When I left the room only Jillian was waiting for me. We went to our suite. I crawled into bed and slept. I dreamed that Jillian and I were alone in the city and that it was a deserted paradise. “You make me so happy,” she said, and then she grinned.
Two months passed quickly. The northern hemisphere slowly turned toward winter and the city was a delight as far as the weather was concerned. Fall was always the best time of year in San Francisco, with warm, sunny days and cool nights. There wasn’t much rain, and there weren’t any TV meteorologists around to tell us California was in another drought.
People came to the Palace, lured by Benjamin’s sign. Thanks to Conaghan we got all the generators running, but we didn’t power any exterior lights and made sure interior lights were usually cloaked by curtains, the older generation making jokes about blackout conditions in old war movies.
By September there were over one hundred people in the Palace. A crew had gone from room to room upstairs, popping open doors with pry bars and searching the rooms for surviving grins. They found one alive and killed it, and found two dead. One had apparently died of starvation. One had choked to death trying to eat a luxuriant bath towel. Renfield found that interesting. Benjamin found it hysterical. I thought it was terribly sad.
While it would be nice to admit that every survivor was of equal value, that wasn’t true. Part of me resented every too-old or too-young survivor. We needed strong backs and ready hands and fighters. Instead we just seemed to gather more and more mouths to feed, more people to care for.
I was inexpressibly thankful when Anna Anders showed up at the door one night, hammering on the glass and screaming as a grin with some devastating lower-body injury crawled after her, and others grins came running, lured by her cries.
Anders had to be in her sixties. She was thin and small, with a pale face and graying black hair. She was a veterinarian. Barring any extreme medical emergencies, we now had a doctor in the house.
We held weekly meetings and assigned different duties, even the children in the hotel had jobs to do, and we tried to hold things together. Some people were adapting. Some were utterly useless, unable to adapt to a world that was too far gone.
The power never did come back on, and after a few weeks the water stopped running as well. That was a bitch. Now we had to ration water, and had begun stockpiling our supply by raiding nearby stores for bottles until we realized all the office towers around us were vertical gold mines. On almost every floor of every building we found at least one of those big five gallon bottles in or near a water cooler. Food was less of a problem, for now. There were more than enough packaged foods in nearby shops and offices to sustain us.
We didn’t have many weapons. There were a total of three guns, an indication of just how far anti-firearm legislation and sentiment had gone in the Bay Area before everything fell apart. Most of our weapons were blunt force weapons. Pry bars, axes and baseball bats were the most effective.
At least once a day helicopters passed over the city or hovered over the bay. We tried any number of ways to signal them and thought we had failed.
We had tried contacting any authorities using two-way radios, an emergency radio found in the basement of the Palace and even the police radio Haise had been wearing, as Randall had taken it along with his gun, but we received no responses.
With no power, we had no way of knowing if TV stations were transmitting. we charged only a few smart phone batteries with the hotel emergency generators and used them to monitor the web If the internet was still up and running none of the cell towers were operational or they had been shut down, because we never got any signals.
Local AM and FM radio was just a sea of white noise.
Our only reliable source of information was a radio Renfield had constructed. It was a small unimpressive plastic box. I asked him where the microphone and speaker were and he told me he was a QRPer. He began throwing a lot of jargon at me. Most of it went over my head but what it boiled down to was this; on the roof of the Palace, via relayed messages, he could communicate with anyone, anywhere, given enough time. He was using the CW band and communicating in Morse code. I thought that was a thing of the past, but he told me that before things fell apart there was a growing number of amateur radio enthusiasts who were returning to the roots of radio communication, building very low-power radios and perfecting their performance. The battery-powered clear polycarbonate cube filled with electronic components soldered to a circuit board became known as Renfield’s Box. It was an effective, yet slow means of communication.
After two weeks we gave up trying to hail any emergency services or government agencies through second or third parties. If they were out there, they were ignoring us.
Sitting on the roof of the hotel with his radio and a pen and notepad, the radio chatter Renfield captured confirmed that the San Francisco area was a quarantine zone. No one was going in or out of the city. Anyone trying to leave the city by crossing the bay and landing a boat in Marin or the East Bay would be shot on sight as the authorities now assumed that anyone living in the city was a carrier of the disease.
Looking down from the roof, Renfield never saw anything on Montgomery Street aside from the stealthy movements of a stray gray and white cat as it weaved between the abandoned cars.
There wasn’t much news outside the Bay Area beyond rumors.
It was said that Manhattan had been leveled, or cleansed, by nuclear weapons. It was said that grin drives were being undertaken by National Guard units all across the plains and down into Texas. The infected were being rounded up like cattle, corralled into large groups and then sprayed down with gasoline and burned alive, which was considered the most cost-efficient method of dealing with them. It was said that nuclear power plants had melted down in Japan, France, and Southern California. It was said there was no longer a centralized government in the United States. All of this information was second hand. Rumor. Supposition.
No one said anything about exploring treatments or vaccines or immunization.
When the technology that united us across great distances and left us more and more isolated from each other than any other time in human history failed, human contact became an essential once again.
There were groups of survivors like us in Seattle, Cheboygan, Dover and New Bedford, people trapped by geography, by lines of water or fire or soldiers, people trapped in gathering places for grins.
More and more grins were appearing in the city. We had a group of fit young men and women who called themselves the Wrecking Crew. The two teams of five went out on hunts, killing as many grins as they could, and they always returned with the same news. There were more of them out there. They were coming up the peninsula to downtown San Francisco. No one knew why.
Haise never came back. Randall finally admitted, in clipped sentences, that he had accused Haise of being a fraud who was playing at being a cop. They had argued, Randall had taken the gun and fired one shot into the ceiling to scare Haise away.
Benjamin was dating Marisol Morales. Her sister Soledad was sharing a room with a mean looking young man named Ed Mariano, who was the head of the Wrecking Crew.
It took us a while to realize that a man who had joined us was a pimp, trading out the favors of his women for whatever he needed.
One of those women was Rose Lubisch. Rose was only eighteen. She was trying and failing to hide the fact that she was pregnant. We had assumed that Kalife Montagne was her husband. He wasn’t.
When we heard this news I wanted to throw the man out. Jillian told me to wait and see what happened. She was hoping Montagne would change, would help out and pitch in and become part of our little community. She always hoped for the best in people.