Carrion (The Bren Watts Diaries #1)

Chapter 17

DAY 3: April 11th, Sunday

Sunday came, the day when we're supposed to leave for home.

I missed my parents. They must be worried sick about me. Jonas brought a hand-held radio out from his manager's office, and we listened to the updates where the city was under Martial Law. There were barely any after that. I doubt I would hear news about Portland. With a curfew in effect, the military was given the order of "Shoot on sight."

It seemed the crisis outside was getting worse and worse as the hours ticked past. Fighter Jets flew over the city, shaking the building walls, and sometimes, helicopters hovered over our street. One time, I heard a military Humvee passed by. We wanted to put up signs on the rooftops, but we didn't have access. We physically had to go out of the store and climb the emergency ladder a few hundred feet down the alley, which no one wanted to do.

It wasn't just Manhattan that was under quarantine...it was the entire metro area itself. The official death toll announced on the radio numbered around the two-hundred mark.

That was a lie. 

I knew it was more than that based on what we saw, and it angered me how the media was trying to lessen the magnitude of the crisis. I only had to peek out of the window and count the bodies lying on the pavement at five dozens. If that were the same for every street I couldn't see, then the body count should be colossal.

The phones still didn't work. They wanted to keep the information out of everyone's reach. No announcements of safe zones came out of the updates. We were never told where to go for help. It was all about hunkering down and waiting for it to blow over. I knew enough to realize that was a worse plan, but the optimistic side of me hoped it would be over soon.

It wasn't until later I found out that it was more than that. 

Way more.

The metro area of New York encapsulated close to twenty-five million people, including the suburbs of Long Island and the densely populated cities in New Jersey adjacent to the area. I couldn't even think of how many millions more lived close to the metro area that would be affected, all the way up to the Connecticut and New Jersey suburbs.

In only twenty-four hours after Dr. Ryan Krasinsky died, close to one million people were presumed to be infected, which was growing at an exponential rate, and the government was scrambling to contain the outbreak in New York.

Even today, there were many disagreements about how the Comoros Epidemic managed to spread so fast, and in turn, shifted the crisis into a pandemic. Most of the historians agreed that the mishandling of the outbreak was the initial cause of the spread (which the government vehemently denied as inaccurate). Though, historians and investigators often muddled how the path of the plague's spread across the city from the contained environment of Columbia University.

I've read a lot of books about the matter after I escaped from the city. Anything that related to the initial outbreak, anyway. Some I could deduce were inaccurate or had artistic freedom placed onto it, which left a bad taste on my mouth.

None of these experts today experienced what happened inside the Red Zone. None.

So, for this journal, I will write my account (and my personal belief) of how the plague spread across the metro area. I already mentioned some of them in the earlier chapters.

When the F-22s blew up that passenger plane, not all of the infected passengers died on their way down. They managed to float on the river and ended up along the banks of Brooklyn, Lower East Side, and Chinatown. And these infected then spread out on those areas.

Furthermore, LaGuardia Airport, which went into quarantine following the plane's containment, had an outbreak of their own that spilled into the streets. A nurse from the NY-Presbyterian hospital (which the authorities flagged the name later on the manifest) managed to escape the quarantine in the university and find her way to the airport in an attempt to flee the city. However, she was infected by the spores of Dr. Krasinsky. Fortunately, her plane wasn't able to fly, and she was forced to stay in the terminal where she hid inside the women's bathroom, where she later turned. 

I didn't know much about the details of how the LaGuardia Airport outbreak kicked off or the magnitude of it since I didn't see it for myself. But the few survivors that managed to get out of there told me of a tale of packed bodies desperately trying to escape through narrow doors and clamor away from the hundreds of infected travelers. The walls and floors drenched in blood and guts, making it harder even to walk, let alone run for their life.

Since the airport was locked down from the outside, the survivors hid inside air vents, storage rooms, kitchen ovens, and lockers. Some broke out through the windows where the police shot them down.

In the end, the infected inside, which numbered close to fifty thousand, managed to break out and spill into the streets of Queens right after the outbreak in Manhattan turned for the worse on the streets.

The protesters and the Neo-Nazis that managed to escape the chaos from Central Park went home to their families across the city, where some of those succumbed to Comoros and caused pockets of the outbreak of their own making. In half a day, they would all overlap together.

The sick filled every nook and cranny of every hospital around the city. And consecutively, the hospitals became a breeding ground for the virus to propagate out to the streets.

In only twenty-four hours, New York Metro Area became a Red Zone.

No one knew how fast an infected individual turned to become a murderous, rage-filled monster because that was what they are—a monster. 

A vector.

It varies based on genetics, environmental factors, the strength of the individual's immune system, or the location of the bite.

I've seen most turned in under five minutes.

I've seen others turned for more than a day later.

But the symptoms and the disease's outcome remained the same. It started with flu-like symptoms: a runny cold, a mild headache, and a slight fever during the first half incubation. In the latter half, a loss of appetite, high fever, reddening skin, bloodshot eyes, and seizures, among others, began to occur. Though, not necessarily in that order.

When I woke up after a four-hour watch near the windows, Logan tapped on my shoulders. I looked at his face, and I began to feel a thick knot in my stomach.

Something was wrong.

"What is it?" I asked.

Logan frowned and cocked his head toward the back. "There's something you should see."

"Why? Did something bad happen?"

"Yes--I mean, no. I don't think so."

"Then, what is it?"

"It's Carson. He's sick."