Drone XTPE 413557 maintained a height of four hundred feet, with a standard deviation of altitude of fifteen feet as it flew along the southern shore of Lake Erie. XTPE 413557 was the newest generation of monitoring drones. A combination of light-weight battery packs, high efficiency solar cells and next generation electric engines meant that XTPE 413557 remained forever aloft, only landing when informed by weather servers of impending inclement weather, or for servicing as self-detected.
Three days ago hospitals worldwide had overflowed with patients. By the evening of that day, one in one hundred people worldwide had experienced symptoms: nausea, severe headache, diarrhea and / or dehydration. By evening of that day the early cases were bleeding from mucous membranes.
Drone XTPE 413557 overflew the Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve as it passed Bratenahl. Its onboard software kept it centered on the shoreline but the small size of the Preserve peninsula allowed it to overfly the half mile square area as it approached downtown Cleveland from the northwest. To the left of its direction of travel were the docks of the Intercity Yacht Club, and, across Interstate 90, the five baseball fields of Gordon Park arranged in a pentagonal pattern.
The traffic lights changed and cars were parked on the road sides. But no cars were moving. There were no pedestrians. Interstate 90 lay bare. Every hundred feet or so a car might be stopped on a shoulder. Birds flew and chirped but aside from that the hinterland of the city was silent.
The next morning, two days ago, one in ten people had had symptoms and two in a hundred from the previous day had died. There was no regular programming. Stations were either static or constant coverage; curfews were announced and by the afternoon military vehicles began to appear. Experts on television declared it to be a new type of hemorrhagic fever, fast-acting and lethally airborne. By evening, two days ago, two in five had symptoms and one in ten had died.
The social web collapsed. Workers from all sectors failed to appear at their jobs. Businesses closed. Scant army units tried and failed to enforce cordon zones. Those few people walking on the streets avoided each other. Violence flared in ten thousand thousand spots across the world where warnings to stay away were ignored.
Drone XTPE 413557 flew past the 55th Street East Marina. The drone flew almost directly above the stone breakwater. On previous passes children would wave, imagining that somewhere someone was looking through a camera on the drone, but such was not the case. There were no children today nor would there be again. Drone XTPE 413557 began a sweeping hyperbolic turn to the Northeast, anticipating the two overlaid rectangles that formed Burke Lakefront Airport.
One day ago nine in ten had symptoms and four in ten had died. None of the infected recovered, all died. The prognosis was evident: symptoms mean death. Human society no longer existed. No one walked the streets. There were no looters. There were no good Samaritans. Some had fled the cities, driving to remote areas, hometowns, backwoods cabins. This had the effect of infecting all the highways and turning all inhabited landmasses into isolated pockets of infection; free zones bordered on all sides by infectious areas.
XTPE 413557 passed the airport and flew across the small faux bay that held the USS Cod Submarine Memorial. The drone passed Voinovich Bicentennial Park and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It had just completed a data upload to a remote server in Buffalo, New York, and had in turn been handed off to a server in Toledo. Pointers were reset and onboard memory was logically if not electronically cleared to zero used. Ahead to the left was First Energy Stadium.
This morning six billion, eight hundred million humans had already died or were dying. The survivors were in outlying and rural areas although many of these had been infected by arrivals from cities. There were people in remote locations, the high arctic, McMurdo Station, and hermits and various other social isolates. Some of these regions had enough community and population to survive for several generations.
XTPE 413557 passed over Edgewater Park Beach. A young man wearing only shorts lay dead on the sand. The areas around his orifices were now a dark rust color. He lay expressionless in the morning sun. An orange rind and a half eaten sandwich lay beside him on the sand. XTPE 413557’s formerly southerly direction now became northerly again as it followed the curve of the coast back out into the lake on the journey west.
Everywhere an infected human breathed became a lethal zone. To exhale was to shed virus. Survivors had limited resources and as supplies became scarce they would fearfully forage into unknown territory. Often they would bring infection back to their band and the uninfected zones grew ever smaller. Those desperate few who had early fled the cities were almost always infected and their arrival meant death. Thirty days after it began there were only seven million survivors left, trapped in small areas.
Drone XTPE 413557 flew past the Lakewood high-rises and adjusted it’s heading again. It was now flying almost entirely west and only slightly north. It overflew the small peninsula of Lakewood Park. Somewhere in among the trees a hungry dog barked and snarled at the movement.
There were small breeding populations, but there was nowhere to expand into that could be considered safe. In 2132, one hundred and fourteen years after the first case, the last human being would die. Twelve years later from now drone XTPE 413557 would develop a critical fault in a motor. This would cause it to drift out over Lake Erie, and a day later, it would be torn apart by a thunderstorm.
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Bill is an aspiring fiction writer with a background in computer programming. He is still trying to decide what he wants to be when he grows up. Born in Indiana, Bill is a transplanted Hoosier living as a Buckeye by way of Canada and the Netherlands. Contact Bill at [email protected].