LITMIR.BIZ

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quiet. She softly called to her mother, who had always been a light sleeper, without getting any response. She crept into her parents’ bedroom. She confirmed they both were unnaturally cold and had probably been dead for several hours. After gently kissing them goodbye, she wearily crept back to her own bed and cried herself to sleep. She fully expected never to wake up again.

      Much to her surprise, she did wake up, at about ten the next morning. In her misery over the loss of her mother and father, she realized she was destined to live at least one more day. She felt very much alone.

      France: The Survivors

      Henri Plouchard was a fifty-year-old baker in the historic city of Avignon in the south of France when the SDC catastrophe swept around the world. The youngest son of a farmer from a nearby village, he had lived in Avignon for more than thirty years. He was married to his childhood sweetheart, Josephine. They lived in a three-bedroom apartment above their small bakery with their two teenage sons, Jacques and Pierre. Henri’s routine had been very much the same every day of the week but Sunday for the fifteen years that he had owned and operated the bakery.

      When he climbed out of bed at his usual time—five in the morning—on Tuesday, July 14, 2015, he had no idea that his life was about to change forever. The flight from New York carrying a middle-aged couple from Glens Falls was at that time flying high over the Atlantic, still two hours from landing at Charles De Gaulle Airport near Paris. George and Jean Grayson were at the start of their long-planned vacation in the Provence region. Avignon was their first destination.

      Jean had made a last-minute stop on Monday at the Glens Falls public library to find just one more travel guide that would help them prepare for their holiday. She had been served by Elaine Henderson.

      Without her knowledge, she had taken more away from her library visit than just the book she had chosen. The SDC virus was now on its way to Avignon.

      After arriving in Paris, the Graysons caught the next high-speed TGV train from the airport directly to Avignon. Less than four hours later, just after lunchtime, they arrived at their destination and took a taxi to their hotel. They were very tired from their long journey but they decided to try to avoid sleeping until the evening. This would allow them to get a good overnight sleep and get adjusted quickly to the six-hour time change. They were both beginning to suffer from the coldlike symptoms of the infection that Jean had unwittingly picked up at the Glens Falls library just twenty-four hours earlier.

      They wandered out of their hotel and began a casual exploration of the streets of the old city nearby. After less than an hour of walking, they were feeling a little hungry. When they passed the storefront of Henri Plouchard’s bakery, they immediately were tempted by the assortment of fresh bread and pastries on display in the window. Henri himself served them the rolls and pastries they requested in their halting French and by pointing at the items they wanted. As usual, Henri was very friendly and helpful to American tourists when they visited his store. They were a major part of his business during the busy tourist season.

      Henri did not realize that as he took payment from the Graysons, he also received traces of the infectious and deadly SDC virus that had so recently started its path around the world. By the end of the day on Tuesday, he was infected himself, and he quickly spread the infection to his family, friends, customers, and many of the other citizens of Avignon with whom he came into contact in the next two days.

      Henri and Josephine were spared the worry about the news of the spreading infection, because they were among the very first people to be infected. By Wednesday night, all the Plouchard family was suffering from the cold symptoms. The infection was not sufficiently advanced to have any fatal results while they slept that night. The same was not true for the Graysons. They both died while asleep in their Avignon hotel room. Their unexplained deaths were not discovered until Thursday afternoon, when the hotel cleaning staff finally used their passkey to gain entry to their room.

      The Plouchard family never knew about the deaths of the Graysons. Despite the mild cold symptoms that all the family members were suffering from, they went about their normal business on Thursday. The boys went to school, and Henri and Josephine worked their usual long day in the bakery. That evening, they all had dinner together and watched television. By 10 p.m., they were all in bed, anticipating an early start again on Friday morning.

      Josephine and the two boys died in their sleep before midnight, when their hearts stopped beating. Henri slept until the alarm awoke him as usual at five. He was one of the few people with the rare genetic makeup that protected him from the “sleeping death” effect of the SDC virus. This was not to be a normal day.

      When he tried to awaken Josephine, he immediately knew that something was seriously wrong. In panic, he called loudly for his sons to wake up and fetch Doctor Leblanc, who lived just down the street. When he got no response from them, he rushed into their bedroom. In despair and disbelief, he quickly recognized that his boys were victims of the same condition as his wife. Suspecting the worst, Henri went to fetch the doctor himself.

      When he returned with Doctor Leblanc, his fears were confirmed. Josephine and the two boys were dead. Their cold bodies proved that they had been dead for several hours. Doctor Leblanc had no explanation to offer He immediately phoned for an ambulance to take the bodies to the local hospital for autopsies to try to diagnose the cause of death.

      Because of the unusual nature of the deaths, he also called the local police. When the officer in charge heard what had happened, he was immediately suspicious that the family’s deaths had not been from natural causes. He strongly suspected some kind of foul play on Henri’s part. He was about to leave the station to pick up Henri for questioning when he received another call about more suspicious sleeping deaths.

      In this case, it was a family of four living on the other side of the city from the Plouchards. The victims were the family of the taxi driver who had driven the Graysons from the train station to their hotel. Like the Plouchards, they had all died in their sleep overnight, without any obvious explanation. Because the officer was also aware of the deaths of the Graysons reported by the hotel the previous afternoon, he correctly stopped worrying about a potential multiple murderer and started worrying about a deadly disease.

      By the end of the morning, ten other cases of sleep deaths had been reported, for a total of thirty-five victims. No one in Avignon ever discovered that the common factor in all the deaths was direct or indirect contact with the Graysons from Glens Falls.

      Henri was unaware that he had been for a short time a suspected multiple murderer. He was in shock and Doctor Leblanc was very worried about his state of mind. Eventually, he persuaded Henri to take a strong sedative. Henri went back to bed and fell into a deeply drugged sleep. When he woke up on Saturday, it seemed at first that he had just had a terrifying nightmare. When he found no sign of his wife and sons in the apartment, he had to admit to himself that the previous day’s events had been no dream.

      When he went out into the street, Henri discovered that Avignon was now a town in panic. He found that many of his neighbors and friends had firsthand experience of the same kind of loss. In many cases, all members of families had died in their sleep during the night and had just been discovered by their neighbors.

      Not able to face his personal losses or understand what was going on in this brutal new world, he retreated to his apartment over the bakery. He locked the doors and started a new path to oblivion with the bottles of red wine he found in the pantry. He did not expect or want to wake from the sleep that finally came.

      In that wish, Henri was to be disappointed. Of the almost ninety thousand population of Avignon, he was the only survivor less than a week after the Graysons’ arrival in the city.

      United States: The Survivors

      Vero Beach was a town on the Atlantic coast of Florida, about a hundred and fifty miles north of Miami. Before SDC, the population of the town itself was about seventeen thousand permanent residents, plus a varying number of tourists, depending on the season.

      The contagion had reached Vero Beach quickly. On that fateful Monday morning, the

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