The Bad Flu
by Richard Allen Stotts

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.
A children's rhyme for skip rope, circa 1918

A little history...all of it true.

When you call to mind the great plagues of history you will probably think of the Black Death, the Bubonic Plague that reigned supreme from 1347 until 1351. It must have surely have been the most deadly epidemic that mankind has ever endured.

Of course you would be wrong.

The great Influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people in one year than did the Black Death in the entire four years of its longest outbreak. Between 20 and 40 million people around the entire planet succumbed to what was known as the "Spanish Flu."

The flu virus struck the hardest at those who would normally be able to survive best such an illness, people between the ages of twenty and forty. The virus could act very fast, people were sometimes literally struck down in the street and could be dead in as little as one day, their lungs filling with thick, viscous fluids that would finally suffocated them.

Of all of the deaths to American fighting men during World War One, about half were due to the flu. At home in America the death toll was estimated at 675,000.

Even so, the mortality rate among those contracting the virus was only about two and one-half percent. A 'normal' flu virus will kill about 0.1 percent or less of its victims.

Flu viruses tend to mutate quickly, changing from year to year. Suppose the next variation of the virus is not survivable by anyone? Give some brief thought to this the next time you feel like you might be coming down with "something."

Chapter One

The Worst of Times

Terrance Allen Winters was finally going home from the hospital after a two-week long struggle to just keep on breathing. The contaminated batch of flu vaccine that had sent him into intensive care had also put over one thousand children in the Santa Cruz School District into various hospitals. The defective vaccine had also put eighty-six of those children into their early graves. Hundreds of lawsuits were being filed; lawyers were arriving from all points to offer their generous services. It was a scandal of national proportions and needless to say people everywhere stopped getting flu shots of any sort, not that it would matter at all in the months to come.

The Center for Disease Control had earlier in the year issued a warning that the coming flu season promised to be especially harsh and had urged people of all ages to get their shots early. In truth the CDC had no hint about what was truly ahead for the world; the bad batch of vaccine in California was just an unfortunate aberration in a needed inoculation program. The program to immunize the U.S. population against the anticipated strain of flu would be a total waste of time. The new strain that was to actually appear would be something else entirely.

----------

"I can walk, for Pete's sakes!" Terry was still weak and had lost weight but he still didn't care too much for the way his mom and dad were constantly fussing over him. Now his father even wanted to carry him into the house from the family's SUV.

"Are you sure, son?" Frank Winters had almost lost his son and did not want anything else to befall the boy, his only boy.

"Yeah, dad. I'm okay!" Terry was ten-going-on-eleven and was at that stage where a guy wanted more adult treatment from his parents. Even his fourteen-year-old sister Marsha (referred to by Terry as the "Martian") was being civil towards him and had even kissed him as they had left the hospital! It was embarrassing!

Apparently the high school that Marsha attended had received a different batch of flu vaccine; the girl had escaped the fate that her pesky brother had not. Terry's mother Ellen had been through her own section of hell these last two weeks trying to keep a household together and at the same time spending most of her time sitting beside her son's bed at the hospital. Many other parents had went through the same thing with her; an informal support group had formed that kept them all mostly sane as they watched their children either get well or die.

To Terry's utter horror their small mountain neighborhood had put together a welcoming home party for him. As he walked in the front door beside his mother horns tooted and cheers of "Welcome home!" assaulted his senses. Confetti was even thrown.

"Oh man!" Terry felt like heading back to the hospital.

"Terry my man! You look like crap!" This from Eddie Briscoll, Terry's partner in crime and long time friend. Eddie had been sickened by the vaccine also but had only spent three days in the hospital and was already back to his live wire self again.

"Thanks. So do you."

"I always look this way," Eddie replied with a grin. In truth Eddie was indeed remarkably homely and was equipped with ears more suitable for some other species. Add a zillion freckles and red hair to the picture. But there are other qualities you look for in choosing a best friend, good looks is way down on that list if you have any smarts at all.

After the endless kisses and head rubs and some of the cake and ice cream, Terry's mother hustled the boy upstairs and into his bed for a nap. Terry didn't protest too much, he was indeed pretty tired from the day's events. His strength would return in time but for now it pretty much just wasn't there.

----------

Hong Kong

The virus was hidden for just now as it was undergoing yet another of it's seemingly endless yearly mutations. It was becoming a killer this time. In the term used by astronomers, paleontologists, and Hollywood filmmakers, the virus was going to be the biological equivalent of an "Ellie," or E.L.E.

Extinction Level Event.

----------

Two weeks had passed since Terry was discharged from the hospital. There had been a stack of schoolwork waiting for him when he got home and he had managed to plod through the most of it. Terry was a practical and methodical sort of person, bright enough to get mostly A's in school but not an actual genius. At almost eleven he had his father's black hair and his mother's blue eyes. He was of average build for his age and had regular features, rather handsome actually but don't ever tell him that. Home cooking and a returning appetite were now filling in the bony places on the boy, there was good color back in his cheeks.

It was after Thanksgiving now and time to go back to school, or rather what was left of it. The flu shot debacle had decimated his small elementary school and only now were students starting to trickle back to its hallowed halls of learning and liberal indoctrination. You have to remember that this was Santa Cruz County, an area with far more than the average population of shiny-faced 'progressive' thinkers and genuinely certifiable nut buckets.

"I already have on every piece of clothes in the house!" Terry was suffering not too gently his mother's efforts to bundle him up for the cool fall day.

"I don't want you catching anything else, not after what you've been though." Ellen had her protesting son outfitted for crossing the Antarctic on foot.

"I'll catch heat stroke first! Lighten up, Mom!"

Eventually a compromise was reached just as the school bus beeped its horn. No gloves, no knitted ski cap.

"Gotta run! Bye, Mom!"

Kiss. Hug. Out the door.

"Stay safe." Ellen whispered as she watched her son dash for the yellow bus. A chill passed over her every time she thought about how they had almost lost him. The awful gasping sounds he had made trying to breathe, the wild fevers that came and went so many times. He had even been given the last rites one very dark night. But now he was back and seemingly well.

"Thank you, God."

----------

Hong Kong

A respected vendor of both real and fake Rolex's had almost decided to stay home for the day, he was coming down with something and didn't feel at all well. But money is money and the tourists still flocked to this exotic city. The watch merchant sold seven of the overpriced timepieces that day and with each customer he concluded the deal with a handshake and a death sentence. Melvin Dayton from Kansas City shook that hand; he would be the first of many to bring the Reaper home to America.

----------

"Mom! I'm out of clean underwear!" If the volume from upstairs was any indication of his health his mother decided that her son must now be fully recovered.

"In the new dresser, I moved them!" Ellen was having a hard time getting upset with her boy these days; his noisy presence was a reassuring sound to the woman. Her smile left her as she focused in on what the hourly news on the radio was saying.

".... over three hundred confirmed cases of the flu in and around the Kansas City area. There is an unconfirmed report that now a total of eleven people have succumbed to the effects of this apparently new and virulent strain of the disease. Officials at the CDC say that there is no need for any panic but prudent steps should be taken by the general population. In other news related to the flu, the massive outbreaks in Hong Kong and Taiwan are believed to be the source of the new virus...."

"Wonderful," muttered Ellen, "just what we all need."

"What's wonderful?" Terry was downstairs by now, dressed from his shower and nosing around the stove to check on dinner's progress.

"Some sort of bad flu outbreak in Kansas City."

This got all of Terry's attention.

"Like what I had?"

"No. Not from a bad vaccine. Something from Hong Kong they think."

"Oh. Bummer."

"Indeed, bummer."

Terry changed the subject.

"Mister Weems said he would teach me how to drive his tractor this Saturday, if it's all right with you and Dad."

"I don't know, those things are...."

"Very safe," Terry interrupted, "it's hardly any bigger than Dad's riding mower." The boy had this argument all plotted and planned.

"Well... ask your father. If he says it's okay then it's okay."

"Thanks, Mom." A hug and kiss were in order and Terry did just that to his mother.

Of course it was all right with Terry's father. After all it was a manly sort of thing to learn, guy stuff. Besides, Frank Winters had been secretly planning to buy one of the motorized man-toys for himself.

Saturday "It has sort of an automatic transmission thing," Weems was explaining it all to Terry as the boy sat nervously on the small earth gouger. Eddie Briscoll and Terry's father were the rapt audience. "Just make sure the brake is set and then switch on the ignition." Weems was loving this lesson also, he was a retired widower and his own three boys were long grown and dispersed to their separate lives. He had always been sort of the neighborhood 'grandfather' to the two boys and any other kid who needed a bike fixed or some willing ears to just listen to their problems.

The tractor rattled to life and settled into a very smooth purr of an idle. Terry was in danger of injuring the muscles in his face that controlled his grin.

"Now raise the loader and tilt the bucket up like I showed you." Weems was grinning too, everyone was.

Terry did as instructed. It was easy, one lever raised the loader, and the other controlled the angle of the scoop.

"Good. Now keep your foot on the brake and put it in low range."

The moment of truth had arrived. Actual motion was next.

"Okay, now let off the brake and give it just a little gas." Weems was hoping that his shed and fences would survive this next step. Not to worry.

"Cool!" Terry did exactly as he was supposed to and soon had the machine slowly cruising around the three back acres of Mister Weems' land. In truth the diminutive tractor was remarkably easy to control and operate. Terry even progressed to digging a small trench and then re-covering the rather untidy hole he had produced. His father was not quite green with envy when Weems let Eddie have a turn also; the man was too old to jump up and down and shout "Me too!" Frank Winters was used to driving 767's around the sky for a living but this seemed like a lot more fun.

It was a very good day. That evening was not so good; it was the beginning of the Bad Times and the end of all fun for a long time.

----------

A nation halted that night and paid attention to their televisions, their radios, the Internet. All of hell was coming for a long stay.

".... there are confirmed outbreaks in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and now in New York City. Apparently symptoms do not appear for at least ten days and during that time the victim is apparently very contagious, spreading the virus without even knowing it. The death toll so far is over nine thousand and growing. I must be honest and tell you that so far no one who has contracted this 'super-flu' has recovered, death has ensued in as little as two days after symptoms appear." The Surgeon General was holding a news conference, even Terry hadn't objected when the network had broken into the middle of the latest car chase documentary. The Surgeon General wasn't just concerned, the man was terrified, and so was the entire nation. There was simply no way to stop this thing and there was certainly no cure for it.

"Dad?" Terry's unformed question was hushed up as the uniformed man on the TV continued.

"We are urging all persons not engaged in matters of public safety to simply stay at home. Do not travel or go shopping if at all possible. This cannot be passed off as anything but a grave situation but our nation can and will survive this latest challenge."

The President came on immediately after the news conference, speaking from the Oval Office. Marshal law was declared; the constitution was pushed to the back burner.

