the second epidemic

The second epidemic was the final, unkindest cut of the superflu pandemic—a Darwinian culling that killed roughly 16 percent of survivors in technological societies like the United States but only about 3 percent in underdeveloped countries such as Peru or Senegal. It had no single name because its symptoms differed wildly from case to case; a sociologist like Glen Bateman might have called it "natural death" or "those ole emergency room blues." In a strictly Darwinian sense, it was the final cut, a second wave of mortality that winnowed the already drastically reduced human population through accident, suicide, murder, and medical incompetence rather than through the virus itself.

Causes and Background

The second epidemic arose not from a new pathogen but from the collapse of the social and medical infrastructure that had once protected the vulnerable. With hospitals overwhelmed or deserted, emergency services nonexistent, and the normal safety nets of civilization gone, survivors were left to fend for themselves in a world where a simple injury, a forgotten illness, or a moment of panic could prove fatal. The epidemic was most common in technological societies, where people had been dependent on complex systems for survival, and least common in underdeveloped countries, where self-reliance was already a way of life. The superflu had wiped out 99.4 percent of the population, as estimated by Project Blue's analysis of the shifting-antigen virus, and the second epidemic finished off many of those who had been spared the initial infection.

Forms of Death

The second epidemic took a staggering variety of forms. Sam Tauber, a five-and-a-half-year-old boy in Murfreesboro, Georgia, wandered into a field of wild blackberries after his entire family died of the superflu; he fell through a rotted well-cover, broke both legs, and died twenty hours later from shock, hunger, and dehydration. Irma Fayette of Lodi, California, a virgin morbidly afraid of rape, shot herself dead with her father's .45 pistol when a drunken man approached her house, killing herself instantly. George McDougall of Nyack, New York, a Catholic who could not commit suicide, jogged for hours every day to keep his grief at bay until he suffered a massive coronary thrombosis and fell dead on a street corner, his face expressing something very like gratitude. Eileen Drummond of Clewiston, Florida, got drunk on crème de menthe, fell asleep while smoking, and burned down her house and most of the town. Arthur Stimson of Reno, Nevada, stepped on a rusty nail, developed gangrene, and died of shock and blood loss while trying to amputate his own foot in the lobby of a casino. Milton Craslow of Harding County, New Mexico, was bitten by a rattlesnake and died half an hour later. Judy Horton of Milltown, Kentucky, who had been delighted by the superflu's removal of her husband and child, locked herself in a walk-in meat freezer and starved to death. Jim Lee of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, electrocuted himself trying to start a gasoline generator. Richard Hoggins of Detroit, Michigan, a heroin addict, injected himself with nearly pure China White and died six minutes later. These were not deaths from the flu; they were deaths from the collapse of the world that had once kept people alive.

Significance

The second epidemic underscored the fragility of human survival in the post-plague world. It was not a single disease but a syndrome of societal breakdown, a final reckoning for those who could not adapt to the new reality. The fact that it killed a far higher percentage of survivors in the United States than in poorer countries was a bitter irony: the very technological sophistication that had made American life comfortable had also made its people dependent on systems that no longer functioned. The second epidemic was the last great wave of mortality before the survivors could begin to rebuild, and it served as a brutal lesson in the costs of civilization's collapse. As Glen Bateman might have observed, it was the final cut—the unkindest cut of all.