Haiku
Jedi Master
“You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the Twilight Zone! (Rod Sterling)”
‘I present to you three stories of incredible disasters. To you they may be real events. You will experience one, two or all three depending on your lesson needs. The following stories are fictional representations intended to be metaphorical representations of issues that we are about to experience.’
‘Let us enter a world where we all know that there is a deadly viral element in our future. In this world all the powers that govern us lie and hide anything that might deprive them of the power that they hold. In this story they withhold the knowledge of the virus too long, the whole population of the world loses because of it. We bring you a story of a viral event that starts with a falling rock …’
‘I woke up, the clock showed that it was 3:30, my normal waking time. It was dark still this early in the morning. It was Saturday and I was hoping that I could sleep in a little later. I laid there for another ten minutes hoping to return to sleep, but it was not happening. I got up and made my coffee. The news was not on for another two hours so I decided to turn on my computer and surf the internet for a time. I did my standard loop of web pages looking for a story that might specify anything that I was expecting to happen. I found nothing …’
A remote village in a mountainous region of this country, in mid-afternoon an object fell from the sky. It barely left a visible streak across the sky because of it being in daylight hours. Minor as it was, it was not seen by anyone in the surrounding area. That was until it impacted in a farmer’s field on the outskirts of this village. The farmer was far from his house in the north field, a fence section had fallen, he was scratching his head on how to fix it. It was then that he heard an odd-sounding crash, half-expecting an accident happened right outside of his home. He walked down from the north field, back to the house. He came around the corner of the house and found nothing in the road, that was odd he thought. He second guessed his recall and again peered up and down the local road, there was nothing there but a rabbit crossing the asphalt.
He shrugged it off and turned to go to the south barn as he needed a piece of equipment and tools to help with the fence repair. As he approached the barn, he saw the ground disruption to the side of it. Something had scattered chunks of ground all of the way over to the side of the barn.
Hesitantly he shuffled his way over to the hole in the ground. It was oval in shape and deeper at one end. It suddenly came to him that he was looking at an impact crater. Yes, the object hit in the deep end which splashed the surrounding ground here over to the barn. He looked up half-expecting to see another object falling from the sky. He first thought was that this might be one of those poop-cycles that had fallen from a passing airplane.
He went to the splashed end of the crater and looked at the crater again. Whatever had impacted here, it came from the east. He raised his head and saw the tree on the next-door neighbor’s property. It had several limbs that looked to have been ripped off and were now laying on the ground beneath the tree. One of them was smoking, a little bit burnt by whatever took it down. There was no flame and it looked like it could not spread, it was OK for now.
Whatever did this was not frozen, it was hot! He crouched down to the crater. This was a meteor. Meteors could be worth something. He remembered a TV show where they picked up meteors for money, they were using magnets to find them.
He jumped up and made his way over to the barn. Just inside was a tool that he used to pick up nails when he did construction around the property. It had a magnet in it that was about a meter across. He grabbed it and rolled it out to the crater. He started making passes over the scattered dirt.
After three passes he stopped and decided to see what he had picked up. There was a sheet of cardboard in the barn, he retrieved it and rolled the magnet onto it. He pulled the magnet handle up and it released all of the metallic items onto the cardboard. He shuffled through what was found. Eight nails, two screws, five washers and one nut. He set them aside and using a dustpan and brush, swept up the remaining metallic objects. There was something here, he had a small pile of magnet particles, one as big as a BB. He picked it up and rolled it in his hands, it was a little slippery, that’s odd. He figured that it was just some oil that he lost when he did the last oil change on the tractor, must be, maybe.
He continued rolling the magnet around and finally got to the side of the crater and he heard a metallic clunk sound. The magnet found something bigger. He went back to the cardboard and released his load on it. Two more nails and yes there it was a chunk the size of his pinky fingernail. He swept it up in a pile and added it to the material that he already found in the dustpan.
Admiring the larger piece that he just found he picked it up. The slimy surface was here also. He brought it up to his nose to smell it. It was sweet smelling, like honey and sugar. He brought it up to his mouth and stuck out his tongue. He barely touched it with his tongue, it was bitter not sweet, it irritated his tongue where he touched it.