"We'll be safe here." Ellen Winters prayed that their more than average isolation in the Santa Cruz Mountains would give them a safety barrier. They would simply stay put until this horrid thing was under control.

But things would not be brought under control. The airlines were the main reason for the rapid spread around the globe of this deadly virus. Frank Winters was a pilot for United and had been infected eight days ago. He would start to sneeze in another two days. Every person he had met or talked to in that time was also now infected. Every neighbor for a good half mile up and down the narrow mountain road was infected. Frank was a very friendly sort and never passed up the opportunity to stop and chew the fat Now they were all going to die.

Save for two.

Chapter Two

Practical Matters

"It's just a cold or something, don't worry." Frank Winters knew better but could not bring himself to say "just the flu or something."

"You're burning up!" Ellen wasn't fooled at all; the thermometer read one hundred and three. In truth her husband felt like a truck had run over him, everything that could ache did. He was starting to cough and there was a tightness in his chest. A deep breath was becoming painful.

Ellen's first reaction was to get her husband to the nearest emergency room but that was no longer an option. Hospitals were no longer accepting patients of any sort. Half of the medical community was already sick or dying, many of the rest simply opted out of a hopeless situation and were staying home to look after their own families. In any event there were no magic bullets to slay the virus; a trip to the hospital was a waste of time. If you had it you were probably as good as dead, in fact you were certainly as good as dead.

There had already been scattered riots at the few open supermarkets and drugstores. Other stores with practical wares had been broken into and stripped bare by an increasingly desperate populace. People were carrying guns and more than a few of them were quick to use them. The telephones and power still functioned with skeleton staffs (if you will pardon the expression) managing the largely automated utilities. Preparations were in place to bring the state's two nuclear power plants to cold shutdowns if their operators continued to dwindle in numbers. Everything seemed to be happening with appalling speed; it was all just starting to fall apart.

"Dad's really sick. I think it's the flu." Terry was talking to his friend Eddie on the phone. The boy was scared silly and it was apparent in his voice.

"My mom doesn't feel good either, she says it's just her allergies acting up but I don't believe her." Eddie sounded on the verge of tears himself.

"Jesus, Eddie! What are we gonna do?"

"I don't know. The radio is really scary. They say that people are dying everywhere. They say that China has gone totally silent."

"Jesus." Terry knew that things were going from bad to worse in a hurry. Some of the local television stations were just carrying the network feeds; none of the usual talking heads were to be seen.

"Are you okay?" Eddie asked, almost afraid to.

"Yeah, I feel all right. You?"

"I'm okay too. Just scared. I have to go now, Mom wants me to fix some lunch for Samantha." Samantha was Eddie's four-year old sister.

"Okay. Call me."

"Yeah."

Ellen Winters did what all good parents would try to do and carried on until she literally collapsed. Terry was by now the only able body left in the house. His father was in a really bad way, his sister had taken to her bed and now his mother was lying on the kitchen floor.

"Mom!" Terry was shaking his mother trying to wake her. He then felt her forehead; it was like touching a hot stove. Some paper towels soaked in cold water finally roused the woman. She blinked her eyes and finally focused on her son.

"Terry? Have you finished your math homework yet?"

She was delirious, even Terry could diagnose that much. His father had been that way for the last day now.

How the boy managed to get the woman up to the spare bedroom is a testament to his grit and desperation. It didn't seem right somehow to put her next to his father, as sick as they both were. Frank Winters had already lost control of his bodily functions, something that Terry could just not bring himself to cope with yet; he wasn't even sure how to cope with it.

Terry did his very best; he tried everything in his very limited knowledge of medicine and nursing.

"Chicken soup!" That was supposed to be good for sick people! Only his sister could manage to swallow a little of the Campbells Chicken and Noodles. He couldn't even get his parents to drink a little Seven-Up or even just some water. They were all dying and in the back of his mind he knew it.

The boy literally ran from room to room trying to do what he could, trying to save his family. It did not even occur to him to wonder why he wasn't anything more than just bone tired. He didn't have the flu at all. An exhausted evening nap on the living room couch was cut short with the startling sound of the phone ringing. It was Eddie.

"Hello?"

"Hi Terr."

"Eddie! How are your...?"

"They're all dead, Terr." Eddie seemed very detached and just as exhausted as his friend was.

"Oh shit." Terry's voice was just a whisper.

"What should I...what do I do now?"

"I don't know. My folks are in a bad way." In fact Terry's mother and father were already dead. His sister would join them in the late hours of this night.

"Stay put for right now, we'll figure out what to do in the morning." Terry was numb with anguish and fear. What could they possibly figure out in the morning?

"Okay. Catch you later." Eddie's voice seemed very small and far away. Too small and too far away.

Terry knew the truth even before he entered his father's and then his mother's room. There were no more sounds of labored breathing, no gasp for air that was not to be had, none of the disgusting sounds they made when coughing up that awful stuff in their lungs. A wet washcloth gently cleaned the mess off of their faces. He didn't cry when he covered them with the blankets. He didn't cry as he sat next to his total pain in the ass sister while holding her hand as she finally became silent and still. Cold.

The crying would have to wait for later.

----------

Eddie was sitting on the front steps of his home when his friend came over the next morning. It was very chilly and damp with wisps of a light fog still clinging to the treetops.

"Hi." Terry didn't know what else to say as he sat beside his best friend. Both of them were in the sort of shock that you might imagine. After a time Eddie ventured to reply.

"I called 911. All I got was a recording."

"What did it say?"

"Basically it said we're on our own and to bury or burn any bodies immediately."

"God."

"Yeah."

For a while longer they just sat huddled close to one another.

"Why aren't we sick?" Terry finally asked.

"I dunno. I kept taking my temperature last night. It was always normal."

"Maybe it was that shitty vaccine we had that made us so sick before all of this?" Terry could think of nothing else to explain their being alive.

"Yeah. Maybe so."

"We should go and check on Mister Weems, maybe...."

"I already did," Eddie interrupted gently, "he's dead too."

"Oh crap!"

Then they both found the tears that had been waiting for them, they both held onto one another for a very long time.

----------

"We have to take care of...we have to bury our folks." Terry knew this had to be done. It was nearly noon by now, the tears had dried up but the empty feeling would not leave them.

"Oh Christ! How are we gonna do that?" Eddie sounded desperate and didn't even want to go back into his house again.

"Mister Weems' tractor. We gotta do this for them, Eddie."

Eddie only nodded his head. They did indeed have to do this one thing that made them human beings. They had to do what was right and what was practical. Instant adulthood had been thrust upon them; childish things must be put aside for now and perhaps forever.

They decided on the small open space behind Eddie's house for the burial site. It was far enough from the small stream that was their second home in the warm months and the soil there wasn't as hard and rocky as the surrounding area. Terry was as ever the practical and methodical one, choosing this place was the logical thing to do.

There were no smiles this time as Weems' small tractor was once more started up and driven carefully down the empty road to Eddie's house. Lack of experience prolonged Terry's excavations until almost dark but a sloping trench that was a good five feet deep and almost twenty feet long was finally achieved. Eddie had helped with a shovel as best he could. They were only young boys and didn't have the muscles that were really needed for the job.

"We'll do it in the morning. We need to rest for now." Terry's words made sense as usual. It had been a very long day.

A simple meal of canned soup and bologna sandwiches in the Winters' kitchen sufficed for dinner. Neither boy liked to think about what was in the upstairs bedrooms of both houses and what they had to do in the morning. Bed and sleep would be sharing the big couch in the living room. There was nothing but static on the local television stations, the DirectTV satellite system had only taped programs seemingly about random subjects. There were no commercials.

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There could be no thought of building proper caskets; they had neither the skills nor the time needed. The boys had to make do with sleeping bags, blankets, and some duct tape. It was a horrible thing to have to do, especially for just young boys, for anyone. They helped one another as best they could, handling a dead body requires some strength as well some respect and care. Eddie lost it completely when it was time to prepare his little sister. Terry took over and spared his friend the awful task. The little girl didn't really look dead at all and seemed to be just sleeping.

Wrapping the bodies of their parents and siblings had been ghastly enough, now they had to somehow transport them to the gravesite.

"We'll use the Navigator." Terry finally decided.

"Can you drive it?" The enormous SUV could have been mistaken for some sort of military assault vehicle save for it's metallic blue paint job.

"I think so. It has an automatic and we can go real slow."

It was a good plan but they simply could not lift Terry's large father into the back of the four-wheeled beast. They had managed to drag the wrapped bodies out to the driveway, but that was all. They would have to use the tractor again, as unfitting as it seemed. The skip loader would supply the muscles the boys lacked but it just didn't seem at all right.

It was late afternoon when the exhausted boys finally had all of their families and Mister Weems laid as neatly in the ragged trench as they could manage. They had by mutual agreement decided that Weems was at this one moment a part of their family and also needed to be properly buried.

Eddie said a prayer he mostly remembered from one of his infrequent visits to church.

Then Terry had to use the tractor to push the cold damp dirt over everyone that they both loved and cared for.

"Now what?" Eddie was as drained and tired as his friend was. What indeed was next?

"Let's go get cleaned up and get some rest. Tomorrow is another day." Terry remembered that last part from an old movie he had once seen on TV. It seemed to fit the occasion.

They would return to this place often, each time gathering and piling a few more rocks on the site.

----------

The power went off at exactly ten the next morning. It was cold and raining outside Terry's house and now it was dim and quite inside. Soon it would also be cold inside. The forced air heating was fueled with propane from a large tank behind the home; the furnace still needed electricity to drive the blower.

"Shit!" Terry was composed enough by this time to get really mad about the hopeless mess they were both in.

"It won't be coming back on, you know." Eddie was no dullard either. He knew that electricity was no longer something to just take for granted.

"I'll get the wind-up radio."

"The what?" Eddie had never heard of such nonsense.

"You wind it up and it plays for about a half hour," Terry explained, "my dad was sort of a gadget freak." Indeed so was Terry.

"But how...?"

"The spring in it drives a sort of generator thing."

"Oh." Eddie was skeptical until his friend fetched the oddly shaped radio/flashlight gizmo and proceeded to indeed wind it up. There were only a few stations still on the air playing taped public service bulletins and emergency information. They never did hear a real, live announcer.

"Waste of time." Eddie concluded after about twenty minutes of the same useless messages.

"I guess so." Terry was starting to wonder about the future, about the truly awful fix they were both in. Then he looked at the refrigerator, and what about the freezer out in the garage? There was not a lot of food in the house that would last without being kept very cold. The stove would work for as long as the propane held out, its burners would keep the kitchen warm but what would they cook on it? Forget about the microwave popcorn and the toaster oven.

