morning.
Josephine and the two boys died in their sleep before midnight, when their hearts stopped beating. Henri slept until the alarm awoke him as usual at five. He was one of the few people with the rare genetic makeup that protected him from the “sleeping death” effect of the SDC virus. This was not to be a normal day.
When he tried to awaken Josephine, he immediately knew that something was seriously wrong. In panic, he called loudly for his sons to wake up and fetch Doctor Leblanc, who lived just down the street. When he got no response from them, he rushed into their bedroom. In despair and disbelief, he quickly recognized that his boys were victims of the same condition as his wife. Suspecting the worst, Henri went to fetch the doctor himself.
When he returned with Doctor Leblanc, his fears were confirmed. Josephine and the two boys were dead. Their cold bodies proved that they had been dead for several hours. Doctor Leblanc had no explanation to offer He immediately phoned for an ambulance to take the bodies to the local hospital for autopsies to try to diagnose the cause of death.
Because of the unusual nature of the deaths, he also called the local police. When the officer in charge heard what had happened, he was immediately suspicious that the family’s deaths had not been from natural causes. He strongly suspected some kind of foul play on Henri’s part. He was about to leave the station to pick up Henri for questioning when he received another call about more suspicious sleeping deaths.
In this case, it was a family of four living on the other side of the city from the Plouchards. The victims were the family of the taxi driver who had driven the Graysons from the train station to their hotel. Like the Plouchards, they had all died in their sleep overnight, without any obvious explanation. Because the officer was also aware of the deaths of the Graysons reported by the hotel the previous afternoon, he correctly stopped worrying about a potential multiple murderer and started worrying about a deadly disease.
By the end of the morning, ten other cases of sleep deaths had been reported, for a total of thirty-five victims. No one in Avignon ever discovered that the common factor in all the deaths was direct or indirect contact with the Graysons from Glens Falls.
Henri was unaware that he had been for a short time a suspected multiple murderer. He was in shock and Doctor Leblanc was very worried about his state of mind. Eventually, he persuaded Henri to take a strong sedative. Henri went back to bed and fell into a deeply drugged sleep. When he woke up on Saturday, it seemed at first that he had just had a terrifying nightmare. When he found no sign of his wife and sons in the apartment, he had to admit to himself that the previous day’s events had been no dream.
When he went out into the street, Henri discovered that Avignon was now a town in panic. He found that many of his neighbors and friends had firsthand experience of the same kind of loss. In many cases, all members of families had died in their sleep during the night and had just been discovered by their neighbors.
Not able to face his personal losses or understand what was going on in this brutal new world, he retreated to his apartment over the bakery. He locked the doors and started a new path to oblivion with the bottles of red wine he found in the pantry. He did not expect or want to wake from the sleep that finally came.
In that wish, Henri was to be disappointed. Of the almost ninety thousand population of Avignon, he was the only survivor less than a week after the Graysons’ arrival in the city.
United States: The Survivors
Vero Beach was a town on the Atlantic coast of Florida, about a hundred and fifty miles north of Miami. Before SDC, the population of the town itself was about seventeen thousand permanent residents, plus a varying number of tourists, depending on the season.
The contagion had reached Vero Beach quickly. On that fateful Monday morning, the Browns, an older couple from Albany, were sitting directly in front of Jim Henderson on his flight to New York. They were on their way down to Florida to look for a new home for their retirement. They were sick of the harsh winters of northern New York State and, now they were both retired, it was time to prepare for their escape to the sun. The Browns’ close contact with Jim Henderson on the flight down to New York ensured they both became infected with the SDC virus.
From New York, they flew to Fort Lauderdale and picked up their rental car on Monday afternoon. They had plenty of time to drive north to the hotel in Vero Beach they had booked as their base for their Florida house search. By Tuesday morning, when the Browns met their real estate agent, their infection had progressed to the point where the mild cold symptoms were making their appearance. The infection was now very contagious and most of the people whom they met in Vero Beach became infected.
On Wednesday night, the Browns died in their hotel bed. Their bodies were not discovered until Thursday afternoon. The hotel manager had finally used his passkey to get into their room after the housekeeping staff got no response to their repeated knocks on the door.
On Friday morning, ten SDC deaths were reported to the local health authorities. The news from New York and other large cities was the main item on radio and TV. As soon as the news of the deaths in Vero Beach was made public, a panicky attempt to flee from the area began, ensuring the contagion would be spread farther and faster than ever.
On Friday night, nearly two hundred of the remaining residents died in their sleep. By the end of the day on Saturday, Vero Beach’s streets were deserted. Most people either had left town or were already dead. The only living people remaining in the town were family members of those who had died the previous night. Their devastating grief would not allow them to leave their loved ones without a proper burial. They also assumed they would be next. They preferred to die in their own beds, as opposed to going through the fruitless panic and stress of a doomed attempt to escape.
Jane Wood, a forty-year-old kindergarten teacher, was one of these people. Her husband, John and her four-year-old daughter, Lizzie, had died on Friday night. She had discovered that John had died in his sleep when she woke up early on Saturday morning to find his body cold and lifeless in bed next to her. She was devastated when she ran to Lizzie’s bedroom, only to find her beloved child had met the same fate.
Her call to the hospital had been finally answered after a long wait. The hospital had already been swamped with similar calls and more were coming in every minute. She was informed an ambulance would be dispatched as soon as one was available.
It did not come and, as Jane listened to the extraordinary news on the local radio, she realized it never would. She decided to stay with her family until she joined them in heaven. After taking three sleeping pills from the medicine cabinet, she lay down in her bed with her husband on one side and little Lizzie on the other. She did not expect to awaken.
The drugs put Jane into a deep, long sleep. She did not wake up until ten Sunday morning, after almost twenty hours of sleep. She was one of the few who were immune to the fatal consequences of SDC. It only took a few moments for her to remember the tragedy of the previous day. The lifeless bodies beside her brought her to quick consciousness and despair.
She was going to have to face the rest of her life without John and Lizzie.
Kenya: The Survivors
Voi was a town of about twenty thousand people in the southeastern part of Kenya, about a hundred miles northwest of the Indian Ocean coast. It is located on both the main road and the mainline railway from the coastal town of Mombasa to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.
Simon Kanaku was the sixteen-year-old son of a town bus driver. He lived with his parents and four younger sisters in
