Plague: Death was only the beginning! by Donald Franck, Francine Franck Page A

the crisis.
    Heather waved her flashlight about to ensure she had everything she needed piled on the gurney. Besides her own belongs, she had placed a Lifepak portable EKG/defibrillator, IV fluids, drugs, isolation gowns, gloves, and a number of nursing scrubs. Under this were oxygen e-tanks, batteries, and oxygen masks as backup supplies. She had quickly realized that coming back to the hospital for supplies would expose her to dangerous diseases caused by the numerous dead.
    Exiting outside, she pushed the gurney to the back of a parked ambulance and began to unload it. While her own car was nearby, it was too small to carry the supplies she was taking. And the ambulance, with its heavy-duty chassis, was built for the job. It was an easy decision to gas it up and to begin loading food, water, and medical supplies inside. It even came with its own bed, of sorts.
    Finished, she sat for a moment on the tailgate and wondered where she was going to go. Her friend, the author, had passed on a secret during his last moments about a place of security where others had already built a home and would welcome a trained cardiac nurse with her own supplies. After checking her map, she mounted up and pulled away from the last hospital she would ever work at. Tears filled her eyes, but she had to remain strong if she was to make her way into this changing landscape.
     

 
     
     
    “The life of man is filled with sorrow and regret. Some more so than others.”
    -Thoughts from the Author
     
    Chapter 23
    Worldwide Deaths: 129,000,000 est.
     
    While the world’s population was still teeming with life, society as a whole was crippled and afraid to show its face out of doors. The major cities had quickly succumbed to the swiftly moving wave of death. Panicked crowds ran through the streets, unknowingly spreading the disease with each breath and touch. Others fell, and in their death throes flung blood and bits of bloody spray about them. Each drop was a death sentence to whoever caught it.
    In Moscow, Red Square was empty of life and as cold as Lenin’s tomb. The few surviving members of the population lay covered in blankets and shawls to conserve whatever warmth was to be found, as they too had lost all power and water days before. As luck would have it, the people saw this as a normal state of affairs and went about life as normally as possible.
    Berlin, Germany saw things in a different light as the bodies of the dead were placed in dump trucks and taken to a mass gravesite outside the city. They were used to burying the dead after two world wars and aided by stories from the holocaust. After burning or burying six million Jews, the cities were efficiently moving each corpse with an almost clock-like expertise of movement. But, even they were struggling to care for the living at expense of the dead. They soon saw mounds of bodies being bulldozed into empty lots or abandoned buildings and set afire, even German engineering and efficiency had its limits. Within a few weeks, even the burnings had stopped as the people died by the thousands in their rooms and apartments, until no one could count the dead.
    In San Paulo, Brazil, the city quickly emptied as the people ran into the jungle to escape the plague. This worked for a while until the disease spread to the local monkey population. They quickly started to die and fell from the trees into the local camps and water systems. Even the jungle was no haven from the Black Death.
    Only in the Polar Regions, were the local populations free from its spread. Here, the cold killed the fleas and airborne bacilli before they could infect others. While transport ships had brought the disease to Fairbanks and points west on the Alaskan coast, the interior was fairly isolated and sat out the end of the world in semi-comfort.
    But here and there, a handful of survivors were immune to the plague, and they watched the world die about them. Like Chevy Sands and Heather, they ruled as a population of one