He spent the next ten minutes trying to spit out the bad flavor that was now spreading across his mouth. He even grabbed his liquor bottle from the barn and tried to wash it out, wasting a quarter of the bottle doing so. Nothing helped.
He sat the bottle on the work bench and grabbed every shovel that he owned. There was some wood by the door, he grabbed it also. He needed to make something to screen everything that was there. Still seeing dollar signs in his eyes, he turned to excavating the entire area, looking for anything that might bring him a reward.
A couple of hours later he had six larger chunks and small pile of lighter material. He took 4 of the larger chunks, put them in a piece of his lunch foil that he had on his sandwich earlier today. He closed the foil, hopped into his vehicle, and drove away to town.
The village had existed in this area for hundreds of years. There was a two-lane road, one lane in some places, the only access road for the village and surrounding areas. The lifestyle of the village was slow and easy for most of the folks that resided here. There was connection to the outside world, internet and such, but many in this area were, shall we say, poorer. Quite a few were older and did not have the technology to interface with others in this manner. It was a quiet village and most liked it this way.
The farmer, not an educated man, had been doing farming work for good portion of his life. He barely made a living every year with the farm, but it was a quiet life that he liked. He drove up and parked in front of the local pub. Anybody that was anybody in this village would eventually come by for a pint or drink. So, he sat down at a table outside and ordered his favorite beer.
Many people passed by on their way into the pub. A few of them even stopped at the farmers table to chat, while he showed them the fragments that he found. Nobody seemed to be interested in his rocks until the local newsman showed up as asked if he could write up a story for the local paper on it. The local paper, weekly produced, was reduced to three sheets, and filling them with new stories took a greater effort on the part of the newsman. Anything was good news to him.
He took some pictures of the rocks in their foil container. It was then he asked about the liquid in the bottom of the foil. The farmer had not noticed that the rock sweating had accumulated into a drop of blue liquid in the wrinkled crease of the foil.
The newsman took the pictures and sent them to a friend of his, a government official in a major nearby city. The story was written and printed in the next weeks paper. The government official forwarded the pictures to an agency that investigates these events. For a time, nothing happened …
A minimal sign above the door stated, Elisabeth Roth. A string of letters underlined her name, credentials of a sort. Below that a single word, “Meteoriticist”. The door opened to a skinny stairwell that went down two floors below street level to a fair-sized room. There was no desk but all along the right wall were shelves full of small rocks, some no bigger than a grain of sand. On the left there was several benches, some with microscopes, others that looked like a scientist’s laboratory with vials and tubes of some unknown liquid. A computer was setup on the rear bench, a woman sat there looking at her emails, sorting through them to find incident reports to follow up on.
That is when she came across the farmers incident, it was two weeks old. She brought up the images that the newsman had taken. She was focused on the blue liquid in the foil. She opened the picture in an image editing program and zoomed into the image until it was showing the pixels of the image. The liquid had a thin line of blue that extended from the pool straight to the rocks. You could see the blue hew in the surface of the rocks. She was thinking that the two were of the same nature, but a rock that sweats, that was unheard of. A bit of research turned up no other space rock that sweated like this.
She reported what she found to her superiors. They reviewed the information and suggested that she travel to the site for a first-hand inspection. A car was obtained for here to drive to the location, it was only a little more than an hour away, up in the mountains to the north of where she was.
About an hour passes and she heard the clink of metal, someone had just dropped car keys into her mail slot of her door. She grabbed her belongings along with a laptop and stuffed it all in her bag. Then she grabbed some sample containers and a pair of insulated tongs and stuffed them in there as well. At the bottom of the stairwell, she grabbed another bag, the safety bag. It had gloves, masks and other safety paraphernalia in it. She made it to the top of the stairwell, grabbed the keys and made her way to the street. Pressing the unlock key, a cars lights lit up. It was a BMW rental, it had a scratches from some previous driver all across the passenger side.
She got in the car and started it, it rattled for a few seconds and then the motor smoothed out to a purr. Away she went to the old road of the mountain. About half-way up there was a turnout and she pulled off and stopped. She got out of the car and took a moment to admire the scenery. It was really beautiful up here, it was nothing like the nearby city. The air was fresh and everything was clean and green. She made a note to herself to visit this area on her next day off, today she was working. She hopped back into the car and drove onto the village of the event.
