Uproot

Prologue

The end began three years after the flooding began. Hurricanes hammered away at the coastlines and tsunamis slowly plunged coastal cities underwater, one by one. Many stubborn humans, determined to drown with their ships, clung steadfast to the artificial material world around them and stayed in their homes. Some of them died oblivious to the catastrophe, because they never unplugged their optic link from the Internet for long enough to see what was happening in the reality around them. Some said that they were the lucky ones. They never had to see what was to come.

As the waters began to settle and the days began to warm, a silent killer crept in on an already, at times, disparaging populace. Large scale homelessness had overtaken a huge percentage of the poor in America. People began to move, en masse, to the north. Rain rarely fell in the southern states, unless accompanied by hurricanes and flooding. The end of Florida's phallic tip had long since been plunged underwater, making Tallahassee, almost suddenly, a much more coastal city. For miles, underwater sprawl stretched. Dead bodies floated up from shallow graves; human waste decomposed in the sun warmed ocean waters. Carried by mosquitoes, who found it quite suitable to lay their eggs in stagnant pools of contaminated water, antibiotic resistant malaria broke out in the human population.

The United States government, held captive by financial obligations to China, and being gouged by the suddenly resource rich Canadian government, had already spent too much money trying to solve the housing crisis caused by flooding, and the food crisis caused by the drought that was wracking the southern half of the nation. Underneath the obligation of providing a country with an antibiotic for an epidemic, the government crumbled behind closed doors. The Center for Disease Control looked more like a bunker. Press and bloggers lined the surrounding fences, cameras itching to take footage for the always news hungry Internet. Mosquito nets sold by the millions, and were shipped systematically from Japan to American families.

Humans were not the only creatures displaced by flooding. Rats, by the millions, were forced inland by the floods, carrying with them, fleas. Water in the south was sparse. River drinking became common among poor humans, as water supplies in many areas had been contaminated by flooding.

No one knows why, but a particular flea on a particular rat was carrying a particularly virulent strain of septicemic plague. This highly evolved gram negative bacteria began its journey by hopping off of that flea and entering the warm waters of the Mississippi River. There in the tepid waters it bred, and it waited to flow downstream and into the eager mouths of Louisiana's poorest people.

The first outbreak happened at a shelter in Baton Rouge. They'd lost their only doctor to malaria no more than a week prior. Every time someone died, an eager body awaited their bed. The attitude of the workers had become somber. Most shelters had closed; the majority of residents, who could afford to, had fled their homes and headed north. The homeless made do in abandoned buildings. But when a bed opened at a shelter, it meant also the opportunity to buy food, and perhaps see a doctor, if you were unlucky enough to catch malaria in a shelter that was lucky enough to have a doctor.

The first person afflicted was a five month old child. Her teenaged mother had meant her no harm, letting her drink from a bottle of water that had been filled with river water a week earlier. They had been unknowingly walking south instead of north, in search of a shelter. The baby had had a fever for days now. She was sweating so much that her mother thought, naturally, to give her lots of water. When they finally reached the shelter, the baby was nearly dead. The shelter had no doctor, and the mother watched as her baby began to vomit violently. Fear of malaria prevented all but one woman from helping her care for the dying child, who eventually vomited until she died of dehydration.

Then, the infection, that was not merely malaria, spread to the two women. The younger woman showed symptoms first. She awoke in the night with a gut wrenching pain. Cramps overtook her and she fell to the ground. Her vision blurred and she heard the rush of blood throbbing in her eardrums like it was the hammering of a hail storm. Consciousness began slipping away from her; the last thought that crossed her sad mind was, "This must be what it feels like to die." Then the pain overtook her.