Journals of the Plague Years

by Norman Spinrad

  I reeled. My skin crawled. My stomach went cold. Worst of all, the Devil caused my weak flesh to become loathsomely aroused as all those terrible and tantalizing memories of Gus came rushing back between my legs to haunt me.

  Revolted, appalled, shaking with outrage and confusion, I was forced to wait until the evening to confront him, and the Devil struck me a second blow in the office, for that was the day when the first reports of the Satanic cult of Our Lady of the Living Dead appeared in my electronic mailbox.

  Of course I was aware that there were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of black-carders living underground outside the Quarantine Zones on bogus blue cards, and spreading their filth among the innocent. We caught hundreds of them every week.

  But this…this…this was Satan’s masterstroke!

  Out there in California was a woman, or perhaps several women, known as Our Lady of the Living Dead, clearly possessed by the Adversary and doing his work quite consciously, recruiting others into her Satanic cult, spreading his lies and the Plague in ever-wider circles.

  Black-carders were openly offering their meat to their fellow black-carders, spreading multiple strains of Plague virus throughout the underground. Interrogations seemed to indicate that these slaves of Satan actually believed that they were the saviors of the species, that in some mystical manner they were speeding the course of evolution, that somehow out of their unholy and deadly couplings a strain of humanity would evolve that was immune to the Plague.

  He is not the prince of Liars for nothing. He had apparently quite convinced these poor doomed creatures of this one, cunningly using their despair-maddened lust and turning it against us all, giving them a truly devilish excuse to wallow in it until they died in the conviction that they were doing God’s Work in the process.

  And laughing at them and at me by causing his servant to wrap herself in the cognomen of the Mother of Jesus!

  I gave the necessary orders. The stamping out of the cult of Our Lady was to be the SP’s number one priority. Arrest these people. If any resisted, shoot to kill. Close as many meatbars as possible. And do it all as conspicuously as could be managed. Spread the fear of God’s wrath and that of the SP among the denizens of the underground.

  After a day like that, I was constrained to return home and confront Billy. There was denial, sobbing confession, promises of repentance, and strong penances set. I had done my patriotic duty and my fatherly duty. It had been hard, but I had done God’s will and was as much at peace as one could be under the terrible circumstances.

  But Satan was still not finished with me. He seized Elaine, my good Christian wife, and caused her to launch into the most appalling tirade. “How can you be so hard-hearted?” she demanded. “Aren’t things bad enough for young people growing up these days? At least you shouldn’t try to keep Billy from a little safe masturbation.”

  “It’s against God’s law! Besides, you saw that revolting, unnatural—”

  “Of course it’s unnatural, Walter! What else can you expect when the most natural thing in the world is the one thing none of us can do anymore!”

  “Elaine—”

  “If you were a real man, Walter T. Bigelow, if you were a real Christian, if you were a real loving father, you’d take the poor boy to a sex machine parlor and show him how to get some harmless release!”

  I could hardly believe my ears for a long moment. This could not be Elaine! But then I understood. This insinuating blasphemy was coming from her lips, but my poor wife was only an instrument. The voice saying these awful things through her had identified itself by the very act of causing a good Christian woman to mouth them.

  “I know you…” I muttered.

  “No you don’t, Walter Bigelow, you don’t know me at all!”

  “Get thee behind me—”

  “Have it your own way!” she shouted. And she locked herself in the bedroom, leaving me to spend a sleepless night in the living room, praying to Jesus, demanding to know why He had so forsaken me in the presence of the Enemy.

  >

  John David

  I made my way up the coast toward San Francisco real slowly, spending nearly a month in Los Angeles, which was big, and sprawling, and a hell of a town for a zombie to party in. There were plenty of meatbars, my latest batch of pallies seemed to be holding up real well, I was lookin’ good, I had umpteen phony blue cards, and I was able to meatfuck myself near to exhaustion. It was almost too easy.

  And then one night I found out why.

  I let myself get picked up on the street by this sexy space case who told me she’d give me free meat if I was a black-carder, if you can believe that one. Well, she was beautiful, I was real stoned and in a kind of funny mood, so I shoved her into an alley, Gave It to her, and then announced my wonderful secret identity as a black-card-carrying zombie of the Army of the Living Dead, expecting to get my jollies watching her freak.

  Only she didn’t. She smiled at me. She fuckin’ kissed me, and she told me I was doin’ the Work of Our Lady whether I knew it or not.

  Say what? Say who?

  And she told me.

  She told me that whether I knew it or not, I was a soldier in a different army now, an army called the Lovers of Our Lady. Whose mission it was to have meat with as many people as possible in order to save the species, if you can believe that one, brothers and sisters! That somehow by all of us Giving as many strains of It to each other as we could, we might end up with multiimmune humans.