She pulled into the village and stopped at the one intersection in it. Just about all of the village could be seen. The school was at the end of the row a few houses, a grocery store, more houses, and a gas station. On one of the corners was a pub, the best-looking building in the village. It had an outside pavilion set with tables and beautiful rosery all around. The house beside the pub had a sign in front of it. It was the local newspaper office. She parked in front of it and got out. the front room of the house has been converted into an office and when she got to the front door, there was a sign taped to the window. It said, ‘Feeling under the weather today, be back to work tomorrow’.
This was going to slow down the investigation. She took a business card and wrote, ‘call me’, and stuffed it in the crack of the door.
She left the residence and instead of getting in her car, she turned left and went into to the pub. It was a small village. Typically, you would find that everybody knows everyone and everything that happens. This meteor event and this village was no different. She found out more about the event and where to find the farmer and farm with the impact crater. The bartender had even cut out the news story and had posted it on the wall, it was quite concise. She took a picture of it with her phone and left the establishment.
The farm was easily found, a white house with blue trim just like the bartender said. She stopped just outside the gate of the residence and parked beside the other vehicle that was there.
As she exited the car, she immediately noticed the fog in the air down by the far barn. It was the middle of the day and tulle fog usually fades away by this time of the day. It was odd but it was shrugged off. She went to the house of the farmer and knocked on the door. There was no response. She knocked again, nobody answered. She knocked again a little firmer shouting to see if someone was home. There was nothing. According to the people of the village, they said that the farmer would either be in the pub or there at the farm. Maybe he was too far away to hear, maybe.
Liz, a sturdy middle-aged woman, having spent all this time to get there, decided to roam around and see if she could find the crater maybe finding the farmer in the process. She was expecting that from the description told, that there was a crater of at least three meters wide somewhere on this farm, it should be noticeable. Seeing the fog was still by the far barn, Liz decided to go down there and see what was causing this oddity.
The barn sat in the lowest point of the property, a depression in the area. The fog seemed to be stationary there. As Liz got closer, the ground disturbance could be seen, it was about ten meters from the side of the barn. The fog looked to be centered around it and stretching all of the way over to where she was standing.
Needing a closer view, she stepped into the fog. It was not acting like any fog that she ever went through, it was thick and staying less than a half of meter off the ground. It swirled around her feet as she walked through it. The crater site was severely damaged. The farmer had been spending a good amount of time here looking for more fragments, it was obvious. There were various tools scattered around the area. A pick and shovel were on the dirt pile, a bar was implanted into the other side of the mound. Looking into the crater remains it was difficult to see much of anything, most was covered in fog. She crouched down and brushed some of the fog away so she could see better. It returned as fast as it could be brushed away. Something here in this pit must be generating it.
Liz pulled out her cell phone, the signal was weak but the was able to connect with a supervisor back at the office. A simple but complete report was given. The supervisor requested that she remain on site for further instructions. The call ended abruptly. She pulled out her phone and took a dozen pictures for the records.
She decided to return to the house to locate the farmer, maybe he was in the back property. She needed to know more of the incident. On her way back to the house, it was noticed that the back door was open. She went to the door and peered into the open doorway. Nobody could be seen. Liz knocked on the door, louder this time and in a raised tone asked if anyone was home. Nobody still answered. She went inside. The first thing that was noticed was food out on the table. It was as if someone was sitting there at one time. A jug of milk was out, she touched it. It was warm as if it had been there a while, the scent of souring milk proved this. A partially eaten sandwich was on a plate, she touched it and it was stale and dry. From what was seen, this food had been out for a while, maybe even days.
A hallway exited the kitchen. One way opened up into the living room and the other was to bedrooms. She decided to go into the living room first, calling out to anyone who would answer. There was still no reply. The living room was in a distressed state. Blankets were piled on the couch as if someone had been sleeping there recently. Food items, juice boxes and wrappers were scattered around the room, some on the coffee table and others just tossed to the floor. There was no one in the room but there was a scent of something off in the house, an antiseptic like smell. She opened the front door to get some fresh air into the house.
