Thad Chadderton had keeled over suddenly one crisp morning while walking from the health food store that he frequented back to his parked Mercedes, which had been sad and more than just a little ironic, given that the official cause of death, at least according to the initial coroner’s report, had been sudden cardiac arrest and also because Chadderton had been a virtual model of good health. He exercised regularly, hitting the treadmill every morning and the heated pool at his Bel Air home almost every night, and he had drank his b12 and protein powder enhanced vegetable juice three times a day like clockwork. Just last year he had competed in the Ironman USA Triathlon held in Lake Placid and had finished in a very respectable 633rd place showing out of nearly twenty five hundred competitors. The man didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and his team of medical specialists, to include one of the very best cardiologists in the greater Los Angeles area, had all given him a bill of almost astonishingly perfect health, were required to in fact, such were the particular regiments of Chadderton’s wellness and physical fitness program. He could not compete and would also not be insurable if his health were not in perfect condition, if he himself were not a walking specimen of ultra clean living. These had been the facts when Chadderton had pitched forward that morning, clutching his chest and cursing the sunshine, facts which had seemed so innocent at the time (hey, game show hosts die too, even perfectly healthy ones with perfectly white teeth and the constitution of a Clydesdale, what did you want?), but had later proved so troubling to the government’s research team and it hadn’t been until the following summer when they had exhumed the body in the interest of national security and performed the second autopsy that they were able to determine that the earliest victim of The Disorder (or The Disruption, as some historians preferred to call it) had in fact been Chadderton, pressing that buzzer for the last time and shuffling off this mortal coil on January 9th, 2010. He had been 57 years old.
The Disorder/Disruption had taken place during a four odd month period that had stretched from Chadderton’s death on the 9th until the last truly high profile death, that of beloved late 1980’s sitcom star Shelley Meredith, who had just recently finished filming the latest (and last) in her highly watchable series of infomercials that showcased her revolutionary new exercise program. Meredith too was in perfect shape for her age (a reported 63) and still a rather stunning beauty and had also been one of the earliest people smart enough to have leveraged their fading celebrity into a lucrative second career in the fast-paced world of televised home shopping. She was much respected in the industry for this and likely could have continued to hawk the products that she felt strongly enough about to attach her name to, had not a sudden stroke cut her down on the afternoon of April 29th. There had been a few additional scattershot deaths during that somber first week of May (the “Desmonds”, the researchers had called these), all bit players of old variety programs of the type once popular in the late seventies and early eighties (such as “Hee Haw” and “Sha Na Na”) who still made the occasional appearance in human interest segments of the local morning news roundup in the communities in which they had decided to live and less frequently, on shows like “The Informer” and “America Tonight!” as part of their once popular “Where Are They Now?” feature. Chadderton had been first, followed on the 12th of January by Kim Stewart, the popular host of her own syndicated cooking show broadcast nationally five days a week, and then on the 15th by Bela Novak, long time veteran of the talk show circuit by simple virtue of being the loquacious and extremely photogenic head animal trainer for the San Diego Zoo for more than twenty five years. It would have been one thing here if Stewart and Novak, aged 53 and 56 respectively, had not also both been in very good condition health wise, or if they had died suddenly by some tragic and unforeseen circumstance directly related to their profession, a tiger mauling perhaps in the case of Novak, or a severe concussion for Stewart caused by a blow to the head from a large falling kettle of some kind; that might have been okay. Or even a car wreck or perhaps an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, which happened often enough as it was, if it had just been something random and disconnected from what the researchers had later found, that might have somehow been better. But the truth was that without exception, all of the deaths that had occurred during the silent spring of 2010 had all been somehow gruesomely related to an abject and sudden failure of the central nervous system, though not necessarily a painful one, thirty three of them in all. Stewart had been struck by a sudden cerebral aneurysm while sleeping alone one Sunday evening and had died almost instantly. Novak from what doctors would later describe as massive internal bleeding from the sudden bursting of his carotid artery near where his long neck had met the jaw. He had drowned almost instantly. They had found him lying peacefully in the zoo’s large polar bear exhibit, curled into the snoring Chinook, the bear with one paw draped over Novak’s mid section and one of his giant hind quarters draped lazily over both of the zookeeper’s inert own. The smiling, satiated look on the bear’s face coupled with Novak’s own peacefully frozen one could only be described as beatific. The warm, musky odor rising from Chinook’s groin area smelled almost like victory. Neither had suffered too much here in the pursuit of either life or death and the sight of Novak’s blood collecting into a thin steady rivulet heading to the waters of the man-made moat below was seen later as poetic somehow, a thing to focus on and to try to make sense of. This was the image that had captivated so many and was run ad nauseum in magazines and in still shots on television programs worldwide. It had stuck with people and became a sort of meme unto itself, a way to understand and to give context to what had happened. The image of the dead man and the sleeping bear became an image to be studied, to be torn apart and artistically re-interpreted by paint and by words, a thing one almost would have to see for themselves in order to be believed. The irony was that the camera had already done most of the necessary work for you.
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