Read The Days and Months We Were First Born- the Unraveling for Free Online

left.
    I didn’t bother to go to Soho. There was nothing of value there, and it seemed inappropriate. I regret that decision now. I should have at least tried to see my roommates. Jack Goodman, Dominique Worthington, and Steve Peterson might have been potheads, but they were good-natured potheads, and they were also my friends. They had disappeared from my life like so many others: without a word, without a trace.
    ***
    It hadn’t taken long for the chaos to finally breakthrough in New York. For the first few days, when I still lived with Julie, martial law held. The security was stifling in Manhattan, and rationing stations had been set up in the middle of city blocks like street fairs. I had to wait in long lines, but eventually, I was able to obtain food and supplies and return to the apartment with little trouble. But by August 2 nd , things started to turn for the worst.
    So many people were infected, and the virus didn’t discriminate. Police officers, soldiers, politicians, rich people, poor people; the virus touched them all in one way or another. It spared the few who were immune while everyone else was doomed. And when you have a scenario where most people are going to die, could you really expect things to be held together? Could you fault a police officer for not protecting citizens, when he or she had a condemned family? Could you blame a soldier for quitting and returning home, if he or she was infected and wanted to be with the ones who mattered most? Could you sustain anger at a politician for losing interest in his or her leadership, when there would soon be no country, state, or city to lead? It’s hard to imagine how someone could. And like a chain that was broken, government collapsed at all levels.
    As the government collapsed, the barely contained hell became uncontained hell. According to some of the stories I heard, many prisoners were rounded up from their cells and executed. They were systematically gunned down, regardless of their sentence, if they were deemed a significant threat. But for every prisoner killed, several were released into the public. And these criminals, as well as maddened, everyday citizens, began terrorizing the city.
    For most of these thugs, there was no future and there was no restraint—a very bad combination. New York became a playground for looting, robbing, rape, and murder. If people were not predators, they were prey; and if they couldn’t defend themselves, that was too bad.
    Faced with the prospect of starvation and vulnerability to violence, many people formed into militias, and other groups and gangs. These makeshift communities, made up of the infected and non-infected alike, tried to maintain order the best they could.
    The day Julie died, I joined one of the militias. I ran into a few of their patrollers as I was making my way to midtown. They called themselves The Last Standers, and their leader was Eric Wu, a former NYPD sergeant.
    We were a thousand strong in the beginning, and every capable man or woman was assigned a role. We had patrollers who combated the criminals and rescued who they could; we had foragers who went into apartments, gathered supplies, and scouted where we were to sleep on a given night; we had childcare providers who watched over the children (many of these children were abandoned and rescued by our patrollers); we had commissaries who arranged our food and administered our supplies; and we had body removal who buried the de ad whenever we ran across them.
    I was assigned to body removal. We had a unit of sixteen men and four women, and we rode in a NYPD truck, a flatbed barricade transport. We wore hazmat suits that used to belong to one government agency or another, and four armed men guarded us with automatic rifles . After we had gathered enough of the dead, we took them to different parks, dug trenches, and buried them. Our most frequent site of burial was Sheep Meadow in Central Park.
    It was very hard work. We worked sunup