and let the immigrants out into the freedom of virtual slavery in the U.S. until they paid off the extortionate price of the transportation. There was sufficient food and water packed into the container to sustain all sixteen. (Twelve males and four females, by the way.) Don't ask about sanitary facilities.

  How could a container of immigrant Chinese possibly make it to Chicago you ask?

  Uh, ship to Seattle then Great Northern Railway to Chicago. Not that hard.

  Oh, customs?

  Containers were categorized several ways. At the low end were containers from sources that were both "unrecognized" and known drug smuggling areas/companies. If, say, a container entered the U.S. that was a. from Colombia, b. from a company that did not have special documentation with Customs and Immigration Service and c. did not have a pre-cleared seal on it, it was five percent likely to be checked.

  That is, of containers coming from known drug source countries without any indication that they didn't contain drugs, only five out of a hundred actually got opened and inspected.

  Oh, there were all sorts of special systems to examine them. Dogs might walk by, X-rays if they weren't something that might get damaged, neutrino systems were even in consideration.

  But only five in a hundred from the worst possible source got opened and examined thoroughly.

  Why?

  Money. Time. Interference in commerce. Call it an iron triangle. Nobody wanted to spend the money on the (huge) number of inspectors that would be necessary to actually check, say, every dodgy container coming into the U.S., much less every container without slowing things down to a crawl. There were containers that never were supposed to get opened in the U.S. There were times when it was smarter and cheaper, if you were shipping something from, say China to France, to ship it via rail across the U.S. It got loaded on a ship in China, dumped off in L.A., put on a train, carried to Jacksonville and loaded on another ship for Nice.

  There were a fuckload of containers coming from China in those days. Most of them were to addresses in the U.S. Hell, you couldn't go into a store and not buy something from China. Even the plastic your food was wrapped in came mostly from . . . China.

  And China was not considered a threat source. Yes, people got smuggled but not, you know, drugs or bombs. Sometimes it was discovered after a "packet" was found that a highly trained bomb-sniffing dog had walked right past one of these snake-head containers and never even quivered. They were good dogs. They were looking for drugs or bombs. People did not count. Don't bark at People. Good dog.

  A snake-head named Chan Twai opened the container when it was dropped off at a rented warehouse. He later said that upon opening it he thought everyone in the container was dead. He knew what was happening in China. He ran, hoping he hadn't caught the Plague.

  Ching Mao Pong, though, was alive. Apparently nearly insane but alive. He stumbled out of the container into a country about which he knew virtually nothing with no one he could speak to and nowhere to go.

  He did what he'd done in China. He looked for food and work. According to his accounts he ate garbage and drank from bathrooms for two days. He saw people bumming for money from people and the police did not stop them. He bummed money and food and even cigarettes and he was not told to stop once by the police, which he found to be very nearly paradise. Truly America was the land of opportunity.

  On the third day he found men that looked somewhat like him standing on a street corner. He was picked to go work on laying sod for a new building in the final stages of completion. He couldn't speak the language of any of the men he worked with but "working with your hands was working with your hands."

  He knew he had been exposed to the Plague. He had gotten sick. He had nearly died. Most of the others in the compartment had died, two from when one of them went mad. But he survived, he recovered. He thought he was fine. He was feeling somewhat unwell when he finally found work but he had had little good food recently.

  He collapsed while working on the job. The contractor who had hired him cursed, loaded Ching in his pickup truck, dropped him off at the emergency room and made himself scarce.

  Ching was semicoherent when dropped off. He was directed to sit in a chair. There were more police and they apparently wanted him to stay. He sat. He collapsed again. The emergency room personnel, who were not masked and had not received their immunizations, put him on a gurney and moved him up the triage list.

  The responding doctor saw a slightly emaciated Asian male in his mid thirties who was suffering from high temperature and disorientation. Initial exam determined he was suffering from, among other things, dehydration. He was given an IV. He went into spasms shortly afterwards and dropped into unconsciousness.

