Chapter III:
Glenn walked over to the window after taking a bite of pizza and parted the vertical blinds with the fingers on his free hand. He looked outside and didn't see anything. The sirens must have come from another street a block or two away, but they were close, they certainly sounded like it. He saw nothing out of the usual on the street; the city bus was still running and a man on bicycle wearing a backpack was riding along much as if it was any ordinary day. Glenn let go of the blinds and let them close in front of him obscuring his view of the street and replacing it with dusty beige plastic illuminated by the fading evening light filtering in through the gray overcast skies which had kept out the sun all day. Glenn stared at the closed blinds for a moment or two. He thought deeply, didn't blink and just remained there like a statue, pizza in hand by his side. He wondered if it was all a dream; he felt a little delirious and drowsy, maybe right now he was actually starting to wake up. Soon his adrenaline jacked nerves would be swallowed by somnolence as he was plunged out of this ocean of his own imagination. His eyes open as they were would see no further than the inside of his eyelids and the sound of the sirens fading into the distance would be replaced by the wretched whining of his alarm clock. That explanation made as good of sense as any; how else would he be able to make sense of the things he had seen today? In some insane parts of the world or in some insane times people may resort to eating people but not here, not in America, the land of plenty. Hell if someone was starving that badly it would be much easier and less severe of a crime to just run down to a store and eat something off the shelf. A twinkie would sure taste better than raw bleeding flesh at that. Even if the afflicted were beset by some ravenous rabid disorder all of the sudden it wouldn't explain the rest of what he encountered, the largest most glaring logical fallacy of them all. The dead simply do not get back up again, they stay dead. There was nothing in Glenn's mind that could rationalize that. He wasn't so much of a man of faith, more or less apathetic in the matter though his belief in the afterlife came in more of a transcendent, spiritual fashion and one that was a lot more noble and clean. Resurrection in the metaphysical sense would not come in the form of rotting meat bags whose only purpose in rising again was to go off in search of more meat. If that was the afterlife then Glenn was certain hell was very much real and that he was living in it.
Glenn blinked expecting to reopen his eyes in the "real" world, lying in his bed cursing the necessity for him to have to go to work. He left them closed for a lot longer than it would take to blink, theorizing it would take some time to let the magic work that would spring him from this dream world. When he opened his eyes nothing had changed, he was still looking at the blinds still the same distant sirens faded away only to be joined by another round of sirens heading in a different direction. He wasn't going to get out of this nightmare the easy way.
"Might as well find out just how bad this is." Glenn said to himself as he walked away from the window and went out into his small living room adjacent to the kitchen. It was really all one room separated only by a thin bar rail which Glenn had stuffed with dirty dishes, empty takeout food containers, comic books and those advertisement and coupon books that came in the mail on a weekly basis. The living room wasn't much better; there were plenty of trash and stains all over the place. His parents would have likely strung him up for being such a slob but they weren't here now were they?
Glenn plopped down on the dingy secondhand chair in front of his TV and dug around in the cushions to his left side to find the remote. He then flipped on the TV and the cable box and waited for them to power on. "And now to see what the world is saying about the situation." Glenn thought to himself. As he took another bite of pizza the screen came to life. Nothing out of the ordinary on Cartoon Network but then again it would have had to have gotten really bad for all the channels to be taken over. Glenn then scrolled through the channels until he got to one of the 24 hour news channels, still nothing concerning cannibalism, same thing with the financial news channel next down the line. The next news channel he turned to had a doctor with the CDC along with a handful of other officials and PR people for the government in a press conference for what appeared to be something related to the things Glenn had seen. "Virulent infection similar in effect to rabies caused by an unknown pathogen spreads." he saw the words scroll down the ticker.
"This must be it." Glenn said setting down the remote and proceeding to consume the pizza that had grown cold in his hand.
