I wrote most of this story before COVID-19 hit and put off posting it because I doubted anyone would want to read a story where a virus kills people when they could get that on the nightly news. It was largely inspired by my all-time favorite novel The Stand by Stephen King and contains similar elements. Since a new adaptation of The Stand is currently being aired on CBS All-Access (from what I hear, it sucks), I figured now was as good a time as any. If people are turned off by the premise now, I doubt they'll be red hot for it in six months or a year, so waiting seems dumb. Now or never and all that.
Dawn trickled tentatively over the low, craggy mountains, spreading warm scarlet light over the hilltops and chasing shadows into misty valleys. With the ever creeping light came warmth, blessed after the long, cold night. Lincoln Loud was awake to watch the sunrise, and basked in it. His hands were numb and chill, like a corpse's; his thick woolen coat hadn't been enough to protect him from the frosty northeastern night. He was thankful that he'd thought to bring it (it was July after all, and in Virginia that meant warm mornings and hot days), but he longed for the moment when he could throw the blasted thing away.
Birds happily greeted the new day, singing from their treetop perches, and all of the little woodland critters stirred restlessly in the brush, impatient for the light to reach their nests and burrows. Something large, perhaps a fox or a deer, thrashed deep in the forest to the man's back; twigs snapped, leaves crunched. Lincoln looked warily over his shoulder; though he wasn't aware of it, he was caressing the Colt resting in his lap.
Realizing what he was doing, Lincoln closed his hand and sighed. Ahead of him, through the thin haze rising from the fire, he could see the wooded side of a mountain, lightening sky above, and nothing else. He didn't need to check his map to know that just beyond that rise was the hamlet of Nazareth. If he kept due south, he could be in Virginia in two weeks.
Though going home was all Lincoln had ever wanted since the horrors of Bull Run, he was afraid of what he would find. He hadn't heard much news from the South since his unit crossed the New Jersey state-line back in late June, but what he had heard was terrifying: cities aflame, slaves revolting, bodies piled in open pits slashed across the earth like ugly scars. The thought of finding his once stately Virginia in ruins squeezed his heart. If it was anything like New York in the last days, he'd be better off going west into the unknown.
He shivered remembering the Battle of Secaucus and the aftermath. It wasn't so much a battle as it was a half-hearted spat in the middle of an urban warzone, a fight for the sake of fighting. The action was spread over three sweltering days with only sporadic fire here and there; the rest of the time was divided between scavenging and tending to the sick and dying. Lincoln was pulled from the frontlines of day two to help the doctor, a tall, cadaverously thin Alabaman named Spekktor, shoot all of the plague victims and heap them into the river. Orders from above, Spekktor told him.
Why would someone order the murder of the ill?
Soon enough, he saw. General Adman wanted them to press into the heart of New York, and the dying were slowing them down.
"The Yanks are cavin'," Sargent Butters told the mustered troops, a sad, tag-tag army indeed, on the morning of the invasion. "We can take all of Manhattan by dark!"
What Butters failed to realize was that they were weak as well. They had been 50,000 strong after Gettysburg; on that listless morning, there were only five hundred. And some of them were coughing.
They met only sparse resistance on the short trek from Secaucus to the Hudson, mainly snipers aiming out second story windows and boys with sling shots and petrol bombs. One Arab in a dress flew at them and exploded into a million pieces, taking out three or four men in the front rank.
Onward they pushed, under overpasses and along roads jammed with stalled cars. At one point, their route overlooked the city across the sparkling blue river.
"Lower Manhattan," someone marveled. A few guys pulled out their cellphones and snapped pictures.
Lincoln had seen photos of the city before, but the view on this day was different. He spotted fires in ground floor buildings, and a few of the famed skyscrapers were smoking like huge Cuban cigars stood on end. He could hear faint noises; glass breaking, car alarms, screams.
He gulped.