----------

It had been a week since the burials. A week of trying to stay sane and plan for a very uncertain future. A week of trying to figure out how to stay warm. Even the water was not coming out of the taps as fast as it used to. They still had hot showers to keep clean but even that would not last. Keeping clean was not normally something that was on your average boy's Big List of Important Things but now it somehow seemed an important link to a better time.

The two boys were eating very well for the time being, it takes some considerable time for steaks and frozen pizza to thaw and spoil in cool weather and inside well-insulated freezers. They were learning cooking on the fly and usually it was edible.

"The meter gizmo on the propane tank says we're going to be very up shit creek very soon." Eddie's brief expedition out to the tank had confirmed his worst fears.

"We can move over to your..."

"No!" Eddie could not abide with returning to the memories of his home. Terry decided not to press the point, ever.

"What about Mister Weems' place?"

"Maybe." Eddie liked the old man a lot and it would not be like living with the ghosts that were now in his own house. The ghost of noisy little Samantha.

"Then let's go scope it out."

----------

They decided to check on the other families that lived close by. At every door their noses told them not to go in. It was a smell that they would soon grow used to.

"Maybe we ought to just burn their houses," Terry said, "we can't bury all of those people, not now...not the way they are."

"Can we do that? Won't we get in trouble?" Eddie perhaps still hadn't fully grasped this new reality.

"In trouble with who?"

"But..."

"It is all we can do for them, the radio said to burn bodies or bury them. We should do it while the weather is still wet so we don't start a forest fire or something."

Eddie blinked a few times as if trying to see things more clearly and finally he did.

"Yeah. I guess you're right."

"We'll do it tomorrow. Right now let's check out Mister Weems' place."

"Okay." Eddie reply was soft and unsure, but he would go along with what seemed the only thing they could do.

They had visited with Weems many times in the past but had never really seen all of the rooms in his small house or what was in the large and always locked metal building out back. A slow walk through the old but tidy home revealed only a mysterious vault-like door to one room; it even had a safe's dial on it. They peered into the man's 'radio room' and moved on. Weems was an avid ham radio sort of person and had once tried to get the boys interested in the useful hobby. Terry and Eddie had been polite and attentive but it was obvious to Weems that they were being bored stupid by his lecture on radio waves and the arcane craft of Morse code.

The water was at full pressure in the house, there was even hot water!

"I remember now! He's not on the county water pipe. Dad said he had a spring fed tank up the hill a ways."

"We've been there! You know, that big green tank up by the tall rocks," Eddie agreed.

"Cool." The water in Terry's home was down to almost a trickle by now.

The boys almost bypassed the old man's bedroom, intending to just shut the door and lock in any ghost who might be lurking in there. A scrap of paper on the carpet beside the bed caught Terry's eye and he entered quickly to pick it up, then he left just as fast and slammed the door shut.

"What is it?" Eddie was trying to read over his friend's shoulder.

"Some stuff he wrote down, he must have been sick when he did it, it's all pretty shaky"

"Well?"

"There's some numbers, 12 L, 19 R, 33 L, 42 R."

"What's that?"

"That door! The one with the dial! It's some sort of safe or something! This must be the combination."

"Is that all it says?"

"No. He says... he wrote "take what you need," there's some other stuff that's all too scribbly to read."

"So let's try to open it!" Eddie came close to a grin for the first time in so many days.

The door opened on the second try. It was a vault door that was a good three inches of hardened steel. As the massive door swung open a small click signaled that a battery powered emergency light had just come on. Both boys just stood in open-mouthed awe at what they were looking at.

"Jesus Horatio Christ." Terry finally whispered.

There must have been one of every military firearm ever manufactured lining the walls. Handguns, sniper rifles, assault rifles, machine guns. All sparkling clean and oiled, all in perfect working order. There were sturdy wooden crates full of all sorts of ammunition. There was even a stubby looking 40mm grenade launcher and a large supply of the fat looking shells it fired.

"What is this?" Both boys hunkered down to look at the massive weapon resting on the floor. A bipod supported its heavy barrel, the telescopic sight looked to be capable of zeroing in on obscure spots on the moon.

"It must shoot these." Terry was holding a 'bullet' that seemed to be the size of a wiener. The weapon was a fifty-caliber Barrett semi-automatic, long-range sniper rifle/cannon.

There was one shelf with nothing but manuals for each of the varied weapons.

"Don't touch that!" Eddie had been well drilled on the evils of guns. Now he would have been better served by being taught how to safely handle them and how to hit what he fired at.

"Why not?" Terry went ahead and lifted one of the compact HK MP-5 submachine guns off of its pegs. It felt surprisingly heavy.

"You know we're not supposed to touch guns!"

"That was then, Eddie. This is now."

"But..."

"But nothing. We need to be able to protect ourselves, there's no one else to do it."

"But...." Eddie's record seemed to be stuck.

"What if some creep kicks in our door some night? What about animals? Are you gonna call 911 or stay alive?"

"You don't have to make fun of me!" Eddie was getting a little steamed by now.

"I'm not making fun of you, Eddie. I'm no great brain but I do know that the world has changed. There are no cops to call. The phones don't work anyway. We have to be sensible now and do things that seemed wrong before...before the bad flu hit. We have to take care of ourselves from now on."

Eddie seemed to come more into focus after Terry's words. They were indeed on their own and defenseless and they couldn't afford to be defenseless.

"I guess you're right. But we gotta be really careful with these things!"

"We will be, those books tell all about how all of these guns work. We'll go slow and learn how to shoot them the right way, the safe way."

"Okay." Eddie was undergoing a radical attitude adjustment. "How did he buy all of this stuff, anyway? Is it legal?"

"I don't know, Eddie, but I'm glad he did buy it all."

Two 9mm Berretta pistols and some ammo, along with the weapon's manuals would be a good starting place. As they prepared to leave Gun Nut Heaven with their loot stuffed in waistbands and pockets Terry noticed some keys hanging by the vault door. They were neatly labeled with a tag that read "storehouse."

"The metal building out back! I wonder what he keeps in there?" Terry wondered aloud. He had asked his father once and even he hadn't known what the old man kept out there.

"Probably a tank or maybe some nukes." Eddie wouldn't have been surprised.

Mister Weems was apparently somewhat more than just the nice old guy they had known and liked so much.

Like most of the mountain residents, Mister Weems' home was heated with propane. Weems had opted for vented radiant heaters that didn't require any electricity to operate them. On the walk back to the isolated metal building the boys stopped by the man's enormous double propane storage tanks.

"They're almost full!" Eddie did grin at this piece of good luck.

"Geez! This will last all winter if we don't waste it!" Terry knew by now that they had found another place to live. A place without ghosts and a place without rooms that you didn't want to go into. Well, maybe just that one bedroom.

----------

If the gun vault was a revelation the "storehouse" was mind bending. It would seem that Mister Weems harbored a deep paranoia about the future of just about everything and he had prepared well for those uncertain futures.

"Yikes!" Eddie squeaked as still more emergency lights blinked on.

"Double yikes," agreed Terry.

They were looking at their salvation. There must have been enough preserved food to last for years. Indeed there was. Freeze-dried, dehydrated, nitrogen packed and just plain canned food. Vitamins, food supplements, bulk flour and cereals. It was a survivalist's supermarket.

There were racks of lanterns, camp stoves, and enough canned fuel for them to last for, well, a very long time. There were three different gasoline powered generators. One was small enough for the two boys to lift if they had wanted to, the largest looked capable of powering a medium size city and had it's own wheels and a trailer hitch. Water purifiers, medical supplies. A lot of medical supplies, including items that probably needed a doctor's prescription to buy. There were all sorts of books neatly arranged in what was almost a small library against one wall.

"Urban Survival Tactics." Terry had read aloud the title of the first book he had pulled off the shelf. The rest of the volumes were of a similar theme. The boys would have plenty to read during the long winter nights that were to follow. Homework.

"Merry Christmas." Terry said after a while.

"What?"

"Tomorrow is Christmas and we've just been given a very big present from Mister Weems."

"I always did like him," Eddie replied.

"Yeah, me too. I think he might be glad that we can use his stuff."

He was.

----------

Christmas Day or not they had a hard task to complete. There were houses to burn.

"This just doesn't seem right." Eddie had said that at least five times as they splashed the stove fuel on the small cottage belonging to Mildred Spence. She had been a really nasty old crab but burning down her house with her body inside was still a hard thing to do or even to think about.

"I know Eddie, but it's this or just leave her there for the bugs and worms. Besides, it's not healthy to have all of these dead people around, the radio said that back when they were still making sense. Now stand back."

Terry managed to light and toss one of the road flares they had brought along onto the cottage's porch. There was no dramatic swoosh or fireball, the house just started burning. Rather slowly at first because of the wet weather, then the boys had to retreat back to the road as the heat became truly intense.

"God!" Terry had never seen a house burn before, it can be a hard thing to watch. It became a little easier with practice as they set fire to six homes that day and four more the next morning.

At least now the wind would not bring the awful smell of death to them.

Their nightmares would persist for another two months after the fires. Perhaps they would for a lifetime.

What the boys had experienced had occurred on a vast scale around the planet. No country, no island however remote escaped the virus. The nine people aboard the International Space Station were healthy and had a grand view of it all, they also knew that returning to Earth might be a death sentence.

"Look at that!" Air Force Brigadier General Clifford Hartz like everyone else spent most of his time at the observation ports. This mission was to have been the officer's last venture into space, he was at the age of fifty-eight considered to be too long in the tooth for operational assignments.

"That's California, isn't it?" Doctor Margaret Long asked as she looked past the man's shoulder.

"Yes. Los Angeles is burning. The smoke is moving offshore, probably those desert winds they sometimes get in the winter."

The ISS crew was as follows: Brigadier General Clifford Hartz, USAF - Station Commander, shuttle pilot qualified.

Lt. Commander Michael Jenkins. USN - shuttle qualified pilot, rescue craft pilot. Station systems specialist.

Colonel Alexi Andropov, Russian Air Force - Soyuz pilot, solar power management specialist.

Major Sergi Nabokov, Russian Air Force - Soyuz qualified pilot, EVA construction specialist.

Diego Cruz, PhD - Spain - Meteorology and Earth Sciences Specialist. Civilian.

Ian Graves, PhD - Ireland - Physicist in charge of current gravity wave detection project. Civilian.

Margaret Long, MD - Station medical research specialist, also in charge of crew health and treatment. Civilian.

Sara Bancroft, PhD - Botanist, in charge of the long-term greenhouse experiment. Civilian.

Andre LeClerc, PhD - France - Specializing in zero gravity manufacturing research. Civilian.

They had all lost their families and loved ones and more than one of them was contemplating a quick way out of this nightmare.