Liz returned to the hallway to get to the back of the building. The smell increased but now it had another scent in it, death. The first door was opened, the smell of death increased, it was a bathroom. The expert peered into the room and saw a foot of a small child poking out from behind the door. Slowly stepping into the room, softly asking if anyone was at home, still no response. Peering behind the door, a child of three of four was laying on the floor, a young boy. There was no breathing, the skin color was pale. This child was dead. From the look of it, it had not been there too long, no decay was visible. It was then that she saw the bed in the adjoining room. Two adults were there, no there is three of them. A baby was in between the two adults. Nobody was moving and a closer look showed that. The man was decaying more than the others. He had been dead the longest. The baby looked like it was next and then the woman, the mother of this family. She was getting scared now with so many bodies, dead bodies, in the house. She needed to get outside, now.
She had just made it out of the house. She dropped down to her knees expelling anything that was still in her stomach. Up on her feet, she made her was back to the car and grabbed a water bottle from the safety bag and flushed her mouth and face with it. The dead smell still lingering in her nostrils. A moment later she righted herself.
Another call was made, she relayed what she saw in the house to those that were listening. At the end of the call, she got the same abrupt ending.
A sheet of paper was retrieved from the car and a descriptive note was made of what was found. This was taped to the front door with one of her cards and closed. The expert went around to the back door and closed it also.
This was when the doghouse was noticed. A puppy was standing outside of it. As the expert got closer more dogs could be seen inside the little house, they were not moving. She went up to the doghouse and gave it a couple of thumps with her fist. Nothing moved, this was not good.
The puppy thought otherwise and was ready to play, it seemed to be having none of the same issues. The expert picked up the puppy, not wanting it to be left alone and put it in the car. It immediately peed on the passenger seat. That was OK, this was a rental.
The trip back to the village was slow as the expert pondered what had been seen. The puppy was enjoying itself while it chewed on the armrest of the seat, oblivious to what had happened. Another stop at the pub was short-lived. She went into the pub for a beer but ended up telling those that were there at the time of the situation up on that farm. She left contact information with the bartender and departed the pub. She never got that beer.
Back in the car, Liz contemplated the situation and decided that it might not be good to hang around this village, it was time to leave. The puppy now sleeping in the wettened passenger seat as the engine rattled to life again.
Her thinking was that she could return at any time. On the road out of the village in a two-lane zone of the road, several black SUV’s passed by going to the village. It was startling as they took up a major portion of the narrow road as they passed.
At one of the one lane sections she was stopped by another one of these vehicles that was parked across the road. Behind it was a camouflage-colored military vehicle. It had a very large machine gun on roof, a man in full face mask was at the gun. The military man cocked the gun and pointed right at the car.
Liz looked down at her hand and saw that it had a sheen of blue on it. This was the last contact that she had.
The puppy however had found its way down to a city dog pound where it was adopted by a family whose main family contributor was a pilot of an international airlines. Unknown to all was that the puppy was carrying the viral element, it had no effect on the small dog. Others were not so lucky …
‘It had been forty-four days since the first search. Before this day nothing had come up. Today a statement was announced live on just about every channel on the TV. It gave the area of a country that was not allowing anyone to enter or leave. It kind of sounded like one of those stay out zones that have been stated before. Corona was always closing off one place or another, this seemed like it was nothing new. The strange thing was the live broadcast of it on so many channels on the TV at the same time for just another one of these statements that we have heard so much these days.
Twelve days later this was repeated. This time it specified an isolation zone that was the entire country.
Twenty-four days passed when the newsflash stated some of the truth of the issue. It was a viral agent that was spreading, isolation was all that was being suggested. There were statements that this virus had a high infectious rate, but there was nothing on the lethality of the virus at this time.
It was over two months later that results were finally coming in that the virus was killing many of those that were infected, it was resembling the black plague. Everyone not affected by the viral element was a carrier that unknowingly spread it wherever they went.
No travel disruption happened for the first two months of infection. It allowed for the viral element to travel around the world, almost every country was infected. This spreading made it to even the most remote locations in the next month. It spread to the entire population of each area in the following months, there was no exceptions. The lethality of the virus was four out of five in most areas.
It took eight months before the deaths started to cease. The population of the world is now about one billion souls, nobody knows for sure. For areas that did not cleanse itself of the dead bodies, they became filth and disease ridden, making it unlivable to human populations. Entire countries had to be closed.’