The closer they got to the city, the quieter they became. Lincoln's stomach went sour after a while, and when he absently licked his lips, he found them sandpaper dry. Battle didn't scare him anymore. He'd seen and been through too much. But marching into New York...he was scared.
Almost three hours after setting off, they reached the Lincoln Tunnel, and found amassed before them an army of maybe 1,000 Yanks, a sea of restless blue.
"Hole-ee hell!" Randolph, a grunt, whistled, "they're gonna tar us for sure!"
"Ain't no chance in hell!" Becker, the flagboy, said.
The firing began at once. Who spat the first shot, Lincoln wasn't sure, but within ten minutes, bodies littered the road, three deep near the toll-booths. Though they were outnumbered, they managed to push the yanks back into the tunnel.
What they found on the other side of that tunnel was beyond words. The closest thing his weary mind could come was "Hell," and that's certainly what it looked like. The streets were clogged with horse drawn carts and Chevys; buildings burned unchecked' and the dead were everywhere. The humid city air was heavy with screams, burglar alarms, cries to God, and gunshots.
Was the plague that bad?
Lincoln and his men had been on a northerly march for months and news from the outside world came in at a trickle. The plague started sometime in the winter. The Yanks said it came from the Confederacy and the Confederate government claimed it began in Maryland. In the North, it was called The Mississippi Flu and in the CSA, it was known as The Blue Flu. The two Americas, locked in a state of war, tossed responsibility back and forth even as it spread through towns and villages, but that didn't surprise Lincoln none. When the milk tips over, no one wants to own up.
In the beginning, Blue Flu resembled the common cold, but after a few days, the victim's neck began to swell like an innertube. Inside of a week, they drowned in their own snot. The first case in Lincoln's unit was diagnosed two weeks ago, and the last he heard, cities up and down the coast were starting to fall apart. The charnal house that was New York City brought those rumors home, and Lincoln got scared. He had a big family back home and he worried about them. He was so worried that he started thinking about disappearing. The night following the Invasion of Manhattan, he did just that, breaking from his unit and threading his way through the streets toward the George Washington Bridge. The penalty for desertion was the firing squad, and the back of Lincoln's neck tingled all the way into Jersey.
No one came after him.
He'd been walking ever since, keeping off the main roads and shying away from villages and homesteads. He slept in the day and traveled at night, but gave up on that after a few days. Everywhere he went, the plague came with, following like death on swift wings. Entire villages stood empty and smash-ups on the highway glinted in the summer sun. He met a few people along the way. Most were scared and sick. A few attacked him.
Lincoln killed them.
Three days ago (or was it four?) he was hiking along a secondary road through hilly countryside. The sun was high and hot and sweat-soaked through his homespun shirt. He took his coat off and shoved it into his rucksack and rolled his sleeves up. Every time he heard the swell of an approaching motor, he bounded off the blacktop and hid in the tall grass. East of Miller's Grove, he came to a meadow near trickling stream. Leaving the highway, he knelt by the creek, dipped his hands in, and drank until a spike rammed into the center of his skull. Full and sloshy, he sat in the shade of an oak tree and promptly fell asleep, only to be awakened sometime later by something prodding his chest. His eyelids fluttered tiredly open and his mind cleared. An old man in suspenders pointed a double-barrel shotgun in Lincoln's face, and Lincoln's heart sank.
"What are you doin' here, boy?" the old man demanded. "You're tresspassin'."
"I was just passing through," Lincoln said, mind beginning to work. "I don't mean any harm. I'll just be on my way."
Holding his hands up, palms out, to show that he was no danger, Lincoln got slowly to his feet. The sun glinted on his belt buckle, and the old man's eyes darted to it. "CSA? You a reb?"
Lincoln tried to come up with some excuse but had nothing, so he started to reach for the Colt nestled in the small of his back. If he was going to go down, he was going to go down fighting, by God.
A big, friendly smile spread across the old man's face and his entire demeanor changed. He lowered the gun and leaned heavily on it like a cane. "By God, where you from? I'm from North Carolina, myself."
