Chapter 1

Soup. That's what I really needed.

I could not find any in the jumble of cans and bottles in the cabinets, but the fridge yielded cold chicken. I had no idea how long it had been there, but nothing was growing on it, and it smelled okay, so I took some and plopped exhaustedly on the sofa in front of the TV.

I wondered how long it had been since I told my assistant I was going home early with a touch of the flu. She must have been frantic trying to reach me.

I had not been this ill since I was a small child. I was vaguely aware of the passage of several days as I feverishly drank juices and water in my rare lucid moments, just trying to stave off dehydration. When the fever had finally broken, I felt weak as a kitten.

I resolved to call my assistant as soon as I had eaten to see if there was anything urgent that I needed to handle. As CEO of TeleSoftCon I could take time off any time I wanted, but it was not good for business for me to be out too long, nor did it set a good example for my executives and other employees.

Melinda, too, must have tried to call and would be worried that I hadn't answered. She had gotten a call that her mother was sick and had flown off to Chicago. As soon as I had some strength back, I would call her, too.

As I sat there in my underwear, nibbling on a chicken leg, exhausted from the effort of finding the food, I used the remote to turn the television on, only to find some public service notice filling the screen. Annoyed, I changed channels only to find a similar notice. One channel after another I flipped through only to discover that they were all the same.

Disgusted, I almost turned the thing off before my fever-addled brain told me I should probably read the notice, first.

"NOTICE: Due to the release of a biological agent by an unknown terrorist organization, regular programming is suspended until further notice. If you are experiencing flu-like symptoms, with nausea and vomiting, the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control recommend taking plenty of fluids and bed rest. Do not leave your home. Roadways are impassable due to excessive traffic and emergency rooms are full to capacity. The death toll from the unknown agent is already in the millions and no effective treatment has been discovered."

I almost threw up everything I had just eaten.

I turned on the radio, only to hear a recorded notice to tune to a particular frequency for information. I found the channel and a voice came through. The signal was loud and clear, the voice weak and shaky.

" ... recorded announcement. A biological agent has been released by an unknown terrorist organization. Reports from all over the globe place the death toll in the billions. There are rare reports of people developing immunity to the disease, but medical and scientific personnel have themselves succumbed too rapidly to the agent to develop an effective remedy. Stay in your homes. You will be notified when it is safe to travel. This is a recorded announcement. A bio... "

I turned it off, fighting further waves of nausea. I shuffled slowly back to my bedroom, trying not to pass out, and grabbed my cell phone.

With a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I began dialing every number in my phone's memory. No answer on any of them - no one answered the phone at TeleSoftCon, nor at any of the other companies whose numbers I kept in my phone.

Crap! Was I the only survivor?

Holding onto furniture and walls, unsure of my legs, I made my way to the window and opened the curtains. Outside, it was morning of a bright autumn day. Birds flitted through the trees, and everything, at first glance, seemed quite normal. I felt a strange sense of something akin to vertigo as the sheer normality of the view hit me. Surely, in the wake of a disaster as monumental as this, there would be fire, smoke, explosions, something to mark the passing of humanity!

That was when our relative insignificance came sharply into focus. Even if every human on the globe died, the planet would go on. Eventually, all of the things that we had built would be torn down by the inexorable march of new vegetation, or by wind, water and weather. Some new species would eventually achieve dominance over the others, and perhaps develop their own form of intelligence and technology.

As I gazed on the bizarrely peaceful scene, small cracks began to appear in the gloss of its façade. There was Mrs. McReady, on the lawn in her bathrobe, as she had been every morning since I moved into this neighborhood. This morning, however, she lay slumped in an awkward position on the grass. Her cat, who appeared at first to be licking her face, could be seen, on closer inspection, to be tearing bites of flesh from her owner's visage, as daintily as if she were eating canned cat food.

Halfway down the block, a delivery van, that on first glance appeared to be double parked, proved, instead, to have drifted into the side of one of the cars parked along the street. Inside the cab, the delivery man was slumped against the side window.

A vast sense of loneliness swept over me as I turned away from the window. One part of my mind told me there must be others besides me who had survived, but the logical, engineering part of my brain told me that, based on the notices on radio and television, and the fact that I could not reach anyone whose number was stored in my phone, there must not be very damned many.

I noticed the light blinking on my answering machine so I pushed the playback button.

"Gavin?" Melinda's voice sounded weak and strained, "Oh Gavin, please be there. Please let me hear your voice one more time! If you get this, please call me. I love you!"

I remembered the last message that Stephanie, my assistant, handed me as I was getting on the elevator.

"Your fiancée called while you were in the meeting," she told me as she handed me one of the ubiquitous, pink, 'While You Were Out' memo slips. "Her mother is sick and her sister needs help taking care of her. She's taking a flight out of SFO to Chicago."

I remembered checking my watch as I scanned the memo. Melinda would already have been in the air.

"Thanks, Stephanie," I said, as the elevator doors began to close.

Shaking the memories out of my head, I punched up Melinda's speed dial number, over and over again. The time stamp on the voice message was two days ago. No answer now. Nor was there any answer at her mother's or her sister's. Desperation and despair mounted as the phones continued to go unanswered.

I was too weak to do anything about it yet, but as I lay there on the rank, sweat-soaked sheets, and my mind started working over the ramifications of a disaster of this magnitude, I knew I had to do something pretty quickly if humanity was to have any chance at all of surviving. Why me? Because somebody had to, and unless and until someone better suited to the job came along, I was the only one I knew who might have a chance to pull it off.

