Post by StoryGirl83 on Nov 10, 2011 22:48:40 GMT -5
Chapter One – Until the Whole World Dies
Tuesday, April 27, 2027
Time has a way of bringing decay. An old shack a mile or so outside of Duxbury, Massachusetts looked like it had seen its fair amount of time. Everything within it was old and broken down.There was a table that have lost two of it’s legs. Broken pottery and food so molded even the mold had died lay on the floor at the broken end. Most of the items lay broken or decayed. Time had not been good to them.
One a wobbly end table a clock that had long since quit ticking sat perched. It looked as if it would begin a downward decent any second, but it moved not an inch.
Then, a curious think happened. The hands of the clock started to move. Slowly at first and then faster with every second that past, the clock turned in a counter clockwise direction. The backward movement counted back seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years until thirteen decades had been counted. And when it had counted back the last second of those thirteen decades it stopped as suddenly as it had started.
Through the broken glass of the window a well could be seen and from it a purple smoke drifted out. At the window, as if she had always been there, a tiny girl peered out. Through her body objects on her other side could be just made out as if she wasn’t quite there. She turned her little head, sadness in her eyes, and to a woman who had most certainly not been there a minute before she said, “Mama, ‘tis ‘ap’nin’, ‘gain.”
Friday, April 30, 2027
The Trudeau residence was rather quiet as Vicki Trudeau made her way into the kitchen. She stretched up and opened the cupboard to grab out a bowl. Over the next couple of minutes she collected a spoon, a box of her favorite cereal, a jug of milk, and a glass. She carried the items into the living room and spread them out on the floor.“Time?” she absently asked.
A clock in the wall of the apartment flickered on and a voice stated, “The time is now oh five-hundred-fifty-nine.”
“Perfect,” she practically purred as she flopped down onto a bean pillow she had arranged on the floor. “TV on. Volume fifteen. Station four-ninety-seven. Begin.”
She was about five minutes into her favorite television show, a show that had never aired in the other reality, but had been running only reruns for over fifteen years, when it was interrupted. Vicki glared at the screen as a map of eastern Massachusetts filled it.
“The area in and around Duxbury has been put under quarantine,” a disembodied voice announced. “It is unknown what is causing the quick spreading disease, but it has been only two days since the first case was spotted and there are already over six hundred confirmed cases. Be advised to avoid the city until further notice. Doctor’s are doing everything they can to contain and diagnose the disease.”
Vicki stared at the screen startled. Duxbury was less than an hour’s drive from there. The man on the screen described the symptoms and then he listed off disease after disease that had already been eliminated. It seemed that the medical community couldn’t even figure out how the disease was spread.
As soon as the announcement finished Vicki ordered the TV off as she ran out of the room, down the hall, and into her parents’ room. Her parents would keep her safe, wouldn’t they?
Tuesday, May 4, 2027
Wyatt had been at the hospital for over ten hours. He slipped into the break room and sank down into a chair.“Coffee?” Helen Hensley, one of the hospital’s nurses, asked him.
Wyatt took it from her with a smile.
“I heard they roped you in here,” she commented. “Did your boss mind?”
Wyatt shook his head. “Half the museum staff is here in the hospital. Hal closed down until further notice. It’s not like anyone was breaking down the door to get in anyway.” He took a sip of the coffee and put the cup down on the end table next to him.
“How’re you holding up?” she asked. “I heard your uncle’s got a pretty bad case.”
Wyatt hung his head down and sighed. “My aunt Prue’s going pretty crazy. She wanted to bring my cousins out here, but there aren’t any airlines running.” He looked up at her, sadly. “You?”
“My family’s all out here,” she informed him, “but yeah, a few of them have come down with it. People quit saying how lucky we were that they just had mild cases, when people started dying yesterday.”
Wyatt nodded, dejected. “Hard to think anyone’s lucky after that.”
“The death count just keeps getting bigger and nothing we do helps,” she moaned. “They still don’t even know how people are getting it. And it doesn’t match up with anything in their database.”
“Four-hundred-seventeen,” Wyatt mumbled.
“What?”
“That’s the latest death count,” he informed her. “A four-year-old died in Weymouth five minutes ago.” He looked so tired, so weary.
“The last I had heard was three-sixty-four,” she whispered. “That was less than an hour ago.”
He took another sip of the coffee and said nothing.
