One Second After

by William R. Forstchen

"Salmonella, that's lurking in any community. I'm talking about the exotics now. In a large urban population you'll have carriers of hepatitis in every variant. What scares the hell out of me is a recent immigrant from overseas or someone stranded at the airport in Charlotte, which is a major hub. He might look well and feel well, but inside he might be carrying typhoid, cholera, you name it. "We get one of those in a crowd, given the sanitation for those people walking here? Just simple hand contact or fecal to water supply or food distribution supply contact and that bacteria will jump. If we give someone a plate of food, and they haven't washed their hands, or we don't clean that plate with boiling water, within a week thousands will be sick and dying. "You ever seen cholera?" Kellor asked. No one spoke. "I did thirty years back. A mission trip to Africa. It makes salmonella look tame. People in those regions, most of them were exposed to it at some point in their lives and survived. We're wide open to it. We are six, seven generations removed from it and we have no natural immunity. America is like an exotic hothouse plant. It can only live now in the artificial environment of vaccinations, sterilization, and antibiotics we started creating a hundred or more years ago. "We're about to get reintroduced to life as it is now in Africa or most of the third world. Not counting the global flu outbreak of 1918, the last really big epidemic, one that killed off a fair percenta...