'Quickly' is a somewhat subjective term when you're chafing under the ravages of a disease that has left you weaker than a newborn.

Three days it took to get me back on my feet for most of the day. I figured if I took it easy, I'd be able to go a bit longer each day. For those three days, I thought and schemed and planned as best I could for what I knew and what I couldn't know. I found that much of the Internet was still available, and used it to do as much research as I could, and every day, I tried Melinda's numbers again. Every day, I got the same result. I resisted the temptation to throw the cell phone through the window, hoping against hope that one of those calls would be answered.

I approached this problem like a business problem, not worrying about causes, for now, only about possible solutions. It kept my mind off of the knowledge of the enormity of this disaster, both personal and public, that lurked in the background and threatened to overwhelm me, and it gave me a purpose. When I finally felt up to getting on with my life, I knew what I was going to do and where I needed to go first.

If there are any other survivors, and I can find them, I am determined to: first, survive, and second, get started on rebuilding whatever can be rebuilt.

It is with that thought in mind that I have started this journal. If anything happens to me, whoever finds this might be able to continue what I've started, and, possibly, learn from my mistakes.

My first thought, of course, was for defense. With the collapse of society and its legal systems, whoever was left would essentially be living in the 'old west, ' except that with the moral decay that had plagued much of our society, there would likely be elements out there with no sense of 'right' and 'wrong' and no concept of 'honor.' If I, and whoever came with me were to survive, we needed to be able to defend ourselves against such elements.

The place to start for that: The Army Reserve depot on Mare Island.

When I started my company, I could have moved closer to Silicon Valley, but Melinda lived in Vallejo, and I preferred to be near her, even if it meant putting up with the commute up and down I-680 every day. Now, I was glad I had made that choice.

Vallejo, situated about thirty-five miles northeast of San Francisco, for most of its history had based its economy around the Naval base and shipyard on Mare Island - not really an island but an extension of the swampy land on the other side of the Napa river from Vallejo. When the DOD closed down the military functions of the base a few years back, businesses and other government agencies moved in, including the one in which I was interested.

There were two bridges connecting Vallejo with Mare Island. The high rise bridge on State Highway 37 at the north end of town was out of the question for me. Not only was it further from my apartment, but in my weakened condition, I doubted that my legs would get me over it on the bicycle, which was my only reasonable choice for transportation if traffic was as bad as the notices said.

The causeway at the end of Tennessee street, however, was flat, and with the drawbridge down would make for relatively easy crossing.

My bicycle threaded its way across town from my apartment in East Vallejo, avoiding hills as much as possible and dodging cars that had simply stopped, or worse, crashed.

I was constantly fighting the urge to stop and help the occupants, and had to keep reminding myself that there was nothing I could do for them. Crossing the causeway to Mare Island, I was almost overwhelmed by the eerie silence. Never, in all my years in Vallejo, had I heard the lapping of waves on the pilings of the Mare Island causeway, simply because there was always too much traffic and other activity. Today, the only unnatural sound was the chain and the tires of my bike, and when I finally reached Mare Island, the forlorn clanking of the line that should have held a flag against the empty flagpole in front of Rodman Center.

The Army Reserve Transportation depot was locked up tight as a drum, but a padlock is no match for a tire iron and, with no one around to stop me, I broke in. My first stop was the motor pool. The lock on the office door was no harder than the one on the gate, but the one on the key cabinet was a little tougher. I wound up tearing the cabinet doors off their hinges, instead.

I had no idea which keys I needed, but I grabbed a handful and walked to the biggest truck on the lot - an M900, 5 ton 6x6. The seventh key slipped in and turned. The engine caught after only a few turns of the starter and rumbled easily at idle after a few roars as I worked the accelerator. I left it in Neutral with the brake on and tossed my mountain bike into the bed.

It had been a while since I had driven anything this big, so it jerked and bounced a bit as I got it moving. To my gratification, the fuel guage read full, and I left it idling as I pulled up in front of the building that housed the weapons vault.

I wasn't surprised to find the combination-locked door closed tight, but the sergeant who had been on duty was slumped over his desk with no pulse and no breath in his lungs. The mess in the wastebasket beside him attested to the illness that had done him in along with most of the rest of humanity.

I unclipped the keyring from his belt and rolled his chair away from the desk, leaning him backward so he wouldn't fall out. I searched the desk thoroughly, including the sides and bottoms of the drawers, but didn't find what I was looking for. I was about to give up and go in search of a cutting torch when I noticed the small black notebook in the front pocket of the Sergeant's camouflage shirt.

Sure enough, penned carefully inside the back cover were two sets of numbers. The top set, four one- or two-digit numbers, had to be the combination to the vault. I wasn't sure about the bottom set; one number comprised of six digits, but I thought I had an idea what it could be.

Sure enough, the top set of numbers opened the combination lock, and I was glad I had held onto the little black book, because I had no sooner opened the vault door than the security alarm panel mounted inside the door began beeping. I quickly punched in the bottom sequence of numbers and the disarm key. Wrong order. After I hit the disarm key it asked for the disarm code, so I punched it in again. To my relief, the beeping stopped and a green light appeared on the panel.

I had to search through the numerous keys on the duty sergeant's key ring to find keys that fit all the locks on the weapons racks, but I went around the room unlocking all the locks before starting to load weapons into the truck.

M-4s, the short-barreled version of the M-16 used for close-quarters combat, and M-16s were plentiful, as was the ammo for them, so I loaded a handtruck several times with them and as much 5.56mm ammunition as I could find. Same with M-9s (9mm automatic pistols) and their ammo.