As to the source of all this misery, the plague itself, little was ultimately learned. The great university labs and the Federal Government, in the form of the CDC, doing the best they could with severely limited facilities and personnel and nearly buried alive by panicky victims, burned through a whole set of letter and number combinations. At last count, they had settled on YP46. But putting a name to the disease did nothing toward preventing its spread. The last anyone heard from the monolithic labs in New Atlanta was that they were still at work on the problem, but with the collapse of basic services and the onset of lawlessness, it is thought that they were, like all other Federal agencies, more or less wiped out.
The disease’s origins were, perhaps inevitably, the source of much conjecture and speculation. The more conspiracy-minded held that it was some sort of experiment gone awry, some secret germ warfare program or, more likely, a terrorist attack, but no evidence of such was ever unearthed, though not for lack of trying; indeed, in the final days, many people seemed more obsessed with the plague’s origin than its effects. In the end, though, no blame could be squarely laid, and the disease was thought to be of a wholly mundane nature. Mother Nature simply served up an organism the human race could not master.
And in its physical manifestation, the organism was cruel. Victims first felt fatigue and a persistent cough, followed quickly by a general systemic breakdown and, finally, a gruesome, bloody death as they choked to death on their own fluids. Mortality was swift; most victims died within three days of infection.
Among survivors, madness was not an uncommon response. From the very religious, wailing of the End Times, to the New Agers praying for alien intervention, from the average guy who just snapped when he was forced to dig another grave for another dead family member, to the clinic worker who’d seen one too many people choke to death on their own blood, quite a number of folks just plain lost it. For those not driven out of their minds outright, scenes of depravity, sexual perversity, violence, and unreasoning destruction became all too common and served perniciously to swell the ranks of the mad and the dead.
Indeed, one of the great tragedies of the event was the loss of life not from plague but from the depredations of those who, panicked by a looming apocalypse, reverted to a “might-is-right” mentality and fought with each other over goods and places which would swiftly be, devoid of a human presence, essentially useless.
And, on top of all this loss of life and misery, those lucky enough to not contract the plague still died, from a variety of other causes. The infirm and the aged, uncared-for and unable to care for themselves, perished from neglect or a simple lack of medical care. Formerly mundane afflictions like diabetes and common heart conditions, not to mention everyday diseases like influenza, became, in the absence of vital medications, modern sanitation, and proper care, as deadly as the plague itself. Common accidents became lethal; even a broken ankle could be life-threatening, and an inflamed appendix was tantamount to a death sentence. In addition, untold numbers of people, faced with the horrors to come, simply took their own lives; there are no figures available, but it is estimated that tens—if not hundreds—of thousands may have committed suicide.
By necessity and nature, those who were survived and weren’t overtly insane tended to band together. There were, naturally, plenty of lone holdouts, survivalist types holed up in what they thought were impregnable fortresses, sometimes whole families, but most people hadn’t been so prescient or prepared. (Interestingly, there is no evidence to point to a lesser mortality rate for such isolationists; the plague knew no boundaries and could not be deterred by weapons and fortifications.) Most were just regular people, young and old, men and women and children who, for whatever reason, had not contracted the disease and now were faced with a daily struggle for mere survival. Sometimes in cities, sometimes in the country, sometimes with forethought, and sometimes slapdash and improvisational, they grouped together.
Many of these bands devolved into rule by the strongest, a simple gang mentality that, while crude and sometimes brutal, often provided the best form of organization for the situation. After all, no one had to think about what to do next if somebody else did it for them, and only a few people had it in them to do the thinking. Still, such groups proved problematic; often it was only by violently preying on each other that they survived and, sadly, some resorted to cannibalism.
Others bands were more “civilized”, better organized and more democratic, electing leaders and using basic rules of order and law, but these were few and far between, generally less aggressive and poorly armed and thus vulnerable, and most ended up being either wiped out or conglomerated into a few larger enclaves. These larger groups, staking out whatever land they deemed worth defending, like islands in a vast sea of wasteland, existed in relatively complete isolation of each other and bore makeshift names like the California Confederacy and the New Hampshire Free State.
Naturally, global communication, land lines, cellular networks, satellites and computers, unmanned and without electrical power, quickly flickered and then went silent. The U.S. Emergency Broadcast Network, reduced to intermittent transmissions of useless advice, sent its last signal on June 6, 2066. Where once there’d been a clamor of human interaction, profound silence descended.
As the months and years went by and neglect set in, the very landscape of America changed. Vegetation, be it tree or vine or simple grass, began to take over; pavements buckled from the weeds sprouting up and saplings germinated on the freeways. Great buildings—skyscrapers, stadiums, cathedrals—were left to the elements and the foliage and began to crumble.
Animals, whether domesticated or wild, proliferated or died out, depending on their adaptability. Indeed, for some species the plague was a veritable boon; it was not uncommon for a survivor to encounter large packs of wild dogs, hordes of overfed rats, or great flocks of carrion-fatted birds. On the other hand, animals like cows and pigs and most poultry, unable to defend themselves or adapt, became much more scarce.
The remains of civilization provided their own serious hazards as well. Railroad and semi tankers full of liquid chlorine and ammonia rusted through and released vast clouds of searing poison gas that sometimes covered a hundred square miles. Waterways, the complex system of locks and dams now untended, dried up in some places and in others overflowed their banks and flooded great stretches of low-lying America. Nuclear plants melted down, burst their containment structures, and lay radioactive waste to whole regions. Rusting, leaking refineries, derelict, chemical-filled industrial plants, weeping oil rigs, giant exploding fuel tanks and a host of other man-made ecological disasters pocked the countryside like gigantic carbuncles.
All in all, it became a very hostile world in which to live, and one not for the weak; murder, rape, insanity, hunger, dread, and general, random lawlessness faced nearly each and every one, each and every day. More esoteric, leisure-oriented things like basic education, religion, science, entertainment and the arts, all waned sharply or took new and different forms as the older survivors died off and the upcoming generation, most of them half-feral orphans, developed their own crude, usually heavily nostalgic, cultures.
By some mutual but tacit agreement, survivors tended to use the same stark, capital-letter terms when speaking of what happened: the decline and collapse of civilization was called the Fall, the years prior to it were known as Before, and the present day was known as After. The plague itself was commonly referred to simply as the Sick.