Greetings all
Here is the opener to my new fan fiction , it's an idea I had a while back and wanted to finally make a start on it . Some of you may know me from my other work in Progress '' Handle with Care''
I fancied a change of pace so here it , please review if you like or even if you don't , any feedback is welcome as long as its constructive
I do not own True Blood or Southern Vampire mystery's , I make no profit from this work and is done solely for enjoyment , hopefully for my readers as well as myself
Thank you
The world changed forever on the 28th August 2015 , but in the interconnected cyber enhanced multi lingual existence mankind was living in , nobody really noticed . Not at first
I can't recall exactly when I first heard the words '' Gundown Virus '' , the name was an American bastardisation of the Chinese province where the disease first took hold , ''Guangdong Province '' as the natives of that nation called it , most Europeans and especially the denizens of north America could never really hope to get there tongues around this , so Guangdong , became , Gundown . The non to subtle connotation with '' Gunned Down '' were also a mental barb that ensured the term stuck .
At first it was simply another SARS or Swine flu , a repeat of the teeth gnashing carried out over Avian flu , or Thai red river fever , something for the media to whip into a whirlwind and the pharmaceutical companies to wet their collective pants in anticipation of a bumper quarterly report .
And that's pretty much how I saw it , I was a waitress in a backwater town working a dead end job in a economically depressed state , in these great united states .
What could I offer other than a quick prayer , a cluck of my tongue and a shake of my head , '' Oh those poor souls '' as gran would have said .
I saw the nightly news when working the late shift at the bar , we all did , 3D digitally rendered colour corrected high tech looking maps were plastered on the screen , time lapse animation showed red zones leaking into green , one after the other , China , Russia , Ukraine , Germany .
But these were still just words to me , names of places I had only ever seen in text books and on globes , places I had never been to and had made my piece with the fact that I never would a long time ago , no world travel package for uneducated lower middle class service personal on the web , I should know I had taken the time to check .
The figures as well failed to really bring anything home , have you ever seen a million in numerals , or two million , all those zeroes just sort of trip over one another until you may as well be looking at the final tally of the weekly grocery shop as it flashed up on the register , which by the way was a far more immediate and pressing concern for me at the time god forgive me .
We have everything in hand , that was the unrelenting battle cry of our duly elected and trusted government , an endless stream of CDC ( Center for Disease Control ) experts were trotted out for the camera to explain in nice calm layman's terms why we were safe , the surgeon general himself appeared on an almost nightly basis to debunk the latest rumour from Europe or Asia , the panics , the funeral pyres , the endless pits of the dead , all were put pains to and we were all more than happy to believe , a child never questions its parent when they are told there is no monster in the closet , there just happy to know it's been investigated and the all clear given .
That's what we were then , children
For the man's man the red neck bible bashers with their red white and blue pick-up trucks , gun racks and '' From my cold dead hand '' bumper stickers , who perhaps didn't quite trust the suited doctors and white lab coated academics , the cameras showed a sight that every true blooded American could get behind .
Majestic battle ships with impossibly large guns prowled our territorial waters , jets so sleek and fast streaked overhead , deadly armament nestled under there swept back wings , an endless marching procession of fully armed , fully trained , combat hardened troops ready to fight and to die for mom and apple pie '' Praise Jesus and pass the ammunition ! '' .
The small fact that the enemy was a germ so small it could not been seen with the naked eye didn't seem to matter to them , military might and the overwhelming confidence in our strategic capabilities was the opiate of the masses , for the last hundred years we as a country had kicked ass and taken names , why should this be any different ? .
Like I said I couldn't exactly recall when I first heard the term '' Gundown'' , or the first time I heard about this new supposed super virus , but I remember in every detail when it finally struck home for me , for most of us actually .
I had been pulling a double shift at the bar that night , Sam always turned to me in a pinch , I never turned him down as hey , I had bills to pay , after gran died I had the upkeep on the house to bear all on my own , and as sad and pathetic as it was I liked that Sam thought so highly of me , he knew I was good at what I did and in the small pond I was fishing that was cause for pride .
And he was my friend
Jane Bodhouse was slugging back the whiskey sours like she thought the drink was going to evaporate in her glass , Sherriff Dearborn was trying to fit as much of a chilli cheese burger that anatomy would allow into his mouth , thick dollops of sauce hitting his plaid brown troopers shirt , muttered curses and frantic mopping with a far too thin napkin .