They had the Soyuz re-entry module that could hold three people and the new 'mini-shuttle' escape craft that could carry the rest down to the surface. It was called the 'taxi." They could hold out for as long as the air and supplies permitted, perhaps as much as another six months. Then they would have to come to Earth. So far the taped radio message they had been sending out had been useless, perhaps there were no longer any people alive to hear it.

Los Angeles was indeed burning from the San Gabriel Mountains all the way to the sea. Many of the planet's large cities had already burned or had at least been partially destroyed by fires. Unchecked even the tiniest spark can bring down the grandest achievements of mankind.

There were no hands to open the spill gates at the great dams, many would overflow and weaken with the spring thaw and the subsequent runoff. The Mississippi would in time find it's own way to the sea as the myriad of levees holding it in check weakened and collapsed. It would take time but the works of man would all fall and crumble.

Chapter Three

Amanda

"You go first!" Eddie had no desire to take the first shot.

"Chicken." Terry had carefully loaded the big automatic, following all of the rules they had read about in the safety booklet. It was still a damned big gun for a boy's hand, Mister Weems didn't seem to have much respect for small and compact. "Okay, put your earplugs in."

The booklet said that it was bad for your hearing not to wear the squishy yellow things.

"Shit!" Terry had jumped almost as much as the Beretta had. More. He was ashamed to see that the pistol was shaking and that the tin can sitting on the cardboard box in the back yard was totally unscathed.

"Try again!" Eddie seemed to be starting to like this.

"Easy for you to say."

Terry managed to empty the clip, becoming more at ease with the noise and recoil with each carefully aimed shot. But he never did hit the stupid can and it was only about twenty feet away.

"Okay, smart ass. Your turn!"

Eddie carefully and correctly reloaded the clip and then shoved it into the pistol.

"Finger!" Terry warned.

"Sorry!" Eddie had his finger inside the trigger guard, a serious no-no when loading a weapon, according to the manual.

"Won't happen again."

"Cool."

Eddie pulled back the slide and let it snap forward. Now he could put his finger on the trigger as he aimed.

Eddie sent the can flying with his first shot.

"Geez!" Was all that Terry could come up with.

"Cool." Eddie had found his true calling. His mother would have been horrified and then driven out of the PTA if they had ever found out about such a thing.

They would practice some almost every day, it was Eddie's favorite 'task' and a source of constant embarrassment for Terry who would always be better off just throwing a rock or anything else close at hand.

------------------------- They made a home for themselves in Mister Weems' house. Terry had to go into Eddie's house to collect some clothes and things from his friend's room. Eddie just could not re-enter his parent's home, no matter what. Terry also brought out some of the family pictures from the living room for his friend to keep.

"Thanks. I'm sorry I...."

"Shuddup. It's cool." Terry resisted the urge to grab his dopey friend and hug him. Guys just didn't do that sort of thing.

----------

"We need to wash our clothes and stuff, they're getting really gross." Eddie was stating the obvious. It was a task that had always been pushed to the bottom of the list. Washing dishes even had more precedence. Now they were completely out clean clothes and had been fishing through the 'laundry' pile for stuff that didn't totally reek.

"Generator." Terry replied.

"Huh?"

"We hook one up to the washing machine. Easy."

"What about the dryer? That takes a lot of time and juice."

"Clothes line. That's how they did it before dryers and modern crap."

"If you say so." Eddie had come to respect his friend more and more for the simple and practical solutions he always seemed to come up with. He had even stopped razzing him about his perfectly awful marksmanship.

Terry's plan worked very well indeed. The clothes were not as soft as a dryer made them but they smelled fresher from drying in the open air. A few days without rain had been a great help.

Running the generator had presented them with another problem, gasoline. A lot of days spent reading with no television or video games to intrude supplied a possible solution.

"It says here in "Urban Survival" that filling stations usually have a connection for emergency power. It's some sort of regulation or something." Terry knew that plenty of gasoline must still be in the big underground tanks.

"And...?" Eddie could already see where this was all heading.

"So we hook up a generator to a station's power thingy and pump our own gas."

"What do we put it in?"

"Well, gas cans, dork!"

"Oh. How do we get there?"

Terry had to pause for a moment. They would have to drive.

"We take my folks' Navigator."

"You can drive."

----------

"Will it still start?"

"I dunno, it's just been sitting here in the driveway all of this time." Terry slid behind the wheel and put the key in the ignition. The vehicle was covered with leaves and was just plain filthy, the windshield would need a lot of cleaning. First they had to see if it would even run.

"Here goes."

The big V-8 had been asleep for a long time. The battery had lost a lot of its charge and the gas had to be pumped back into the carburetor. But after a lot of yelling and screaming from the two boys the engine finally caught and rumbled into life. In moments it was purring and warming up, the battery was charging again. The gauge on the dash said they had three-quarters of a full tank of gas. Terry's dad had always liked to keep it at least half full.

"Yesssss!" Terry was mostly just a toothy grin by this point in time.

There were still problems to be worked out. The SUV's brake and accelerator were too far away, even with the seat all of the way forward. It was hard to see over the wheel.

This time Eddie had the solution. It wasn't very elegant but it worked.

Duct tape and some wooden blocks cut from 2x4 lumber put the pedals within easy reach of Terry's feet. Some cushions from the lawn furniture raised him to a level where the road would be mostly in sight. A lot of grunting and shoving had the mid-size generator up a makeshift ramp and into the ample cargo area of the Navigator. They could have used the small tractor for this job but they didn't think of it until the damned generator was mostly into the SUV.

That evening there were final plans to be made.

"We take the pistols, the HK .308, the MP-5, and the bloop gun."

"Cool." Terry knew by now to leave matters concerning firearms to his now deadly friend; they would be a rolling arsenal in the morning. By the way, the "bloop gun" was the grenade launcher, it got that name from the odd report it made when firing. Eddie was by now very competent with it, numerous shredded spots in the surrounding forest proved that. Deer had prudently left the vicinity entirely.

"What if we find some other people?" Terry didn't know what they should do if that happened.

"I think we be really careful," Eddie replied, "things have been nuts for a long time."

"True. Think about it though, we didn't get the flu and we both had those bad shots. A lot of kids had those shots. There might be some other kids we know still alive. Kids we don't know."

"Then we still be careful and try to make friends."

Eddie might have been as handsome as a pig's rear end but he wasn't at all stupid.

----------

The First Expedition

"Do we have everything?" Terry asked for the third time.

"Yes we do. Except for gas cans."

They would have to find some of those.

"Okay then, here goes. Safety belts."

If you put your average eleven-year-old behind the wheel of a large SUV and say, "go for it" he or she will probably just freeze up and properly refuse to budge. Terry didn't have that option.

"Watch the mailbox!" Eddie was already a back seat driver and they weren't even out onto the road yet.

"I see it!"

Driving wasn't nearly as easy as it had seemed to be when riding with Mom or Dad. Ten miles per hour simply would not do.

"You drive like an old lady, we'll be in Santa Cruz in about twenty years at this rate!"

"Would you like to drive?" Terry would have gladly belted his friend if he could have pried his own death-grip hands off of the steering wheel.

"No thanks. Just try to go a little faster. Sorry." Eddie cooled it with the too-easy criticisms.

"Man!"

After what seemed to be endless miles (five) Terry started to come to grips with piloting the great beast of a vehicle, his speed was now up to a blazing twenty-five. So far they had not seen a single sign of life. Except for the dogs. There seemed to be a lot of dogs running around.

What had they all been eating to stay alive?

----------

"Stop!" Eddie hadn't quite screamed, just almost.

"What?" The SUV's tires chirped to an abrupt halt as Terry stood on the brakes.

"Over there! What's that?"

It was a body. Or rather what was left of a body. It was lying in the parking lot of the Fosters Freeze drive in. The small town of Felton had also not been spared from the bad flu. No place had.

"Gross! Terry could see that some large parts of the man/woman were no longer present and attached.

"Keep going." Eddie had also seen more than he wanted to.

"Stop!" Eddie yelled after another two miles.

"Now what?"

"Gas can! On the back of that Jeep! I'll get it!"

"Shit! Be careful!"

Terry switched off the ignition and got out with his friend. He had his pistol drawn as Eddie dashed over to the abandoned Jeep and tried to retrieve the large red can latched to the rear of the vehicle, it was of course padlocked to the vehicle. They were being watched while this occurred but these dogs were not at all sure about moving in on live humans, not just yet anyway.

Both boys presented an image that would have put your average pre-flu, liberal-minded anti-gun activist into deep shock. Terry had opted for a simple four-clip harness and an attached black nylon cross-chest holster for his big Berretta.

Eddie looked like a pint-sized Terminator and tended to make metallic sounds when he walked.

"Shit! Let's go!"

Terry didn't have to be told twice as Eddie climbed back into the SUV. It was truly spooky around here.

It was spooky everywhere.

There were actually very few bodies out in the open. People mostly want to be indoors and warm when they felt bad and indoors were where most of humanity had curled up and died. The big SUV finally purred into downtown Santa Cruz with only the occasional trash and debris from the sporadic looting to steer carefully around. It was early March, still mostly cool, wet weather but the sun was out today and it was almost warm.

"Let's go down to the beach." Eddie and his friend had spent many happy days on the coast's numerous public beaches.

"We gotta do what we came for!" Terry wanted to just do what they had planned on and then split for home.

"Just for a little while."

"Crap! Okay!"

What they found down by the municipal pier and boardwalk had them both speechless for a time.

"Look at that." Eddie finally whispered.

"Yeah. Geez."

An enormous cargo container ship had apparently plowed at full speed into the sand between the municipal pier and the old ballroom. The bow of the huge vessel had driven almost as far as the street, the buckled hull plates testified to the violence of the impact. On its deck many of the shackled cargo containers had broke loose and crashed forward, several were smashed open on the beach.

"Let's take a closer look," Eddie said.

"Okay." Terry was also very curious by now. Who would not be?

From the street they could already see something yellow scattered on the sand and even bobbing in the low surf. Both boys broke into laughter when they got close enough to identify the small objects.

"Rubber ducks! There's gotta be a zillion of them here!"

"Made in China." Terry was reading the printing on one of the soggy cardboard boxes. "Let's check out the other side."

It was like walking next to a steel cliff. The vessel seemed to tower over them as they rounded the bow of the vessel. Another container was busted open on this side too.

"Microwave ovens!" Terry exclaimed.

"More Chinese crap." Eddie's father had been a 'Buy American' sort of union person.

"Doesn't matter, they're all full of sand and seawater anyway."

Both boys wondered what else might be on the vast ship but there was no way to get onboard to see. No boarding ramps had been dropped and there was no way to scale the vertical steel hull. The crew had been either dead or too sick to manage anything when the vessel beached.

Maybe someday they could figure a way to climb the hull.

"Come on. Let's try the Home Depot. They have lots of hardware crap and stuff." Terry had been there many times with his father; it was their last resort before calling someone who actually knew how to properly fix a bathtub faucet or a garbage disposal. It was a macho, guy sort of place.