  A Chinese-speaking nurse was called in when he regained consciousness. By then the possibility of bird flu was considered and Nurse Quan was in Cat Four dress. Ching was questioned closely. He was initially uncooperative until the nurse, who was an immigrant, called in a security guard and, unknown to the doctor or any of the others including the guard, warned that he would be sent to "reeducation" if he did not tell her everything she asked. He spilled his guts.

  He went back into febrile disorientation a few hours later, slipped into a coma that night and died before dawn.

  CDC, by that time, had over sixteen active quarantines on the West Coast. Specialists got on the still flying planes for Chicago and arrived just as Ching breathed his last. They attempted to get the Illinois and Chicago authorities to override the President's directive against forced immunization. Two problems. Chicago was one of the cities that had screwed up its receipt of vaccine and they weren't even willing to do forced immunizations with what they had.

  But the news media got the news that a confirmed case had been detected in Chicago and Katy Bar the Door.

  Chapter Five

  When the

  Turbine Blows Up

  Now we get to the subject of "trust." Trust, as a society, is something that most people understand poorly. Trust is vital for a society to function. It's not hard to explain, though. Trust means that if you loan your lawn mower to a neighbor, you've got a pretty good chance of getting it back. There's an implied contract. I let you use the lawn mower. You return it in pretty much the same condition you got it.

  You don't loan it to your cousin who then uses it to cut his clients' yards. If you borrow it, you don't break it and give it back and then insist you didn't break it. You don't sell it. You give it back in pretty much the same condition you got it.

  There are several different types of societal trust but they really boil down into two major groups. Familial and general. Familial is the society where if you loan your lawn mower to your cousin, he'll give it back. But if you loan it to your neighbor, who is not your cousin, you don't know if he'll give it back or not. So you don't loan it to your neighbor. You don't do anything for anyone if you can possibly help it. You don't trust the cop unless he's a cousin. You don't trust the banker unless he's a cousin.

  If you've ever been overseas (or, hell, in certain areas in the U.S.) and had someone say "I have a cousin who . . . " then you're in a familial trust society.

  Then there are general trust societies. The U.S. is, by and large, (and we'll get to Chicago, L.A. and Detroit in a second) a general trust society. In most segments of American society you could loan your lawn mower to your neighbor with a fair expectation of getting it back. If you didn't, you could take him to small claims court and the judge wasn't going to care about you or your neighbor, mostly, just about the merits of the case.

  Trust is vit
al in a society. If societal trust is too low, people trust no one. Except, maybe, their cousins.

  This brings us to "multiculturalism."

  A study was done by a very liberal sociologist back in the mid-oughts. The study set out to prove that multicultural societies had higher levels of societal trust than monoculture societies. It seems a no-brainer that the reverse was the case, but at the time multiculturalism, along with a bunch of other urban myths, was the way of the world.

  However, it was a no-brainer. The study proved the exact opposite. That is, the more diverse an area was in cultures, the less societal trust there was.

  Look, humans don't trust "the other." The name every single primitive tribe gives for "other" translates as "enemy." Apache was the Hopi name for the Apache tribes and that's the exact translation: Enemy.

  But it's more complex than that. Say you're from a general trust culture. A neighbor moves in next door who is from a familial trust culture. You offer the use of your lawn mower. It never comes back. You point that out and eventually learn that it's been used to cut about a hundred lawns. If you get it back, it's trashed.

  The neighbor considers you a moron for loaning it to him in the first place. And he doesn't care if you think he's a dick. He doesn't trust you anyway. You're not family.

  Actual real-world example I picked up on a forum. Group in one of the most pre-Plague diverse neighborhoods in the U.S. wanted to build a play-area for their kids in the local park. They'd established a "multicultural neighborhood committee" of "the entire rainbow." I got this from the liberal "general trust" side of the story. I'd have loved to have gotten it from the rest of the cultures. If they could stop laughing.

  Anyway, this group of "let's all sing kumbaya" liberals got their little brown brothers together and proposed they all build a playground for their kids. There was a kinda run-down park in the neighborhood. Let's build swings so our children can all play together. Kumbaya.

  There were, indeed, little brown brothers and yellow and black. But . . .