As I said , every detail
A news bulletin interrupted some piece of rubbish action flick that the summer time hunters and weekend Rambo's just loved to watch as they swilled beer after beer , Sam indulged them as they put greenbacks in the till and that in turn put food on my table so as long as they kept there wandering hands to themselves , we let the babies have their bottle .
The hero had just been jumping out of a crashing helicopter firing an improbably large gun while a blond starlet with equally improbably large breasts clung to him for dear life and screamed , to me it seemed she did little else but I don't think I was the target demographic , if I wanted to see a blond with large tits I just had to stand in front of the mirror , for Tray , Bubba and Cletus , three of the regular potbellied , check shirt wearing gator poachers who frequented the bar , this was probably the closet they got , well besides me anyway , and I wasn't offering anything other than service with a smile .
The public announcement screen flashed up , it was a familiar sight to us now , it normally happened when the outbreak moved into new territory , the last time it had been England , that little island that had thought its self safe from the oncoming pestilence due to its natural defence of almost a mile and a half of stormy , frigid sea , they had been wrong , very wrong and had been paying the price for that arrogance for a while now . I remember when the Queen of England and half the royal family had contacted the virus , the UK press was in an uproar , that seemed so strange to me , half the country sick and dying , the army barely able to clear away the dead fast enough , but one old lady grabbing all the headlines ? . Maybe you had to be English to get it , like cricket , of jokes about the weather .
A sweaty pallid looking anchor man appeared , as he began to speak the screen cut to a sight we had seen all too often in the last few months , but as the camera pulled back , the man's words faded out , he could have been saying anything and I wouldn't have heard him , I think it was the same for everybody in the bar that night , pool balls had stopped clacking , tongues had stopped wagging , even Jane bodhouse stopped drinking , that last one would have on any day been a sign that something truly significant was going on .
I had never understood why the European and Asian authority's had picked bright red for their body bags , to me it just seemed to scream '' Hey look over here , there's a dead body '' , but I guess it was for some scientific reason that my barmaids brain had simply not been made to understand .
As it turns out , even when they are Green , the message is the same
Bag after bag was being carried out by what looked like astronauts , gas masks and rubber suits , huge hoods of clear polythene .
But this wasn't in some city or town whose name I would show my lack of education by hideously mispronouncing , it wasn't in a country I would never visit where they spoke a language I would never understand , it was here
It was New York .
Times square could be seen clear as day in the background , the high rise apartment that was now being encased in thick plastic sheeting dropped from its roof like a giant packed lunch .
Throngs of people gathered and gawped and photographed and pointed and did whatever else they felt like was appropriate , I agreed with the ones who were praying . But think about that , somebody shouts killer virus and everyone runs to see what going on ? . Maybe that right there is a small insight into the fatalistic tendency of mankind , cultured , technologically advanced lemmings charging with single purpose towards the horizon , safe in the knowledge that the person in front must know where were going , what we're doing .
And that's how it came home for all of us from then one , gone were the maps of the world , we didn't care about them anymore , even the country's that had quite literally gone dark , with no word on what the hell was going on there anymore made the news , now the only map we cared about was the map of the good old US of A .
The daily news reports took on a new heightened frenzy after that day , when the men in white lab coats gave their opinion or talked about some new treatment or plan , they didn't do it like they had before , like they were discussing the best way to control climate change , of restart the US economy
They now had '' The Look '' in their eyes , we could all spot it because we were seeing it more and more every day , in everyone around us .
One Monday morning I was in the Wal-Mart just off Shreveport route 96 , I had taken the radio at its word and decided to up my dried and canned goods store , that morning I cleaned out every penny of my meagre savings from the bank , that day I turned $716.87 into food , bottled water and a few other bare essentials , as I was paying and finishing loading up my trolley the women next in line , coughed , that was it , no big spurt of blood , or juddering convolution , she just coughed , an elderly lady by the looks of her , I'd say about sixty years odd . She swayed on her feet a little and then regained her balance , but that was all it took .
