August 19, 20XX
The last news that Rodney Coffey received from his daughter and eldest child, Lashon, was good news. It made Rodney so happy that he forgot about his nightly routine of waiting until he was sure that his sons were asleep or lost in video games or movies in their rooms, before turning on the tv and listening to the grim reports of the deadly pandemic that was sweeping the globe. By that time, the islands of Puerto Rico and Cuba had been completely overrun by the mysterious illness and they were both designated as Dead Zones where North, Central and South America began sending their dead. The island of Hispaniola devolved into chaos as it tried to avoid the Dead Zone distinction and there were constant armed conflicts because the Dominican Republic shut the border with Haiti as the numbers of the living dead rose there. The situation in Haiti escalated daily as the living dead organized and declared Port-au-Prince their capital. A leader of the living dead emerged, a charismatic young man who called on the living dead to come to Haiti where the revolution for the rights of the undead would start in earnest. Many of the living dead around the world who were able to receive the message were inspired, the conditions they were herded into around the world were abhorrent and there are reports of packed boats of the living dead arriving in Haiti everyday. The living Haitians hoping to leave the island were forced to flee to the Dominican Republic, but came up against armed guards and a rapidly constructed border wall made of cinder blocks. Meanwhile, there were growing tensions over the strained supplies of goods worldwide as the international supply chain struggled to keep up with the increased need for computer chips and metals used in the manufacture of computers. As more people hunkered down at home to avoid exposure to the illness, there were less people willing to do necessary labor and the cost of technology was rising steadily. All the while, there was little progress in determining the origin of the illness and developing a vaccine to protect against it.
Rodney and his sons had ordered a lot of computer equipment to ensure they would be able to continue the jobs they were able to find in the new world order. Both his sons did tech support, one for a phone company and the other for a computer company, and they were savy with computers because they had grown up with them. They made good money doing video chats with despondent people who’d been inside their homes for three months with their kids who refused to walk them through the technology necessary to continue their jobs, and Rodney was happy to have them to avoid the many scams that popped up on the internet as the demand for technology increased.
Since he last spoke with Lashon, Rodney has been tracking the schedules of the large cruise ships that had been commandeered to return people stranded in foreign countries to their homes that crisscrossed the Atlantic every three weeks. The boats were organized by USMC and EU officials dedicated to bringing their nationals home safely without exacerbating the spread of the illness and people were able to register with the system to return home on the ships after completing a health screening and quarantine. The system had returned thousands to their family without increasing the numbers of the living dead. Lashon had just completed her quarantine and her name had been added to the online manifest for one of ships and Rodney spent most of his time checking and rechecking the planned departure of the ship. He stayed up late reviewing the itinerary of the ship, where it docked to pick up more passengers before sailing across the Atlantic, and he checked infection rates in those places. He couldn’t help it. He wished he had a job like his sons to distract him for most of the day, but even in the new times created by the pandemic, Rodney Coffey was retired and would not go back to work.
He was elated when he saw that his daughter had boarded the ship; passengers were registered in real time as the ship prepared to leave, a courtesy to families because the passengers were unable to communicate with anyone once they started their quarantine and until they arrived at their destination. His sons tried to talk to him and get updates on their sister’s journey, but they learned that Rodney would give updates when he was ready and at any other time he ignored them and stared intently at his computer. He was that way for days as Lashon made her way home.
“I should see y’all in a few hours,” Lashon said through tears of joy when she spoke with her family after arriving at a port in Charleston, South Carolina.
Rodney was crying to as he and his sons huddled around his cell phone and they listened to Lashon over the speaker.
“I’m almost there,” she said almost triumphantly and they hung up eager for the hours to pass.
Lashon and people from the same area where she was from, were loaded onto a bus and driven to the Charlotte metro area and Lashon was tickled at how much it reminded her of taking the bus in middle school. If not for the armed guards in hazmat suits, it would have been just like it as the bus pulled up to houses and people were let off to be reunited with their loved ones. Before being let off the bus, each person was given a rapid test that had been developed to detect any trace of the illness in a person. The test was about sixty percent accurate and a positive test usually meant quarantine and observation.
Lashon was happy that they started dropping people off in the suburbs of Charlotte, and she was elated that it seemed they would stop at her house first – she recognized the neighborhood they rode into. But before coming to her house, they stopped at one a few streets over. A man and a young girl stood and practically ran to the front, they were both so excited. Lashon smiled, happy for them, as the rapid test was administered, and her smile faded as the bus rumbled around her. She could see the face of the person who had administered the test, but the amount of time they waited there, and then hearing one of the guards making a phone call, Lashon knew what was happening and she began to cry. The test was positive. The man was in hysterics and he had to be tranquilized. His daughter sobbed watching the scene unfold. Everyone else, including Lashon, were too mortified to cry.
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