The Story So Far

It's fascinating how quickly the things we love 

become the things we hate; 

The ineffable ease with which an object of absolute desire 

can become an instrument of abject despair.

This was the rather eloquent and observant thought that was banging around Arthur Cromwell's head; or rather, would be if he wasn't preoccupied with not falling off his wobbly bar stool. The irregular oscillations caused by Arthurs manic stool rocking were causing the contents of his glass to slosh about, though you could hardly see it happening. The once clear glass which held the slurry of "hard water chips" (I dare not call it 'ice') and "whiskey" (not going there) was frosted over with the caked finger oils from the thousand unsavory drunks which rented the glass before Cromwell. 

His tumbler was a pretty good simile for the state of the whole of America in these days. And America was a pretty good metaphor for the state of the whole of the planet. Everything was dirty. And not just regular dirty; everything was deeply inextricable crummy. If you asked any American what the true spirit of America was, they'd tell you "grime". And it wasn't just that everything was filthy (which it certainly was), there were brand new things were growing in the filth; and they were all horribly, incomprehensibly disgusting. I don't want to go into too much detail, but if you imagine a particularly virulent bread mold mating with a conservative American pundit, you'll be pretty close.

Though things were certainly more colorful than before! Every surface had a nice rainbow sheen to it. This was almost certainly due to the 2% biocrude oil that was now part-and-parcel of the chemical makeup of the atmosphere. Luckily for the peace-of-mind of most, the water was crystal clear. Unfortunately for the well-being of most, that was due to the truly inconceivable amount of chemical dispersant which now comprised 5% of the chemical makeup of the oceans.

All this backstory is probably very dull compared to the balding old-before-his time man nearly falling off his bar stool every thirty seconds. I should probably move on with the story, as I don't want to give the false impression this is some kind of trite "global warming" story. Every story for the next 500 years of human kind will be in some way a "global warming" story. It's about time you get comfortable with rising ocean level, receding ice sheets, poor air quality, unfiltered ultraviolet radiation, and the collapse of agriculture as a "setting" rather than a "plot".

Anyway, Arthur was more a walking trope than a man. His spindly arms, insufferable accent, and houndstooth… everything gave him the unmistakeable appearance of an American who wanted very desperately to be British. In the Good Ol' Days, as they were sometimes ironically (occasionally affectionally [rarely nostalgically]) called, Arthur would have been labeled an Anglophile, and rightfully so. But these weren't the Good Ol' Days. These weren't the Good Ol' anything. Hell, they were barely even days. 

That's not exactly fair; they were technically still days. But I digress.

These days were anything but good, and Arthur was anything but English, though that hardly mattered. These days, you were who you claimed to be. There wasn't exactly a good way to check out a story, and there was exactly zero good reason too. These days, you could pick whatever label you wanted and wear it with pride. Nobody really cared because there were ultimately only two labels that mattered anyway, and you didn't get to pick those: "Immune" and "Infected".

Now I want to stop you right there. I know what you're thinking. "Oh my, not another story about the living dead." And you're right! This isn't a story about the living dead. It's a story about the living, the dead, and the the implacable march of the former towards the latter. This is the story of a world gone mad, a woman gone missing, and a man whose just lost the one thing he had to lose. (That makes him a man with nothing left to lose.)

Oh, and the thing he lost wasn't the woman; seriously. There are stories that involve a man and a woman that aren't about love. (Though they're often not very good, are they? Hrmm...) At any rate, this isn't a story about love, and it isn't about a narrator and his obsession for breaking the fourth wall; well not primarily anyway. This is a story about loss. And not just anyone's loss, but everyone's loss. This is a story about of how the world ends.

It might be important to mention that Arthur isn't really Arthur. Well not really Arthur Cromwell anyway. And I don't just mean the name is an alias (though it is). I mean that Arthur Cromwell was a real person, and that our Arthur Cromwell is not the real Arthur. The real Arthur was really very British, and he was also really very infected. My Arthur simply happened to find Real Arthur's ID while looting a corpse, and liked the name and jacket and hat so much he "put him on". That's kind of creepy though, and not really relevant to the story at hand, so I'm just going to move on.

Now, If you were to ask the average American in the years before the Greatest Dying who we'd be fighting in World War III; and I'd like to clarify here: there wasn't a single American who didn't think we'd be a major player in WWV (Some clever design firm came up with that, hand to god. Someone actually designed a logo for this war); the answers you would get would be all over the map: the terrorists, the Chinese, the Chinese terrorists, New Zealand (Not everyone understood the question). Point is, not a single person imagined it wouldn't be a fight against anyone. 