“I got to get back to work,” Helen announced suddenly. “I hope your uncle gets better.”
Wyatt offered her a weak smile. “Thanks, Helen. Your family, too.”
“Thanks,” she replied before she headed back into the hospital to see to the comfort of the sick. There was nothing they could do to heal them, because they had no idea what was making them sick.
As she closed the door behind her Wyatt sipped the rest of the coffee. This had better be regular, because it was going to be a while before he had time for sleep. He looked down at his hands. He’d been told that sometimes whitelighters could heal disease, but if it weren’t for the broken leg he’d accidentally healed earlier, he would have thought his healing power was broken. It hadn’t affected anyone who was sick.
Thursday, May 6, 2027
The attic in the manor was unusually busy or rather unusually full. Half a dozen teenagers lay sound asleep on the couch and the floor. Hank Mitchell stood in front of the podium that held the Book of Shadows. As of five minutes before he had looked at every page in the book twice. That didn’t, of course, mean that he had read them all, but he’d looked at them.“Want me to take over?” Hank’s cousin, Hope Halliwell offered.
Hank shook his head. “There’s nothing in here, no point in you wasting time looking. We’ll need to find another source.”
“What if there is no other source?” she looked at him concerned. “Not every demon or evil spell out there has shown up before. There’s a first time for everything.”
He closed the Book and looked at her. “It’s not new. This has happened before.”
But where’s your proof,” she asked. “We asked Uncle Leo and he didn’t remember anything like this.”
“He also didn’t remember when James Thomas kidnapped all those kids in 1927,” he pointed out.
“He wasn’t even three yet,” she protested.
“Exactly,” Hank agreed. “If this happened when he was young or before he was born, he wouldn’t know anything about it.”
“Yow asked Ava’s kids,” she added. “They’re pretty old.”
“Yes, but they didn’t spend much time out of the alternate dimension James Thomas created,” Hank pointed out.
Hope frowned as she thought. “Well, what about your grandpa? What did he say?”
“I haven’t been able to reach him,” Hank admitted. “He doesn’t exactly have a phone number.”
Hope sighed. “Do we know anyone older than that?”
“The elders,” was his mumbled reply.
She wrinkled her nose. “That means going Up There. I sure can’t do that.”
“Neither can I,” he informed her.
“But I thought . . .”
He shrugged. “I can orb. I just can’t seem to orb Up There.”
“Have you ever tried before?”
He shook his head. “I’ve never had that need before.”
“Your mom’s downstairs,” Hope pointed out. “We can ask her to go Up There and ask. If you’ll do that, I’m going to wake Cilly so I can ask her to go see the cupids. They’ve been around a very long time. Maybe they know something.”
“According to your dad they don’t pay a whole lot of attention to world events unless they pertain directly to love,” he reminded her.
Hope frowned. “Well, I think nearly two thousand dead in the eastern US and Canada along with over four million sick from an unknown disease would catch their attention.”
Hank moaned. “Every day just gets worse.”
“We can’t let this go on another day,” she moaned. “All these people. A week ago no one was sick. Now there are millions scattered over the entire continent. How soon before South America’s infected, too?”
“I’d say that’s a sure bet,” Hank informed her. “There have been cases reported on the western coast of Europe. There’s little doubt that people in South America are either infected or will be soon.”
Hope’s bottom lip quivered. “I don’t want to lose Uncle Leo or Uncle Andy.”
Hank wrapped her up in his arms. “We know this is magical, that’s a start.”
“Only if we find a cure,” she looked up at him sadly. “Every hour more people die and every minute more people get sick.”
“Then, let’s quit looking through the Book of Shadows for something we know isn’t there,” he decided. “You wake your sisters and have Cilly go ask the cupids. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they know something. Then, go find out where Chris is. He’s going to start calling a lot of whitelighters until we find someone who knows something useful. I’ll go get my mom and ask her to go Up There. Then, I’ll wake my sisters. We don’t just sit idly by and do nothing. We are going to find this cure and we are going to do it today.”
Hope smiled up at him and wiggled out of his arms. He let go of her instantly and she headed over to where Cilly lay asleep on the floor by the couch.
As Hank headed toward the attic door he tried to hide his feelings. Please let me be right. Besides his two uncles, he had classmates who were sick, neighbors, and there was a girl he liked who was sick. He didn’t know what was going on, but he couldn’t let his cousin see just how scared he was.