The enormous hardware store was untouched. Perhaps it had been the shotgun-armed manager who had from the store's roof discouraged any looting. There were three untidy 'lumps' lying in the parking lot that had once desired whatever they could carry away from the store.

Number four buckshot is a nasty invention at best.

"Gross!" Terry almost felt nauseous at the sight.

"You keep saying that!" Eddie was by now not as squeamish as he had been about the few bodies that littered the landscape, it was still gross.

"Come on. They should have gas cans. Let's be careful."

"Yes, dear." Eddie had to grin back at his one and only friend. They did tend to caution each other a lot these days.

"It's all locked!" Terry had tried all of the heavy glass doors, to no avail.

"Stand back."

Terry didn't need to be asked again. Eddie was pointing his trusty Berretta at the middle door.

The glass exploded into a million little safety bits, birds fled upwards from the neglected open-air nursery department at the side of the building.

"After you." Eddie gestured toward the vacant doorframe.

"Geez!"

Terry knew better than to remind his friend about engaging the safety on his pistol.

Eddie knew that, by now it was as natural as farting.

It was very dim and sort of scary in the huge store but there were indeed gas cans, five kinds in fact. The boys made four trips to the SUV cramming the largest of the empty red containers into every spare corner of the Navigator. Perhaps not enough thought had been given to the safety aspects of riding around in a vehicle crammed with gasoline.

"Now what?" Terry didn't quite know where to head for next.

"I dunno. Find a gas station I guess."

"Okay."

The Shell station on Ocean Street seemed a good choice. There were no bodies lying around. It had the lowest prices of the last three stations they had passed.

"Park over there, by the electric wires...."

"Yeah, I see it." Terry carefully guided the Navigator over to where the power lines from the poles fed led into the main building. Where they fixed flat tires and did tune-ups.

The fuse box was of course padlocked.

"Stand back." Eddie was preparing to remove the padlock.

"Wait a minute, you'll mess up the electrical stuff inside!"

Ten minutes with a hacksaw retrieved from inside the looted service area removed the cheap padlock.

"There. Plug it in."

"Wait a sec."

The power panel had some painted over lettering stamped into the metal. "Emergency 110/120 Input. Disengage outside line first." There was a very large and imposing handle, Terry tugged it all of the way down. Then he plugged it in.

"So start it up, I guess?" Terry could see nothing else left to do and did just that. The Honda generator in the back of the SUV started as quickly as advertised. No sparks or zapping sounds resulted. No great fireballs of exploding gasoline. Of course the cashier's booth was locked and the pumps were all switched off.

Eddie took care of all of that with the MP-5. Besides, it was getting late.

"Fill 'er up!" Eddie was beginning to be a complete menace. Still, he was very useful when it came to opening places that were closed and locked.

Twenty minutes later all of the cans were filled with the overpriced premium octane, so was the SUV.

"Let's go home."

"Cool." Eddie had also had enough for one day. Like his friend he was also starting to have visions of freeze-dried spaghetti and meatballs or whatever else might be on tonight's simple menu.

"Stop!"

"What now?" Terry once more shuddered the big SUV to a jolting halt.

"Over there!"

A pack of dogs ranging from a German Shepard to a skinny looking pit bull were milling around and yapping at one of the bushy decorative trees that lined what had served as a downtown mall for the old seaside community. A small pair of Nikes up in the tree were just out of range of the dog's lunging jaws.

Both boys knew what had to be done.

There was another actual live human being in that tree! Another person!

"Eddie. Use the rifle."

Eddie was already scrambling into the back seat where the .308 HK scoped rifle was resting. Say what you will about the German people's choice of leaders and of what wars to start, they really knew how to build a proper weapon.

"Roll down the window." Eddie was uncapping the huge day/night scope that dominated the heavy sniper rifle. Somewhere in Eddie's genes there had to be Marines and any other sort of hard cases that come to mind. Maybe even a couple of Vikings.

Terry pushed the correct button in front of his door's armrest and the passenger-side window disappeared with a low whirring sound.

"Don't miss."

"Shuddup."

Terry wasn't at all offended by his friend's quiet rebuke. He shut up.

BOOM!

Even with his hands over his ears Terry could feel the power of the weapon that Eddie was wielding. The stupid dogs didn't catch on until the third shot and by then there were only two of them still moving. Eddie killed the last one with a round up the butt as it skittered up the street past it's very dead companions.

"Eddie?"

"Yeah?"

"Please don't ever get really pissed off at me."

"Never happen. There's still someone in that tree."

Terry had edged the SUV up very close to the tree. Both boys were all eyes and swivel heads as they got out and then peered up into the branches. Dead dogs and splattered canine stuff made them step carefully.

"Hello?" Terry didn't know what else to say.

Only the pair of Nikes showed any reaction as they jerked upwards a little.

It was also starting to get dark.

"Are you okay? We won't hurt you!"

After a long time a face briefly replaced the Nikes and then disappeared again into the thick leaves. It was a dirty face and it had been streaked with tears.

"Geez." Eddie whispered. Terry was at a total loss.

It had almost looked like it was a girl.

"I have a knife! Go away!" The face and the Nike's also had a voice.

"The dogs are all dead. We won't hurt you." Terry was trying really hard to place that familiar voice.

"I'm not gonna be in your dumb ass gang. Beat it!"

"What gang? There's just me and Eddie."

Terry and Eddie just stared at one another. What the hell was she talking about? Gang?

"I know who that is," Terry finally whispered, "so do you."

It was Amanda Brooks, from school.

She had sat two seats in front of Terry and across from Eddie in weird old Miss Dankins' class.

The light was fading fast. They really had to get home.

"Amanda! It's me, Terry Winters! From school! Eddie's here too! We've gotta get out of here. Please come on down!"

"What?" The voice up in the tree sounded very small and very confused.

"Come on, more dogs might come back." Terry had lowered his voice. Yelling would only make things worse. The dogs might hear. Amanda was scared enough already.

The girl began to slowly clamber down but lost her grip and landed with a thump at Terry's feet.

"Owww!"

Both boys moved to try and help the girl stand but then jumped back as a medium sized carving knife was shoved in their faces.

"Amanda!" Terry didn't know whether run or what. Neither did Eddie.

"Terry?" The girl was finally realizing that these two mini-Rambo's had been her schoolmates. Just two dorky boys in her class. Except Terry wasn't so dorky, she had always thought he was sort of nice and looked a little like Harry Potter from that stupid movie. Except he didn't wear glasses.

"Yes! Geez, don't stab us!"

"Oh gosh." Amanda lowered her knife/machete. These two weren't the gang jerks. These were good kids, she knew them!

"How did you get here?" Eddie asked. It was miles from where they knew she lived. They had both been to her totally lame Halloween party last year.

"My aunt.... I thought I should go there on my bike...after my parents..." After her parents died. After her whole world had died.

"We have a good place to stay near my folks place. Its safe there, come with us!" Terry very much wanted to just get moving.

"I can't"

"Why?"

"Benny and Keesha!"

"Who?"

"Benny and Keesha. They're all alone where I left them, they're just little kids! I had to go out to find some more food for us."

Terry and Eddie exchanged confused looks at each other. Now what?

"Then get in the tank," Terry decided, "we'll go get them."

"But the gang's close to where they are now!"

"What gang?" Terry was about ready to start screaming for the girl to make some real sense for a change.

"A bunch of stupid kids, mostly boys. They're bad news. They drive around playing demolition derby all day like in some stupid Mad Max movie or something. I saw them beat up some kids too."

Eddie was checking the safety on his MP-5 as they finally got the girl into the SUV.

Eddie could also be sort of bad news. Terry and his chest full of pistol clips looked like he was bad news too, but he really wasn't.

----------

"Maybe if you turned on the headlights?" Eddie was also straining to see into the near darkness.

"No! They'll see us!" Amanda still had her over-sized blade and the boys saw no reason to press the issue with her. "It's just up there, that big white house!"

The house had been empty of bodies so the girl had made it her temporary home.

Terry stopped and put the SUV/tank in park. It didn't seem prudent to turn off the ignition.

"Where are they?" Eddie whispered, as if someone might hear them even inside the vehicle.

"Stay here, I'll go get them." Amanda was out of the vehicle and running for the house's front door before either boy could think to argue with her.

"This is not cool." Eddie was all eyes and rotating head.

"No shit."

Headlights in the rear view mirrors.

Three sets of them about two blocks down the residential street from the house where the two sweaty-palmed boys sat waiting.

"Eddie!"

"Blow the horn." Eddie seemed altogether too calm and composed.

Terry did just that as the boy who was once afraid of guns scrambled over the gas cans and into the back cargo area. Eddie then lowered the rear window and chambered a round into the MP-5. Four of the full gas cans had been shoved out onto the pavement by the time Amanda and the two small waifs in her charge bolted into the open passenger side door.

"Go very fast!" Eddie's urgent advice was closely followed as Terry turned on the headlights and for the first time ever totally floored the accelerator.

Eddie was also loading the bloop gun from the absurdly outsized bandolier he wore.

The pursuing would-be gangsters arrived at the four gas cans at about the same time as Eddie fired the bloop gun. None of the mini-hoods died in the ensuing fireball but several of them would need to grow some of their hair back. They had in a quick moment learned that playing at being tough was entirely different from actually being tough. Most of them just ran off in different directions crying for mothers they no longer had. Frankie Delgado had instantly lost control of his gang and now just stood glaring at the big SUV that was fast disappearing down the dark street.

"I'll find those basturds!" He swore under his breath. One day he would too.

"You can slow down now!" Eddie had raised the rear window, he was now more concerned that they must be doing about ninety in a residential area. There were still six of the full gas cans in the back of SUV. "Cool It!"

Terry finally eased off on the gas. Then he stopped entirely in the dark and deserted intersection of Highway Seventeen and Highway Nine.

Amanda and her terrified two little ones just sat clutching one another while staring wide-eyed at their insane driver and his crazy tail gunner.

"Is everyone okay?" Terry croaked.

"I think so." Amanda finally squeaked out.

"I'm cool. Let's get on home." Eddie still sounded altogether too calm.

"Okay. Wait just a minute."

Terry very deliberately unbuckled his seatbelt and got out of the SUV. The sound of the boy's dry retching at the side of the vehicle told everyone that not all people are cut out for high speed car chases and blinding explosions. But Terry had been there when it counted and that was all that mattered.

"All right. Then let's go home." Terry was once more behind the wheel. No one saw any need to object to the sedate speed as the SUV purred carefully up the inky mountain roads to the safe place amid the green trees. The high beams plus the fog lamps pushed the ghosts and goblins back out of sight and into the woods.

Barely.