‘I present to you three stories of incredible disasters. To you they may be real events. You will experience one, two or all three depending on your lesson needs. The following stories are fictional representations intended to be metaphorical representations of issues that we are about to experience.’
‘Let us enter a world where we all know that there is a deadly viral element in our future. In this world all the powers that govern us lie and hide anything that might deprive them of the power that they hold. In this story they withhold the knowledge of the virus too long, the whole population of the world loses because of it. We bring you a story of a viral event that starts with a falling rock …’
‘I woke up, the clock showed that it was 3:30, my normal waking time. It was dark still this early in the morning. It was Saturday and I was hoping that I could sleep in a little later. I laid there for another ten minutes hoping to return to sleep, but it was not happening. I got up and made my coffee. The news was not on for another two hours so I decided to turn on my computer and surf the internet for a time. I did my standard loop of web pages looking for a story that might specify anything that I was expecting to happen. I found nothing …’
A remote village in a mountainous region of this country, in mid-afternoon an object fell from the sky. It barely left a visible streak across the sky because of it being in daylight hours. Minor as it was, it was not seen by anyone in the surrounding area. That was until it impacted in a farmer’s field on the outskirts of this village. The farmer was far from his house in the north field, a fence section had fallen, he was scratching his head on how to fix it. It was then that he heard an odd-sounding crash, half-expecting an accident happened right outside of his home. He walked down from the north field, back to the house. He came around the corner of the house and found nothing in the road, that was odd he thought. He second guessed his recall and again peered up and down the local road, there was nothing there but a rabbit crossing the asphalt.
He shrugged it off and turned to go to the south barn as he needed a piece of equipment and tools to help with the fence repair. As he approached the barn, he saw the ground disruption to the side of it. Something had scattered chunks of ground all of the way over to the side of the barn.
Hesitantly he shuffled his way over to the hole in the ground. It was oval in shape and deeper at one end. It suddenly came to him that he was looking at an impact crater. Yes, the object hit in the deep end which splashed the surrounding ground here over to the barn. He looked up half-expecting to see another object falling from the sky. He first thought was that this might be one of those poop-cycles that had fallen from a passing airplane.
He went to the splashed end of the crater and looked at the crater again. Whatever had impacted here, it came from the east. He raised his head and saw the tree on the next-door neighbor’s property. It had several limbs that looked to have been ripped off and were now laying on the ground beneath the tree. One of them was smoking, a little bit burnt by whatever took it down. There was no flame and it looked like it could not spread, it was OK for now.
Whatever did this was not frozen, it was hot! He crouched down to the crater. This was a meteor. Meteors could be worth something. He remembered a TV show where they picked up meteors for money, they were using magnets to find them.
He jumped up and made his way over to the barn. Just inside was a tool that he used to pick up nails when he did construction around the property. It had a magnet in it that was about a meter across. He grabbed it and rolled it out to the crater. He started making passes over the scattered dirt.
After three passes he stopped and decided to see what he had picked up. There was a sheet of cardboard in the barn, he retrieved it and rolled the magnet onto it. He pulled the magnet handle up and it released all of the metallic items onto the cardboard. He shuffled through what was found. Eight nails, two screws, five washers and one nut. He set them aside and using a dustpan and brush, swept up the remaining metallic objects. There was something here, he had a small pile of magnet particles, one as big as a BB. He picked it up and rolled it in his hands, it was a little slippery, that’s odd. He figured that it was just some oil that he lost when he did the last oil change on the tractor, must be, maybe.
He continued rolling the magnet around and finally got to the side of the crater and he heard a metallic clunk sound. The magnet found something bigger. He went back to the cardboard and released his load on it. Two more nails and yes there it was a chunk the size of his pinky fingernail. He swept it up in a pile and added it to the material that he already found in the dustpan.
Admiring the larger piece that he just found he picked it up. The slimy surface was here also. He brought it up to his nose to smell it. It was sweet smelling, like honey and sugar. He brought it up to his mouth and stuck out his tongue. He barely touched it with his tongue, it was bitter not sweet, it irritated his tongue where he touched it.
