The Earworm -

The Earworm

by Andre Infante

   "You could wade the brillig tide
   And try a dozen slithy cars
   But why turn down a vorpal ride
   At Jimbo's used car stars!"

       -A radio advertisement for Jimbo's Used Car Stars.
      Censored, just in case.

Was it an invasion? An accident? Punishment from an ironic God? Or perhaps it was just some hellish innovation risen from the depths of the collective unconscious, a demon nurtured in a womb of jingles, of advertising, of voices on the radio. Maybe it was just bad luck. Bad luck. I almost could sleep at night if that were true.

In the end, I don't know. Nobody knows. Maybe nobody will ever know. I'm going to tell you, though, I'm going to tell you everything. There will be lies in it, though. Things that I don't know or are too hard to explain, I'm just going to lie about. It doesn't really matter- I'm a historian, I guess, but who cares about history when they don't have anything to eat? Let me start:

I should start in Saffron, Texas. I've been to Saffron. After, not before. Seems like it was a nice town, at one point. Real quiet place, right off the freeway. Sign says population 800, but somebody crossed it out and wrote 'two'. It has a church (Protestant), and a general store. That should give you some idea. It had a radio station, though, a shitty little local job, which must've been the initial point of contagion. Sometime in early august, the fifth or the sixth, they made the broadcast on local radio. Three weeks later, a man named Jack Bellson, a professional thief from Missouri, drove into town for gas.

The town is at the end of a pretty winding dirt road. You could miss it if you weren't looking closely. He found his path blocked by a road block, complete with orange barrels, saw horses, and police tape. This had turned back every potential visitor to the town for four weeks. It would have turned back Bellson, too, except that his needle had been firmly pegged at empty for four miles, and he hadn't seen another town for half an hour. So, Bellson drove his car off the road, drove at a thirty degree angle on the shoulder for ten feet, swerved back onto the road. His engine died as he coasted in the parking lot of the gas station. He would've been creeped out by then, because it would've been completely quiet. I know what fresh worm-towns look like, too. Boarded up windows, cold smoke pooling in the distance, cars abandoned in the street or wrecked. Not a sign of human life. Probably a few corpses, too, if you knew where to look.

He parked in the gas station by one of the pumps, got out, and found that the machines were inoperable. The power was off. He went into the store, and found that it was locked. He also noticed signs of chaos inside. Unfortunately, Benson was a curious man. He returned to his car, got a suitable bump key, and broke into the store. He found that the power and the water were off inside, and that the store had been completely robbed. Every scrap of food had been removed. He walked through the empty shelves for a few minutes, and then left.

He must've spent hours walking down the streets, which are eerily normal in places in worm towns. Cars parked in driveways, untouched front porches. You could almost believe everything was normal. He knocked on the doors to a few houses, and found them deserted. The three or four he tried were unlocked. Inside, the phones were gone, had been torn from the walls in some cases. The food was gone, all of it. The power was off. Many of the bathtubs were full of water, which was good, because the taps didn't work.

Now thoroughly spooked, he tried to call 911 on his cell phone, but got no service. He climbed up onto a roof, found the nearest cell tower, and looked closely at it. It looked like the top had been either cut off or blown up. Either way, it was missing, and a thin column of smoke rose from it. He tried the sheriff's office, and found it to be abandoned. The armory was empty, the cells were deserted, and there were bloodstains behind the front desk. For lack of a better idea, he tried the church next. It was locked as well, from the outside. He unlocked it, and went inside. Inside, he found about three hundred of the eight hundred people in the town. The pews had been covered with sleeping bags, and the entire congregation were huddled on the benches.  Towards the front, behind the podium, were piles of food – canned, bottled, dried, anything that would keep, and drums of water.

The people on the bed were sick or dying.  Most of the dead had been wrapped in black plastic garbage bags, though some of the more recent fatalities had been left to rot.  Those still alive were tremendously pale.  I’m intimately familiar with the symptoms- the wide, staring eyes, the pale skin, the cracked lips forming silent notes and words over and over and over again, breathing shallowly, fingers clutching at the bed linens.

Jack Bellson must have had a stronger constitution than I, because he lasted long enough in the little chapel to find the town doctor, carrying a pitcher and a sponge, collapsed behind the podium.  At that, his curiosity broke.  Fearing plague, he fled the chapel, breaking into the general store to steal a painter’s mask – a sensible precaution but, of course, entirely useless.

He stole a car, a black SUV that had careened into a telephone pole.  He found the corpse of a woman some twenty feet away under a slur of leaves, and took the key from her.  He opened the car, and found the girl.  She was maybe two or three, and half dead of dehydration.  She’d struck her head in the impact, and had a concussion.  Dried blood slicked down the sides of her face from her ears.  Dehydration aside, she didn’t appear to be infected.