And I don't mean in that "war on terror" "unconventional enemy" sense. I'm not speaking of "terror cells" as not "anyones"; I mean literally, World War Three wasn't a war between human beings. It was a war between human beings and an inconceivable deadly strain of Poliomyelitis Virus, more affectionally known as "Polio" and most commonly (and incorrectly) thought to have been completely wiped out by the work of Billy Kapow, The Jonas Brothers, and Albert Salk centuries earlier. At least, according to the Wiki article I read about it before the web went down.

The number of people who died globally was… roughly all of them. Within six months of it's introduction to the civilian population, over 5% of the world was infected. That number skyrocketed to almost 25% before the year ended. By the third year, the virus had gone extinct again. Not because the human race cured it; simply because it ran out of hosts to infect; he human race's numbers were nearly centimated. At the start of the outbreak, the global population was hovering around 10 billion. Today, that number is around 10 million and plummeting. I'd try and give you a sense of that by saying like "Imagine the entire population of New York City", but you probably don't know what that means, so I'm just going to write the numbers out:

Pre "War" Population:    10,000,000,000

Post "War" Population:        10,000,000

That's people. Total. Everywhere. It represents the 0.1% of the population. This is about the number of people with a natural immunity to the virus, plus or minus a few "fringe of society" whackjobs who just never got infected. Sadly, there's no real rhyme nor reason to which people were immune, and the immunity wasn't generically inherited. As a result, the global population wasn't an idealized collection of civil servants (engineering), pastry chefs, and field-leading biochemists but rather a hodgepodge of civil service (postal), end-of-days zealots, and men-out-standing-in fields. 

It was remarked once by a general who refused to get out of his chair for "reasons unrelated to the virus" to a press corp of people equally comfortable remaining seated that "top men" were on the problem. Sadly, these "top men" weren't really looking into the problem. I don't mean to give the sense that they hadn't looked into it. They had. Thoroughly. But by the point this remark was made, most of these "top men" were looking into the business end of a revolver.

American's always considered themselves a "warrior nation" who, for whatever brilliant and well-thought-out-reason, decided that medical care was whatever the opposite of a necessity was. It came as quite a shock to a great many Americans when they found out the billions of tax dollars which were spent on building nuclear arsenals, stealth bombers, humanoid IFF targeting systems, and torpedoes that create bubbles of air around them with swiveling nose cones and are propelled by rockets underwater (seriously, real thing) couldn't be used in any way to fight their new and nefarious nemesis. The irony that the government had replaced the free healthcare plan with a mandatory military service bill to "ensure the continued safety and security of the United States" was lost on almost no one.

Luckily, personal gun ownership had not suffered much. Bullets were at a premium, thanks to some brand new sweeping reactionary federal regulations. But that seemed not to matter. Most people only needed 4.5 bullets; which was still the then median size of the American family, and in those days you could get that on any street corner simply to agreeing to shoot the guy who was selling them to you. Trouble was, most Americans couldn't get to their street corners. They couldn't get anywhere. New Polio, much like New Coke, was much much worse than it's predecessor. This one sported full body paralysis, a three week incubation period, and a r-naught of 48. I'd explain what all of that means to you, but if you don't already know, it will only serve to really upset you. All you really need to glean is that it was bad, it was mean, and it was fast.

I don't want to keep harping on the American view of things; it's just the only part of the story I know. I'd like to think that one day, my volume, my record of things, will be compiled with others from around the world. Maybe as like a book of "where we came from". I'd like to think that someday, my children's children will read these lofty tomes with reverence, and learn from our mistakes. I'd like to think that someday, our society, our species, will recover.

I'd like to think that; but I can't. I'm a realist. 

I'm also called Kringle. But only Arthur calls me that. Partly because that's my name, mostly because there's only Arthur and me. Well, use to be there's only Arthur and me. Now there's only me. 

I was the man with something to lose; someone actually. That someone is… was Arthur. That someone is… now a corpse! (Gallows and puns are the only types of humor left in the world; it's… tragic.)

That stupid bald drunk fell off his bar stool and cracked his bloody head open, leaving me alone with this infernal solar-powered laptop, a infinitely ferociously and incredibly unfriendly blank page, and the most obnoxious keyboard layout in the history of time. Seriously who puts delete there! I'd say I'd like to kill the designer, but I'm sure he's already dead.

Author's Note

There are numerous intentional mis-representations of the world-of-the-past in this chapter. The intent was to make minor "smudges" in actual history as an attempt to convey the true lack of reliable information available to the author.

Things like combining and misidentifying the original doctors who worked on the polio vaccine, etc.

I haven't decided whom the author is yet. I figure it'll reveal itself over time. So far he's definitely a cheeky man whose just on the border of insanity. I'm attempting to write him in as level headed while recounting his tales, and manic while "living his life off screen".

I'm pretty sure this will take on a "Chapter is a diary" form, which is sort of what I'm going for I guess. I want this to read sort of like "World War Z", but with much less hope, and far fewer characters/locations.

Because like, I'm new.