"Virginia," Lincoln said guardedly. "Royal Woods."
"By Warrenton?" the old man asked.
Lincoln nodded, "Roundabout."
"Hell, I know where that's at."
The old man invited him back to his house and Lincoln accepted. They forded their way through a stand of brush and followed a trail to a yellow Victorian with faded trim and narrow windows. "My name's Amos,"
"Lincoln."
Amos grimaced. "Like that commie?"
"No, sir," Lincoln said, "I was named after Ben Lincoln."
"Ah," Amos said, "General Lincoln. You related?"
"No, sir. My grandfather served under him."
Amos lived alone with his wife and spinster daughter, whom Lincoln was sure was actually a man in drag. "My wife's sick," Amos explained, "she got the flu."
"Blue Flu?" Lincoln asked.
Amos hesitated, then nodded. "She's been down three or four days."
The old man directed his daughter - named Bertha, which seemed fitting - to make lunch, and they ate in the kitchen a t the back of the house. During the meal, the local doctor, a cadaverously thin man in a tweed jacket and bowtie, called and spent time with Amos's wife before coming into the kitchen. "How is she, Doc?"
"She's sleeping now," the doctor said. "She's the tenth plague victim I've seen this afternoon and she's better off than the rest. I'll tell you that much."
"You think she'll make it?" Amos asked hopefully.
The doctor looked uncomfortable. There was no cure for the Blue Flu. From what Lincoln had seen, it killed anyone who got it. In the beginning, Lincoln was dreadfully certain that he would catch it and succumb like so many others, but so far he hadn't got it, and was beginning to think he was one of the few people with natural immunities.
That night, Lincoln slept in the guest room. He paged through a Bible by the flickering light of an oil lamp but found no answers or comfort. Amos's wife was in the next room over and her coughing and hacking kept Lincoln awake long into the night. It stopped around 2am, and the next morning, he found out why.
She was dead.
Amos and Bertha sewed her into a makeshift shroud of sheets and bedding, and before he left, Lincoln carried her outside and buried her in the backyard. Amos and Bertha saw him off and as Lincoln walked away, feeling strangely guilty about leaving these people he barely knew, he could have sworn he heard Amos cough.
Since then, Lincoln had been constantly moving, stopping only to sleep. He saw fewer cars the day he left Amos's, and even fewer the next. Over the past two days, he hadn't seen any. He passed through three towns. In the first, men heaped dead bodies onto a horse-drawn cart. In the second, a few people shambled through the streets like restless spirits, each one coughing and sneezing. In the third, the only signs of life were the birds roosting on the rooftops and the rats scurrying through the gutters. He came across three dead bodies. One of them, a woman, sat against the front of a drugstore, her head lolling to one side. Her neck was swollen like an innertube and flies clustered on her pallid face.
That night, she haunted Lincoln's dreams.
Presently, Lincoln stared off into the distance. Thin, pinkish strips of chipmunk meat cooked over an open fire and the smell made Lincoln's stomach rumble. After eating, he rolled up his bag, slipped it into his pack, strapped it to his back, and shouldered his musket.
A narrow dirt path wound down the hillside and came out on a grassy ridge overlooking a gray river shimmering in the new morning light. Beyond that river was a highway twisting along the foot of the mountain, matching the river bend-for-bend. He started down, walking carefully to avoid falling, and picked his way through the grass. At the bottom, he stepped onto a blacktop highway. A Ford Explorer sat dejectedly in the dusty breakdown lane. Nearby, a man in a blue Union uniform lie sprawled next to his musket.
Lincoln thought of raiding the corpse for anything that might be of value, but decided against it. He couldn't bear to look upon the face of another plague victim. If he needed anything, he'd take it in Nazareth.
Because he'd lost his way the day before, Lincoln had to double back nearly five miles to a fork in the road. On his way, he passed only an overturned UPS truck and a stalled tank, several blue bodies lying around its treads.