He took her out of the car, put her in a red truck, wrapped in his jacket.  He broke into a house, found a glass, filled it with water from the tub, and brought it back to her.  After that, gesturing frantically that he would return, he got into the truck and drove.

He drove the truck through the barrier, onto the freeway, and drove for five miles until he got a signal.  He called the police, and told them there’d been an outbreak of some kind of plague, and told them where he was.  After convincing the 911 operator that he wasn’t joking, he was told to remain in his car, and drive away from any populated area.  A medical helicopter was dispatched to his location.  After the early scouting party had assessed the situation, they called back, saying that the entire town needed to be quarantined.  The dead were burned, and the survivors were taken to the nearest hospital, which the military shut down for the purpose of dealing with what they suspected was a bioterror attack.

I was one of the doctors working there.  Yes, I know it’s uncommon.  Believe me, it puts enormous strain on my time, these days.  We have few enough doctors left – for some reason, deafness and medicine don’t seem to go hand in hand.  I was there when they brought the survivors in.  Jack Bellson and the girl were the only two who weren’t yet terminal.  As for the others, early assessment showed that they were suffering from near-terminal exhaustion, brought on by sleep deprivation.  We sedated them, which kept them alive for a while, but meant we couldn’t talk to them.  They all died anyway, eventually.  Unconsciousness is no substitute for sleep.

The child, once we got her on IV nutrients and fluids, remained unconscious or semilucid for about thirty hours.  I was one of the ones who examined her during that period.  The bleeding from the ears was, as it turned out, totally unrelated to the head injury – her eardrums had been lanced by a hot needle, producing what would probably be permanent deafness.  Perhaps more alarmingly, it had been done with incredible care, and there were traces of medical anesthesia in her system.  They’d even found cotton plugs to staunch the bleeding in the car, which she’d torn loose.  The mutilation had almost certainly been done by a doctor or a surgeon.

The other patients had had similar mutilations, except with one change: the nerves to their vocal cords had been surgically severed.   To a man, they were mutes.  After the last examination, I left the surgical theatre with the horrible impression that they had already quarantined themselves, but not from disease.  I had, perhaps, the barest shadow of what had happened to these people.  Why didn’t I act on it?  Because it was insane.  It’s hard to understand, these days, but back in those days before words could kill, it was madness.  I did not truly accept it myself, though I did feel a certain sense of bottomless dread, when I found that they’d managed to wake up one of patients after re-attaching the nerves in his throat.  Still, I walked into the containment room with the rest of them. We were wearing clean suits, of course.  Despite being totally unable to identify a pathogen, we were still taking all the precautions we would for Ebola.

One of them brought a dry erase board, and put it on the table in front of his bed.  The man must’ve been infected pretty recently.  He didn’t look good, though.  They’d given him a massive dose of modafinil to try to keep him lucid. He was very pale, and sickly looking, his throat still wrapped up in bandages.  My boss, Charlie Banniger picked up a marker and wrote on the dry erase board.

DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?

He shook his head.  He spoke, and his voice was abnormally loud and raw and breathless.  This is all second hand, incidentally.  One of the other doctors knew ALS, Jim, I think, and he was translating for me as we went.

“Hospital?”

MOTHER OF MERCY HOSPITAL -  FORT WORTH, TX – WHAT HAPPENED AT SAFFRON?

He cleared his throat.  It looked like he was in pain.

“Nobody could sleep. It was on the radio. Car lot.  We realized what was going on,” he stared into the distance for a long moment, “the doctor started cutting people. Everything was so quiet.  We tried to isolate.  Dynamite the cell tower, cut the power, take the phones, put up the road block.  Kept us busy, at least.  Didn't work. Things started to get bad. Went to the church.  Health people left, sick people stayed at the church.  It was - I mean. Oh god...”

He was rapidly developing a glass, thousand-yard stare.

And then he started to hum.  I couldn’t hear it, of course, so I’ll quote a description by Banniger, who was in the room and described it to me later that day.

“It was a catchy little jingle.  I mean, really, very much so.  I don’t know words, but, wow, it just grabs you.  Whoever made that up deserves a medal.  I don’t know how else to explain it.  Wish you could have heard it, Al.”

  He quit answering questions after that, losing lucidity fast, and returning to unconsciousness within a minute or so. We considered increasing his dosage, but his heartbeat was irregular from exhaustion, and he was already flirting with amphetamine toxicity, between the depressed liver function and all the drugs we already had him on.  We chose to wait to give him another dose.  I guess it didn’t really matter, because he died the next morning anyway.  It seemed like a big deal at the time.