Chapter Four

Family Life and Spacemen

"Oh God! You have hot water!" Amanda was more than a mess. Terry and Eddie had been gentlemen enough not to comment on her definite...aroma. Not to mention the grubby state of the two kindergarten attendees that she had struggled to keep fed and alive. She had had no storehouse full of supplies to draw from, just her wits and some luck, "You and Keesha get clean first, then we'll hose off Benny and ourselves. Your clothes will have to wait till tomorrow for the laundry, you can put on some of Eddie's stuff and mine. They're mostly clean but they may not fit. Then we can eat."

"Bless you." Amanda then planted the first real kiss Terry had ever got on his actual lips from an actual girl. Gosh!

Eddie barely managed to not lapse into helpless laughter as he witnessed this most unlikely of events.

Amanda could have spent the next three weeks alone under the hot spray but the tiny black girl in her care also needed an industrial scrubbing. When they both finally emerged from the fog of the warm shower it was like a new life had begun for them both. Out of habit she toweled the both of them off and started to pick up the electric hair dryer, then she felt really foolish. Extra work with the towel and a hairbrush would have to suffice for the girl's hair. At any rate they smelled clean again rather than just smelling.

"Maybe we should knock or something?" The small house had only the one bathroom and Terry and Eddie had forgotten how females seemed to spend most of their life in them.

"You knock." Terry still remembered the big knife the girl had wielded, that sort of memory tends to stay with a person.

They didn't have to knock, the door opened as if on cue. The towel-wrapped Amanda just smiled and daintily stepped passed the two, now three boys. Keesha was less concerned with modesty and just dashed bare past the grinning boys like a small chocolate doll.

"Keesha!" Amanda seemed exasperated by the little girl's behavior. The girl had become sort of an instant mother and was learning some of what all mothers experience.

"Come on, Benny. It's soap time!"

Benny hadn't uttered a single word since they had first met him. The boy's decided to make it a communal shower bath; it seemed the most practical way to get the little boy clean. Eddie held Benny mostly in one place while Terry washed and scrubbed the parts that came to hand from time to time. The child was blonde to the point of being close to albino. Keesha was black to the point of being, well, very black. She hadn't said anything either.

Perhaps both of the very young humans had seen and heard more than they could be expected to process. Maybe some time in a safe place would help. They must have talked to Amanda though; she knew their names and all. Benny repeated Keesha's nude escape and had to be chased down the hall by the towel clad Terry and Eddie for a quick dressing session. In time the sight of anyone's skin would not be much cause for comment or embarrassment, it didn't really matter now and they were all making a start at being like just family, albeit a very young and newly formed family.

Amanda had found the Benny and Keesha in the apartment building where her aunt had lived. The two small children were not related in any way and seemed to have simply found one another as they wandered through the building full of dead people. Even Amanda had not yet been able to find out what their last names were. The two six-year-olds tended to behave like children even younger than they actually were; perhaps it was some sort of reversion thing, or something.

Terry and Eddie's first houseguests were rather oddly dressed for dinner. Benny and Keesha had on sweatshirts beneath old and ratty football jerseys that almost reached to their ankles. Amanda had on a pair of Eddie's jeans and one of Terry's sweatshirts. Never mind about what the girl had to settle on for some clean underwear. At least the house was warm and comfortable. Tomorrow would be a General Laundry Day.

Terry had also forgotten what pretty auburn hair and brown eyes that Amanda had.

"Turkey and noodles. Canned green beans. Dog biscuit crackers. Canned peaches. Grape Cool Aid or powdered milk that really sucks rocks."

Terry was explaining the evening menu. Two hissing lanterns provided a bright and cheery light for the table.

"Dog biscuit crackers?" Amanda politely inquired.

"We sort of call them that. There's a ton of them in vacuum cans in the storehouse. They're not too bad after you get past their lack of any actual flavor."

"Oh. Then I guess they must be better than actual dog biscuits?"

"Huh?"

Amanda knew from hard experience what actual dog biscuits tasted like. Not as bad as you might imagine. Sort of like compressed sawdust flavored with Spam. Better than nothing.

Towards the end of the meal there were tears on the girl's cheeks. She seemed to be crying. Terry and Eddie looked at one another in confusion. Had they done something wrong? Girls were another species altogether in their minds.

"Amanda?" Terry began.

"What?" (Sniff) "Did we say something...what's wrong?"

"I'm just so happy about finding you both, being with nice people for a change. I'm happy about being in a safe place."

"Oh. Well, we're happy to have you here. We were both getting really tired of just having each other to cuss at. Stop crying."

This only increased the flow of tears and the boys were more confused than ever. If she got any happier she might fall out of her chair and curl up in a ball on the floor.

Eventually calm prevailed.

Eddie again lost the nightly coin toss and had to wash the dishes for the third time in a row.

----------

Amanda and the little ones got the grand tour the next morning after breakfast. The girl's night had been spent on the fold-out bed that was inside Weems' living room sofa; camping cots fetched from the Never Ending Storehouse sufficed for Benny and Keesha. Terry and Eddie had the spare bedroom as usual; the bunk bed brought over from Terry's old room had been their sleeping arrangement from day one. There was no thought about using Weems' bedroom; he had died in that bed. Maybe later they could get rid of the bed and clean out the room entirely, then Amanda could have her own room.

Maybe they could get rid of the ghost in there.

The girl was by no means your average mall-rat bubblehead. She had intended to follow in her father's footsteps and become an electronics engineer. She would have too; she had the brains and aptitude for it. A female nerd, if you will. Amanda was happier in an electronics emporium than in a designer clothing store.

Weems' small radio room drew her in like a moth to a flame.

"Neat! Have you picked up anyone yet?"

"Huh?" Terry found himself saying that a lot when he talked with Amanda.

"The transceiver. Have you heard anyone on it?"

"Well...there's no electricity unless we run a generator."

"You mean you haven't even tried it?"

"No, not actually." In fact they didn't even really know how to properly turn on the button and dial-ridden contraption. Terry felt like an idiot. So did Eddie.

Amanda pointed to the two large RV batteries and the inverter that were set back under the table the radio equipment was resting on. Apparently there was little that Weems hadn't prepared for. The batteries still retained about half of their full charge. She flipped one switch on the inverter and another on the radio, and then everything lit up. There was a faint hiss of static coming from the speaker.

"Geez!" Terry felt like even more of an idiot.

Amanda sat down at the table and studied the elaborate and very expensive radio and it's various attachments. It had an auto-scan mode that the girl activated.

"What's it doing?" Eddie was staring at the rapidly blinking numbers on the digital readout, they were changing so fast it was just a blur.

"Looking for a signal."

"Oh."

For a long time nothing but faint static issued from the speaker. Amanda was reaching over to turn off the radio when the frequency readout froze at exactly two hundred megahertz. Then everyone almost jumped straight up.

".... hearing this transmission is requested to respond on this frequency or on one-hundred, three-hundred, or four-hundred megahertz. This is the International Space Station requesting any response."

It kept repeating over and over until the signal faded away completely.

"Jesus!" Terry finally shouted. "Get it back!"

Instead the girl turned off the radio entirely.

"Why did you do that?"

"To save the batteries. We'll have to wait."

"For what?" Terry was about ready to pull his hair out.

"Two-hundred megahertz is pretty much just a line of sight sort of thing."

"Okay! So?"

"The space station is in orbit, dummy."

I told you she was a nerd.

"But..."

"We have to wait for it to come back around the Earth again, maybe an hour or so."

"Oh. Sorry I yelled at you."

"That's okay. What do we say to them?"

"We can talk to them?" Eddie asked in surprise.

"See this," Amanda pointed to the microphone and then to the transmit button on it's side, "we can talk to them if they can hear us."

The next hour lasted about nine years.

----------

Doctor Margaret Long was studying the medical reference CD's listings on flu viruses for the hundredth time as she took her turn monitoring the always-silent communications console.

"...Hello the space station. Calling the space station. Can you hear us?"

It is almost impossible to faint in zero gravity but the female astronaut came very close. Then she piped the incoming transmission into every part of the orbiting space station. Several more people almost fainted and then it became very crowded in the small communications module.

----------

"Maybe they're all dead too?" Eddie was losing hope as Amanda alternated between transmitting and listening.

"Hush!" Amanda didn't quite growl, just almost.

The needle on the signal strength meter was starting to twitch.

"This is ISS, we read you! Please identify!" It was weak but it was really there. It was a woman's voice.

"HOLY SHIT!" Exactly who shouted that was debatable, maybe they all did.

"Talk to them! Terry demanded.

"What do I say?" For this one time the girl had no intelligent comeback.

"Gimme that!" Terry took the microphone from the unresisting girl. Terry didn't really know what to say either but that didn't stop him.

"Hello... This is Terry Winters, Eddie Briscoll...and Amanda Brooks. We're in California, near Santa Cruz. There are no grown-ups here. Just us." It wasn't a very well thought out response but it was heard.

----------

"Children?" General Hartz was as stunned as the rest of the crew.

"Apparently." Doctor Long had almost gone into pediatrics before deciding on her rather esoteric space medicine career. She knew how to talk to kids but they never really seemed to like her very much.

----------

"Hello Terry. My name is Doctor Margaret Long. There are nine people up here who are so very glad to hear your voice. Can you tell us all about yourselves?"

Terry almost froze up entirely but finally just started blurting out things. Amanda had to remind him to press the button on the microphone.

"Hello...there aren't any grown-ups left anywhere that we know of. Everyone here who is alive had some flu shots at school that had something wrong with them. We were all really sick, some kids even died from the shots. I almost died."

"Are you all well now?"

"Yeah. We're fine. None of us caught the bad flu. Our folks did...they all died."

"Then you have been...on your own? Taking care of yourselves?"

"Yes. Things have been pretty bad but we've started to sort of get organized now. They're some bad kids in town, sort of a gang or something. We live up in the mountains here, away from them."

Eddie and Amanda were having trouble remembering to breathe while Terry spoke to honest-to-God astronauts. Actual adults.

Benny and Keesha were all eyes but remained as silent as ever.

________________ "The Berkin Labs vaccine!" General Hartz and the rest of the crew knew very well about the inoculations that "had something wrong with them," it had been all that was on the news for weeks when it had occurred. Whatever had been wrong with the vaccine had in fact probably saved what was left of the human race.

------------------------- Both the children and the astronauts were too shocked by their mutual discovery to conduct a very coherent conversation. Before the space station moved out of range again a quick explanation of orbital mechanics told the children that talking to the station would be only a sometime proposition. The station's orbital path did not constantly pass over the same points below but shifted with each orbit. Some sort of schedule was promised from the astronauts but until that was worked out it would be a wait and listen situation. Every evening between six and nine was decided upon for the time being.

"We need to charge these batteries." Amanda said as she again turned off the radio. They needed to do a thousand things.

