Posted on June 1, 2007

The Hole: Part 7

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not like there were many left by the time the collections stopped.”

When this had all began, when the first people here and there got sick and the news was treating it like nothing more than another summer cycle of West Nile Virus or the latest strain of flu, the town on Charlottesville maintained its simple status quo. That first month, three elderly residents had contracted the disease and they’d all heard about a dozen more over in Richmond, but old people are always getting sick. It’s not worth getting worked into a town wide panic because a handful old people come down with something–even if that something makes them speak in tongues and slowly go mad.

But as it spread, as more stories came in from across the country and the television news channels put together animated intros, complete with heavy music, for stories about the plague, neighbors started talking about how maybe this was cause for genuine concern. Grandparents were pulled from nursing homes to live with their families. People stopped going out as much and the restaurants, bars, and nightclubs saw business plunge. Authorities told people to be calm and adopt the usual precautions: report any new cases, wash hands, avoid the sick, and only assemble when necessary.

Then the plague hit the children. A little boy in Alabama came down with it but his parents, conservative Pentecostals, thought his babbling was the voice of the Lord and so it was only when the autopsy found the spongy masses where his liver and stomach had been that the world realized the full panic of not just those already close to death being picked off but the youngest generation, too. As more sick children were found, the schools closed and Carlottesville organized food drops so citizens could remain in their homes, minimizing contact even with close friends and extended family.

The hospitals closed when the plague had infected forty percent of the adult population. Television stations went into automated reruns and the news played only recorded messages about new disposal procedures. Anyone dead was to be brought to the curb, where garbage collection had once occurred, and men in trucks came by every other day to pick them up. These men would leave immediately in anyone from in the houses tried to approach, cutting off perhaps the only remaining venue for updates beyond the city. And even that minimal contact ceased.

Two weeks before Clarine got sick, the trucks failed to arrive. The number of bodies being dragged out to the street had diminished greatly, but what small piles there were just stayed there. Elliot and Evajean were lucky enough in that respect to live on a street already effectively depopulated, so the views from their front windows were unobstructed by that sad picture of human remains.

So it had been the middle of July since either one of them had learned anything about their dying world. Now, driving through its outskirts for the first time in over a month, Elliot shared Evajean’s confusion. How could the entire population of a town, even in the reduced size left after the collections stopped, simply vanish?