The Rest of the World in Chaos...
It took me months to research and take in many of the survivors' first and second-hand accounts of the world's reaction to the quarantine and the outbreak. Inside the red zone, you didn't have a clue what happened to the outside world. Back then, I thought that the outbreak was everywhere. While we drove to Albany, a lot of shit had gone down across the globe.
The government had imposed a soft curfew following the initial outbreak in New York. Then, when things turned for the worse inside the city, the government ordered a full lockdown of all non-essential businesses, banned the gathering of crowds of more than four, and placed the curfew to before seven in the evening. No one was to be caught wandering at night.
This was only the order given in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
However, for the rest of the country, Alfie filled in the gaps and told me that their lockdowns were much more relaxed. Many folks on Reddit or Twitter thought it was a drastic government oversight, a complete disregard for privacy and freedom. Major cities across the county had days of protests by the thousands complaining about the matter. Various human rights groups accused the government of murder and racial profiling from videos streaming online, mostly of people of color in Harlem being butchered by the NYPD and the army, not knowing that the people who died were vectors. Still, the uproar and anger were deafening, and riots against the police happened non-stop that the national guard had to be deployed.
Of course, from the guards to the police, they imposed excessive force.
One college student, a famous YouTuber who documented his college life and posted hours of "Study with me!" Videos were accused of being a child killer when he videotaped killing two vector children, saying how smart they were and organizing most of the attacks. He saved the lives of his dorm mates because of it (before the bombs fell). I want to think it gave the army enough information on how to deal with the vectors. After that video was released, squads were now hunting sick children, separating them from the infected adults, much to their parents' fury.
But people misconstrued the YouTuber's words as that of a crazy serial child killer admiring his latest victims. His information was doxxed, causing his family, who lived in California, to have a press conference, begging him to surrender to the police. I laughed out loud when Alfie told me about it, thinking, "What police? They're all dead."
"They'll control them once they turn," a doctor told me once. "It'll take a minute or two, but that is how narrow your window is on dispatching an infected child. Lord only knows how difficult that must be for our boys in green."
"Just two minutes?" I asked.
"Once the child turns, they'll reorient themselves. Dazed at first, but once they smell the others, or that's what I think they do, control takes hold. The infected become coordinated, and their attacks deadlier. They sure are dumb before, but a child can control a horde of a hundred."
That was the magic number: One infected child controlled a horde of a hundred.
I'll give them a name here so that I could distinguish them better in the future. The vector horde was like their drones, and the child was like the head honcho, so I'll name the infected children honchos. Drones and Honchos. There. That should separate the two.
I felt sorry for the Youtuber. He's probably dead now with the bombs and all, but he stopped a coordinated attack from two hundred vector drones from killing his schoolmates when he dispatched those children. I liked to think that his parents would later understand the sacrifice he had to make to save his friends and that he was not a child murderer.
Alfie later told me of a video of an entire class of fourth-grade children killing their teacher (or what seemed like the teacher). Still, people thought those young elementary kids were brave because they had the heart to stop a shooter on their own, and thereby halting another mass shooting in a school (and the man in the video did have a rifle in his hand). They did not know that those kids were vectors, and the man, the teacher, had to do the hardest thing he could in his entire life—to kill his students—so he could save what's left of the children in his class cowering behind him.
I shuddered to think about what happened to the rest of the kids.
It was pandemonium.
People sought justice to these cops, to these killers, to these gunmen running around New York killing anyone they could find, and maybe they were satisfied that the bombs fell, given that most of those cops and killers were probably vectors or were now burnt to a crisp. Sure, they lamented the dead, believed themselves it was an attack by a nefarious foe—another government or terrorist group—thinking that it was some biological nerve gas that turned everyone crazy.
I still couldn't forgive the government for putting the rest of the country in the dark, said that they had everything under control, and since ignorance was the absolute fucking bliss, people ate it all up like some motherfucking kool-aid. It was in the name of civility for the economy to continue or preserve the comfort of life. If they didn't see it, it was not their problem.
Shit, how wrong they were.
It might have saved more lives in the future.
But no matter how much truth was put out there from the various news organizations that still had the integrity to report the proper news, millions of people online always believed that these were all a hoax. Some even went so far as blaming other countries like North Korea, Russia, or China for the attacks.
A brave few actively sought out the quarantine zone, thinking their conspiracy theory was correct, or as a sign of rebellion, or even to seek out fame by going viral. Only a few manage to get out alive. The army had caught those that did, or the police detained to stop the spread of information.
Tessa told me of one famous group of Instagram fitness models who slipped through the quarantine border (and a couple of those she followed on the app) headed toward New Jersey. They broadcasted their entire trip live to gain as many followers and hearts as they could, posing filtered photos in front of various looted buildings and ruins while writing hollowed posts about peace and kindness or some other attention-hogging bullshit like that.
They were instantly killed when they entered Jersey city, attacked by a group of people.
Tessa did not think of it much at the time, believing it to be a violent group of rioters (as most peaceful protests around the country were mysteriously turning violent). Still, she realized now that the rabid people she saw were vectors.