----------

ISS, over Barcelona, Spain "Do we go for an immediate departure or do we wait?" Ian Graves was Ireland's first astronaut and like the rest he had now been given an actual reason to go on living. But would they go on living if they returned to the flu-decimated Earth?

"All of the literature that I have available on flu viruses tends to indicate that the virus may simply cease to exist after a time. Unless there are other species that it can survive in, that is." Doctor Long had voiced this opinion before.

"Such as?" Asked Diego Cruz over whose homeland they were now passing.

"Swine have been known to harbor the viruses, even chickens and other poultry."

"Then we might still catch it if we return?"

"Yes. Personally I would like to take my chances on Earth. In the end we will have no other choice but to return."

They all knew that, they had only just so much reserve air and food left. Besides, there were children down below who were trying to survive and cope in a world without any adults to teach them and watch over them.

There were also a thousand things for the astronauts to decide and to do.

----------

"Well shit!" Terry said what they were all thinking. After the boys had nearly killed themselves racing around getting the smallest generator in place outside and then running in an extension to the battery charger the space station's last message had been very short and very weak. The orbiting outpost was drifting too far south in its basket weave path around the Earth "Take care of one another. Be care...." Was the last that they could make out from Doctor Long.

Amanda had some practical suggestions, there was little else they could do for the time being, it might be a couple of days before the station was close enough again for good communications. They all needed some time to come to mental grips with a world that now had some adults in it, or at least over it.

"Benny and Keesha need some clothes, that and some toys to play with to keep them occupied. They're just little kids, you know! I need clothes too. We should grab some laptop computers somewhere also. Maybe a stop at a Fry's if they haven't all been cleaned out."

"Okay," Terry agreed. "Why the computers though, there's no more internet or anything?"

"Laptops can be very useful for encyclopedia software, map software, that sort of stuff. They don't need much electricity and they can play movies and games too."

This last part again made the boys feel like idiots. They could have had some entertainment these long dark nights. DVD's! Neither of the boys were big computer geeks, mostly they had only used the exasperating things for homework and trying to get into adult sites that might get past the filter software their parents had installed on their full-size desktop machines. They had not really had much success with the latter endeavor.

"So where do we go shopping?" Eddie asked. Santa Cruz didn't seem too appealing after their last visit there.

"Over the hill," Amanda replied, "it's a four-lane road, and even Terry can stay in the middle of that."

Terry wanted to sock her but you just didn't do that to a girl. He had done the best he could driving the SUV!

"That's sort of a long ways," Eddie argued.

"Over the hill" meant Highway Seventeen and then San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale.

Silicon Valley.

Nerd land.

There were also some very large and expensive malls there. Most of the looting had been at the more practical places. Hardware stores, sporting goods and gun shops, supermarkets, drugstores.

"Listen you two ninnies. All of that bad vaccine was here in the Santa Cruz schools! It should be pretty safe over there. No bad kids, no anyone." Amanda was so very hard to argue with.

No gangs, probably. Terry and Eddie just looked at one another and shrugged.

"Okay. Tomorrow morning we go." Terry decided the issue. Eddie saw no real reason to object either and went off to clean his bloop gun, again.

Keesha picked this particular moment to giggle. Perhaps she was once more starting to feel safe. Benny only grinned a little.

Terry had once asked Amanda about her parents. Did she want himself and Eddie to 'take care' of them for her, properly?

"No. I set fire to the house when I left. Like the radio said."

"Oh. Sorry." Terry knew all about that sort of thing and except to tell Eddie he never mentioned the subject again. Why open up old wounds?

----------

"You get to drive today." Terry smiled and handed the keys to the open mouthed girl. It was payback time for her past comments on his driving skills.

"I can't drive!" She squeaked.

"Neither could I before yesterday. Besides, we should all learn how to drive. Eddie's turn will be on the trip home."

Now it was Eddie's turn to protest.

"No way, man! Forget it!"

"Are you going to start clucking too?"

No boy worthy of the title will ever take being seriously called a chicken.

"Okay then, it's your necks."

Amanda was as terrified as Terry had been but she did manage to get the big SUV out onto the road. She almost missed the mailbox, but not quite.

"You scratched the paint!" Terry was leaning out the window examining the damage. "My dad's gonna kill..."

Terry felt embarrassed about what he had started to say. His dad wasn't going to kill anyone. "Sorry. Let's get moving," he muttered as he leaned back in.

Neither Eddie nor the girl commented on what Terry had said, they too still could not really accept that they no longer had any parents to yell at them when they messed up bad.

"I'm sorry about the mailbox and the paint." Amanda had the same death-grip on the wheel that Terry had had. They were going about five miles per hour.

"It's not important. We probably won't be seeing the mailman again anyway. Try going a little faster, sundown is only ten hours away."

Amanda sped up to a blazing twenty-five and then managed to free one hand to punch Terry in the arm.

"Oww! Crap!"

Having a totally empty road to learn to drive on was a big help. Stop signs still made one tend to slow down at first and look both ways. Amanda was gaining confidence and speed by the time that had made it through the small town of Scotts Valley and onto the four lanes of Highway 17. Terry and Eddie had done an admirable job of biting their tongues and only yelling when disaster seemed absolutely imminent.

Small mudslides (and on occasion large ones) were the winter norm for the mountain commute highway from the coast to Silicon Valley. This winter had been no exception and there were no road crews left alive to clean up the mess.

"Stop" Terry/Eddie yelled. Even Keesha managed a proper squeal.

"I see it, criminy!"

A sloping flow of rocks, dirt and brush was across both of the northbound lanes. The cement safety barrier that divided the north and southbound lanes had stopped the flow and now prevented the SUV from using those lanes.

"Let's get out and take a look," Terry said as he opened his door. "Put it in park and use the handbrake thing."

Amanda managed to do all of that and then shut off the ignition.

The slide was perhaps only two feet deep near the cement safety barrier.

"I think we can just drive over it." Terry decided, trying to sound more confident than he really was.

"What if we get stuck?" Amanda's question was very much in order. By now Terry was walking across the slide area, testing the footing.

"It's mostly rocks and gravel, it's dried out enough not to go all squishy!"

"Then you do it!" Amanda handed the keys to him when he returned from his scouting trip. Eddie had designated himself as lookout and guard during the stop, he seemed to be looking around for something to bloop.

"Okay. Wait here till I get it across and then follow me."

Terry climbed into the SUV/tank and sat for a moment collecting his thoughts. Was this the right thing to try and do? With a shrug of his shoulders he decided it might be. Maybe.

"Let's see. Four-wheel drive?"

It was a first for the boy and the SUV. Like many of the urban assault vehicles the Navigator had never actually been in a situation needing four-wheel drive. Even the winter trips to the ski country had never required more than normal traction. Eventually Terry was rewarded with a small 'thunk' as he figured out how to engage all of the wheels. The transmission even went into some sort of wall-climbing extra-low gear and then the big vehicle proceeded to slowly crawl forward.

It was very much an anti-climax. It would all have made an excellent TV commercial for the Lincoln Division of Ford; even a child could do it! No tire slipped or bogged down, Terry hardly even had to use the accelerator.

"Cool!" Terry said out loud after he was once more breathing and on solid asphalt again. He seemed entirely too smug to Amanda as he handed the keys back to her when they had all caught up to the vehicle.

There were very few cars left sitting on the roads, no gigantic pileups or masses of abandoned vehicles. People wanted to be at home when they felt bad and that was were they went before they died. Amanda had the SUV up to almost fifty-five when they finally made it to their first planned stop.

"Hamilton!" Terry pointed to the leaf-littered turnoff ramp.

"I see it, I'm not blind you know."

"Sorry."

The parking lot was totally empty; the glass doors at the top of the motionless outdoor escalator were intact. The store hadn't been looted. Fry's Electronics had been Amanda and her father's second home. Electronics was sort of an understatement; you could find enough to build your own computer from scratch, you could buy a lava lamp or perhaps just grab a jumbo bag of beef jerky. Take your pick.

"Crap! How are we going to get in?" Amanda hadn't been around Eddie long enough to know any better than to ask that silly question.

"Come with me." Terry herded the girl and the two little ones partway back down the escalator, then he told Keesha and Benny to cover their ears. By now Amanda knew how they would get into the store. The girl didn't like guns at all but had learned the hard way that they did give one a certain feeling of security in a world with dogs and no police.

BLAM!

It only took Eddie just the one shot, safety glass being what it is and all.

They would need flashlights or something; the only light in the place came from the front doors. Of course Amanda knew where the flashlights and batteries were displayed, not too far from the entrance. She knew where everything was.

There were even shopping carts, It was dark and spooky but the boys were getting used to that.

Amanda preferred Apple laptops; the boys were only familiar with Windows stuff. So they got both type of laptops; the price was the same. There must have been fifty yards of DVDs and Amanda made sure that a lot of them were sappy Disney-type stuff for Benny and Keesha to watch.

"Check this out!" Eddie was in mild shock the same as Terry was. They had an unlimited credit limit with no payment due date and that was very hard to cope with. No more saving up allowances and odd job money, no more whining and wheedling parents for extra cash.

"What?" Terry and the rest congregated around the display were Eddie was salivating.

"Look! Little DVD player things!"

It was true. Half the size of a laptop computer and almost as expensive. Like the laptops they had twelve-volt adaptors.

"Now why didn't I remember these?" Amanda asked out loud.

"Get that one," Terry pointed to the most expensive Sony unit with the biggest screen. Eddie got three of them.

It came as no surprise that Amanda even knew where all of the boxed merchandise in the stock rooms was stored. The clerks had all known her and her father; there had even been discussions of a reserved parking space for them.

It was almost noon and the back of the SUV was half filled with batteries of all sorts, computers, and computer software, sixty-seven DVD's. They had all of the store's largest solar panels for recharging car batteries. There were some very pricey portable communications scanners and walkie-talkies. There was also a very, very pricey Grundig radio that could tune in everything but smoke signals. Ten bags of beef jerky. No Lava lamps.

They would have to come back to this place again, a lot. Amanda knew where there were two more of these chain stores located and both of them were even bigger than this one was.

Clothes were next. The vast covered mall they had decided on had been partially looted but children's clothing had not been too high on the looters shopping lists. In a way it was the most eerie of places that they had yet visited; dim and silent, yet filled with bright colors and manikins dressed in the latest vogue. The doors to the mall had been wide open, left unlocked and pushed back to their stops. Only a gray house cat was to be seen inside, that and few sparrows who didn't seem bright enough to find their way back outside again.

Keesha and Benny needed everything, so did Amanda. Terry and Eddie assumed the pained expressions common to all males who aren't clever enough to avoid shopping with females. Underwear, socks, jeans, shirts of all sorts. More underwear. Jackets. More socks. Shoes!