He spent the next ten minutes trying to spit out the bad flavor that was now spreading across his mouth. He even grabbed his liquor bottle from the barn and tried to wash it out, wasting a quarter of the bottle doing so. Nothing helped.
He sat the bottle on the work bench and grabbed every shovel that he owned. There was some wood by the door, he grabbed it also. He needed to make something to screen everything that was there. Still seeing dollar signs in his eyes, he turned to excavating the entire area, looking for anything that might bring him a reward.
A couple of hours later he had six larger chunks and small pile of lighter material. He took 4 of the larger chunks, put them in a piece of his lunch foil that he had on his sandwich earlier today. He closed the foil, hopped into his vehicle, and drove away to town.
The village had existed in this area for hundreds of years. There was a two-lane road, one lane in some places, the only access road for the village and surrounding areas. The lifestyle of the village was slow and easy for most of the folks that resided here. There was connection to the outside world, internet and such, but many in this area were, shall we say, poorer. Quite a few were older and did not have the technology to interface with others in this manner. It was a quiet village and most liked it this way.
The farmer, not an educated man, had been doing farming work for good portion of his life. He barely made a living every year with the farm, but it was a quiet life that he liked. He drove up and parked in front of the local pub. Anybody that was anybody in this village would eventually come by for a pint or drink. So, he sat down at a table outside and ordered his favorite beer.
Many people passed by on their way into the pub. A few of them even stopped at the farmers table to chat, while he showed them the fragments that he found. Nobody seemed to be interested in his rocks until the local newsman showed up as asked if he could write up a story for the local paper on it. The local paper, weekly produced, was reduced to three sheets, and filling them with new stories took a greater effort on the part of the newsman. Anything was good news to him.
He took some pictures of the rocks in their foil container. It was then he asked about the liquid in the bottom of the foil. The farmer had not noticed that the rock sweating had accumulated into a drop of blue liquid in the wrinkled crease of the foil.
The newsman took the pictures and sent them to a friend of his, a government official in a major nearby city. The story was written and printed in the next weeks paper. The government official forwarded the pictures to an agency that investigates these events. For a time, nothing happened …
A minimal sign above the door stated, Elisabeth Roth. A string of letters underlined her name, credentials of a sort. Below that a single word, “Meteoriticist”. The door opened to a skinny stairwell that went down two floors below street level to a fair-sized room. There was no desk but all along the right wall were shelves full of small rocks, some no bigger than a grain of sand. On the left there was several benches, some with microscopes, others that looked like a scientist’s laboratory with vials and tubes of some unknown liquid. A computer was setup on the rear bench, a woman sat there looking at her emails, sorting through them to find incident reports to follow up on.
That is when she came across the farmers incident, it was two weeks old. She brought up the images that the newsman had taken. She was focused on the blue liquid in the foil. She opened the picture in an image editing program and zoomed into the image until it was showing the pixels of the image. The liquid had a thin line of blue that extended from the pool straight to the rocks. You could see the blue hew in the surface of the rocks. She was thinking that the two were of the same nature, but a rock that sweats, that was unheard of. A bit of research turned up no other space rock that sweated like this.
She reported what she found to her superiors. They reviewed the information and suggested that she travel to the site for a first-hand inspection. A car was obtained for here to drive to the location, it was only a little more than an hour away, up in the mountains to the north of where she was.
About an hour passes and she heard the clink of metal, someone had just dropped car keys into her mail slot of her door. She grabbed her belongings along with a laptop and stuffed it all in her bag. Then she grabbed some sample containers and a pair of insulated tongs and stuffed them in there as well. At the bottom of the stairwell, she grabbed another bag, the safety bag. It had gloves, masks and other safety paraphernalia in it. She made it to the top of the stairwell, grabbed the keys and made her way to the street. Pressing the unlock key, a cars lights lit up. It was a BMW rental, it had a scratches from some previous driver all across the passenger side.
She got in the car and started it, it rattled for a few seconds and then the motor smoothed out to a purr. Away she went to the old road of the mountain. About half-way up there was a turnout and she pulled off and stopped. She got out of the car and took a moment to admire the scenery. It was really beautiful up here, it was nothing like the nearby city. The air was fresh and everything was clean and green. She made a note to herself to visit this area on her next day off, today she was working. She hopped back into the car and drove onto the village of the event.
