The coronavirus, covid-19, (CO-corona, VI-virus, D-disease, 19-2019) — initially known as the 2019 novel coronavirus; now, after the mutation, was something new, something unknown in the annals of humanity. As it changed it became death; simple, mindless, final. In the weeks and months following the metamorphosis, as its tentacles wrapt themselves around the Earth it was most often referred to as The Plague. To many it came so swiftly it remained nameless. To those calling themselves believers it was death incarnate astride a pale horse; the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. Among the last of them was Jonus Zebulun, known as Reverend Zeb or Ole Zeb for as long as anyone could remember. He proclaimed the horseman’s arrival even before the mutation, and so he preaches now.
An African-American octogenarian with furrows in his forehead and radiating out from the corners of his cataract clouded eyes as deep and pronounced as those he’d plowed into the gumbo mud along Bayou Pierre as a boy, he held a tattered bible as old or older than himself in his right hand. He waved it above his head, or shook it violently in front of him whenever he felt compelled by the Spirit to do so, its dog eared pages slapping together, applauding his message with their approval. He stood on the steps of the First Baptist Church of Couchon, Louisiana, facing Second Street, and pronounced the judgement of God. There was no one there to hear him.
The virus, the plague, mutated sometimes around Christmas of 2020. The economy was well on its way back. News reports said herd immunity was almost at hand. A vaccine was still just around the corner, but people were genuinely hopeful. Almost everyone knew someone who’d been taken, but unless they worked in a nursing home, hospital or other setting dealing with the elderly or chronically infirm they weren’t likely to know many among the dead. More likely they were to have had the virus and recovered, as had the majority of their families and friends.
Then it all changed. On Christmas eve families were crowded around opulent dining room tables, carved turkeys, cornbread dressing and green bean casseroles eagerly consumed following a toast to Grandma June or Great Uncle Jake who’d fallen to the pandemic. By New Years a third of them were gone. Those left huddled together in small family groups doing their best at social distancing. They’d waited a week or two too late.
They watched helplessly, frightened of their own family members, as by ones and twos, they struggled to breathe. Once stricken they inevitably died. Some stretched the labored breathing, the coughing fits and suffocating lack of oxygen out as long as a day. Most mercifully passed in three to four hours.
By spring the dying had stopped, there were very few left to die. The coronavirus, with a lethality from one to four percent, depending on where you were and who you asked, mutated into something entirely different, something threatening the existence of humanity itself, threatening extenction. There is a critical mass, a number of people, below which modern civilization, with its specialized workforce and technology dependent masses, cannot function and collapses.
There were scientists who could calculate that number and tell you precisely what it was. As far as anyone knew, there was no one left with the knowledge to calculate such a number anymore. Not that it mattered anyway. Whatever the number had been, the population fell below it millions of people ago.
In mid December of 2020 the world had 7.65 billion inhabitants. In May of 2021, it had 1.5 million. 99.9804% of the people were gone. With very few exceptions, there wasn’t even anyone left to remember them. One out of every five thousand people were left alive.
New York City’s population, a little under 9 million before the great dying, was now roughly 1800. Of those, some would die of suicide. Some would starve to death surrounded by food-stores sufficient to sustain millions, lacking the knowledge or will to avail themselves of the bounty all around them. Still others would parish from loneliness. Unable to bear the loss of everyone they knew, they simply stopped living.
In population centers like those, places with hundreds or even thousands of survivors, there was likely to be a scattering of doctors or nurses, engineers or electricians, agriculture professors or displaced farmers, mechanics, weavers, carpenters and others with the skills necessary to rebuild. In some metropolises they were doing just that, adhering to the better angels of their natures.
In other population centers, whether from fear, greed, mistrust or the undeniable power of the baser instincts of human nature, the survivors turned on one another. Neighborhood versus neighborhood, household versus household, person versus person, the remnants of humanity finished what the plague could not.
In some cases the direction a city took depended on the leaders that rose from among the living, from whether the desire for power or the desire to do good won the battle within the leadership once authority had been secured. In other cities the direction taken, the path to rebirth or destruction, seemed to be chosen by chance, its source unidentifiable; the will of God among the faithful, the results of uncertainty among the rest.
In the smaller communities dotting the maps of the world there were almost certainly no doctors or nurses left, however. No engineers to keep the power on or the water flowing and drinkable, no mechanics or carpenters. There were simply scatterings of people, alone or in groups whose numbers could be counted on the fingers of any one of those few chosen to endure.
New York was reorganizing, becoming something new, and perhaps sustainable. Its depleted population was still grieving, of course, but also feeling the beginnings of a collective hopefulness, a belief that something worthwhile may be afoot. Cooperation was spreading much as had the virus.
Chicago was afire. It’s remaining population reduced daily by its own hands. Anarchy, mistrust and vigilantly justice were quickly reducing its structural grandeur to rubble. Those that could left the city seeking isolation from others, trust in the kindness of strangers no longer a part of their being. They were not of the land, however, and were lost amongst broad horizons with no concrete walls for protection.
Cities across the Earth were following similar paths, reconstruction, reduction to ruin, or something in between all seemingly as likely as the other possibilities. People mourned, raged and hoped depending on their situations, their luck and the fortitude or lack of it they found within themselves
The little town of Couchon, lying astride Reed River in northwest Louisiana, was a prime example of a dot on the map community. Actually, it was doing a little better than the statistics predicted. With a prepandemic population of just under twenty thousand, there should have been four survivors.
So far seven had found one another. Among them were Reverend Zeb and a statistically impossible pair of surviving siblings, thirteen year old Jessie Roge and his eleven year old sister, Josie. Rounding out the seven were Lisa Alexander, a twenty-five year old waitress and occasional bartender; Sam Delphit, a fifty something handyman when sober; Stella James, unquestioned holder of the now meaningless top rung on the latter of small town southern society; and Roger Riggins, principal at Couchon Academy, the only principle Jessie and Josie had ever known.
Thus was the state of the Country, of the world, of humanity; after.
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