were not aware that they had returned to Morrisburg with something more noteworthy than their weekend supply of cheap beer.
Several Morrisburg residents had jobs in Ottawa. When they returned home on Friday evening after a hard day’s work, two of them brought the SDC virus home with them. By the end of the day on Friday, more than a dozen Morrisburg residents were infected.
Several serious breakfast gatherings took place on Saturday morning to review and discuss the latest news about the rapidly spreading contagion. These breakfast meetings ensured SDC’s dispersal among the residents of Morrisburg, including Michael Warren and his parents, was almost complete by the end of the day. The news on the television that night was serious, but the only recommendation was not try to flee. However, a few people did leave hastily to go to their cottages in the nearby Rideau Lakes region. They were already too late to save themselves.
On Sunday morning, it was discovered that eight Morrisburg residents had died in their sleep during the night.
On Sunday night, almost everybody in Morrisburg died within an hour of going to sleep. The only exceptions were Michael Warren and three senior citizens who lived alone and had been too frail to leave their homes on Saturday.
Michael woke on Monday morning to find his worst fears had become a horrifying reality. He found his mother and father had died in their bed. He called 911, but ominously, no one answered the phone. All the local radio and TV stations from Ottawa, Watertown and Syracuse were transmitting prerecorded “stay calm and stay put” announcements. Otherwise, they were not transmitting at all. He went to his neighbors’ homes to try to get help. No one answered his desperate knocking and there were no signs of life. He called and texted all his friends and family on his cell phone without getting any responses.
He got into his car and drove frantically around the small town. It was deserted, even though it was now ten on a Monday morning. He called at the houses of all his close friends without getting any reaction. He dejectedly returned to his own home, having concluded that most Morrisburg residents had become victims of SDC. He was not sure why he was spared so far, but he assumed he would die soon.
Rather than face immediate reality, he went into his father’s liquor cabinet and fixed himself a strong rum and Coke. He quickly followed it with a second and then a third. Feeling no pain and with the room going around and around, he fell onto the couch in the living room to take a nap. In what little was left of his consciousness, he did not expect to wake up again.
Michael awoke briefly with a headache in the early evening but was still in shock and not ready to face the consequences of his new situation. After three more strong rum and cokes, he had finished the almost full bottle of rum. He went back to the couch and fell asleep again.
When he woke up next morning, he had a bad hangover. It was even worse than after his occasional Saturday-night party binges. Through the somewhat-familiar pain, however, he recognized he probably was not going to die like everyone else in Morrisburg. He was not at all sure this was a good thing.
England: The Survivors
Ripon was a small city in the northeast of England, with a population of about thirteen thousand before the disaster of 2015. It was a market town in the center of a large farming community. Margaret West had moved there just a couple of years earlier, after her divorce, to be closer to her parents. They lived in the small village of Dishforth, only five miles away. She had turned thirty a month earlier and had no children. She was a doctor and had joined two other local general practitioners in starting a family-medicine clinic in Ripon eighteen months earlier.
SDC was relatively slow to reach Ripon. The first deaths in England had occurred on Wednesday night in London. These victims had caught SDC after contact with Jim Henderson in New York on Monday.
From London, SDC had spread rapidly to most major population centers in England. By the luck of the draw, SDC did not reach Ripon until the following Monday. Three families fleeing from Leeds had arrived. Like most of the people fleeing from SDC, they had left too late; they were already infected.
Margaret and her colleagues in the clinic were aware of the devastating progress of the contagion from the news on television, radio and newspapers. They were also receiving email bulletins from the Ministry of Health as SDC progressed across the country. Margaret had seen the initial reports on Friday July 17, with some significant professional interest but without too much real concern for herself or her patients in Ripon. The hundreds of unexplained sleep deaths in North America were a long way away, on the other side of the Atlantic. Closer to home, about fifty deaths had been reported in England, all in the London area.
The first Ministry of Health email bulletin had arrived at noon on Friday. It did not include much useful information that had not been on the TV newscast she had seen at lunchtime. It did note the cold like symptoms that many of the victims had experienced before their unexplained sleep deaths, according to their families.
It was Margaret’s turn to be the clinic’s on-call doctor for the weekend. She suspected she might get some emergency calls from patients suffering from cold symptoms. As she left the office on Friday, she mentally prepared her “there is nothing to be concerned about” speech to answer these calls. She could not have known just how wrong her assessment of the situation really was.
The news on Saturday was much more disturbing. The numbers of reported deaths in England and the rest of Europe grew alarmingly as they were discovered and reported during the morning. By noon, the urgent bulletins were appearing on the TV every fifteen minutes and the latest reports put the number of deaths in Europe at more than a thousand. The reports and speculations on the internet were even more disturbing.
Margaret had already taken more than twenty emergency calls from clinic patients. They were becoming harder to satisfy and her “nothing to be concerned about” response became less and less acceptable to them—and to herself.
By Saturday afternoon, Margaret began to have severe doubts. After some discussion on the phone, the three clinic doctors decided to go into the office immediately, review all the information available and decide on an action plan for their patients. They met in the waiting room with the TV tuned to the BBC, which was now running continuous news coverage of the SDC disaster. Reports were starting to come in from North America. Because of the time difference, several thousand Friday-night deaths were just being discovered as their loved ones awoke.
The news at four (eleven in the morning in Washington) was that the president of the United States had declared an unprecedented general state of emergency. He had suspended all travel by air, rail and automobile within the country. The doctors cynically but correctly interpreted this news to mean things were getting totally beyond control in North America. Shortly afterwards, the British prime minister made a live TV broadcast to the nation, announcing similar quarantine measures to take effect immediately in Great Britain.
The Ministry of Health bulletins kept coming in on the fax and email during the afternoon. Apart from updating the estimated victim count, they were not much help to the doctors, who were trying to come up with any usable advice for their own patients in Ripon. In the end, the three doctors decided that rather than continue to try to answer an increasing number of emergency calls without anything new to say, they would simply leave a voice message for all callers. The essence of their message was the same as the government’s “stay calm and stay put” instructions. They did not feel good about their response to anxious patients but did not know what else they could do. They left the office and agreed to get in touch again by phone at noon the next day.
Sunday was a very difficult day for Margaret and her colleagues. The news of the escalating number of deaths was the only thing in the
