The Winter

By J R Hobeck

How did the Winter start and when will it end. A courageous, hardy band of survivors struggles to survive a cataclysm that threatens to wipe out the entire human race. In the process they discover strength they did not know they possessed, along with some awful truths about those they admired and trusted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Indigo Sea Press
• Release date: Jun 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781938101663

Book preview

Chapter 1: First things first

The Winter came upon mankind suddenly. That is what most of the Beefs say. Beefs are the people who were alive before the Winter and remember how life used to be. Or, at least, they remember how their own lives used to be. That is something that I find fascinating; there is an incredible diversity in how the Beefs view the past. Some of them think that life is actually better now for them than it was before. For others, the pain of loss in their past is a shadow that keeps them from living in their present.

There are a few of the Beefs who claim to have seen it coming. They say they saw the signs before the event. They cite things like the rapid destruction of the tropical rainforests, global warming, increasing antibiotic resistance (although I have yet to get a good explanation of how this relates to viruses), civil unrest in Africa driving the population from the cities into the countryside and famine in Africa causing alteration in usual diet, political upheaval and collapse in the Arab world, financial ruin in Europe, technological advances and inequality among nations, and the neo-luddite movements, all as harbingers of the devastation that was to come. They have been able to draw very detailed connections between these things and what has happened. Of course, it is likely that these connections were created in hindsight. Of course there are others who say they are lying, that it was impossible to see it coming. That is one of the perpetual discussions among the Beefs when they gather in the taverns or around their fireplaces at night.

From the beginning of the Winter until now, what little is left of humanity has been almost entirely concerned with survival. Much of what makes up a truly civilized society has been put aside, although not forgotten, in the day-to-day pursuit of what is required to keep mankind alive. Before now, there has not been time to put together a coherent history of what happened. But we have reached the point where the new society has settled down into a steady enough rhythm and pulled back far enough from the brink of oblivion, to make such an undertaking possible.

The reason for writing this history is twofold. The first is simply for historical interest. None of the Beefs remembers everything. Even the most boisterous and pompous of them will readily admit that. There are often long discussions late into the night in the few taverns around New Phoenix, discussing various details of what happened. Many of those who survived would like to have a comprehensive, fact based history to refer to. Many want to validate their own memories. Some want a history to use as a weapon to invalidate the theories of others about what happened.

For some, the idea of a complete history gives them hope for some sort of closure. For them, knowing with certainty what happened will put to rest any ambiguity or second guessing that has plagued them. For some it is the desire for an accurate timeline. The events, although horrible, have for many, become muddied and run together. They have become, in some cases, foggy in the shadow of grief. For others, there is the desire to know if there might have been a way to avoid the tragedy. For others, perhaps there is a search for evidence that there was nothing that could have been done. I think this may be one of the biggest motivators. Many of those who survived, when their spouses, children, parents and friends died, have an immense sense of guilt. To be able to definitely say that there was nothing else they might have done to keep those others alive might bring a bit of peace. For now, there are simply too many holes in our knowledge for them to be able to forgive themselves for living. Whether the history can actually fulfill this role remains to be seen.

The second reason is simple. As has been said many times before, Those who do not heed the past are doomed to repeat it. Mankind barely survived after the event. Our leaders, and most of the general population who understand that, want to know as much about what happened as possible. The hope is that that knowledge will be useful in preventing something like it from happening again. It has also been said that the victor writes the history books; in this case it is the survivors. That is one point that seems to be universally agreed upon. There was no winner in this, when the world changes as much as it has changed from before the Winter until now. There is no one left to claim victory.

The other part of this point is that there are a few of our leaders who want to compare what happened to us with the other great collapses of civilization that have occurred in the past. They want to know if the Winter has any similarities to the fall of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Egyptian Dynasties or, more recently, the end of the British Empire and the Soviet Union. They are looking to see if there are common errors to be avoided, far before the point of crisis, to make what is left of civilization more stable, with a long-term plan to maintain that stability. The basic idea is that they want to see if there are any past collapse issues to be aware of that may cause problems in the near future.

I’m not sure this is really a valid association to be made. In the instance of each of those other situations, the human population remained somewhat stable. Granted, a portion of the population may have been enslaved, moved or absorbed into a new nation, but the number of people remained fairly constant before and after the collapse. That is simply not the case for us. By some estimates 99.8 percent of the world’s population is dead. I have a hard time extrapolating the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, due to problems with their basic ideology, to apply to the near extinction of the human species.

My uncle Rolland Mowery has been assigned the task of writing this history. My name is Hope Steele. I will be helping him. I have worked alongside of him since the early days of the Archives. That is why I was asked to help him write this work.

I have decided to keep a journal of this process, as an informal record of where and how we get the information and maybe as a companion to the formal History. I plan on writing about the mythology of before, as I understand it, as a counterpoint to the structured History that Uncle Rolland and I will be writing. Many of the stories told by the Beefs have what, I’m sure, are grains of truth. I think it will be interesting to compare those stories to what we find in our research.

Chapter 2: The end of my first life

I’ll begin with a little about myself. I’m seventeen years old. I was twelve years old when The Winter began. The first time I realized there was something really wrong was late one evening when I was at home with my mother. My father had left a few days earlier on another business trip. Like a lot of twelve year olds, I didn’t really pay much attention to the news on television or on the radio. All I really knew was that there was some kind of sickness going around and school was closed because of that. I remember sitting in front of the fireplace in the living room, its warmth and light washing over me. The orange glow of the fire was the only light in the room. My mother said we would pretend we were camping that night and sleep in the living room, with the fire in the fireplace as our campfire.

