According to Montana National Guard protocol, curfew enforcement patrol would put one soldier on each city block from dusk to dawn. There would also be the occasional Humvee or Bradley fighting vehicle on driving patrols.
A national guardsman in a tactical face mask walked into view, heading away from me down the middle of an otherwise empty street, machine gun at the ready. After fourteen seconds, another soldier moved down the closest cross street on a perpendicular trajectory, and five seconds after that—and two blocks up—a third soldier appeared, walked briefly in my direction, then turned right.
I clocked their respective velocities, which varied by degrees of .2, .1, and .35 mph, then ran a quick mental equation, vectoring myself into their midst and solving for my window of invisibility.
When the time was right, I left the shelter of the trees, moving at a brisk clip down a sidewalk and not loving the restricted view of my face shield and the general dampening of sensory input by my hazmat suit.
I heard:
A dog barking.
A man sobbing as he begged for someone named Jane to please wake up.
A voice magnified through a megaphone five or six blocks away, shouting instructions to a crowd.
What sounded like gunshots on the far side of town.
And from more than one house that maniacal laughter I’d heard in that viral video.
Cloth—dishrags, towels, torn T-shirts—hung from nearly every door I passed. There were three colors: green, red, and black.
According to KLTZ, the AM radio station serving Glasgow, the CDC and National Guard had ordered every household to keep a visual marker hanging from their front door that identified the condition of the people inside.
Green = no illness.
Red = someone inside showing symptoms.
Black = someone dead inside.
As I walked up Ninth Street S., it was a devastating thing to see—every ninth or tenth house had a piece of black cloth hanging from its doorknob.
When I glimpsed new soldiers on patrol, I added the additional variable into my equation.
The first few houses I approached were no-go—either dogs barking or lights on inside or locked. I didn’t need to be triggering an alarm. I needed a dark house, with no dog, and an unlocked door.
To the north, I glimpsed the epicenter of activity.
White tents gleaming under spotlights.
Lines of people waiting for treatment.
Drones hovering above it all.
I stopped for a moment, trying to take it all in.
You could almost feel the fear in the air—a living thing. These poor people. They must have been scared out of their minds, wondering what psychotic twist of fate had brought this disease into their midst. And, unlike me, they had no way to put their fear aside.
I needed to find a house.
Get my sample.
Get back to the van.
Right on time, in the reflection of a car windshield across the street, I caught movement—a soldier in night camo coming around the block.
Even from a distance of forty yards, I could see they were on a trajectory that would bring me into their field of vision in just under two seconds.
I lunged in front of a car, flattening myself across the curb.
Waited until they passed.
On the next block, I saw a familiar address. I walked up onto the covered porch. The black cloth nailed to the door was the remnants of a Beyoncé T-shirt, from her farewell tour.
I knocked.
The porch light glowed above me, but there were no lights on inside. I reached up into the fixture and unscrewed the bulb.
Then pressed my ear to the door.
No incoming footsteps.
No voices.
I reached down, tried the doorknob.
It wasn’t locked, and I kept turning it, finally easing the door open.
The house was dark.
Silent.
I stepped inside, closed the door behind me.
The death stench hit me even through my respirator.
I walked into a small living room.
From an arched pass-through, I entered a kitchen.
Flipped a switch on the wall.
Track lights shined down on countertops covered in towers of putrid-smelling dishes.
I called out, “Hello?”
The emptiness swallowed my voice and gave back no answer.
I climbed the carpeted stairs toward the second floor, arriving at a landing that accessed several doors.
All closed.
I opened the middle one—a bathroom with doors on either side, presumably linking the adjacent bedrooms.
The door on the right led into a home office.
I turned on an overhead light.
There was a scrapbooking table covered in photographs and various cutting instruments.
On the wall over the table hung a framed portrait of a multigenerational family standing in front of a huge Christmas tree in unquestionably better times.
I moved back through the bathroom and opened the door to the second upstairs bedroom.
My eyes began to water.
I heard—muffled by my hood—the softest rasp.
I dropped everything, pulled my pistol, and nearly shot a woman in a silk nightgown sitting in the farthest, darkest corner of the room.
She just watched me, sitting motionless with her arms wrapped around her knees, her hair hanging in her face.
“What are you doing in my house?” Her monotone suggested she was in shock, and there was a clenched quality to her voice.
“I saw the black shirt on your door,” I said. “I knocked, but no one answered.”
The woman hadn’t moved. She was nearly invisible in the dark.
I lowered my gun, took a few steps toward her.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked.
I thought I saw her head shake.
I went to the wall, flipped the light switch.
A lamp on a bedside table glowed to life, illuminating a bloated man keeled over on a queen-size bed. His eyes were open. Skin a pale, waxy sheen. He was in the range of forty to forty-five, wore a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, and there were several dozen framed photographs placed all around him like a makeshift memorial.
The photos were of the dead man and the woman sitting in the corner.
At the London Eye.
Chichen Itza in Yucatán.
The base of Seattle’s Space Needle.
At a concert.
On snowmobiles.
“When did he pass?” I asked.
“Three days ago. I tried to call his mother, but you people turned off our Wi-Fi. Blocked all cell reception except nine-one-one.”
“He was acting strange before he died?”
“Yes.”
“Just sitting in bed? Shaking?”
She nodded.
“Compulsive laughter?”
“It got worse and worse. He wouldn’t eat or drink. Wouldn’t take himself to the bathroom. Refused to go with me to the hospital. By the time I finally called for help, it was mayhem in town.”
“No one ever came to help you?”
She shook her head. “Toward the end, he didn’t even recognize me.” Tears rolled down her face. “I lost my father to dementia five years ago. This was like experiencing the entire course of that disease in ten days. The last time I tried to make him drink water, he hit me. Broke my jaw.” Leaning forward, I saw the left side of her face. It was darkened, swollen. “He finally became unresponsive. Just stared for hours on end into nothing. After he slipped into some kind of coma, I lay down with him in our bed, my hand on his chest, just feeling it rise and fall. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, his chest wasn’t moving anymore.”