Whenever I’ve been sitting at my desk I keep reading the first page or two of a fiction I had started a few years ago.\u00a0 I really really like it – like in a, it’s impossible that I wrote this kind of way.\u00a0 I’m so distracted by that stack of paper (printed for editing and refreshing so I will finish it), that I’m going to put some of it up here.\u00a0 Here, a few paragraphs from the beginning of 800 square miles:<\/p>\n
I was born George Allen Pasternack to middle class parents in what used to be a factory town in Ohio.\u00a0 That\u2019s how people begin their life stories, right?\u00a0 I grew up at a normal pace, I went to school, I dated; I was poised to accept my nice clean Rockwellian future.\u00a0 You get, from the past tense, that nothing ended up the way I had originally envisioned it?\u00a0 What would be the beginning of my independent adult life and I\u2019m concocting my autobiography to my mirror image.\u00a0 Reflections of myself are all the faces I\u2019ve seen for a few months now.\u00a0 There are other people here, trying to live like they were used to, but we avoid each other.\u00a0 Looking at each other means we have to face up to the fact (no pun intended) that something is changing within us.<\/p>\n
Our town is one of many that have been quarantined in order to halt the progression of whatever we have among people further away from the impact site.\u00a0 We don\u2019t get doctors, other than the ones that already lived among us, and we don\u2019t get information.\u00a0 Most people stay in their houses all day watching TV programs that have been played over and over again by the only TV station we have left.\u00a0 We\u2019ve been relieved of the responsibilities of work for the most part.\u00a0 We take turns doing the few jobs that require an insider, like keeping the library open and manning the grocery store for the days when we aren\u2019t getting shipments from hazmat suited government truck drivers.\u00a0 We keep the shades drawn and move about in shadows.\u00a0 Our aversion to the sight of each other and ourselves is a little extreme, I think, considering how little our appearances have changed, but the changes make us different, and its hard to be afraid of something alien to you when its you that is alien.<\/p>\n
Compared to some other people in town, I have it pretty great.\u00a0 I live alone.\u00a0 I can look at myself or not, and there is no one else in the house to remind me if I don\u2019t want to think about it.\u00a0 There is no one whose heart will break when I avoid them in the hallway on the way to the bathroom; no one to ruin my escapist moments and propel me into insanity.\u00a0 Sometimes I wonder why we are fed so well and sometimes provided with more TV shows on disc to keep us amused and distracted.\u00a0 It would be better to die in riots of hungry chaos then to spiral slowly through this darkness without knowing the only bits of information that I want to know most.\u00a0 What\u2019s happening to me?<\/p>\n
*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/p>\n
After the clouds of dust and debris filling the sky started to dissipate and the extent of the damage was first being revealed, the only thing any country could do was manage what was left.\u00a0 People had not been evacuated and any forewarning of impending disaster was heard only faintly from other countries.\u00a0 An estimated six million people died immediately, and it took months for any near complete list of dead to be posted.\u00a0 Next came the food shortage.\u00a0 Grey skies and erratic weather conditions killed food staple after food staple across the North American bread basket.\u00a0 Troops were called home from all over globe to help regulate their own communities and dole out food in what was decided to be fair increments per family.\u00a0 So much hardship everywhere, all at once hid the first whisperings of any biological threat.<\/p>\n
That first biological threat came stumbling into a hospital in southern Ohio after being hit and abandoned by a dirty blue Ford Cortina.\u00a0\u00a0 He had a broken arm, three broken ribs, and a fractured jaw.\u00a0 He also had a hither to unknown blood anomaly, a strange rash, and what looked like a third eyelid.\u00a0 He was treated quickly and reported even quicker.\u00a0 When the military showed up he was put in quarantine until scientists and doctors of adequately high political rank could come and stick needles in him themselves.\u00a0 He now occupies a small room in a medical research facility in California.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t take long for the military government machine to start searching out the possibility of there being more like this man.\u00a0 Small town physicians were interrogated, people were herded like cattle into highschool gyms for checkups, and eventually fences were put up.\u00a0 Windy and flimsy looking chainlink fences soared skywards around small towns, and their barbed wire collars waved in the air like a child on the merry go round waves to her parents as she spins by.\u00a0 Larger towns had to make do with road blocks and observation towers all of which were quickly abandoned as the circle of containment radiated further and further out.<\/p>\n
More people began to die.\u00a0 Those tell-tale rashes would sometimes get infected and the medicines were slow coming if they came at all.\u00a0 Many developed a kind of asthmatic condition and suffocated in the attacks.\u00a0 The oldest and the youngest, as is always the case, were the ones to die most quickly and most assuredly.\u00a0 People panicked and rioted.\u00a0 Store fronts and city halls were attacked and vandalized.\u00a0 More people died in the violence that wasn\u2019t squelched or regulated by the policing force moving like a wall at the perimeter of the quarantined zone.\u00a0 Eventually everyone got tired of burying each other, and eventually everyone stopped getting sick.<\/p>\n
Most of the residents of the quarantine zone have no idea what the current containment barricades look like\u2014they are so far away, and travel even within quarantined cities is strictly regulated by helicopters and more men in hazmat suits.\u00a0 They all know what about them had frightened the rest of the country in those first check-ups and interrogations.\u00a0 How could they not?\u00a0 It was their face and their own eyes in the mirror every morning, and their children\u2019s faces and eyes across the table at breakfast.\u00a0 All they could do at the time was turn a blind eye and hope it would go away, or stop.\u00a0 But it didn\u2019t stop, not after their containment, the medicine crises, the riots and the funerals, and now they, none of them, kept much track of what their faces in the mirror looked like every morning.\u00a0 They lived in curtain-drawn darkness, alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"