She pulled into the village and stopped at the one intersection in it. Just about all of the village could be seen. The school was at the end of the row a few houses, a grocery store, more houses, and a gas station. On one of the corners was a pub, the best-looking building in the village. It had an outside pavilion set with tables and beautiful rosery all around. The house beside the pub had a sign in front of it. It was the local newspaper office. She parked in front of it and got out. the front room of the house has been converted into an office and when she got to the front door, there was a sign taped to the window. It said, ‘Feeling under the weather today, be back to work tomorrow’.
This was going to slow down the investigation. She took a business card and wrote, ‘call me’, and stuffed it in the crack of the door.
She left the residence and instead of getting in her car, she turned left and went into to the pub. It was a small village. Typically, you would find that everybody knows everyone and everything that happens. This meteor event and this village was no different. She found out more about the event and where to find the farmer and farm with the impact crater. The bartender had even cut out the news story and had posted it on the wall, it was quite concise. She took a picture of it with her phone and left the establishment.
The farm was easily found, a white house with blue trim just like the bartender said. She stopped just outside the gate of the residence and parked beside the other vehicle that was there.
As she exited the car, she immediately noticed the fog in the air down by the far barn. It was the middle of the day and tulle fog usually fades away by this time of the day. It was odd but it was shrugged off. She went to the house of the farmer and knocked on the door. There was no response. She knocked again, nobody answered. She knocked again a little firmer shouting to see if someone was home. There was nothing. According to the people of the village, they said that the farmer would either be in the pub or there at the farm. Maybe he was too far away to hear, maybe.
Liz, a sturdy middle-aged woman, having spent all this time to get there, decided to roam around and see if she could find the crater maybe finding the farmer in the process. She was expecting that from the description told, that there was a crater of at least three meters wide somewhere on this farm, it should be noticeable. Seeing the fog was still by the far barn, Liz decided to go down there and see what was causing this oddity.
The barn sat in the lowest point of the property, a depression in the area. The fog seemed to be stationary there. As Liz got closer, the ground disturbance could be seen, it was about ten meters from the side of the barn. The fog looked to be centered around it and stretching all of the way over to where she was standing.
Needing a closer view, she stepped into the fog. It was not acting like any fog that she ever went through, it was thick and staying less than a half of meter off the ground. It swirled around her feet as she walked through it. The crater site was severely damaged. The farmer had been spending a good amount of time here looking for more fragments, it was obvious. There were various tools scattered around the area. A pick and shovel were on the dirt pile, a bar was implanted into the other side of the mound. Looking into the crater remains it was difficult to see much of anything, most was covered in fog. She crouched down and brushed some of the fog away so she could see better. It returned as fast as it could be brushed away. Something here in this pit must be generating it.
Liz pulled out her cell phone, the signal was weak but the was able to connect with a supervisor back at the office. A simple but complete report was given. The supervisor requested that she remain on site for further instructions. The call ended abruptly. She pulled out her phone and took a dozen pictures for the records.
She decided to return to the house to locate the farmer, maybe he was in the back property. She needed to know more of the incident. On her way back to the house, it was noticed that the back door was open. She went to the door and peered into the open doorway. Nobody could be seen. Liz knocked on the door, louder this time and in a raised tone asked if anyone was home. Nobody still answered. She went inside. The first thing that was noticed was food out on the table. It was as if someone was sitting there at one time. A jug of milk was out, she touched it. It was warm as if it had been there a while, the scent of souring milk proved this. A partially eaten sandwich was on a plate, she touched it and it was stale and dry. From what was seen, this food had been out for a while, maybe even days.
A hallway exited the kitchen. One way opened up into the living room and the other was to bedrooms. She decided to go into the living room first, calling out to anyone who would answer. There was still no reply. The living room was in a distressed state. Blankets were piled on the couch as if someone had been sleeping there recently. Food items, juice boxes and wrappers were scattered around the room, some on the coffee table and others just tossed to the floor. There was no one in the room but there was a scent of something off in the house, an antiseptic like smell. She opened the front door to get some fresh air into the house.