The mall also had a toy store, a big one. Benny said the first word that Terry and Eddie had heard him utter (shout).

"Barney!"

The enormous stuffed purple 'thing' wound up tied to the roof rack of the SUV; there was no more room inside. More groans from Terry and Eddie; Barney had to be a good five feet tall and seemed to weigh about nine hundred pounds. But it had made Benny speak and that had decided the matter for them.

"I still need some lip gloss and...." Amanda was rather rudely cut off.

"Later. We're going home!" Terry's tone offered no appeal so Amanda didn't push it. She knew that the boys had been amazingly patient, not that she would ever say that to them.

Now it was Eddie's turn to drive and the sun was getting low on the horizon.

"Slow down!" Terry demanded for the fourth time.

"Why?" Eddie was only doing about seventy; there certainly wasn't any traffic to impede him. Barney on the roof was in no danger of flying off, yet.

"We're getting close to the mountains, dork! This isn't a sports car!"

Eddie had been driving for all of twenty minutes and was wondering just what his companions had found so difficult about in controlling a vehicle. If Terry was the practical one and Amanda the brainy one, then Eddie was the one who belonged in an F-18 or an M1A1 main battle tank. Or perhaps a Formula-1 racecar.

"Just cool it, please! Think of Keesha and Benny!"

Terry's words had finally made an impression. Eddie winced at the thought of causing any harm to the little ones, or to his best and only friend. And to Amanda.

He cooled it.

"We should get another car maybe, as sort of a backup." Eddie suggested this as he smoothly turned onto the dark and narrow two-lane road that led to home.

"What kind of car?" Terry by now felt very safe with Eddie driving, so did Amanda. Keesha and Benny were mercifully asleep. Barney on the roof was only a little wind-frayed.

"A Corvette. Or maybe something really fast."

Terry and Amanda could only exchange glances of total despair.

----------

"I don't like guns!" Amanda saw no reason to learn how to shoot; she had two pint-sized Rambo's to protect her.

"You don't have to like them. You do have to learn how to use them. Remember the dogs." Terry was leaving no room for an argument.

She did remember the dogs, and that stupid gang of kids.

"Crap! Okay, but..."

"No buts, you have to be able to protect yourself. We have just the right gun for you."

The boys had found the high-tech version of the venerable .38 revolver in Weems' writing desk. It's small frame made from titanium and other light alloys reduced its weight to almost nothing, only the barrel liner was made of steel.

"See! It's really light and the grip is small. Five shots." Eddie had taken over the shooting lesson, which was fine with Terry.

"Oh! It's sort of pretty."

It was sort of pretty; light-metallic blue and two shades of gray. Walnut inserts in the black, rubber-like grip.

"Is it loaded?" Amanda accepted the weapon as if being handed a lit stick of dynamite.

"Rule number one. Always assume that a gun is loaded."

That was what the manuals said and Eddie had them all memorized. "Also, you've just broke rule two and rule three."

"What? I haven't done anything yet!"

"Your finger is on the trigger and look at where the muzzle is pointed."

The unloaded .38 was aimed without thought in the general direction of where Terry sat with Benny and Keesha on the overgrown backyard lawn. Barney was over there too.

"Oh shit!" Amanda whispered. After this the lessons went very well indeed. The girl would eventually be a much better shot than Terry was (no real accomplishment) but never even close to as good as Eddie was.

----------

Contact with the ISS was finally re-established the next evening. The astronauts had made decisions and plans for a return.

"We have decided to wait for as long as we can before returning to Earth," Doctor Long explained, "I feel that the longer we wait the less chance there will be that any of the virus will remain viable."

That made sense to Terry but he wanted to know how long it would be.

"We think perhaps another three months before we have to return. We all very much want to be with you and to help you as much as we can, but we also want to stay alive. Do you think that you will be all right for that length of time?"

"We should be fine. The bad part is mostly behind us and things are getting better now. Amanda has been a really big help in making things more civilized around here." This got a big grin from the girl; she had been working pretty hard to whip the boys into a semblance of civilized behavior. No belching or farting at the dinner table and that sort of thing. More attention to keeping things picked up, even actual housecleaning, sort of. The girl would make an insanely good mother one day; she already was in many ways.

"We have to discuss a landing area for the Soyuz and the Taxi. Without ground tracking data we're going to need a big flat area. Both vehicles use parachutes in the final descent."

"Where would you land if that stuff was all working?"

"We would try for Edwards down south in the desert from you, the Soyuz normally lands in central Russia."

"Edwards is sort of a long ways from here." Terry had some half formed plans to be on the ground waiting for them when they landed. "I read where astronauts are sort of weak and wobbly when they return from a long time in space."

"That's true. We may have some real problems with that."

"Can't you land closer, that way we could be there to help you? What about some sort of flat farmland kind of place?"

"We've been discussing that too. Anywhere on the coast is out, our re-entry may not be very exact, we could wind up in the ocean. The Sacramento Valley might be a good place to try for."

Terry exchanged looks with the others, it did seem like the best idea.

"Okay. That's not too awfully far, we can drive there pretty easy."

"You kids have been driving?"

"Well, sure. We have to. We've even figured out how to power the gas pumps at the stations too." He felt very proud about that.

"That's amazing! Perhaps we've been underestimating you kids. My apologies to you all and do be careful."

"That's okay. We've been trying to talk Eddie out of getting a Corvette, maybe you can help."

"A Corvette! Eddie, you listen to your doctor! No corvette or I'll tan your butt when I get there!"

Terry grinned and handed the microphone to the irked Eddie.

"Yes, Ma'am. No Corvette."

The doctor hadn't said anything about a Porsche or maybe a Lamborghini or two.

----------

"Three months!" Terry said with some disappointment.

"It'll be summer by then." Amanda added.

"So we have plenty of time to get ready." Eddie seemed the least worried of the three. "We're gonna need something big for the trip, for all of those feeblenauts to ride in when we find them."

"What? A bus?" Terry asked. The SUV was as big of a bus as he wanted to pilot.

"Motor home," Eddie replied casually, "one of those really big mothers."

"You get to drive it, then!"

"No problem. My uncle had one the size of the Enterprise. Automatic transmission, automatic everything. Just bigger."

"Oh." Maybe they could do it after all, Terry decided. Maybe.

First they would have to find one in operating condition.

"We get a new one from a dealer, the biggest and the best they have." Amanda added.

"Geez." Terry had been over-ruled by the vote count.

----------

Terry and Company were faring better than the vast majority of the children left adrift by the virus. The more sensible of the survivors took proper stock of their position and worked as best they could to make their lives more bearable and safe. Small groups gathered together for support and safety, and for just the mere presence of other humans. Safety was in numbers. A few of the groups developed into little more than gangs ruled by the strongest but most of the children had more common sense than to follow that dead end path.

Some of the orphaned children had just seen too much to remain sane and became feral loners, moving from place to place, shunning other young humans, and eating what came to hand. Sometimes they died a lonely death either from broken hearts and neglected bodies or from the roving dog packs. A few of the lost souls simply fled into the wilderness areas away from the cities and towns, away from the smell of the bodies. They would become the truly wild children, those few who survived.

----------

Tomorrow they would go on another 'shopping' expedition, this time for four-wheeled merchandise. As was their habit Terry and Eddie talked quietly in their bunk bed before sleep took them for the night. Eddie preferred the top bunk, he always had.

"I was thinking another SUV of some sort to start with, then maybe we can look for a motor home dealer someplace," Terry began.

"No Corvette, huh?" Eddie's voice had a little bit of an edge in it tonight.

"Ed-Dee. We need something that can drive over stuff like last week, something with four-wheel drive."

"So you're telling me I can't get something I would like, something to have a little fun with for a change?"

Terry could see that his friend was more than a little put out.

"No. I'm not your boss. Me and Amanda just want to do what's..."

"You and Amanda? Not me?"

"Huh?"

"It just seems like sometimes the both of you think you are in charge of me. I sort of don't like that."

Terry was quiet for a moment; maybe they had been taking Eddie too much for granted.

"Have we been doing that?"

"Pretty much."

"Then I apologize, really. It's just that we've been trying to do so much. Maybe we've been trying to do too much in too little time. You're my best friend, I want to keep it that way."

"Cool." Eddie seemed mollified by Terry's words and was silent for a time. "So what do you think, a Porsche or maybe a Lamborghini?"

"Go for the Porsche. Dad says...he said that those Italian jobs are too finicky and hard to keep running good."

"Cool." Eddie was smiling again, so was Terry.

"You know of course that most sports cars have manual transmissions."

"Really?"

"I think Corvettes have automatics in some of them."

"Doctor Long said...."

"Eddie, she's in orbit. Get the Corvette!"

"Cool. A red one."

"Plus another SUV for Amanda to drive, maybe a Jeep." Terry added.

"Cool."

All was well again, or at least until they had to tell Amanda.

-------------------------- "Most of these car places are on either Stevens Creek or Capitol." Terry said as he poured over the Nerd land Yellow Pages while munching his breakfast cornflakes.

"I like white cars," Amanda offered as she helped Keesha pour the "sucks rocks" milk on her oatmeal.

"She'll probably stick cute little bunny decals all over the poor thing." Eddie snickered.

"Maybe I will!" Amanda stuck her tongue out at her tormentor.

"There's a big Chevy place on Stevens Creek." Terry continued, easing his way into dangerous territory.

"I thought you said a Jeep SUV would be good choice?"

"Oh, sure. They have some other stuff at the Chevy place."

"Like.... what?" The girl was no dullard by light years and she smelled a rat. Two young male rats to be precise.

"'Vettes." Eddie took the plunge.

"No way! We decided, so did Doctor Long!" Amanda's eyes were narrowed in a way that the boys hadn't seen before.

"Remain calm," Terry said gently.

"Calm! We need to be sensible...."

"Eddie needs a Corvette. He saved you from those dogs you know! Maybe he saved all of our skins when that stupid gang was after us. Cut him some slack."

"But...Doctor Long said..."

"Doctor Long is in orbit, not here. If Eddie wants a Corvette then he gets a Corvette."

Amanda gave up and shut up. She could see that she was defeated on this issue, however the rest of the simple breakfast meal was decidedly frosty.

"Barney comes too!" Benny had put together three words in a row, the most that the boys had yet to hear from him.

Terry just groaned as Eddie trudged back into the house and carted out the stuffed purple beast that was as large as he was. If Barney could get Benny to talk then Barney could hitch a ride too.

Terry had just started up the Navigator when Eddie yelled at him to stop.

"What now?"

"Wooden blocks and duct tape. For the pedals."

"Oh. Crap!" Despite the hours of planning they had almost forgotten that very important detail.

Thirty minutes later they were finally moving toward their destination. Amanda was still frosty and wasn't saying very mu