Free Pox by P X Duke Page A

telescopes squatted atop
mountain observatories. Every once in a while, television news
would coax some university egghead to venture forth from his hole,
like the fabled, eager groundhog anxious to see if the sun might be
shining.
    The poor fool would position himself in front of a
bookshelf, hoping to look erudite and impressive, and fumble with a
mess of papers scattered randomly across a monstrous desk occupying
most of his office. Mumbled, incomprehensible jargon would follow.
No one could understand a word the purported scientist said.
    When the interview concluded, a network team of
reporters would make an attempt at repeating and interpreting what
had been said. Ignorant as the rest of us, the media ass-hats made
even less sense than the egghead. Instead, they preened in their
three-thousand-dollar suits and began interviewing each other.
    None of it made for good television.
    The egghead who was the cause of it all ended up
scurrying back to academe, never to be heard from again.
    The radio broadcasts fared no better. None were
capable of creating a verbal picture of the chaos. There was no one
to interview that could make sense of what was happening. Instead,
charlatans and fools ended up being commissioned to do the bulk of
the radio spots. Eventually, television caught on and moved to use
the same uninformed experts to turn the sky’s unfolding events into
religious and voodoo scams and shams.
    The final insult to anyone with a modicum of
intelligence occurred when someone randomly mentioned the sun’s
magnetic poles were about to reverse. Never mind that this had been
happening every ten or twelve years on a regular basis. Radio and
television evangelists ran with it as another sign of the coming
apocalypse.
    The hoarding began slowly, just as it had under other
false religious prophets in other years and decades. At first, it
was only a trickle, and went unnoticed. It wasn’t long before the
trickle became a flood, and everyone began trying to catch up to
everyone else.
    It seemed as though anyone who was capable of
thinking for themselves became a risk to others. If you didn’t jump
on the prophecy bandwagon, you had to be silenced.
     
    Towards the end of the third month, news reports of
measles outbreaks in South America and to the north in Canada began
to surface. That, coupled with reports of the deadly Ebola virus
growing out of control in West Africa, pretty much guaranteed that
panic, enforced by the Western news media’s fevered reporting,
would ensue.
    It wasn’t long before street-corner encounters
started. The gatherings began with a small-town atmosphere in the
rural outback of the state. Then cities large and small caught on
to the idea. Four and five people to begin with, growing by dozens
and then hundreds as word of the rallies got out, ensured that the
wave would be impossible to stop.
    Distrust of the media grew daily.
    Many, if not all, of the gatherings were encouraged
and pushed by religious zealots and fundamentalists in churches and
basements, in the past infamous only for their predictions of world
disaster that never occurred.
    People who wanted to believe in the end of the world
listened anew. The same tired explanations came straight out of
bible scripture, interpreted and preached with a religious zealotry
unknown in the past.
    It wasn’t obvious at first. Then, stores couldn’t
keep their shelves filled. They began to run out of everything.
First water. Then canned goods. Flour. Rice. It all disappeared, a
little bit at a time.
    Eventually, it became too late to halt the panic,
particularly when media caught wind of it and started their version
of panic and despair fueled by hourly updates and breaking news
headlines plastered across television screens.
    The more populous states called out the National
Guard first. Those with smaller, more isolated populations were the
last to call out the Guard. By then, it was too late.
    No one knew it at the