We continued to got through the motions of quarantine, not realising that it was far too late.  I noticed my boss whistling in the halls.  The infection was out of the hospital by noon, I suspect.  It must’ve been all of the city in a couple of days.  By then, all the patients had died except for the little girl and Jack Bellson.  Jack was getting very antsy by now.  He’d told us what he knew in a dozen different ways, and was getting frustrated at being stuck in a quarantine chamber, especially since he exhibited no symptoms.

Jim came with me to translate for me.  He looked kind of bad, said he hadn’t been able to sleep very well the night before.  I remembering asking him if he thought he was sick.  He said that containment hadn’t been broken, and that it was just stress.  He laughed, then, and said that the damn jingle had been stuck in his head all night.  Fucking earworms, huh?

I sat down across from Jack Bellson, who immediately started off on me.  Jim stood between, translating.

“Look, do your tests say I’m sick?  They don’t, and I know they don’t.  I’ve told you people everything I know.  What do you want from me?  I’ve got a life to live, man.”

I signed to Jim, who relayed it.

“Mr. Bellson.  We don’t know if you’re sick or not, or what you’ve got if you are.  You don’t appear to be dying, but we don’t know how the diease works.  You could be a carrier.  We can’t let you go, or we might have a million deaths in a few weeks.  Do you understand?”

“Yeah, yeah, hell, I guess.  Look, is the little girl okay?”

I turned to Jim, and the process repeated.

  “We don’t know, but she seems to be asymptomatic, like you.  She’s recovering well from her injuries, though she’ll probably never hear again.”

He relaxed a little.

“Good, well, that’s something, isn’t it?”

He paused.

“Could you at least tell me what’s going on?  Christ, I mean, I’m having nightmares about that church.  What could even do that to a place?”

This time, Jim's job was easy.

“Honestly?  We don’t know.”

He nodded.

"Figures. You guys do know that this is going to blow up in your face, right? Half the fucking town walked off into the woods. You think they're not sick, or that they won't cough on somebody?"

I hesitated. After we'd talked to the other guy, we'd sent a scouting party out into the woods. We found a lot of bodies. Evidently, somebody had brought a gas can with them for lighting signal fires, and somebody else had soaked the sleeping mats in them and burned them. Mass suicide, or homicide, or something. It looked like they'd been sleeping when somebody dropped the match. They'd packed up the bits, and burned the whole area to prevent contagion, but it was pretty clear that none of them had lived.  It was pretty clear that they were not a viable vector any longer. I decided not to tell him this, though, and instead elected to end the interview. Jim stomped away, looking tired, whistling, though I couldn't hear the tune.

The tune, sprung from those dry lips in that hospital room, now there was an infection. A disease that could spread a hundred feet on a quiet night, a disease that could pass through a biohazars suit, that could be spread through phone lines. A single radio broadcast could infect an entire city - and did, of course, later. It was infectious. It got into your brain, and it stayed there. Something about it, some pattern engraved it, stomped it into short term memory where it refused to be quiet. That song haunted you, got into you, never left you alone, not even to sleep. It was, as I'm sure you've worked out by now, the earworm. Meme 119, we called, it once we figured it out. I don't remember why. From an initial broadcast on early morning radio in Saffron, it wiped out the entire town, despite their efforts at quarantine. I was there at ground zero. Our attempts at quarantine set it loose. If we had waited another three days, until the last of them were dead, the world would have trundled along without so much as pausing over the strange fate of Saffron, which would be consigned to urban legends and campfire stories. If we had waited three more days, there would still be skyscrapers outside.

I still remember the first days after it got out. It was subtle. People looking steadily more haggard. People went to extraordinary lengths to deny what was going on. It was just stress- after all, we were trying to contain an incredibly lethal plague. It was only natural that a guy might have trouble sleeping.

Then we hit the five day mark, and events came to a head. Nurses started collapsing in the middle of shifts. A couple of older doctors had minor heart attacks from exhaustion. Everywhere I turned, lips were forming notes, humming or whistling the tune. Eventually, it became impossible to deny what it was. Nobody but me
had slept in seven days. The widespread insomnia epidemic in the city had gotten national news coverage. Before we could decide what to do, the CDC decided that we'd breached containment, and quarantined the entire city. They left the phone lines intact, though. I don't think they could've blocked the Internet if they tried, but at least the phones. They were treating this like an ordinary pathogen, like something that you could stop with a millimeter of plastic.

People started dying. Things got ugly, fast. If you think food riots are scary, you've never seen a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people who haven't slept in two weeks. People get desperate. If you get tired enough, everything goes out the window. All your enlightened instincts come away and what's left is just animal.

Most of the hospital staff didn't die of the earworm. You can manage it, barely, with haliperidol and modafinil during the day, and barbiturates at night. Once we worked out what was happening, we found a regiment that let you sleep a few hours a night. Not ideal, but it would take a while to kill you. No, we got killed mostly by the other infected.