Liz returned to the hallway to get to the back of the building. The smell increased but now it had another scent in it, death. The first door was opened, the smell of death increased, it was a bathroom. The expert peered into the room and saw a foot of a small child poking out from behind the door. Slowly stepping into the room, softly asking if anyone was at home, still no response. Peering behind the door, a child of three of four was laying on the floor, a young boy. There was no breathing, the skin color was pale. This child was dead. From the look of it, it had not been there too long, no decay was visible. It was then that she saw the bed in the adjoining room. Two adults were there, no there is three of them. A baby was in between the two adults. Nobody was moving and a closer look showed that. The man was decaying more than the others. He had been dead the longest. The baby looked like it was next and then the woman, the mother of this family. She was getting scared now with so many bodies, dead bodies, in the house. She needed to get outside, now.
She had just made it out of the house. She dropped down to her knees expelling anything that was still in her stomach. Up on her feet, she made her was back to the car and grabbed a water bottle from the safety bag and flushed her mouth and face with it. The dead smell still lingering in her nostrils. A moment later she righted herself.
Another call was made, she relayed what she saw in the house to those that were listening. At the end of the call, she got the same abrupt ending.
A sheet of paper was retrieved from the car and a descriptive note was made of what was found. This was taped to the front door with one of her cards and closed. The expert went around to the back door and closed it also.
This was when the doghouse was noticed. A puppy was standing outside of it. As the expert got closer more dogs could be seen inside the little house, they were not moving. She went up to the doghouse and gave it a couple of thumps with her fist. Nothing moved, this was not good.
The puppy thought otherwise and was ready to play, it seemed to be having none of the same issues. The expert picked up the puppy, not wanting it to be left alone and put it in the car. It immediately peed on the passenger seat. That was OK, this was a rental.
The trip back to the village was slow as the expert pondered what had been seen. The puppy was enjoying itself while it chewed on the armrest of the seat, oblivious to what had happened. Another stop at the pub was short-lived. She went into the pub for a beer but ended up telling those that were there at the time of the situation up on that farm. She left contact information with the bartender and departed the pub. She never got that beer.
Back in the car, Liz contemplated the situation and decided that it might not be good to hang around this village, it was time to leave. The puppy now sleeping in the wettened passenger seat as the engine rattled to life again.
Her thinking was that she could return at any time. On the road out of the village in a two-lane zone of the road, several black SUV’s passed by going to the village. It was startling as they took up a major portion of the narrow road as they passed.
At one of the one lane sections she was stopped by another one of these vehicles that was parked across the road. Behind it was a camouflage-colored military vehicle. It had a very large machine gun on roof, a man in full face mask was at the gun. The military man cocked the gun and pointed right at the car.
Liz looked down at her hand and saw that it had a sheen of blue on it. This was the last contact that she had.
The puppy however had found its way down to a city dog pound where it was adopted by a family whose main family contributor was a pilot of an international airlines. Unknown to all was that the puppy was carrying the viral element, it had no effect on the small dog. Others were not so lucky …
‘It had been forty-four days since the first search. Before this day nothing had come up. Today a statement was announced live on just about every channel on the TV. It gave the area of a country that was not allowing anyone to enter or leave. It kind of sounded like one of those stay out zones that have been stated before. Corona was always closing off one place or another, this seemed like it was nothing new. The strange thing was the live broadcast of it on so many channels on the TV at the same time for just another one of these statements that we have heard so much these days.
Twelve days later this was repeated. This time it specified an isolation zone that was the entire country.
Twenty-four days passed when the newsflash stated some of the truth of the issue. It was a viral agent that was spreading, isolation was all that was being suggested. There were statements that this virus had a high infectious rate, but there was nothing on the lethality of the virus at this time.
It was over two months later that results were finally coming in that the virus was killing many of those that were infected, it was resembling the black plague. Everyone not affected by the viral element was a carrier that unknowingly spread it wherever they went.
No travel disruption happened for the first two months of infection. It allowed for the viral element to travel around the world, almost every country was infected. This spreading made it to even the most remote locations in the next month. It spread to the entire population of each area in the following months, there was no exceptions. The lethality of the virus was four out of five in most areas.
It took eight months before the deaths started to cease. The population of the world is now about one billion souls, nobody knows for sure. For areas that did not cleanse itself of the dead bodies, they became filth and disease ridden, making it unlivable to human populations. Entire countries had to be closed.’
