Mark Rivett
CONVOY 19
With Special Thanks To: Tommy Ryan
Prologue
How did we get here?
That is a simple question with too many answers. I’ve been staring at it on my computer monitor for hours, wondering where to begin. My house is very quiet without Melissa and Ruben. It’s difficult to stay focused, and I haven’t slept in days.
It’s a blessing that television and radio have stopped broadcasting. The day-to-day carnage and slaughter that had been dumped into everyone’s houses for months was bad enough, and those horrifying images bear no small level of responsibility for the panic and paranoia that pushed us over the edge. But the talking heads: the pontificating blowhards, raging wall-bangers, and self-righteous assholes that drowned out anyone with a real solution in the pursuit of ratings… that was just too much.
That’s probably not a good place to start. The failure of media to inform the public is a piece of the puzzle, but it isn’t the biggest piece. Their biased finger pointing and brinkmanship helped to drive the political climate, but our leaders still had the ability to make the right choices. Only they didn’t.
How did we get here? This is a country with enough guns to arm every man, woman, and child. The United States military budget is larger than every other country combined. How is it that the dead not only rose from the grave to attack the living, but we also failed to manage that horror to the point that it got the better of us? This is a country that survived small pox, cholera, World War Two… how the living hell did we get here?
The dead rose from the grave to attack the living… that’s the first time I’ve written those words. You’d think that the Secretary of Health and Human Services to the President of the United States of America would have a clear and honest grasp of this crisis, but my staff and I, went to astounding lengths to obfuscate it behind politically correct jargon that had been thoroughly watered down and sanitized for public consumption. “Dissociative Psychotic Fugue”, “Antisocial Analgesia”, “Neurotic Cannibalistic Syndrome”, “Infectious Cotard Disorder.” These are just a few of the ridiculous euphemisms that served no purpose beyond lying to ourselves about what was really happening.
Of course, even we didn’t understand that we were dealing with the living dead initially. Now, months into this disaster, it’s pretty damn clear to everyone. Yet, this is the first time I’ve directly addressed it. Reminds me of what a bunch of dumb cattle we (not just myself, but everyone else who’s supposed to be in charge) really are.
Maybe that’s a good place to start: government. The government failed in so many ways that it’s absurd. I could write a book about it, and it would be equal parts tragedy and comedy.
Let’s start with me. I have a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from the University of Texas. What the hell am I doing as Secretary of Health and Human Services? I’ll tell you — I rubbed elbows with a lot of people in the administration’s campaign. I don’t have any real skeletons in my closet and I was rewarded. Jobs were rewarded not for skill or merit, but for political cronyism. Of the ten HHS districts, not one of my directors is a medical doctor, psychologist, or sociologist. They are business people and lawyers. They are men and women who knew the right people and could navigate their way around an office, but when it came to solving real health epidemics or addressing social issues, they may as well have been walking corpses themselves. I never realized there was anything wrong with that… until now. That was simply how the world was run. Brilliant guys like Dr. Henry Damico who had the talent but no connections… they had mid-level desk jobs writing reports to dumb-asses like me… who couldn’t even understand them with a translator.
So, when shit got real, and it was time for HHS to mobilize… there wasn’t any leadership. I take responsibility for that. If you were building a bonfire to burn down the world, a lot of those logs would have my name on them.
I’d be in good company, though. I honestly watched the Secretary of State once ask for demographics on the infected, so that he could determine whether Republicans or Democrats were being hit disproportionately in order to prioritize relief. He literally wanted what few semi-competent staff members he had on hand to stop what they were doing so he could — in essence — allow opposing voters to die while giving aid to supporters. I’ll never forget the President’s response: “That’s a really good idea. That’s a really goddamn good idea.”
About a month ago, I watched a frustrated General try to explain to the Secretary of Defense that the living dead could only be killed by destroying their brain. We were months into this shit-storm and the guy who was managing our rapidly diminishing military resources didn’t even understand how to kill the enemy. The last time I saw him, he was running to his car. When I asked his personal aide what was going on, she said that the marine platoon he had delegated to guard his family’s neighborhood had gone AWOL.
When refugees started flooding in from every corner of the globe under the false assumption that America would manage the crisis better than their home nations, Homeland Security was still looking for terrorists. Plane-loads of Asian and European infected were just pouring into our airports, but as long as they weren’t on the terror list… they were welcomed in with open arms. Months into the shit, when the President finally asked if it would be a good idea to screen air travelers, the Director of Homeland Security hadn’t even thought about how to do it. By the time screenings started, commercial flights had long since been grounded.
It wasn’t just the executive branch that was laden with incompetence. The House and The Senate were just as pitiful. Congress never saw a crisis it didn’t try to exploit, and the zombie apocalypse was no exception. If the parties weren’t already entrenched and oppositional, they were ten-fold now.
“Need emergency funding for relief to metropolitan Chicago? Fuck you, we have to stop the spending somewhere!”
“Cut my irrelevant ear-mark in a bill that gives the military authority to set up refugee centers in American cities? Fuck you! What do I get out of it?”
“This bill makes sense, but makes the opposing party look good… fuck you. I’ll make up some reason to vote it down.”
Some congressmen courted their base by toeing the line that the entire issue was a religious one. The rapture crowd was a vocal minority, but man, were they vocal. There was news footage of some representatives actually claiming that flesh-eating undead monsters had human rights, and actually floated federal bills that made it illegal to kill them. There were state and local governments that didn’t just put forth bills like that, but actually passed them.
There was no end to the insanity. In the beginning, before we really understood the epidemic, there were some extremists within government that wanted to quarantine every town in the nation, and go door to door looking for infected, shooting them on sight. Draconian policies like this smacked of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and the backlash from the American public was so extreme that the CDC saw incident reporting drop like a stone. Conversely, CDC field agent casualties — a term that I had never before even seen in a report — skyrocketed. The last thing you should tell an American citizen, is that the government is going to come to their home and kill someone they love. We knew the epidemic was spreading, but now, thanks to a couple of career politicians who wanted to look like John Wayne to their constituency, the CDC was blinded and their people were being killed.
When things started getting really bad, representatives went to their home districts so they could put their own face to their voters’ salvation. This is when things got much worse. Every senator and congressmen wanted to be the man or woman who saved The Empire State Building, the Lincoln Memorial, the public library, or some little old lady’s house. Hundreds of established and defensible military perimeters were moved and thinned, quickly became indefensible, and then failed. Hard choices had been made by the few capable people left in leadership. Sadly, those choices were immediately and directly undermined by politicians who didn’t just lack an understanding of the situation, but had a rooted self-interest in exploiting it however they could. These so-called leaders had spent so much time in Washington that they didn’t even know how to stop campaigning when their very survival depended on it. People were dying by the thousands and rising from the grave, and the people with the power to make a difference were worried about their next election. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you’re a high-powered senator or a public school janitor. Your brains taste the same to the zombies. Way too many Americans and far too few politicians found that fact out the hard way.