"The disease has an extremely long incubation time, upwards of ten to twenty years from our estimates. During this time it is highly infectious but undetectable. The pathogen exists simply as incomplete protein strands throughout the body which later are assembled into the pathogen as we know it. These strands are virtually indistinguishable from the body's own protein sequences. It's only when the first symptoms begin to manifest which we can notice traces of the infectious agent in the bloodstream. At that point death and subsequent reanimation occurs between 12 hours to 12 days which leads to the type of occurrences we see happening in Chicago. The short time frame between manifestation of symptoms and death also give us little time to study the disease in detail." the head doctor on the news broadcast stated.
"Chicago? What about what was happening here?" Glenn said to himself. This was CNN no less, they were based in Atlanta. All they had to do was look out the window and see what was going on. Perhaps it wasn't happening where they were downtown. That was comforting to some degree but the fact that the infection hadn't manifested across that much of Atlanta was overshadowed by the fact that it had sprung up in a serious manner in Chicago and presumably other cities as well. The knowledge that whatever was going on here was also happening elsewhere, and even to a more serious degree was unsettling to Glenn. Still he hoped that the whole affair could be wrapped up nicely within a few days. It wouldn't be no different than that Ebola scare; everyone thought that was going to be the end of the world and it turned out to only claim a few lives before it was contained and soon after nothing more was said about it.
"So this virus is what is causing people to go mad and eat each other?" the reporter interviewing the CDC doctor asked.
"It's not entirely accurate to call this a virus. A virus is essentially a self-replicating strand of either DNA or RNA which invades a cell. This is comprised entirely of protein sequences which makes it more like a prion than anything else we know of. Honestly it's not even fair to consider this organism as a living organism to begin with, by most accepted definitions "it" isn't even alive, it's just a bunch of chemicals. Now these proteins are harmless in the body until they gather in sufficient quantities in the central nervous system at that point it is actually the body's own autoimmune reaction which kills the patient not the pathogen itself." the doctor explained.
Whatever it was Glenn didn't care, he only wanted to know about what was being done to find a cure and fix this whole mess. He sat through a few more stories about the outbreak, one from Chicago another from Los Angeles and a brief mention of similar troubles in Jakarta. From what he heard quarantine efforts were already underway. Air travel was going to be suspended in and out of identified hotspots; Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Calcutta, Lagos, Parakou, Porto Novo, Lome, Accra, Kumasi, and a host of smaller cities and regions primarily located in West Africa were listed for quarantine. Surprisingly Atlanta was not among those locations on the list. Within the US checkpoints were being set up on certain highways out of the affected zones to screen for the disease as well. These checkpoints and the quarantine in general was already starting to draw ire from the public and had set off a series of demonstrations in Los Angeles.
"I should've known California would be the first place to burn." Glenn chuckled to himself when he saw the last report. He knew he shouldn't make light of the situation but in a way it kind of helped him cope with his own fears where he was to know that other people had it worse.
"So the problem isn't just here." Glenn thought as he reclined back and yawned. It wasn't even simply confined to the US. From the looks of it the disease originated in West Africa and had since spread elsewhere around the world, just like the Ebola scare Glenn presumed. Although it was possible the disease could have originated anywhere and the lack of adequate public health resources in that part of the world could have made the spread more severe in a shorter amount of time. Then there was the fact that whatever this was had been around for decades worming it's way silently through the population and by this time when the final stage of symptoms began making themselves manifest it was too late to truly get a point of origin on the disease. All of these interesting facts and theories on the news Glenn would find himself forgetting later on sure enough but for the mean time his mind was trying to figure it all out. Apparently in Chicago residents were being screened as emergency workers sectioned off neighborhoods and went house to house testing everyone for infection. It didn't say what happened to the people who popped positive only that those who came back clean were being moved to secure areas. Glenn could only assume that as the situation escalated in Atlanta that the same thing would start to happen here. He might as well start packing and plan for relocation. The thought hadn't even occurred to him that he may be one of the infected; he simply assumed that he was clean because well; he didn't feel like a zombie.
