Simon Clark - Stranger

These clippings were whispers of events just around the corner. As the man said: “Coming events cast their shadows before.”

Take this one. It has a nice, cheesy title: GENESIS OF CALAMITY. Another Bible-sounding title could have been HERE COMES THE FLOOD. There are plenty like this that hint at what was on its way.

I’ll copy out here in full: Miguel Santarrez followed the well-worn path down the mountain to the little Colombian town of Carallaya. The young man had made this journey on foot every month since he was a boy when his family brought the sheep down to market. He knew every switchback turn, where to ford the river now in flood from the spring rains. Always he’d made the journey by day, only now he followed the dangerous path at night in the teeth of a gale that howled with pitiless savagery along the ravine. In his arms he carried his infant son. The fever that wracked the little body had reduced the baby’s cries to a whimper. Miguel knew the only chance for the boy’s survival lay with the doctor in town. Two hours later Miguel walked along the windswept streets of Carallaya. He passed through the deserted market square by shuttered stores and cantinas. With the time long past midnight he no longer expected to find the doctor awake, but the sight that met his eyes was enough to stop him dead in the street. A house lay with its front door swinging back and forth in the storm. Lights still burned, but there was no one home. Miguel saw it was the same with the neighboring house, and the next, and the next. The once bustling town of twenty thousand lay deserted. Not a living soul remained. And when the desperate Miguel Santarrez telephoned the city hospital in Barranquilla, his call went unanswered. When he switched on a radio in an abandoned home all he heard was static…

Get the picture? The article tells it like a mystery story, or a weird piece of Forteana-an abandoned town hidden in the mountains of South America. All exotic-sounding, all faraway and, when all’s said and done, not a blind thing to do with us.

Only it started to get closer to home. Creeping north through South America men and women began to abandon their towns and cities. Nation governments down there worked like fury to contain the news and stop the panic. But it was a case of “Here comes the Flood.” Once it started there was no way of turning back the flow.

You’ll know about rabies. You know dogs, bats, even people foam at the mouth and die. But did you know a symptom of the disease is hydrophobia? A victim of rabies becomes terrified of water. There’s no way you can sit the person down and say, “Look, this is only a glass of water. It can’t harm you.” No, show a rabid man a glass of water and he’ll go crazy with fear. He’d jump through a tenth-story window rather than have that glass near him. Throw the glass of water in his face and pure fear would kill him stone dead.

Something like that got into the air or water system in South America. No one knows exactly how it was transmitted. But that bug moved fast. From what they could tell it began with symptoms like gastric flu, triggering bouts of stomachache, diarrhea and low-grade fever. Nothing life-threatening. At least not what they thought was dangerous. But scientists reckon the virus… if it was a virus.. . moved into the brain after the initial bout of the craps. Like hydrophobia in rabies or aversion to light in meningitis, people developed a morbid fear of illness. And I mean real fear. A fear so large and so overwhelming and so God almighty powerful that people were terrified to visit a relative in the hospital in case they inhaled bacteria and became sick themselves. There’s footage of sufferers being carried into hospitals for treatment, but they’re so terrified they hold their breath to stop inhaling disease bugs and just pass out right on the floor. Some stopped breathing altogether. Terror jerked their throat muscles into spasm, sealing the airway, and good-bye, Earth.

You can read later news reports, when medical experts started to understand this plague. It seemed there was something like a 90 percent infection rate. And those patients completely recovered from the physical effects of stomachache and diarrhea (exploding underpants syndrome was how Bart described it in a “Simpsons” episode that spoofed the whole epidemic). The colony of bugs in the brain was the real problem. I mean, you only have to think it through. A town is hit by the plague (called Gantose Syndrome after the smug asshole that first identified it-if you saw his photograph you’d know why I used those words); as people recover from the physical illness they’re gripped by the phobia. Your neighbors are still going down with it. They have fevers; they’re clutching their bellies. And in the meantime you are going out of your mind with fear. Like the man with hydrophobia killing himself to escape the glass of water, you can’t just tell yourself, “OK, my terror of illness is all in the mind. I’ll just ignore it.” You can’t. What’s more, all your family are the same. So your fear feeds their fear. So you tell yourself, “I’m getting the hell out of here. I’m going where I’ll be safe.” But where will you be safe? Go north, your instincts tell you. “America will help me. They’ve got the best medicines. The best health care. Go north.”

And did they go north?

You bet.

What must have been three quarters of the fucking entire South American continent walked out of their houses and headed north. You can imagine millions choking roads in cars, buses and tractors as they drive northward. Jesus, just look through your mind’s eye. People who are desperate with terror get hungry and thirsty and tired. Cars break down. They beg lifts. They steal cars. They kill the people in the next car for a bag of apples because they’re so hungry. Highways turn into stinking mortuaries with thousands of corpses rotting at the roadside. Flies swarm so thick in the air they become a black fog through which car lights can’t penetrate.

Flies. Shit-filled ditches. Corpses going rotten in the sun. What does that spread?

Disease.

What do the people infected with Gantose fear?

Disease!

So in terror they move faster. They infect country after country as these refugees pour north.

As I said earlier, Nature likes to play tricks. Remember years ago, when there was that panic about a flesh eating tropical disease? And how scientists said it would rampage across the world? Then (red faces all around) they realized it couldn’t spread naturally outside the tropics. Well, the Gantose bug wound up being cut from the same cloth.

The plague ran northward like a tidal wave. Then north of the Panama Canal when you hit the drier territories of Mexico suddenly there were no new cases. OK, so a few people came down with it, but these had contracted the disease in places like Brazil and Peru. They’d incubated the disease as they’d grabbed a flight north. What’s more, they didn’t infect Mexicans. Those South Americans who reached the States, even though they went down with the screaming meanies whenever they saw a hospital or an ambulance, didn’t pass the bug on to a single American.

There was a race issue here. One prominent medical expert announced that it was all a question of blood. That most of the South American population had a little native Indian blood in them; maybe a dash of Inca or Aztec, I don’t know. This professor guy was frozen out of his university post pretty quickly. But there were many who believed him. They used it as an excuse to exclude anyone with a Hispanic face from restaurants and bars. Even those whose grandparents were born here.

The bottom line was that all those months ago the disease appeared to have run out of gas. Those infected with Gantose even stopped going into a mindless panic when someone sneezed across the street. But you can’t dum p hell knows how many million people into Mexico without the place exploding at the seams. Massive global aid programs worked for a while, but there were still too many people to feed. Distribution networks collapsed. Even though grain piled mountain high at ports it didn’t reach the refugees deeper inland. Hunger drove them farther north, as far as the U.S. border with its walls and fences to keep illegal immigrants out. There, as the saying goes, the irresistible force met the immovable object.