Slowly , like a stop motion explosion the crowd around the checkout moved away from the epicentre of this little old A bomb , whispers then raised voices and then a shout '' GUNDOWN ''
It was as if somebody had fired the starting pistol to the greatest race on earth
I am not for one moment exaggerating when I say I barely made it out of there alive
Thirteen people lost theirs that day , the resulting crush and stampede injured three times as many more , I heard later that the little old lady had survived , she had a cold , that's all , a plain old chicken soup cold . I would say what a waste but what followed in the weeks and months to come well and truly moved the goal posts to how I looked at the world .
I knew then that things were truly falling apart , if one tiny pebble like that old lady tossed into the puddle of a single Wal-Mart , one of literally hundreds across America , what would happen when someone tossed a fucking boulder into the great lake that was our nation .
I didn't have to wait very long to get my answer .
While all this hell was going on , the body bags ,the quarantine , the CDC '' Hot Zones '' the endless shift of red into green , I never for a minute asked myself
I wonder about the Vampires ? .
I like the rest of the planet three years previously had been caught up in the seemingly world changing announcement '' We are real and we are among you ''
I had watched as the pretty blond lady had sat calm and serene in the television studio , looking to the whole of the country like nothing more than another soccer mom dressed up for job interview , the kind of women you would have passed in the street a hundred times that week and never looked twice , but then she sprouted fangs
News interviews , magazine specials , documentary's , a never ending stream of celebrities , religious leaders , political movers and shakers sallied forth to give there opinions and predictions . Clean cut all American looking vampire representatives of the VRL ( Vampire rights League ) were soon a common sight on the nightly news , it didn't take long for it to seem almost normal , results of a carefully targeted and expertly planned PR campaign I suppose .
We have a blood substitute now , we only want to exist in peace with you , yadda yadda , etc etc
The rest of the planet had reacted in a variety of different ways , I hear that the Vampires had it pretty tough in the middle East but then again who the hell didn't . Most had welcomed this seemingly new branch of mankind , hate groups popped up sure but hey , show me any minority and I do mean ANY , and with a few clicks on the web I could bring up the hate mongers home pages , web sites and good lord knows what else , white , black , Asian , Jew , Muslim , Christian . Everybody was hated by somebody so it was not really anything new . When the Rev Steve Newlin graced our screens to rant and rave about his Fellowship of the sun and it mission to expose every fanged abomination to Jesus's holy light , some took notice sure .
Bu then again some had taken notice when Jerry Falwell had launched attack after attack on homosexuals , even when he rallied his followers to the cause of exposing a children's TV character as openly gay , if Teletubbies were fair game then I guess Vampires were as well , these so called men of god never seemed to realise for every one American who nodded their head in agreement and picked up the banner of their touted cause , ten more shook their heads in bemused disgust and changed the channel .
We were just used to it
I had wanted to meet a vampire for a while there as well , after all who wouldn't want to get a glimpse of something that had been legend when you were born and then fact before you hit thirty
But I never did , I guess Bon Tomps didn't have much to offer the undead besides skeeter bites and dynamite fishing , nether of which they took us up on . I played with the idea of heading out to New Orleans or maybe Shreveport , Bojer perhaps to check out the new clubs and bars that had sprung up to cater for the avid fans of the Vampires but had just never got round to it , I always seemed to have something else to do , or the cash to spare .
And in the days of Gundown , well let's just say I had bigger fish to fry
I wonder now in hindsight how no one ever saw it coming , or if they did they never got the chance or the opportunity to possibly share those thoughts on the matter with the wider public . I do kick myself now , after all the events that followed .
I had taken Biology and Evolutionary history in school , the US supreme court had decided Creationism while a nice idea was probably not the best curricular subject , I had agreed , I truly did believe in the god the father and the holy ghost , I went to church every Sunday and prayed for the souls of my family , I was blessed if you want to call it that , with the faith that comes from having buried every member of my kin from my grandmother to my Parents down to my brother , Heart attack , flash flood and drink driving all in that order , I needed to believe I would see them again someday to believe that we would all be together as a family should be . I needed that
But one man and one women populating the entire planet….No , I don't think so
I preferred the argument that evolution was how and not necessarily the why . There are greater things in heaven and Earth then we were ever meant to know , I forget where I heard that but it always smacked of the truth to me .