  Believe it when they tell you L.A. is full of all kinds of weirdos, brothers and sisters!

  But soon the weirdness began getting ominous. All of a sudden the SPs were swarming all over the meatbars like flies on horseshit, running every last customer they caught through the national data bank no matter how long it took. The underground safe houses were no longer so safe. They were grabbing people at random on the streets and blowing away anyone who showed any resistance. I mean, suddenly the Sex Police were real agitated.

  I never did find out whether they were hot after me and my fellow zombies or what, I mean after a few close calls, there was clearly no percentage in sticking around to find out. Especially since the pallies were starting to wear off once more and I was getting to lookin’ obvious and ragged. San Francisco was beginning to look like my best bet again after all.

  I snatched me another car and headed north again, staying away from the population centers, meatfucking my way slowly up the center of California, following a kind of secret underground circuit.

  It was real easy, once I got the hang of it and picked up on the stories. That weirdo back in L.A. had given me a good steer. All I had to tell these assholes was that I was doin’ the Work of Our Lady and they’d do me anything.

  >

  Dr. Richard Bruno

  It was arduous, but my little dreadnaught was ready with five days to spare, and it was even more elegant than my original concept. Like the Plague itself, it infected via the usual sexual or intravenous vectors, colonizing semen, blood, and mucous membrane. Unlike the Plague, however, it did not interfere with T-cell activity or production. Lacking an antigen coat, it was “invisible” to the host immune system.

  As a retrovirus, it would write itself into host genomes, so that when it expressed itself during cellular reproduction, it would invade two more cells, a process that would continue until all suitable host cells were infected.

  If an invading retrovirus should be encountered during the expression phase, it would destroy the active core and wrap itself in the “dead” antigen coat. If the host already had antibodies to these antigens, that variant would die. If not, it would eventually write itself back into a host genome, shedding the antigen “shell” in the process.

  Thus, when a retrovirus invaded the host, the host bloodstream would become saturated with empty invader antigen coats, to which the host immune system would eventually form antibodies, conferring immunity to the invader precisely in the manner of a “killed virus” vaccine.


  It not only conferred immunity to all strains of the Plague virus, it would automatically immunize the host against all retroviruses. And, like the Plague, it would spread via sexual contact.

  That was what my molecular analysis predicted. It remained only to test the dreadnaught. But there was a stringent law against introducing into human hosts a live, genetically tailored organism capable of reproduction outside the lab, even for test purposes. It would take congressional legislation to allow me to begin human tests, and even then it could be years before the dreadnaught received FDA certification.

  And I had only five days. In five days, I was up for ID card updating. If I tested out black, which I would, I would lose my job and be dumped unceremoniously into the San Francisco Quarantine Zone, and all would be lost.

  I had only one chance to keep my blue card long enough to see the whole process through. I myself would have to be my first test subject. If it didn’t work, all was lost anyway. If it did—and I was convinced it would—no one ever need know that I had violated the FDA regulations.

  So I injected myself with the dreadnaught culture. Three days later, my body was free of the Plague. I took some of my blood and exposed it to other Plague strains as well as a variety of other retroviruses. My dreadnaught killed them all.

  I called Harlow Prinz, the president of Sutcliffe, and asked for a special meeting of the board of directors, at which I promised to present the greatest advance in medicine in the last fifty years and then some. I could all but hear him drooling.

  The Nobel for medicine seemed a certainty.

  And, seeing as how the dreadnaught would spread itself by sexual contact without the need for economically prohibitive mass inoculation, it could eliminate the Plague from the festering Third World as well, so a second Nobel, this one for peace, might not be beyond the bounds of possibility.

  >

  Walter T. Bigelow

  Elaine refused to have interface sex with me at all. She refused to sleep in the same bedroom with me. She took to disparaging my manhood. Meals were undercooked, overcooked, slovenly prepared. Her housekeeping deteriorated. She kept insisting that I introduce Billy to the sex machine parlors and called my righteous refusal “un-Christian.”

  I no longer knew the woman I lived with. Elaine was now acting like a woman with a secret life, indeed like a woman hiding an adulterous relationship. Was it possible? How long had it been going on? Had she been making a fool of me all these years?

  Of course I had the necessary resources to find out. I had her followed. But what the reports revealed was no human lover.

  There were written accounts. There were still photos. There was even an ingeniously obtained clandestine video.

  Elaine was a sex machine addict.

  Almost every day when I was away at work, she visited one of several sex machine parlors, and stayed for at least an hour, engaging in machine sex perversions of which I had previously been unaware, which I had not even previously believed possible.

  When I confronted her with the evidence, she defiantly admitted that she had been doing it secretly for years. “You just haven’t been satisfying me, Walter.”

  “Adulteress!”

  “Adulteress? Just the opposite! I’ve been doing it to keep from becoming an adulteress!”