The power is out and the rest of the house is too cold right now. So we’ll just stay in here tonight, she had said.

She had been smiling, but I could tell there was worry behind the smile. We were sitting in front of the fireplace with the lights out. There was some kind of music playing from the battery powered radio. I remember a buzzing sound, followed by a creepy, mechanical man’s voice. I don’t remember what the voice said. I didn’t hear it clearly. When the buzzing had started, my mother had gone and picked up the radio, with her back to me and turned the volume down, but not off, so she could hear it and I couldn’t. I only remember that my mother began to cry. She hugged me close for a long time. Then she said it was time to go to sleep. She tucked me into a big comforter on the couch. Usually, in my room, she would close the door and leave me alone to fall asleep. This night she sat in the rocking chair next to the couch, watching me, with tears running down her cheeks. I know now that the voice on the radio was telling us what was happening in India and Pakistan. I didn’t understand it then. I do now.

The next morning when I woke up, the room was cold, and the fire had almost gone out. My mother had moved from the rocking chair to a big easy chair close to the fireplace. She was snoring softly, wrapped up in a heavy quilt that usually lay folded at the foot of the bed in the guest room. A ray of sun just touched the very edge of the quilt, and I watched for a moment as the dust floating in the beam seemed to dance.

I started to build the fire, like my father had taught me, by first putting on a couple small pieces of wood, then laying larger pieces across them. There was enough heat left in the coals to catch the smaller bits of wood on fire. Soon the fire was crackling as the room became both brighter as more sun came through the window and warmer as the fire began to make more heat.

I remember this with incredible clarity. I think the reason for that is these were the last moments my world still seemed somewhat normal. The shock of what would come in the next few days would somehow imprint this moment into my memory.

My mother slept on while I sat under a blanket and read. I thought this was strange. My mother usually was an early riser and a light sleeper. The clock over the fireplace was an old wind up clock that held a ritualistic place in our usual Sunday evenings.

That’s called an eight day clock, I remember my father telling me. It will run for eight days on one winding. That way if you wind it once a week, it never runs down.

Each Sunday evening we would wind the clock. If my father were home, he and I would wind it. If it were just my mother and I, she would watch as I wound the clock. We had done it every Sunday as far back as I remembered. This morning the clock showed nine forty-five, when there was a knock on the door.

Go see who is there, my mother said. Her voice didn’t sound quite right. She sat up and looked terrible. Her face was pale, with her red-rimmed eyes looking very out of place. There were splotches of pink on her pale skin as well and a dark rim around one nostril that looked like she had had a bloody nose. I stared at her for a moment as I realized there was something very wrong.

There was another knock at the door, louder this time. I went and stood on my tiptoes to look through the peep hole. It was my Uncle Rolland. I opened the door and gave him a hug.

There’s something wrong with Mom, I said.

She’s sick, isn’t she? he asked.

Yes. How did you know?

There are a lot of people who are sick, he said.

Uncle Rolland stayed with us after that. He didn’t leave for very long at a time, He stayed with my mother and me as she got sicker.

The next day, she had a really bad nose bleed and wasn’t able to eat. She got up and walked around the apartment a lot. She said she felt restless. This restlessness went on for a couple days.

Then she started sleeping a lot. She also started coughing up blood. Then after about a week, she started having blood coming out of her eyes mixed with tears, so she had a crust of dried blood on her eyelids and her cheeks.

All at once, my mother seemed a little better. I remember having a brief moment of hope. My Uncle Rolland had prepared me. He had told me that sometimes when people are very sick, they have a last surge for a short amount of time just before the end. He told me my mother would die. But, for just a moment, I thought she might live. Then an hour later she lay down and called me to her.

I think I’m done. Go with your Uncle Rolland. He will take care of you, she said.

I could do nothing but cry. I watched her as she closed her eyes. After a time, it could have been a few seconds or a few minutes, I simply don’t know how long, she opened her eyes again.

I love you, she said.

She took a breath, let it out, took another, let it out and that was it. She died. At the last, there was no struggle. I watched her eyes, locked on my own. For a moment after that last breath, there was life there. Then it was gone. It just disappeared. One moment she was alive. The next she wasn’t.

I was alone in the house. My Uncle Rolland had gone out to try and get water and more batteries. I think now he wanted me to have these last minutes with my mother alone, He knew it was over, and he didn’t want to be in the way as I let my mother go. I sat and cried. I felt cold, despite the heat from the fire. At that moment I felt totally alone. My world had changed. I just didn’t yet realize how much the whole world had changed.

My father was not home when everything happened. My father was a businessman who traveled a lot for his job. He was away on one of his business trips when the world went sideways. He was in India when the bombs fell. I have few memories of him. He spent more time travelling than he spent at home. I have a couple pictures of him. He had very kind eyes. In one of the pictures he is holding me when I was a baby. I like that picture, I can see how much he loved me. Now the only family I have left is my uncle.

I have friends who are a few years older than me. They remember how things were before. They remember both of their parents clearly. Sometimes they talk about how their parents died. The descriptions they give of their parents dying because of the Monkeypox are disturbing because they are so similar to how I remember my mother dying. I know the Monkeypox is what killed my mother, and I hate to hear about it. Looking at it from the standpoint of better ways to die, I think my dad got the better deal. For him, it was a flash; then it was over. I hope when it is my time to die, I will be lucky enough to go in a flash like my father and not in a long, lingering, painful death like my mother.

Sometimes I can see the pain on my friends’ faces in the quiet moments, when a comment or a picture catches them off guard.