The Stranger by Simon Clark Read Free Book Online Page A

years to run its course. Mostly it might disappear for ten years or more and the infected person has no symptoms, nothing. Then back it comes out of the great blue yonder. The sufferer suddenly finds pus squirting from his ears. His hair falls out. His skin gets all blistered and a dirty great crust of scabs forms on his face. Madness gathers up his wits and hurls them from the window.
    The funkily named Gantose Syndrome was something like that. When experts told us the condition had run its course what seemed to have happened was that the Gantose bug merely submerged itself into the bones and muscle tissues of the victims, where it mutated into something even more sinister. After the first real heat wave of the year that was enough to knock an elephant off its feet Gantose 2 flared up again.
    Here’s another headline:
    tet!
USA
    This explains everything in the word. Like the surprise attack by the communists in Vietnam, in what were supposed to be safe cities hundreds of miles away from the front line, so America was torched. I mean literally torched. On Sunday, June 1, refugees ran amok in towns and cities across the whole of the U.S.
    Afterward, there were all kinds of theories. That it had been a coordinated attack. That the bread bandits all had little radios with them, that the order was broadcast in code and WHAM! They rioted in their millions, turning over cars, looting stores, burning houses, killing American men, women and children with their bare hands.
    It wasn’t quite like that. Everyone agrees now it was that bug in their blood. It burrowed into their brains and made them do that. Just like a man with rabies’ll jump from a window rather than permit a glass of water to come near him. But why did it all happen on that Sunday? The doctor here in Sullivan will tell you it was the heat wave that fired up the dormant bug, pushing it into its next phase of the condition.
    Still things don’t add up. A mystery the size of Texas’s still hanging over our heads. Sure there were millions of bread bandits here. To carry on the disease image, they’d infiltrated and infected the entire body of our country from one end to the other. But there still weren’t enough of them to make the whole nation implode. But that’s what happened. Our society, which seemed solid as the rock you stand on, just disintegrated.
    One problem was the lack of food. Huge, HUGE problem. Bread bandits looted everything down to the last candy bar from supermarkets. They torched cars on the highways. Roads blocked everywhere, and the image blazing in my mind right now is that big antique vase in a cartoon. The one that gets just a gentle tap and a little crack appears . . . that crack in the china leads to another one, then another, and another, until with a low crick-crack sound the vase becomes a mass of fractures before the whole thing collapses into dust. Our country was like that vase. Suddenly there was no food. Thousands of families were burned from their homes. Bread bandits torched food warehouses. Food couldn’t be delivered to where it was needed through gridlocked roads.
    American citizens became refugees, too. Only they headed for cities that had no food either. What takes your breath away was the SPEED it all happened. I’m not talking weeks, but four, maybe five, days. Panic buying at service stations meant gasoline vanished. No new stocks could be brought in because roads were a mess of burnt-out trucks. The guys who were to clear the routes into town with bulldozers didn’t show up to man the vehicles because they were working their guts out to find food for their families. Can you blame them? Any more than you can blame the cops for choosing to guard their own homes, rather then standing guard at city hall to stop some bread bandit trashing the Xerox machine? It’s human instinct. Family first.
    Freakish things happened. Marines protected an IRS office while bread bandits butchered kids in kindergarten half a mile away.