Manel Loureiro - Dark Days

A little lizard sat motionless for hours on a sun-baked rock in a bleak corner of the Sahara desert. His sides expanded and contracted as he breathed in air as hot as a blast from hell. He flicked out his rough tongue, testing the air, biding his time till nightfall when he could go hunting.

Suddenly, the lizard detected a sound too low to be heard by human ears. He cowered under the rock in case some strange, fearsome predator was making that noise.

After a few seconds, the sound overhead crescendoed from a slight hum to a deafening rattle. The sound grew fainter and fainter, and then was gone.

The little lizard cautiously poked his head out and blinked his gummy eyes in the fierce midday light. For an instant, he stared up into the ruthlessly bright blue sky as the Sahara shimmered in the heat.

If he’d stuck his head out thirty seconds sooner, he’d have glimpsed something completely out of place in that corner of the world: a huge, yellow and white Sokol helicopter, with the faded logo of the AUTONOMOUS GOVERNMENT OF GALICIA painted on one side and a cargo net, filled with fuel drums, hanging from its underbelly. The pilot, a small guy in his forties, with a bushy, blond mustache, had a tired but determined look on his face; some fingers were missing from his right hand. In the copilot’s seat was a tall, thin man in his thirties with a scraggly beard and sharp features. His profoundly weary eyes stared blankly at the unfolding desert landscape, his mind very far away, as he slowly pet a large Persian cat asleep on his lap. Rounding out the odd group were an older woman and a teenaged girl sitting in the passengers’ seats.

The thin man would’ve told anyone who’d listen that he’d had an uneventful life as a small-town lawyer in northern Spain, dividing his time among work, family, and friends. The death of his young wife just a year before the Apocalypse had left a huge, painful hole in his heart and turned his life into a relentless cycle of pain and routine. Until the Apocalypse nearly a year ago, when everything went to hell.

Everything.

At first, he didn’t pay much attention to the brief, conflicting reports in the press about a jihadist faction that had the brilliant idea to attack a Russian army base in Dagestan, a remote former Soviet republic; take hostages; and steal either chemical or conventional weapons to sell on the black market.

What those attackers didn’t know was that research into biological weapons had been carried out at that base. Some of the world’s most virulent strains of viruses were sleeping peacefully in test tubes there. To be fair, the jihadists weren’t really to blame. That base was a half-forgotten detritus of the old Soviet empire; Western intelligence agencies didn’t even know it existed. Compared to what came next, the break-in was small potatoes.

Depending on how you look at it, the attack was successful—or a horrible failure. The jihadists successfully took over the base, but they accidentally released a viral strain that should never have been created. Less than forty-eight hours after the attack, all the terrorists were dead. Or kind of dead.

The worst part was that that virus was now free. And nothing and no one could stop it from spreading like wildfire.

At first, no one knew anything about it. In the old, over-confident Europe, as well as in America and Asia, life went on calmly and peacefully. During those first seventy-two hours, something could’ve been done to get the pandemic under control. However, Dagestan was a very small, very poor country; its government didn’t have the resources to stop the virus. The virus was already past the incubation phase.

By then it was too late.

No one, not even our Spanish lawyer, became worried until a few days later. The first news of a rare hemorrhagic fever sweeping the Caucasus Mountains was just background noise in the newspapers and on TV, drowned out by the final picks for the European soccer championship and the latest political scandal.

Almost no one paid attention to that virus, so it just kept spreading.

A few days passed before anyone realized that something was terribly wrong. Large areas of Dagestan were dark and silent, as if there wasn’t a single living soul left. The government of that tiny republic took a closer look. Terrified by what it saw, it called upon Moscow for help. The Russians were so horrified by the situation, they immediately closed their borders with Dagestan—and with every country on its border. Too late to do any good.

The news started filtering out to the rest of the world, sounding at first like confusing nonsense. Then a series of conflicting reports from the Russian government, the CDC in Atlanta, and several other organizations claimed it was an outbreak of Ebola or smallpox or West Nile virus or the Marburg virus that first broke out in Germany in the sixties—or none of the above. Outrageous rumors, blown out of proportion, started to circulate. The shadow of darkness leapt from Dagestan to neighboring countries, as refugees fled “it.” Whatever “it” was. Putin’s government declared a news blackout in an effort to get the situation under control, suppressing freedom of the press within the Russian Federation, then finally broke down and requested emergency aid from the international community.

But, once again, it was too late.

By that time our lawyer and most of humanity were waiting in suspense for updates on what was happening in that corner of the world. It was no longer back-page news; reports were splashed across every front page. Despite heavy censorship, images leaked out, showing lines of refugees stretching as far as the eye could see and columns of soldiers just as long. The most observant commentators remarked that it was strange for the army to be battling the epidemic, but they were in the minority. Most people just paid attention to the official report. Finally, international aid teams were deployed to help control the epidemic. Fifteen days before, they’d have had a chance for success.

But not any longer.

A few days later, the epidemic went global when aid teams returned home, taking with them members of their group who’d been injured by those things. Although no one realized it, the pandemic was now definitely out of control. The logical thing would have been to “eliminate” anyone infected, since governments were beginning to understand what they were facing, but political interests and public opinion overrode common sense.

The last chance to control the pandemic evaporated and the virus began its deadly march, turning the pandemic into an Apocalypse.