Glenn got an old gaudy orange and brown suitcase with floral trim out of his bedroom closet and began packing a few changes of clothes and some basic necessities; toothpaste, a pocket knife, a roll of toilet paper, dry shampoo, deodorant, that kind of stuff. The suitcase used to belong to his mother hence the rather effeminate and unappealing in general design to it but Glenn didn't care, it was sturdy and had served him faithfully through many trips by car, bus and plane. It didn't take him long to pack; he didn't own too many possessions; most of what filled his apartment was garbage or dirty laundry. He set the suitcase down in the hallway beside the bathroom door and placed a flashlight next to it. He thought about it a minute and then knelt down and picked up the flashlight to take it into the bathroom with him. Glenn took a quick shower, just in case he didn't have the time to do so when the inevitable quarantine actions began in Atlanta. After drying himself off with a raggedy faded red towel patting himself down and putting on a clean white T-shirt and loose fitting lightweight pocketed grey sweatpants he picked up the flashlight and stood silently next to the bathroom door. He placed his ear against the door and listened. He heard nothing except for the low hum of the air conditioner running and the sound of distant cars whooshing by on the street downstairs and outside. No hissing, no growling, no auditory indications that the monsters had gotten inside. He gripped the flashlight tightly and raised it above his head like a bludgeon as he slowly turned the handle on the bathroom door and carefully opened it. He stepped out into the hallway and quickly checked both directions. There was no one there; he was still alone in his apartment. Glenn let out a sigh of relief and walked back into the living room and kitchen. He checked all the windows and the front door and found them all intact as they should be. He took the dull butcher knife out of the kitchen which still had a little bit of cake on pizza sauce and cheese on the cutting edge. He now had two weapons so to speak in case he found himself in need of them. With that he could relax so he turned back on the TV and watched a few prime time into the late night adult cartoons while flipping back and forth between the news to check in on how the real world was doing. He sat there trying to reassure himself that everything was going to be alright while keeping the knife and the mag-lite at his side in case it wasn't. Eventually he felt the arms of Morpheus begin to pull him into their embrace; sleep was not something he could fight forever, and even fear would be overcome by fatigue. If things got worse Glenn reasoned he had better be well rested because he may not have too many secure nights in his own bed left to look forward to once the relocation effort began here. So with that Glenn got up and resolved to put himself to bed.
Taking what precautions he could Glenn backed his couch up against the window by the front door. He flipped it on its side to make it more difficult to move and placed a bunch of empty bottles and cans on top of it as well as in front of the door. It was the only one which someone could just walk up to and break to get in, assuming these diseased people were left with enough brain capacity to think about busting into homes and buildings. The other windows would require ladders to reach as he lived on the second floor. The bottles and cans were there to alert him if someone was trying to get in; the clang of cans or the clink and shattering of glass would be enough to rouse him from whatever light slumber he managed to get. He pushed aside stacks of papers and assorted junk off the nightstand beside his bed and laid the flashlight, his cell phone and the knife there. He one last time went around making sure all the windows and doors were locked and lastly when he shut his bedroom door he pushed his computer desk up against it as a second barricade for any intruders seeking entry. Why he would be of any value in here he didn't know but fear enough told him that he wasn't safe and should in turn act that way. Glenn then laid down in his bed and stared up at the ceiling counting the dried white paint lumps laid out like stars above his head until his eyes grew heavy and he let the night take him where he needed to go.
Throughout the night the sirens call intensified as more and more incidents were reported throughout the city. He awoke several times almost as if they were at regularly planned intervals. He got up, stumbled to the bathroom and drained his bladder, still groggy and disoriented. Each time in order to reassure himself it was ok to go back to sleep he went out to the living room and checked nothing had changed, the bottles and cans remained undisturbed. Once he had seen the flickering lights of a structure fire going up several streets over to the north accompanied by the flashing lights of firefighters and police vehicles. The fire was too far away to be of concern but its existence coupled with what Glenn had seen earlier that day it was unsettling and made it difficult to get back to sleep. He had to rest, he needed his strength and so long as nothing forced him out of his apartment he was going to remain in bed whether he could sleep or not. So the last day of life as Glenn knew it came and went and the dawn of the first day of a new world was fast upon him.