As the day wore on and morning gave way to afternoon, the heat grew neigh on unbearable. Lincoln stopped at a little covered bridge, and spent nearly an hour swimming in the stream over which it crossed.
At three, he blew into Nazareth, a small village clustered in a bowl and surrounded by mountains on all sides. Standing on the highway above the town, he was able to see everything. A mill, a church, a schoolhouse, several streets lined with houses. At the intersection of Main and Union, a pick-up truck kissed the crumpled side panel of a Ford Focus, the driver hanging out the driver window. His face was swollen and puffy, eyes straining from their sockets and a mixture of blood and snot crushing his nose.
He didn't die in the crash.
As Lincoln walked down the center of Main, he was aware of being watched. Curtains fluttered here and there, and once, he glimpsed a wan face staring out at him. He couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman...or if it was living or dead. A pile of burned bodies was heaped in a parking lot next to the primary school, and a collection of military vehicles and dead horses littered the area. The few survivors - or, more likely, those who simply hadn't died yet - cowered in their homes.
None came out to confront him.
Lincoln's first stop was at a small camping supply store on Main. He picked up a new pair of boots, some pants, and a few sweaters. At one point he looked at himself in the mirror. His snowy white hair was ashy with dirt and thick grime coated his face. On the upside, he didn't look like no Johnny Reb anymore.
Next, Lincoln dropped in the pharmacy and filled his bag with Tylenol and a few other things he figured he might need on the road.
Done, he checked his pocket watch. It was just after five. That left about four hours of sunlight, plenty of time to jump back on the road.
He left town on 191, and followed it all the way to Route 22, where he set up camp in a shaggy field at dusk.
As the evening drew to twilight, Lincoln built a fire to hold back the darkness and cooked the last of the chipmunk. When he was finished, he sat with his back against a time worn rock jutting from the ground and filled his pipe with tobacco. Full darkness had fallen and stars twinkled overhead like winking eyes. The brightest star in the sky, Elzra, burned in the north, and Lincoln looked up at it as he smoked. They said that if you followed it into the frozen wastes at the top of the world, you would eventually come to the mountain upon which God kept His throne. Lincoln was a practical man and believed only in what he could touch. Was God up there, watching from the tallest place in Everyworld? He didn't know. He'd have to see to know.
One thing Lincoln did believe in was family. He was one of eleven children and the only boy. He and his sisters were close. Best of friends, you might say. The oldest ones - Lori, Leni, Luna, Luan, and Lynn - had all left home and married before he joined the army. The younger ones - Lucy, Lana, Lola, Lisa, and Lily - stayed to tend the homestead.
How were they?
Lincoln had been asking himself that question for weeks, and every time it occurred to him, it was a little more pressing, a little more urgent. Even before Blue Flu, things in the Confederacy had been flaky. Most things were being rationed and diverted to the military, and most of the cities had been without power since the spring. In May, the Yanks launched an amphibious assault on Charleston and burned half the city before being driven back. Lincoln heard tell that Florida had fallen and that New Orleans was under siege.
Then the plague came and he stopped getting letters from home. His worry grew until it consumed him, and even now, it festered in his stomach like cancer. What would he find when he finally got home?
Would home even be there?
He didn't know, and that scared him.
By now, his pipe had gone cold. He tapped the loose tobacco out and put it away, then climbed into his sleeping bag.
It took him a long time to drop off.
Lincoln started awake at sunup, his naked torso bathed in cold sweat and his heart racing in his chest. Disoriented, he sat bolt upright and looked around. A thin pencil-line of dark blue hugged the horizon to one side, and to the other there was only blackness.
Panting, he fought to get his thundering heart under control. Just a dream.
He'd been having a lot of nightmares since leaving New York. In most of them, he was accosted on the Washington Bridge by a legion of the plague-dead, their glands swollen and their eyes bloody. In a few of them, he was dragged into a manhole and devoured by some godawful creature called The Godalming. He didn't know what the hell a Godalming was in waking light, but in his dreams he did. It was...something.
