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situation. After three more strong rum and cokes, he had finished the almost full bottle of rum. He went back to the couch and fell asleep again.

      When he woke up next morning, he had a bad hangover. It was even worse than after his occasional Saturday-night party binges. Through the somewhat-familiar pain, however, he recognized he probably was not going to die like everyone else in Morrisburg. He was not at all sure this was a good thing.

      England: The Survivors

      Ripon was a small city in the northeast of England, with a population of about thirteen thousand before the disaster of 2015. It was a market town in the center of a large farming community. Margaret West had moved there just a couple of years earlier, after her divorce, to be closer to her parents. They lived in the small village of Dishforth, only five miles away. She had turned thirty a month earlier and had no children. She was a doctor and had joined two other local general practitioners in starting a family-medicine clinic in Ripon eighteen months earlier.

      SDC was relatively slow to reach Ripon. The first deaths in England had occurred on Wednesday night in London. These victims had caught SDC after contact with Jim Henderson in New York on Monday.

      From London, SDC had spread rapidly to most major population centers in England. By the luck of the draw, SDC did not reach Ripon until the following Monday. Three families fleeing from Leeds had arrived. Like most of the people fleeing from SDC, they had left too late; they were already infected.

      Margaret and her colleagues in the clinic were aware of the devastating progress of the contagion from the news on television, radio and newspapers. They were also receiving email bulletins from the Ministry of Health as SDC progressed across the country. Margaret had seen the initial reports on Friday July 17, with some significant professional interest but without too much real concern for herself or her patients in Ripon. The hundreds of unexplained sleep deaths in North America were a long way away, on the other side of the Atlantic. Closer to home, about fifty deaths had been reported in England, all in the London area.

      The first Ministry of Health email bulletin had arrived at noon on Friday. It did not include much useful information that had not been on the TV newscast she had seen at lunchtime. It did note the cold like symptoms that many of the victims had experienced before their unexplained sleep deaths, according to their families.

      It was Margaret’s turn to be the clinic’s on-call doctor for the weekend. She suspected she might get some emergency calls from patients suffering from cold symptoms. As she left the office on Friday, she mentally prepared her “there is nothing to be concerned about” speech to answer these calls. She could not have known just how wrong her assessment of the situation really was.

      The news on Saturday was much more disturbing. The numbers of reported deaths in England and the rest of Europe grew alarmingly as they were discovered and reported during the morning. By noon, the urgent bulletins were appearing on the TV every fifteen minutes and the latest reports put the number of deaths in Europe at more than a thousand. The reports and speculations on the internet were even more disturbing.

      Margaret had already taken more than twenty emergency calls from clinic patients. They were becoming harder to satisfy and her “nothing to be concerned about” response became less and less acceptable to them—and to herself.

      By Saturday afternoon, Margaret began to have severe doubts. After some discussion on the phone, the three clinic doctors decided to go into the office immediately, review all the information available and decide on an action plan for their patients. They met in the waiting room with the TV tuned to the BBC, which was now running continuous news coverage of the SDC disaster. Reports were starting to come in from North America. Because of the time difference, several thousand Friday-night deaths were just being discovered as their loved ones awoke.

      The news at four (eleven in the morning in Washington) was that the president of the United States had declared an unprecedented general state of emergency. He had suspended all travel by air, rail and automobile within the country. The doctors cynically but correctly interpreted this news to mean things were getting totally beyond control in North America. Shortly afterwards, the British prime minister made a live TV broadcast to the nation, announcing similar quarantine measures to take effect immediately in Great Britain.

      The Ministry of Health bulletins kept coming in on the fax and email during the afternoon. Apart from updating the estimated victim count, they were not much help to the doctors, who were trying to come up with any usable advice for their own patients in Ripon. In the end, the three doctors decided that rather than continue to try to answer an increasing number of emergency calls without anything new to say, they would simply leave a voice message for all callers. The essence of their message was the same as the government’s “stay calm and stay put” instructions. They did not feel good about their response to anxious patients but did not know what else they could do. They left the office and agreed to get in touch again by phone at noon the next day.

      Sunday was a very difficult day for Margaret and her colleagues. The news of the escalating number of deaths was the only thing in the papers and on the television and radio. As Sunday progressed, it became obvious the number of deaths had increased tenfold during the night. The first deaths closer to home had been reported from Leeds, less than thirty miles away.

      The few patients who knew her home phone number or email contacted her directly after getting frustrated with listening to the message on the clinic’s emergency number. The connection to the mild cold symptoms had now been publicized in the news and on the internet. Anyone suffering from a runny nose and headache was in a real panic. They were desperate to hear about vaccines or drugs to cure them. Her responses to these calls were not well accepted. Her neighbors and friends, who knew she was a doctor and where she lived, just knocked on her door. She could not give them any peace of mind either.

      When she talked on the phone to her clinic partners at noon, she found their experiences had been similar. They met briefly in the office but were unable to come up with any plan of action that was any better than what they were already doing. There were more emails and faxes from the Ministry of Health, but they still did not provide any new information. They did give a special phone number for doctors to access to get help in dealing with SDC. After trying the number for more than half an hour, the doctors finally got through. To their immense frustration, they discovered they could only leave a message on an answering machine. They put the phone down in disgust and despair.

      During Saturday and Sunday, Margaret had talked to her parents in Dishforth on the phone several times. Their level of anxiety was increasing with every news report they heard. At the end of a stressful and frustrating Sunday afternoon, Margaret decided there was nothing more she could do for her patients. She would drive over to her parents’ place for dinner and try to calm them down. She got into her car for the short drive, not thinking at all about the ban on all travel that had been announced the previous day.

      She encountered the first roadblock at the edge of town. The police officer staffing the barricade was one of her patients, so she had little trouble persuading him to let her past the roadblock; she was a doctor carrying out her medical duties. However, he did warn her that all the major roads had been blocked to enforce the travel ban. Being a local, she was not too concerned. She knew all the back roads and immediately plotted an alternative route to her parents’ house that would bypass all the major roads and the most likely locations for roadblocks.

      Half an hour later, she parked in front of her parents’ small bungalow in Dishforth. They were relieved to see her and welcomed her in with even more warmth than usual. She had phoned ahead to let them know she was on her way. By the time she arrived, her mother had dinner ready. As the family ate their dinner together, they discussed the crisis. Her parents were obviously expecting more from their daughter, the doctor, than she was able to provide.

      Margaret had no more news than what they had already seen on the TV bulletins. To their great distress, she did not bring a vaccine or any other drugs to prevent or cure the disease that was now spreading rapidly across the country. She patiently explained to them that there were no known medicines to fight SDC. The only protection was to avoid coming into

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