Carrion (The Bren Watts Diaries #1)

Chapter 54

The Rest of the World in Chaos...

It took me months to research and take in many of the survivors' first and second-hand accounts of the world's reaction to the quarantine and the outbreak. Inside the red zone, you didn't have a clue what happened to the outside world. Back then, I thought that the outbreak was everywhere. While we drove to Albany, a lot of shit had gone down across the globe.

The government had imposed a soft curfew following the initial outbreak in New York. Then, when things turned for the worse inside the city, the government ordered a full lockdown of all non-essential businesses, banned the gathering of crowds of more than four, and placed the curfew to before seven in the evening. No one was to be caught wandering at night.

This was only the order given in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

However, for the rest of the country, Alfie filled in the gaps and told me that their lockdowns were much more relaxed. Many folks on Reddit or Twitter thought it was a drastic government oversight, a complete disregard for privacy and freedom. Major cities across the county had days of protests by the thousands complaining about the matter. Various human rights groups accused the government of murder and racial profiling from videos streaming online, mostly of people of color in Harlem being butchered by the NYPD and the army, not knowing that the people who died were vectors. Still, the uproar and anger were deafening, and riots against the police happened non-stop that the national guard had to be deployed.

Of course, from the guards to the police, they imposed excessive force.

One college student, a famous YouTuber who documented his college life and posted hours of "Study with me!" Videos were accused of being a child killer when he videotaped killing two vector children, saying how smart they were and organizing most of the attacks. He saved the lives of his dorm mates because of it (before the bombs fell). I want to think it gave the army enough information on how to deal with the vectors. After that video was released, squads were now hunting sick children, separating them from the infected adults, much to their parents' fury.

But people misconstrued the YouTuber's words as that of a crazy serial child killer admiring his latest victims. His information was doxxed, causing his family, who lived in California, to have a press conference, begging him to surrender to the police. I laughed out loud when Alfie told me about it, thinking, "What police? They're all dead."

"They'll control them once they turn," a doctor told me once. "It'll take a minute or two, but that is how narrow your window is on dispatching an infected child. Lord only knows how difficult that must be for our boys in green."

"Just two minutes?" I asked.

"Once the child turns, they'll reorient themselves. Dazed at first, but once they smell the others, or that's what I think they do, control takes hold. The infected become coordinated, and their attacks deadlier. They sure are dumb before, but a child can control a horde of a hundred."

That was the magic number: One infected child controlled a horde of a hundred.

I'll give them a name here so that I could distinguish them better in the future. The vector horde was like their drones, and the child was like the head honcho, so I'll name the infected children honchos. Drones and Honchos. There. That should separate the two.

I felt sorry for the Youtuber. He's probably dead now with the bombs and all, but he stopped a coordinated attack from two hundred vector drones from killing his schoolmates when he dispatched those children. I liked to think that his parents would later understand the sacrifice he had to make to save his friends and that he was not a child murderer.