In the one he'd just wakened from, he met a man in cowboy boots. Lincoln wasn't sure who he was, even in his dream, but he knew he was evil. His hair was long and gray and his eyes blazed red. When he grinned, his teeth were wide and sharp.
Shivering in the early morning cold, Lincoln drew his blanket up to his chin and waited for sunrise, which couldn't come fast enough.
He ate rice and beans for breakfast. He let a piece of hardtack soften in his chickaree, and had that last.
As he ate, he sat on a stone and watched the silent highway before him. An RV sat dead along the guardrail. Far behind it was something that looked like a Pennsylvania state patrol car. A green sign nearly overgrown with moss read:
PHILADELPHIA: 105
WASHINGTON: 178
VIRGINIA: 200
He would have to cut further west today. He didn't want to have to pick his way through any more fallen cities. New York had been enough.
After downing the last bit of chicory, he packed up his game and started hiking. He crossed over onto US15, and followed that most of the morning. Around him, the highlands began to taper off and melt into low farmland. From the road, he saw several crumbling barns faded red and a couple large, rambling farmhouses.
Checking his watch, he found that it was noon. He wasn't particularly hungry, but figured that it might be as good a time as any to stop and have lunch. That one house off to his right looked like it might yield something of value. Like a television. He hadn't seen much since leaving New York, and had no idea what the state of the union was. The last newscast he heard had the president hiding in West Virginia and the military in charge. The last thing he'd heard about the Confederacy was just that things were real bad there. Nothing specific.
Leaving the road, moseyed over to the house. With its screened front porch, green tin roof, and large, gaping windows, it reminded him of that old movie Night of the Living Dead.
He left his knapsack by the bottom of the stairs along with his musket. He unholstered the Colt, and held it before him as he climbed the steps. The porch wasn't as large as it looked from the road; he could stand in the middle and touch the house and the screen at the same time. It was nicely furnished, though. An old wooden rocker, a wicker chair, a swing, a wicker table with a small transistor radio on it...
He did a double take. A radio.
He plopped down in the chair (unconsciously wincing, bracing for impact should it not support his weight), and started fiddling with it. Up and down the FM band, he found nothing but static (save for some tiny Indian music, high and haunting Hi how are yas from the plains). On AM, however, he found a news program, the voices screened by static.
"...Movements. President Ewing today declared a national state of emergency, placing General Ulysses S. Grant in de facto charge of the country. Grant, who had just lost a major battle to General Lee at Dahlgren, was recalled from the field and replaced by General Douglas McArthur.
"In other news, rolling blackouts have left millions up and down the Union without power. AmCo spokesperson Gerald Oscar says that crews are working around the clock to get the motors up and running, but that death and desertion are keeping their numbers below medium strength.
"Confederate attacks from Canada continue to plague Vermont and New Hampshire. The town of Stovington, Vermont, was pillaged and set ablaze last night by raiders in gray. The town was mostly deserted..."
He turned the dial.
"So, the abolitionist elite in this country are waging a war of pestilence on the South. What, did it backfire?"
"Not really, Rush; you see, most people in the Union don't care about slavery either way, and that, they're afraid, will show through in any election. What we're looking at is a case of genocide. They are killing off all good Americans so that they can free the slaves and let them run our country."
"There you have it, folks. Joe Biden tells it like it is. This is the kind of news you'll only hear here, on the EIB network."
He turned it off.
Inside, he found a TV. A nice one, too. The living room wasn't too bad either, except for the modern wood flooring. He preferred carpeting, shag carpeting, to be exact; something comfy and cozy, something that invited you to take your socks and shoes off.
It took him a while to find the remote control (it was stuffed down in the couch cushions), and when he finally did, he was at a loss. There were so many friggin buttons and whistles and doodads, it looked like something from NASA.
After about half an hour of trying, he got the damn thing to turn on. It clicked, the screen lightened, and suddenly the room with filled with Spongebob Squarepants.
