They go home. They hold hands. They watch TV. They get sick and then they get sicker. Mommy and Daddy take care of the children as well as they can until they are at the point of collapse then lie in bed to wait it out. There's a box of bottled water in every room and that's about all they can do.
They go through the pneumonic stage. Mommy and Daddy come out of it at about the same time. They check the children and make sure they're taking their antibiotics. The kids are both alive, thank God.
They relapse, almost at the same time. Mommy doesn't remember much of that period except shouting at her husband to stop screaming.
Mommy wakes up covered in sweat but clear-headed. Her husband is dead by her side. She finds her children in the kitchen eating cereal; the only thing they know how to make. There is no power and the water runs for a moment then stops. She hugs her children and tells them that Daddy has gone up to heaven. The children are shell-shocked. They know Daddy is dead. And he said bad things to them before he died. So did Mommy. They're terrified but she comforts them as well as she can and gets them something better to eat. That, at the moment, is the most she can do.
Mommy tells the children to go out in the front yard and not to come in the back yard or the house until she tells them. Weak, dehydrated and just recovered from a killer illness, she nonetheless drags her late husband's heavy body into the backyard. There she digs a shallow hole and puts him in it, wrapped in the sheet from the bed. It's spring. She looks around the yard and, despite her aching bones and fatigue, picks up the plastic tray filled with pansies that were supposed to eventually ornament a planter on the front porch and arrays them across the tilled earth that is all she has left of her lover, her friend, her mate.
Across the United States there are these small monuments to the horror and glory of the Plague and the response of just everyday people. Flower beds across our God-kissed nation rear up from the bones of the dead, their death bringing new life and beauty into the world they have left.
My father is buried under roses.
Yes, there were the charnel pits. There were the death trucks with their slowly tolling bell. Manned mostly by garbage men in cities they carried away thousands and do so still in places. But when people really grasped how messed up things had become and when they had the land many of their family members ended up in a flower bed.
Personally, I'd have preferred that, wouldn't you?
But then came the next step. What do you do when the world has so clearly come apart? Radio reports indicate that nothing is working, anywhere. The Federal government is telling people to do the best they can until help arrives.
I'll describe later what happened in low trust countries. But this narrative is about the happy suburban family, an environment where societal trust, believe me, is probably the highest it has been in recorded history. People growing up in suburbs just don't know how unusual they are. That "it looks the same all over" is boring as hell but it's a function of high trust.
The U.S. is a strange country. Growing up in it I never realized that, but spending those tours overseas really brought it home. We're just fucking weird.
Alex de Touqueville spoke of this weirdness in his book Democracy in America way back in the 1800s. "Americans, contrary to every other society I have studied, form voluntary random social alliances."
Look, let's drill that down a bit and look at that most American of activities: The Barn Raising.
I know that virtually none of you have ever participated in a barn raising. But everyone knows what I mean. A family in an established commuity that has gotten to the point they can build a barn or need a new one or maybe a new pioneer family that needs a barn puts out the word. There's going to be a barn raising on x day, usually Saturday or Sunday.
People from miles around walk over to the family's farm and work all day raising the barn. Mostly the guys do the heavy work while women work on food. That evening everybody gets together for a party. They sleep out or in the new barn, then walk home the next day to their usual routine.
ONLY HAPPENS IN AMERICA.
Only ever happened in America. It is a purely American invention and is from inconceivable to repugnant to other cultures.
A group of very near strangers in that they are not family or some extended tribe gather together in a "voluntary random social alliance" to aid another family for no direct benefit to themselves. The family that is getting the barn would normally supply some major food and if culturally acceptable and available some form of alcohol. But the people gathering to aid them have access to the same or better. There is a bit of a party afterwards but a social gathering does not pay for a hard day's work. (And raising a barn is a hard day's work.)
The benefit rests solely in the trust that when another family needs aid, the aided family will do their best to provide such aid.
Trust.
Americans form "voluntary random social alliances." Other societies do not. Low trust societies in the U.S. do not. The kumbayas trying to build swings for the neighborhood children assumed the willingness of their "rainbow" neighbors to form a "voluntary random social alliance" for mutual benefit and discovered how rare American are.
In other countries an extended family might gather together to raise the barn or some other major endeavor. But this is not a voluntary random alliance. They turn up because the matriarch or patriarch has ordered it. And family is anything but random societally. (However random it may seem from the inside.)
This leads to the next stage of the narrative of our family. The mother performs an inventory of what they have. She considers heading to the hills. Many did. But most, those that survived and lived in high trust areas, then did something unthinkable in most areas of the world: They set out to help their neighbors.
Note: In many areas of the world, most neighbors would be extended family. In those areas, similar things happened. But they stopped at the level of extended family. From there on out, it became the government's problem. The king is supposed to fix big disasters. Individuals help their family as much as they can and then it's up to the king. The king will tell us what to do.
The mother of this narrative, and it's documented in at least twenty studies that it happened in all "high trust" zones in the United States, then went next door. There she found one of her neighor's children dead, another alive and very nearly psychotic. The child clings to her and she comforts her. Then she suggests that the child go play with her children. Children will recover their feet quickly when given anything orderly and common. The child is marginally functional by the time she goes back to the house. Long-term effects may be high, but right now functional is all that matters.
She returns to the house. In this case the wife is dead and the husband in the last throes of the cerebral portion of the progression. She removes her friend's body from the bed and gives the husband as much support as she can.
Note: One function of the H5N1 is that children rarely suffered from the cerebral infection stage or did so moderately. This was across the board and the clinical rationale is still poorly understood. The hypothesis (unproven) is that kids' bodies, due to growth hormones and such, tended to hold the blood in despite systemic flu. Thus they didn't suffer as much from cerebral and other organic breakdown. No solid clinical data but that's the hypothesis.