So in school I had read about Apex predators and heard the teacher tell us that if we still had woolly mammoth , we would still have had saber tooth cat , or more recently that if we still had more unpolluted ocean and arguably less Japanese we would still have Humpback whales
He would point to the big pyramid on the white board and break down the levels of the food chain for our eager young minds to digest , at the top , standing proud and pretty , was man . But those charts were all pre great reveal as the papers called the big Vampire outing , like a Sunday league football team that had dropped the ball once too often we had been relegated to the lower leagues , we were not the top of the pyramid anymore , we weren't the Apex . The Vampire was
I guess that just hadn't sunk in yet .
But I suppose in my and our collective defence , we had enough troubles slapping us in the face in those days to go looking for new ones , you don't look for the wolf behind you when the tiger in front of you is so close you can smell his breath , and what an acrid , stinking breath it was , the kind of smell that can only come from twenty five million dead in five months , globally I'm ashamed to say I have no clue , not even now , but I do know that a few weeks after the first cases hit New York and Yonkers went up in flames , not to mention the living hell of what happened on Manhattan island , the US government had made repeated attempts to contact the People's republic of china , Satellite , Radio , Jesus I even heard we tried mail and twitter . No reply was forthcoming
Now some said this was simply the '' chinks '' their term not mine , just messing with us , keeping themselves off the grid and hunkering down to tackle the problem , but after watching what Gundown had wrought on our corner of the world after a few weeks , I just didn't want to imagine what the year and half they had endured had done . Do you know what I thought ? , I was of the mind that there was simply no one left to pick up the phone , and there was , they really had nothing to say .
All through the news broadcast and radio updates , even after the Wal-Mart incident I was still trying to hang onto the last bit of delusion , that little scrap of fantasy that I wrapped round myself at night and let me imagine a year or two down the road from now , I would be slinging beers in Merlotes , slapping grabbing hands away from my tush and serving up heart bypasses on a roll to my brothers old friends on the road crew , we would chat and say stuff like '' Hey you remember all that who-ha about Gundown ? , dodged a bullet there didn't we ''
That was torn away from me one Saturday morning in July , Louisiana was a hot zone by then , Marshal law and all that Jazz , Merlotes was allowed to stay open as to be frank the quarantine effort in other states had amounted to two things '' Jack'' and ''Shit '' , folks didn't choose to congregate as much sure , but a lot still did simply because they didn't know what else to do or had no place left to go , people around here could take a lot , but I think the reason they didn't close places like Merlotes down was simple , tell a southerner he may very well die soon and they may take it hard , tell em they can't get a drink ? , well like my daddy used to say god rest his soul '' That's a cunt hair to far''
Better in the bars than in the streets right . The government had enough to deal with , they didn't need riots as well , although they did get those to eventually . And some doozies they were
I had been begging my poor little Toyota not to die on me for the last mile to work , gas was in short supply and it was only because of Hoyt bless his heart my brothers friend from School , and then the work crew that I had any at all , public service vehicles were rationed a government supply and Hoyt would skim a little off the top for me , I would always offer to pay but he would just blush and refuse , Hoyt was what my Grandmother used to call a touched spirit , somebody just so naturally kind and good that they were put on the earth as a reminder of what folks could be if they tried , I knew he liked to look out for me as he had always blamed himself for Jason's Death , Hoyt had backed down the night Jason picked up his car keys drunk , oh Hoyt tried you can bet your ass he did , and he got a fist to the face for his trouble , my brother had turned into a pretty mean drunk after gran died , he was one of those former jocks who had lived it up in high school , enjoyed the dizzying heights of popularity and fame that came from his throwing arm and all state wins , but then come down with a pretty painful thud when life and everyone else moved on and he had no place left to go , no place but down .
Not smart enough for College , not good enough for the NFL . He was lucky to get on the road crew
He became one of those sad caricatures of good ol boys , glory days long past , he grew a beer gut and his former good looks started to fade from the heavy drinking and bitter bile that had built up inside him
That night he wrapped his car around a tree , I take a little comfort that they said he died instantly , but not that much .
Hoyt had never forgiven himself , so I think he tried to be there for me and make amends , although he had nothing to feel sorry for , Jason had made his choice
I saw the smoke before the flames , I turned into Merlotes car park and straight into a scene from hell , thick black smoke hung everywhere , tongues of flames leaped thirty feet high into the air , I recognised the VAR ( Virus Alert Response ) team and those big red trailers they drove around in , like fire engines but without the hose and ladder
A fire engine wasn't even there
I scrambled out of my car and ran over only to be stopped by Bud Dearborn , he didn't touch me , that was pretty much taboo these days , he just held up his hands to halt me , his cold war era gas mask just looked almost comical , even I knew anything less than a full NBC suit didn't do shit against Gundown
( Nuclear , Biological ,Chemical )
He explained as calmly and as slowly as he could as I watched the bar reduced to blackened cinders
He had got the report this morning to come down here , someone had found Sam dead behind the bar , I still don't know to this day how he got sick , who gave it to him , but then most didn't back then , you got it , you died
The VAR team confirmed the infection , then set fire to the whole building , it was standard practice . They had burnt the whole city of Chicago to the ground to try and halt the disease , they weren't going to spare a moment thinking about torching a red neck bar
The incubation period varied so much some doctors argued we weren't dealing with one virus but about a dozen , but at that time I really couldn't have cared less . I walked away from Bud not knowing that would be the last time I would see him alive , he contracted it from his wife a few days later , he knew she was sick but he didn't try and do anything , I heard he closed up his house , hung a warning on the door and climbed into bed with her , Bud could be a pain in the ass about a lot of things and I knew he was also a bit of a bigot and a racist .
But he loved his wife more than anything in the world . Even living , so you knew he had a heart
I drove home on auto pilot , I don't recall any of the journey , once home I took off my coat and hung it on the back of the kitchen door , kicked off my comfy work sneakers and curled into a ball right there on the floor , and I cried , and I cried , and I cried
I didn't think I had that much water in me .
It was all pretty much downhill after that , not to say that it had been a cake walk up to that point but still , now I had no place left to hide , not even in my own head
Things went from bad , to worse , to fucked up , and if there was a next level after that , we hit it as well .
I stayed indoors for pretty much the next three months , my secluded little house was actually a survivors dream , I had no neighbours for miles , Bon tomps was a sparsely populated area surrounded by swamp , and a lot of folk had up sticks and moved when the shit had really hit the fan , I never understood that , a lot of those family's lived in houses just like mine , out of the way and stocked well with supplies , but they gave it all up to head to New Orleans or other population centres , chasing stupid rumours about vaccines or a big helicopter evacuation , evacuate ? , where the hell did they think they were going to evacuate to ? .
This was a fucking global Pandemic , it was every where
I had tried to get hold of Hoyt just before the phones and electricity went down , I figured if I wanted anyone with me Hoyt was top of my list , a good man with a good aim , no dear who ever saw Hoyt point a gun at it ever got to tell his buddies about it . I wanted to ask if he and his mamma wanted to come bunk with me , you know , pool our resources or what ever .
I wasn't so keen on Mrs Fotternberry but I was Christian enough to swallow my distaste and look at the bigger picture , plus even if I didn't care for her that much , I sure as shit didn't want to be out here all on my own .
I had been about to hang up after the tenth ring or so but then coughing and spluttering came over the wire , a tired and weak voice asked who it was , I recognised Mrs Fotternberry's voice small as it was , I told her who I was and asked if she was alright , a stupid question I know , I could hear she was sick , but southern manners died about as hard as Southerners themselves .
She told me she was indeed sick and had been since yesterday when she had buried Hoyt in the back garden , she coughed some more and then wished me god speed , told me I was a good girl, then the line went dead .
I didn't cry , I didn't have any tears left
That was the last time I spoke to anybody for what seemed like a coons age , I had my wind up radio to make sure I didn't miss a second of the collapse of the world humans had spent the last ten thousand years or so building , I would sit by candle light in my grans old rocking chair in front of the living room hearth , cup of sweet tea in one hand , radio , in the other and my shotgun on my lap
I think those were some of the darkest days of my life , and coming from someone who's said goodbye to every living piece of family they ever had in this world ? . That's pretty dark
I didn't know then that very shortly one kind of nightmare would be replaced with another , that fear of one thing would soon begin to pale with fear of another
That Soon I was going to meet my first Vampire , and nothing was ever going to be the same again
My name is Sookie Stackhouse , and I'm an endangered species
It's nice to meet you .
What do you think ?