I began to form an idea of what it was like outside the quarantine zone. Yes, they saw the horrors happening in New York and now in New England, but they had the bliss of having only the smallest bite of the chocolate cake, choosing to focus on the frosting, the sugar, instead of the cake itself.
If they only knew what was behind the quarantine border, they might not think otherwise. They had the benefit of ignorance until reality brought its ugly head to remind them that they cannot escape it. The world was in on the fog, hoping it would go away. After all, this was the United States of America, leader of the free world. They should get their shit together faster than most countries could.
When humans asked themselves why bad things happened to them, it's because they ignored the problem before until there was nothing left to do but to face the ugly fucker. Bad stuff happened because our ignorance of the issues blinded us, but it wasn't all world-ending. Flight or fight, it would ask, a fifty percent chance of making it or not, and you get to move on to live your best days or your worst days.
Mother Nature gave us that ultimatum with this disease. You could chuck it in as the virus manifesting itself due to man-made global warming or some conspiracy of Earth fighting back against the disease called humanity and their ignorance of the planet's problems. Hence, the bad stuff happened.
Reality would be the judge of your fate.
I hoped he or she was kind to me.
So, it wasn't a surprise that fate weaved a frightening path for the disease, placing its bet on Comoros winning this grand apocalyptic game over us frail humans.
Right before the bombs fell, a turboprop Cessna caravan plane (which could carry 10-14 passengers) left Newark in the nick of time. The pilot was smart to avoid detection from the Air Force and other tracking radar, hovering low as they flew out of New England.
They managed to fly out over the ocean, avoiding land until they reached North Carolina, where they moved inland. Somehow, this flight never reached whatever destination the survivors inside intended, crashing on the woods near Raleigh, the state's capital city, which had a population of half a million.
I surmised that someone on board the plane was infected, maybe several of them, trying to escape through a vector-filled airport like Newark, turned and killed the rest of the survivors.
As I said earlier, the rest of the country was blind to the disease, so the first responders never considered that the plane was from New York. They might have thought (and I'm paraphrasing), "Flights bound for the Northeast are canceled due to the quarantine. No way this came from there."
The basic comforts of life went on outside the red zone. Travel was still high, people walked around freely outside without masks on, jobs were still stress-inducing, and traffic was still heavy.
So, when the infection spread across Raleigh, all eyes were on the Northeast.
No one was looking at their back door.
Like New York, it took two days for Raleigh to fall. The first day still had their flights departing from Raleigh-Durham International Airport, where a few of the passengers onboard were infected. None stopped them. No one noticed until it was too late.
Of the twenty flights departing that day, about half had infected passengers. Four of which spread out across North Carolina, infecting more cities across the state.
One went to Atlanta, Georgia, the state's capital city, with a population of six hundred thousand.
Two flights went to Orlando, Florida, a city of three hundred thousand. The flights were packed with passengers (some infected) on vacation to Disney World and Universal Studios, two popular theme parks that received eighty million guests per year combined, both local and international. About five percent of the guests were infected by the first day of Orlando's outbreak (and day two for Raleigh). Two percent of those affected had international flights going to cities like Amsterdam, Keflavik, Punta Cana, London, Brasilia, and Mexico City. The rest of the local plane spread out across the south, from Georgia to Oklahoma.
Another plane departing from Raleigh had a connecting flight from Baltimore to Paris. I believed one (or several) passengers had boarded the connecting flight. Midway through the Atlantic, the passengers on board succumb to Comoros, forcing the pilots to secure themselves inside the cockpit. But before they could land in Paris, they intentionally crashed the plane on the Bay of Biscay, ninety miles off La Rochelle, France, sacrificing themselves. It only bought France a week. Soon, the plague came from London and spread out across mainland Europe.
And the last two flights out of Raleigh went to Toronto, Canada, and New Orleans. Like before, it took two or three days for the city to succumb to the disease.
Planes still flew out from each city on their first and second day of the outbreak, infecting more cities in return—a domino effect.
Since that Cessna turboprop plane flew out of New York and crash-landed in the outskirts of Raleigh, it took four days for the virus to spread across six continents. It was the same time it took us to reach the Albany Safe Zone, thinking that the military was hard-pressed in containing the disease when there's already an inferno coming from behind.
Albeit the vectors were still few in numbers, by the end of the fifth month, most of the world was affected. It only took three weeks for the world to wake up to it, and by that time, everything was a losing battle.
It'll take me a long time to write about how the other countries dealt with the Comoros plague and its astounding epidemiology. Various historians now collected most of their history, but it saddened me to say that about sixty percent of the existing nations pre-Comoros never recovered; their citizens all dead. Take Jamaica, for example. With nowhere to hide on an island, survivors had to swim or sail out to the sea. Historians believed that only two percent of the original population made it out safely. All island nations suffered the same fate, even the state of Hawaii. But even countries like China had the same problem. Due to having the largest population, it meant they had the largest vector population, too.
So, the world fell in five months after New York was bombed.
There had been thousands still alive in New York before the MOAB, and whatever the government believed about killing the few to save the many...well, all that big sacrifice for little gain and little reward.
We reached Albany, thinking we had all the time in the world to make up for the pain and the horrors we endured, not knowing that the world was already gone.
The world had become hell itself.