A kid lived here, he thought, and his heart sank. Poor little thing was probably upstairs in its crib now, dead and gone.
He changed the channel. Quick.
On the screen, a black-and-white newscaster with glasses and a bald pate read from a teletype. "...Looters: cease and desist or you will be shot on sight. Anyone caught outside after dark will be hanged in the town square. Citizens: Bring your dead to your designated dumpsite. It is illegal to do otherwise. The penalty is death."
He stopped, looked off camera, and seemed to grow grave. "Folks, I've just gotten word that there's a problem with our frequency. We'll be off the air for a few moments until it is repaired. In the meantime, stay tuned..."
The screen went gray, and a WE ARE CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES placard appeared. Something told Lincoln that their difficulties weren't technical, and that they probably wouldn't be back on the air.
Ever.
He changed the channel. Naked women dancing on Disney. A gay man shaking his ass on History. Bill Maher on TVLand.
"...That's where this thing came from. The hicks down south whipped it up to wipe out their little black problem, but they're so fucking stupid, they let it jump to the outside world. Now we're all getting fucked up the ass. Just look at the first case. The guy who got it was a Reb in Maryland. One minute he's coughing, the next..."
Maher sneezed.
Some things are better left known, Lincoln figured, as he left the house. He debated with himself about leaving the radio, but finally grabbed it and put it in his sack. Just because you didn't wanna hear something didn't mean you shouldn't hear it.
It was a little after one when he got back on the road. He had a long walk ahead of him. He didn't know much about weather, but he did know enough to know that it was too hot out, even by Virginia standards. The sun sat high in the bleached sky, baking the unfortunate earth. The heat was terrible. Felt like the desert.
Fifteen minutes after leaving the house, he stopped at a Texaco off the highway and stocked up on protein bars, Powerade, and roadmaps. If he walked fifteen miles west, he'd meet the turnpike. From there, the road would carry him south through Western Maryland. He'd enter Virginia near Harpers Ferry. That put him about fifty miles from home at that point. Not too bad. Maybe he would be there in less than two weeks.
After crunching a protein bar and chugging a Powerade, Lincoln set off again, the sun above and the turnpike ahead. The road was wide, and on either side of it was waving farmland for as far as the eye could see. It seemed a pity that southern Pennsylvania wasn't a part of the Confederacy: It'd fit right in.
But it wasn't and that was that. He was still in hostile territory, foreign territory. He wouldn't feel right again at least until he crossed into Maryland, though it too was Union. The good thing was that it was a thin state. He could probably traverse all of it in two days, three if he was forced to forsake the roads and go overland. It was densely populated, unlike the vast wilds of east-central Pennsylvania, and thus there would be more people. He didn't look like a reb in his cargo shorts, green T-shirt, and tan vest, but that didn't mean he wouldn't be stopped along the way somewhere. If that happened, they'd search his bag and keep him from going home. Hell, they'd probably stick him in some type of prison camp with a bunch of other downtrodden southern men.
That thought scared him more than anything. Not only would he most likely never see home again, but he'd also be among hundreds or thousands of plague victims, hacking and spitting, wheezing and dying. He'd had enough of that in the army, whole nights where he couldn't sleep for the sounds of death all around him. No matter how hard you press your pillow against your head, you can't block out such wretched noises. The worst was the delirium that came with it, frying your brain and turning you crazy. You talked out of your head to people that weren't there, and there was something disturbing about lying in the dark and listening to men-dozens of them-talking to invisible friends and family. It was almost as if they were being visited in their last moments by phantoms sent to guide their souls to hell.
He had to be careful. He couldn't take that. He would rather be shot down like a dog on the border than face that.
He was crossing over a green iron bridge now, the riverbed dry and rocky. He paused, unshouldered his bag, and rummaged around. When he was done, he threw several things (his CSA belt buckle, his hat, his clothes, his papers, which he first balled) into the tall weeds along the river bank. He felt better, and when he started out again, he walked just a little quicker.
