The valleys and cities
of USA will get hotter at the same time Covid is allowed to spread. Soon there is death and disease
dominating life, along with a climate becoming unlivable. Many institutions
are broken down, including law enforcement.
So roving militias show up in places with no advance warning, heavily armed.
Mass shootings and stabbings, including bloodbaths with bayonets and machetes, become
almost ordinary events in the fright filled land.
The disease they used to call Covid that started
in 2019 mutates. Now it blows in the wind so for humans even being outside
can be threatening. Swarms of the RNA strands of the virus, like tiny flocks of birds connected by webs, carry the disease across counties and states.
Many humans survive the
illness, and walk the streets with broken and bent bodies from residual effects
of the virus. Persons who are blind and deaf beg on the street dressed in rags.
I'll still be here, in
my Tahoe mountain top home. The town was long ago closed off to visitors. Border patrols check every car coming and going
on the three highways that come up the mountain, tourist attractions have long
ago closed and are either boarded up or transformed to flea markets where the locals
sell each other their used and homemade items.
Groceries still get to
Tahoe as well as internet access, unlike many regions of USA now. Since
mansions dot the region and many autocrats, kleptocrats, and entrepreneurs
who've profited from our years of chaos live here, basic infrastructure gets
maintained here. I use delivery services who I meet in the parking lot. No one
outside the building knows for sure which apartment is mine.
Luckily you can't see
my unit from the street. This old apartment structure used to house
low income seniors now holds whoever has cash to move in. There is no longer any subsidized rent as HUD, the federal
department of Housing and Urban Development, no longer exists. I'm lucky I got
in here when I did and, through a series of serendipitous events, I had the buyout money to be able to stay after the building
converted to condos owned by TrumpPutin. Everything is owned by TrumpPutin these
days.
My daughter used to
come up from L.A. and stay with me but last six months the patrols won't let
her through, because even though she survived the disease, she keeps testing positive, it's like there is so much disease in Southern California, she keeps getting reinfected. So even
though I'm her mother in my eighties living here alone, she can't visit.
So I'm here on my own in
a crumbling building, hiding. I only go out in the early AM hours to
throw away my trash before most the other residents are awake. I exercise by walking round and round the apartment or
putting on music and dancing alone. I
arrange the light in the rooms and shades on the glass so that no one can see
in the window.
Most of the time I'm safe
here, but occasionally bands of gang members, agile and bone thin snarling
angry people who roam the nation, can be heard out on the streets. So I have spent several nights crouched in
fear hiding in shadows, listening to them prowling right outside my windows,
peering inside as much as they can, smelling, shouting, spitting. It seems, for infected
persons, spreading their disease by spitting on people has become a political statement.
Somehow, in my
eighties, I managed to avoid the illness that surrounds me and the madness that
seems to be accompanying it. I stay in my rooms, I have a stockpile of supplies and I go through it sparingly. I stay entertained, I never get
sick, not even a cold, and seem able to self medicate any minor injuries. As the
weeks pass, I try not to draw attention to myself, and wait for the pandemic to
finally be over.
*
*
Kay Ebeling
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