Get the picture? The article tells it like a mystery story, or a weird piece of Forteana-an abandoned town hidden in the mountains of South America. All exotic-sounding, all faraway and, when all’s said and done, not a blind thing to do with us.
Only it started to get closer to home. Creeping north through South America men and women began to abandon their towns and cities. Nation governments down there worked like fury to contain the news and stop the panic. But it was a case of “Here comes the Flood.” Once it started there was no way of turning back the flow.
You’ll know about rabies. You know dogs, bats, even people foam at the mouth and die. But did you know a symptom of the disease is hydrophobia? A victim of rabies becomes terrified of water. There’s no way you can sit the person down and say, “Look, this is only a glass of water. It can’t harm you.” No, show a rabid man a glass of water and he’ll go crazy with fear. He’d jump through a tenth-story window rather than have that glass near him. Throw the glass of water in his face and pure fear would kill him stone dead.
Something like that got into the air or water system in South America. No one knows exactly how it was transmitted. But that bug moved fast. From what they could tell it began with symptoms like gastric flu, triggering bouts of stomachache, diarrhea and low-grade fever. Nothing life-threatening. At least not what they thought was dangerous. But scientists reckon the virus… if it was a virus.. . moved into the brain after the initial bout of the craps. Like hydrophobia in rabies or aversion to light in meningitis, people developed a morbid fear of illness. And I mean real fear. A fear so large and so overwhelming and so God almighty powerful that people were terrified to visit a relative in the hospital in case they inhaled bacteria and became sick themselves. There’s footage of sufferers being carried into hospitals for treatment, but they’re so terrified they hold their breath to stop inhaling disease bugs and just pass out right on the floor. Some stopped breathing altogether. Terror jerked their throat muscles into spasm, sealing the airway, and good-bye, Earth.
You can read later news reports, when medical experts started to understand this plague. It seemed there was something like a 90 percent infection rate. And those patients completely recovered from the physical effects of stomachache and diarrhea (exploding underpants syndrome was how Bart described it in a “Simpsons” episode that spoofed the whole epidemic). The colony of bugs in the brain was the real problem. I mean, you only have to think it through. A town is hit by the plague (called Gantose Syndrome after the smug asshole that first identified it-if you saw his photograph you’d know why I used those words); as people recover from the physical illness they’re gripped by the phobia. Your neighbors are still going down with it. They have fevers; they’re clutching their bellies. And in the meantime you are going out of your mind with fear. Like the man with hydrophobia killing himself to escape the glass of water, you can’t just tell yourself, “OK, my terror of illness is all in the mind. I’ll just ignore it.” You can’t. What’s more, all your family are the same. So your fear feeds their fear. So you tell yourself, “I’m getting the hell out of here. I’m going where I’ll be safe.” But where will you be safe? Go north, your instincts tell you. “America will help me. They’ve got the best medicines. The best health care. Go north.”
And did they go north?
You bet.
What must have been three quarters of the fucking entire South American continent walked out of their houses and headed north. You can imagine millions choking roads in cars, buses and tractors as they drive northward. Jesus, just look through your mind’s eye. People who are desperate with terror get hungry and thirsty and tired. Cars break down. They beg lifts. They steal cars. They kill the people in the next car for a bag of apples because they’re so hungry. Highways turn into stinking mortuaries with thousands of corpses rotting at the roadside. Flies swarm so thick in the air they become a black fog through which car lights can’t penetrate.
Flies. Shit-filled ditches. Corpses going rotten in the sun. What does that spread?
Disease.
What do the people infected with Gantose fear?
Disease!
So in terror they move faster. They infect country after country as these refugees pour north.
As I said earlier, Nature likes to play tricks. Remember years ago, when there was that panic about a flesh eating tropical disease? And how scientists said it would rampage across the world? Then (red faces all around) they realized it couldn’t spread naturally outside the tropics. Well, the Gantose bug wound up being cut from the same cloth.
The plague ran northward like a tidal wave. Then north of the Panama Canal when you hit the drier territories of Mexico suddenly there were no new cases. OK, so a few people came down with it, but these had contracted the disease in places like Brazil and Peru. They’d incubated the disease as they’d grabbed a flight north. What’s more, they didn’t infect Mexicans. Those South Americans who reached the States, even though they went down with the screaming meanies whenever they saw a hospital or an ambulance, didn’t pass the bug on to a single American.
There was a race issue here. One prominent medical expert announced that it was all a question of blood. That most of the South American population had a little native Indian blood in them; maybe a dash of Inca or Aztec, I don’t know. This professor guy was frozen out of his university post pretty quickly. But there were many who believed him. They used it as an excuse to exclude anyone with a Hispanic face from restaurants and bars. Even those whose grandparents were born here.
The bottom line was that all those months ago the disease appeared to have run out of gas. Those infected with Gantose even stopped going into a mindless panic when someone sneezed across the street. But you can’t dum p hell knows how many million people into Mexico without the place exploding at the seams. Massive global aid programs worked for a while, but there were still too many people to feed. Distribution networks collapsed. Even though grain piled mountain high at ports it didn’t reach the refugees deeper inland. Hunger drove them farther north, as far as the U.S. border with its walls and fences to keep illegal immigrants out. There, as the saying goes, the irresistible force met the immovable object.
Here’s another cutting. It contains an interview with one of the American patrol guards on the Mexican border the day of the Breakout. “It’s all gone to hell. But how can you stop them? There must have been a million men, women and children. And there were kids holding babies in their arms.” The harrowing memories were enough to render the man’sface ugly, and he’d just lit his third cigarette in the ten minutes I’d been speaking with him. “They tore the border fence apart with their bare hands… I mean, what am I supposed to do? Shoot them? Shoot kids and babies, for Chrissakes. All we could do was climb on top of our cruiser as they came by. They weren’t people; they were a whole flood. So we just hung on to the roof light and watched them pour by.”
The flood that engulfed America began that dry-asa-bone May morning. “Refugees sometimes turn into invading armies,” prophesied one commentator, but millions of Americans contributed food parcels and volunteered to help avert a humanitarian disaster. We, as a nation, labored to do the right thing.
Soon every state accepted a given number of refugees. And that flood kept coming. Empty hostels, hotels, army camps, redundant cruise liners were crammed to capacity. You could visit your local supermarket one day, everything normal. The next day you drove into the parking lot and there’d be five hundred Brazilians living in a shanty town of cardboard boxes. It got like that in the city parks. Tents made of sticks and carrier bags became home to millions nationwide. Of course they were all hungry. They all needed clean water. Medicines. Clothes. Shoes. And, goddam, we did do the right thing. We did our best to feed them. But there were too many. These half-starved bastards-and I don’t mean that in an insulting way, believe me-filled the streets begging for food. They weren’t violent or intimidating or anything. Of course, hardly any spoke English, and it seemed the only word they did learn was bread. So you’d walk downtown and there would be beautiful young Brazilian women or Mexican women (helluva lot of Mexicans seemed to get carried with the northward flow) and they’re all holding out their hands; they’ve got beautiful brown eyes that overflow with pleading, and they’re all saying one word as you pass: