No answer, just a squeal of brakes, a shrill “Fuck,” and static.
Mary closed her phone and shrugged. Soon twelve would be thirteen. It had taken a while. Too long in fact. But once she finally had thirteen primes the endgame could start. There might be four horsemen but at the end of days Mary planned to be the only one that mattered.
Fact: All poets before Plato thought of love as a disease.
Quote: You given me the fever,
I got you under my skin,
You given me love-blindness,
This broken heart’s done in.
—Moses ‘Duke’ Domino
Fact: The ancient Romans thought love was a sickness.
Quote: My love is as a fever longing still—for that which longer nurtures the disease.
—William Shakespeare
Shula glanced at Little Ed, secure in his car seat, adjusted her mirror and pulled out into the traffic. Her Ford Mercury wheezed a little as she accelerated. Getting old, like Dad back in his grocery shop.
The lights held her at the interchange. Shula watched the red, her mind running over the day. Dad in his shop, growing gray with just the Dale Winters special to remind her he was young once. The smile still took her back, to when she was a child, to the vital man who threw her in the air, so high she almost wet herself. And Deke. She thought about her boy, out there somewhere, getting into trouble, a wild one with a streak of angry hurt in him. Shula didn’t know where that had come from. Maybe folks got born that way. And Ed, her own sweet Ed, tied to a desk up at that research center, bound by a fear of cutting loose.
A crash shook Shula from her reverie, a noise louder than anything reasonable could be.
She found herself face to face with the steering wheel, pressed hard enough to take the grip pattern into her skin. For what seemed an age, she wondered why nothing hurt. When at last the pain started up, not in her head where she expected it, but in her shins, she wondered why the hell her airbag hadn’t gone off.
A new thought smacked into her head, like an unseen pass in any ball game you care to mention. Little Ed!
With arms that felt at once too heavy and too soft to be hers, Shula thrust herself back off the steering wheel.
Little Ed drew in a breath, as though he’d been holding it all the while, and started laughing.
BANG! BANG BANG!
Shula tried to shake the fuzziness from her head. Somebody was hammering on her window. She reached out for the switch, and on the third attempt the window rolled down.
“Jesus, lady! Are you ok? I’m sorry. I really am. Oh Jesus, you’ve got a baby with you…”
She shook her head again. The man at the window reminded her a lot of Ed. The same square jaw and wide blue eyes.
“I…”
“Can you open the door? We should get you out of there.”
“I… I think I’m OK.” By her side, Little Ed subsided into chuckles. The shock took her without warning, as if the force of the rear ending had been stored up and now struck her in the chest—a sledgehammer blow. The tears just ran out of her.
“Hey, don’t cry, Miss.” He looked more terrified than she felt. “Open the door and we’ll get you out now.”
The door gave at the third tug after she’d unlocked it. Shula struggled out, half carrying Little Ed, half dragging him, supported by the man outside. A pale woman in white stood close by, watching, a cardboard box in her hands.
“He’s OK? The baby’s OK?”
“Wh…yeah, I think so.” Shula held Ed up for inspection and tried to sniff away her tears. “You’re all right aren’t you, Sweety?”
She looked around to get her bearings. The lights at the Sherman interchange. Green now. A simple fender bender. The rest of the traffic was just going around, leaving the two of them alone to exchange insurance details.
“Hell, I’m so sorry—”
“Wasn’t there a woman with you?” Shula asked.
“What? A woman?”
Shula positioned Little Ed on her hip and made a slow turn on the spot.
“Sure. With a box.”
The man frowned. “Do you see a woman here?”
Shula glanced back at the man’s car. Empty. “Sorry, I’m still shaken up, I guess.”
“No look, it’s me that should be sorry. I saw the lights change and I just went for it. Rear ended you. Entirely my fault.” He got his wallet out and fished a card from one of the compartments. “Rick Hippocra. It’s one of those weirdy Greek names, don’t worry. Anyhow, all my insurance stuff is on there.”
Shula took the card, not sure what to say.
Rick turned to go, then turned back. “You’re sure you’re OK? The baby’s good? You don’t need a doctor?”
“We’ll be all right,” Shula said. “It wasn’t all you. I should have seen the lights change. I was miles away.”
Rick reached out to touch Little Ed’s hand. His eyes were bright, not far off crying, Shula thought.
“Thank God.” Rick manufactured a grin for Ed. “You know, if I’d hurt him…” He shook his head.
Shula clutched the baby a little tighter to her, and as she did a sneeze tore through him. “He’s fine,” she said. “Just this cold to worry about now. It’s come on so fast, and he’s getting a temperature with it. I should get him home now, before it turns into flu or something.”
Rick turned away at that, a hard look on his face. He went to his car without a word. Shula was still putting Ed back into his seat when Rick pulled out and passed them by.
Shula did up the center buckle, letting her fingers figure it out. ‘Do you see a woman here?’ That’s what he said. An odd way of answering her question.
She climbed into her seat and started the engine up. A quick adjustment of the mirror and she pulled away. There had been a woman. She was sure of it. A pale woman with a smile like fever, and a cardboard box in her hands.
“I want you to let that baby go.”
Rick didn’t look over at Enza, but he could feel her in the passenger seat, he could feel the sharp pricking of her presence, like the tickle of a cough that’s going to leave your throat raw.
“Sure you do,” she said, amiably.
“You’re going to let that baby go,” he said.
“In 1918, Rick, I went for a walk,” Enza said. “A little stroll across nations. You know who gave me my marching orders?”
Rick kept his eyes on the road. Something about the way that woman tightened her arms around her baby, something about it wouldn’t let him go.
“It was your own little Mary,” Enza said. “Mary Tee. Your own little Typhoid Mary. Mary mild. Pestilence herself in her big ol’ car. Only it wasn’t a car then. She rode the trains in those days. And the ships before that, down in the holds with the rats. Oh, it’s been a while since the horse, but it’s hard to keep up with you people sometimes.”
“That baby—”
“You know how many corpses I left?” Enza cut across him. “In the winter of 1918?”
“Do tell.” A dark voice from the box in her lap.
“Twenty million,” Enza said. “Did you ever count to twenty million, Rick? Did you? You didn’t? Well, don’t talk to me about one baby. Not interested.”
“Did you ever get sick, Rick?” Eric from his box again, relishing the rhyme.
“I’ve been sick,” he said. He kept his eyes on the road, on the white lines flashing by. Somehow they reminded him of the kid, the soft whiteness of baby arms.
“I thought you were immune?” Enza said. She leaned toward him, her grin wider, interested.
“Plague came to visit. A house call back when we lived in Arizona.” Rick couldn’t repress a shudder. Some nights he’d wake with a start and the image of that black figure in the doorway. “I had a few bad nights of it before I shook it off. And one time… Well, let’s just say that the worst of you guys can sometimes get one over on me for a while, but I shake it off in the end.”
“Tell me more,” Enza said.
> “Tell me why you’ve got a head in a box.”
“It’s a new thing,” Eric spoke up for himself. “You clever little humans have been getting up to all sorts these last hundred years.”
“The men in white coats,” Enza said. “If they can grab hold of a disease, they try to cripple it.”
“Then they send it out harmless, so everyone can get used to it,” Eric said. He didn’t sound pleased.
“Immunization!” Rick saw the center up ahead, tall fences with razor wire surrounding a clutch of drab buildings.
“That’s what they call it,” Enza said.
“You’re an ebola vaccine.” Rick risked a glance down at the box. The head inside regarded him with black eyes.
“Mary’s going to make me whole again.” Laughter bubbled from the box. “Going to make me better than whole! Going to make me ready for prime time!”
An oxygen cylinder taller than a two-story building stood outside Virology Lab 3, its lower third and the feeder pipes crusted with frost and steaming gently in the Idaho heat. Narrower pipes, black with insulating foam, led away into the building. Beside the oxygen cylinder stood a small one, the words ‘Liquid Nitrogen’ stencilled on its side. The first of Mary’s carrots fitted snugly into the emergency vent valve of the larger cylinder, the second blocked the nitrogen cylinder’s port after a little pushing. The third she took a bite from before tossing over her shoulder.
“This place creeps me out,” Roy said. He sniffed and wiped at his nose, leaving a snail’s trail of slime across the back of his hand.
“It’s just buildings.” Deke shrugged. It creeped him out, too. Where was everyone?
They hurried along in the shadow of a long windowless wall. Pipes ran the length of the brickwork, branching into a confusion of smaller tubes, like the veins in a wrestler’s arm. In some of them, Deke could hear whatever it was inside, whispering through the dark interior.
They reached the far end, and stopped at the corner.
“Is it me, or has it just gotten cold?” Deke could see the gooseflesh on his arms.
“Feels too hot to me.” Roy sounded bunged up, like he had a quart of phlegm bubbling in his lungs.
They turned the corner together.
Two huge cylinders towered over them, the pipes around their base thick with frost and radiating a fierce cold that didn’t so much soften the heat of the day as flip it one-eighty into something just as hard. The wheel valve on the feed line into each was rusted shut. A tiny jet of gas plumed out of a joint close to Deke and the whole cylinder seemed to tremble.
Roy stooped. “What’s this?” The word ‘this’ came out ‘dis’ through his pinched nose.
“A carrot.” Deke frowned at the teeth marks. “Half a carrot.”
A large hand descended on his shoulder. “Oh boy, are you two ever in trouble!”
Mary moved along the corridors, pausing at each junction and then taking the turn that most appealed. They reminded her of hospital corridors. Long, antiseptic, cheap linoleum worn by too many busy feet. She had spent a lot of time in hospitals.
Twice she passed people, a man in a white coat, a woman in a business suit with coffee in one hand. They didn’t spare her a glance. The place seemed pretty empty, by and large.
She reached a water cooler outside a common room. Two young men stood on either side, plastic cups to their lips.
“Like a ghost ship here today.” The taller man tossed his cup into the bin.
“You and me against the world, Bud. The flu’s got everyone else.” The shorter one shot a look in Mary’s direction, and frowned. He blinked twice and shook his head.
Folks didn’t normally see Mary unless she wanted them to. It made crossing the road tricky on occasion, but it had its uses. Some people had the knack for it though. People who knew how to look.
“Doctor Ed’s still here, of course,” the tall man said. “Stirring his potions.”
“That’s Doctor Winters to you, Bud. Doctor Ed’s a talking horse.”
“That’s Mister Ed, you doofus…”
Mary moved on.
She came to the door she wanted. A white portal. Enamelled stainless steel, rubber, and pneumatics. Hermetically sealed. A small round window, triple glazed, gave a view of the laboratory beyond, a wide room with half a dozen Perspex cells, each with its own air supply.
Mary set her hand to the door. She pushed. Nothing. She pushed again, harder, in the regular way, and in a wide variety of irregular ways. No give, not even an ounce. If ever there were a door designed to keep Pestilence out, this was it.
She pressed her face to the glass. Way back in a cell behind the others, she saw movement. A figure in a bubble suit, trailing an air hose. Pestilence smiled to herself. In the same way Death knew his clients, she knew her foes.
Inside the sealed lab a red light began to flash on a phone by the far cell. A voice rang out on speaker.
“Doctor Winters?”
“Jesus! Shit. Sorry, sorry, nearly dropped…never mind. Yes?”
“I need you to come to reception, Doctor Winters.”
“I can’t. I’m in the middle of something, and I’m the only one on right now.” The figure moved toward the phone on the desk.
“We need you here, Sir.”
“It can’t wait?”
“Sir, I’ve got two boys here. One of them says he’s your son—”
“Deke?”
“That’s the one. And—”
“What the hell is Deke doing on site?”
“I found them at the cylinders. I think they may have broken them, but I can’t raise maintenance, or the front gate. I’m the only security this side of the site, and until you come for your boy, I’m stuck watching him. Unless you want me to handcuff them to a radiator?”
“Just wait. I’m coming out. Be there in five.”
The suited figure came by stages through the Perspex airlock from his study chamber, out beneath a fine spray of corrosive detergents, and to the main door, disrobing as he went. The disconnected air-supply tube trailed behind him. He hung the suit on its peg alongside the door, shed the boots, peeled the gloves off into a biohazard vent in the wall.
Mary waited. The door opened with a sigh that sounded like relief. Dr. Winters hurried through, a frown creasing his forehead beneath a shock of black hair. He didn’t look at her, didn’t see her at all, didn’t so much as flinch when she slipped past him into the airlock. He sealed the door behind her, allowing her to open the next door and enter the laboratory.
Pestilence walked between the lab tables. She trailed her hands over their sterile surfaces and corruption bubbled where her fingers passed. Her children watched from within their prison cells, some held in glass vials, some in cultures, in cloudy solutions, some behind the pink eyes of white rats shivering with the early stages of their doom.
Pestilence loved her children. They might be legion, they might be transient, but they were hers. Warriors all. Locked in combat with flesh. A war older than humanity, almost as old as life, almost as old as Death. And first among her children, she loved her primes, raised from amid a host of mild ailments to become her captains, the harbingers of the end days. A dozen of them, the last elevated to his station in a year when the gas-lamp had been new technology. Time to complete the set before humans got too clever for disease.
“These humans…” she spoke aloud, taking a test tube from a long rack as she passed. “They’re different. It’s always been a war, my children, pestilence against flesh…but these humans, they’ve made their own battleground.”
She unstoppered the tube and took a swig. Typhoid, an old favorite, sweet on her tongue, a memory of sickness running through man, woman, and child, swimming in the very water that made them. You might not be able to stop Death, but on a hot day, in a typhoid summer in old New York, Pestilence had made her sister run to keep up.
The humans had made a new battleground, with their microscopes, their vaccines, their bitter little pills, CAT scans, a
nd stem cells. And in a sense, they’d made her, too. Pestilence couldn’t pinpoint her first conscious thought, but it had been in Africa, about two hundred thousand BC.
She reached Dr. Winters’ research chamber. A headless body rose from the table within, scattering glassware, and executed a deep bow.
“Why there you are, Ebola,” Pestilence said. “Well, hurry up. We’re going to do what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t do. And when we’ve put you back together again…you’ve got some work to do. You’ll be my thirteenth apostle and we can begin the end—at long last we can begin the end. You’re going to be very busy.”
They met at the front gate. Rick and Mary—Pestilence to her kindred—face to face at the rusting gates of Holden Research Center for Communicable Diseases. Rick had Enza with him, and a head-sized cardboard box in his hands. Mary had a warm smile, a gingham summer frock, and a headless body following at her heels.
“Baby, you brought it! You’re the best.”
Rick crossed his hands over the box. He frowned, shaking his head as if to bring some loose memory to the surface.
Mary held her hands out. “Darling, the box.”
Behind her, thirty yards back along the dusty road to the complex, three figures lay in the dirt, a man in a white coat, black hair, and two boys, coughing weakly.
“Mary, we’ve got to talk about this.”
“We will, Darling. Later.” She kept her hands out.
“You’re going to let ebola loose? Here in Holden?”
“Holden?” She wrinkled her nose. “Well, yes. Idaho. The Western States.”
“The Western States…”
“At least.” She grinned. “He’s to be the thirteenth prime—I’ve got to let him practice.”
“Christ.”
“I’m not him.”
“I can’t let you do it,” Rick said.
Mary gave him her look. The one she reserved for when he’d said he would load the dishwasher and four hours later he hadn’t. The one for when he farted and blamed it on the dog they didn’t have.
“We’ve talked about this, Rick,” she said. “Death and taxes. It’s all about inevitables. Darkness defines light. Disease defines health. People die every day, in their tens of thousands. A slip from a ladder, a knife in the kidney, a cough, a sniffle, a carcinoma, a car crash, it’s going to happen. It’s the job. So why not here, why not now, why anywhere but on your doorstep?”
Lucky or Unlucky? 13 Stories of Fate Page 27