We had to shut the doors to the hospital after day twelve, because they were rioting for sedatives. A few days after that, they stormed the place. We had a few guns, but at that point I doubt most of them cared. They broke down the doors, killed almost all of it. I hid in the bottom of a closet until the mob took all the drugs and left. I spent the next week wandering the streets, staying out of the way of looters. I had my choice of abode, though, since nobody else could really use one. I ate garbage and slept in a five star hotel. The looters would come through occasionally, looking for sleeping pills, weed, amphetamines, anything to help them sleep or at least feel better. I'd just stay out of their way until they finished checking the room and moved on.

As time went on, some patterns began to emerge. Everyone but the deaf were sick, had the tune haunt them, dog them, it never stopped playing in their heads. Still, as the crowds got paler and sicker, and eventually succumbed to psychosis, some of the infected seemed to fare a lot better than others. Chronic insomniacs, whose bodies were already adjusted to minimal sleep, lasted nearly twice as long, or didn't succumb at all. Opiate addicts, particularly morphine, seemed to have damaged reward circuits in the brain, and were in many cases immune. As the rest of the city went insane and finally died, what was left was us, the survivors, the immune. Mostly deafmutes, but the others as well. We made no distinction.

By then, there were outbreaks in a hundred other major cities. They were quarantined, too, but the CDC failed to recognize the nature of the beast until it was far too late. I, and a few other hospital staff who'd survived, put out a warning. A thousand warnings. We called everyone we knew, everyone we didn't. We told them what to do. A few of them listened. Maybe it was enough.

Quarantine failed not long after that. The army was stretched increasingly thin, between the other outbreaks and a high incidence of infection and desertion. At some point, the mobs broke through the police lines, and it was over. I got out later, trying to contact my parents. I found out that the CDC had started bombing server farms, cell towers, and data lines. Most of the internet was down, and phone service was off across the country. I wandered out among the blowing trash, walking on broken glass. It was the middle of the night.

The last memory I have of Fort Worth was of Jack Bellson and the girl, him with a rifle, and her with a bag of hoarded food, crossing the road under the glare of army's spotlights and walking out into the dark. A trickle of blood ran from both of his ears. It's the last I saw of either of them. I like to think that they made it.

After a long moment, staring out into the dark after them, I turned ninety degrees and started walking.

The meme wars came next. I missed most of them, since I was hiking across the state to Dallas, and then to Houston. In any case, there isn't time to describe them now. The four week war was a story in itself, and I am nearly out of paper. Suffice to say that half the world burned, and the other half died of exhaustion. In all, if you are reading this, you are a lucky man. You are part of the five percent of immunes. More like three percent, now, since nearly half starved or got sick, or just had an accident.

I never did find my parents. My father was deaf, so it's possible that he made it. I haven't heard from him, but, then, we've only just re-established ham radio contact with a few other camps. My mother was never an addict, never an insomniac, and had perfect hearing. I still mourn her. It's been a few years, though. And now here I am, writing this. I'm sitting here, in my tent in Houston, on the runway of the old airport. Nearly a hundred thousand people mill about outside, most in the airport, are the remains of the population. We have a few cars, a little gas, some food. We've drafted a dinky little constitution, and we have an official language, American Sign. We're not doing too badly.

We have a pilot, he was addicted to morphine in the army. We have a plane that we finished repairing yesterday, a passenger jet. We've heard rumors of a big colony of survivors in Salt Lake City, and some of us around going to try for it, and come back for the rest if it pans out.

And now I'm done writing this. I'm leaving this in the hands of a friend here, to keep safe in case something happens to us. I have no illusions about the safety of what we're doing - we're probably not going to make it. I don't care. It's my fault, it was. I SUSPECTED, and I didn't act. I don't know why I didn't act. It's the same reason people stay in their cars, half-on the tracks, fruitlessly trying to restart the engine as the train bears down on them. I need to try to make some tiny part of it right, and I might be able to do that, but not here. I have to go. They're flashing my name from the semaphor outside, and I can feel the plane starting to taxi down the runway.

Still, there needs to be some kind of record, some memory of what happened. This isn't the whole story, or even close to it. There's so more I'd like to tell you, but I've only got an inch of paper left.

This is Dr. Alan Winters in Houston, Texas. This is what happened. Goodnight, and good luck.

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Sorry to anyone who actually read this. Getting the adds to target on a site like this is... challenging.

Author's Note:

The last half of this was written on an iphone, because I was away from my desk. To that, I attribute any errors in spelling, grammar, or logical cohesion.

Sorry this is a little late. Had to rush a bit to avoid giving you guys the really lousy story I had originally written for this slot.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go stick my thumbs in ice water. I've got near-terminal carpal tunnel syndrome.