I am sitting by a lake that runs through the town of Albert Lea Minnesota. This area was at one time a park that I can imagine got a lot of use by the town’s people. I close my eyes and feel the warm breeze and contemplate my next move. I am at a cross roads, I could take I 35 south and head towards Kansas City or I could walk on east and walk around the Great lakes again. My main objec
tive is to not get caught up north in the winter like I did my first time through, that mistake almost cost me, but I was just trying to make sure I covered all of New England. I may stay around this town for awhile; I’m in no hurry to decide. So far I have seen no one, but I am keeping my eyes peeled. This is a good size town and some of the stores have been picked through quite a bit, which means people rummaged through them. But when? And are any left? I wonder sometimes how many people are left every where.I remember hearing the percentages, the body counts. The news people were the first to coin the phrase “The Effect”. All the catastrophes all over the world, happening like a chain of events over the last 20 to 30 years, they reported. Some egg heads had it all figure out how one event causes another. When the quakes hit, we heard the death toll. When the storms would come we heard of all the damages and cost of lives. When the food was contaminated and people got sick and died, we heard the percentages of people infected. One disaster, after another, took many lives but they would be years or least months apart and people would rebuild, move on or try to recover. But when the screams started, there was no television to break the news. No live reports on radio, no head lines in the news paper….just the screams….and there would be no recovering from it, at all!
I remember watching the Ten Commandments when it came on Television the first time. I was too young to see it in the Theaters when it was first released. What a block buster even for TV and all done the hard way, no CG, no animatronics, just good old fashion camera tricks, model building and great directing. But all that did not make as much an impression on me as the scene of the last plague. It was when the death angel took the entire first born of Egypt. I remember very well the pictured scene of the Hebrew families gathered inside their home protected by the lambs blood crossed on the door post. Then they would shudder as they heard the screams of the Egyptians when another first born died. But that paled in comparison to what we had to live through. At night we would lie in bed and hold each other; even though it was so hot we were drenched in sweat. It’s amazing how sound carries at night when there is no electricity flowing through everyone’s homes, no cars on the road, nothing to break the silence, but horrifying screams as another person sees a love one drop dead.
No one knows for sure what happened, because there were no Doctors to figure it out, no scientist to speculate on it and no news people to report the causes. But some how the tags in people cause them to just drop dead. Rfid revenge hit the population hard and fast. I have heard as much as 85 to 90 percent of the people tagged, died. Everyone was effected and most families died out with in a week. Some would shudder and go into a coma that lasted a day, some would seizure and then die and some just fell over dead. I have heard many legends on what might have happen. Some say when the tags went viral they change frequency and interfered with the brain waves or the central nervous system. Others talked about tumors or ruptures in the body, but no one knows for sure. But I have heard it was a global event as well, just like the virus that took down communications and power grids all over the world. Many countries made it mandatory to be tagged, so they could keep up with their population. New born babies tagged at birth, but at least it was voluntary here. But what parent would not want a way to recover or find their child if lost or hurt? It was approved; the FDA said it was safe. So why not have it, why not….
Now no one was left to turn the power back on or fix the big problems….no one, but us few. And we survivors were just sitting ducks for the next round coming our way. Do you have any idea of the diseases that will breed in that kind of death toll, any idea at all? Of course not, in the past this just sounds like a movie plot, or a fictional story. Your thinking; in a world with all the people gone you could live in any house or drive any car. Not if every house had a family of bodies decaying in it or the car people used to race away in a panic was only driven into a tree or just ran off the road when the occupant died. Most of the cars stop being drivable after awhile anyway if the virus hit it before the power went out, it would eventually corrupt the cars computer. I don’t think the designer of the virus every dream it would mutate and do what it did when he planted the first chip. I’m sure he just wanted to shut down a few systems, not the whole world. At least I like to think that was the case.
We survived, in our little house; we survived because of good old fashion stubbornness. We did not get tagged; we paid with cash and regular debit cards and felt like old fools when everyone else rushed through the check out with their speed pay or the Nurse had to actual look up our med records instead of just scanning us. “I do not want to be reduced to a bar code, I’m still a human being”, I would rant. Yes we survived; but what kind of world did we survive into? No government, no National Guard, no military of any kind. Who will clean this up, when will help come? What are we going to do now? That was the questions I saw on her face. And I did not have an answer…………I’m so sorry; I did not have the answers…………ENOUGH!
This is a nice area, the lake breeze is comforting and these trees offer nice shade, I think I will camp here tonight and explore around town, tomorrow. Funny thing, even when the night is darkest, there is always a tomorrow.Go to Day 981