  “It’s against God’s law!”

  “Show me anything in the scriptures against it!”

  “It’s the sin of Onan!”

  “Good Lord, Walter, it’s the Plague, can’t you see that?”

  “Of course I can see that! God is testing us, and you’ve failed Him.”

  “I’ve failed Him? Or has He failed us?”

  “Blasphemy!”

  “Is it?” she insinuated. “Can it be Jesus’s God of Love who has taken natural love itself away from us and forced us into all these perversions? Look what’s happened to us! Look what’s happened to Billy! Where is God’s Love in all that?”

  “It’s the Devil tormenting us, not God, Elaine!”

  “That’s what I’m telling you, Walter Bigelow! The Plague is the work of the Devil, not God. So anything that helps us survive Satan’s torment—the interfaces, the sex machines—must be God’s mercy. Jesus loves us, doesn’t He? He can’t want us to suffer any more than we have to!”

  And then I knew for certain.

  Not the Prince of Liars for nothing.

  My Elaine had neither the evilness of spirit nor the cunning of mind to say these things to me. She was clearly possessed by the Devil.

  Christian and husbandly duty coincided.

  I placed Elaine under clandestine house arrest.

  And began consulting exorcists.

  >

  Dr. Richard Bruno

  They were all there—Harlow Prinz, the president of Sutcliffe, Warren Feinstein, the chairman of the board, and the entire board of directors. They all had dollar signs in their eyes as I began my presentation. They listened with rapt silence as I proceeded, a silence that grew rather ominous and eerie as I went on.

  And the conclusion of my presentation fell into a deathly graveyard hush that seemed to go on forever. I finally had to break it myself.

  “Uh…any questions?”

  “This, ah, dreadnaught virus is a self-replicating organism? It will reproduce by itself outside the lab?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And it spreads like the Plague?”

  “It can easily enough be made pandemic.”

  “Who has had access to this information?”

  “Why, no one outside this room,” I told them. “I did this one on my own.”

  Like a crystal suddenly dissolving back into solution, the hushed atmosphere shattered into a series of whispered cross-conversations. After a few minutes of this, Prinz snapped orders into his intercom.

  “Security to lab twelve! Seal it off. No one in or out except on my personal orders. Get a decontamination team down there and execute Code Black procedures.”

  “Code Black?” I cried. “There’s no Code Black in my lab! No pathogen release! No—”

  “Shut up, Bruno! Haven’t you done enough already?” Prinz shouted at me. “You’ve created an artificial human parasite, you imbecile! The FDA will crucify us!”

  “If we report it…” Feinstein said slowly.

  “Yes…” Prinz said.

  “What are you going to do, Harlow?”

  “I’ve already done it. We’ll follow maximum Code Black procedure. Incinerate the contents of lab twelve, then pump it full of molten glass. We’ll keep this an internal matter. It never happened.”

  “But what about him?”

  “Indeed…” Prinz said slowly. “Security to the boardroom!” he snapped into his intercom.

  “What the hell is going on?” I finally managed to demand.

  “You’ve committed a very serious breach of FDA regulations, Dr. Bruno,” Feinstein told me. “One that could have grave consequences for the company.”

  “But it’s a monumental breakthrough!” I cried. “Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? It’s a cure for all possible Plague variants! It’ll save the country from—”

  “It would destroy Sutcliffe, you cretin!” Prinz shouted. “Fifty-two percent of our gross derives from Plague vaccines, and another twenty-one percent from the sale of palliatives! And your damned dreadnaught is a venereal disease, man—it wouldn’t even be a marketable product!”

  “But surely the national interest—”

  “I’m afraid you haven’t considered the national interest at all, Dr. Bruno,” Feinstein said much more smoothly. “The medical industry’s share of GNP has been twenty-five percent for years, and the Plague is hard-wired into our economy; your dreadnaught would have precipitated a massive depression.”

  “And destroyed the whole raison d’être of our policy vis-à-vis the Third World.”

  “Thereby shattering the Russian-Chinese-American-Japanese entente and rekindling the Cold War.”

  “Leading to a nuc
lear Armageddon and the destruction of our entire species!”

  What monstrous sophistry! What sheer insanity! What loathsome utterly self-interested bullshit! They couldn’t be serious!

  But just then two armed guards entered the boardroom, and their presence suddenly forced me to realize just how serious the board really was. They were already destroying the organism. From their own outrageously cold point of view, their hideous logic was quite correct. The dreadnaught virus would reduce the medical industry to an economic shadow of its former self. Sutcliffe would fold. And their jobs and their fortunes would be gone…

  “Dr. Bruno is not to be allowed to leave the premises or to communicate with the outside,” Prinz told the guards. They crossed the room to flank my chair with pistols at the ready.

  “What are we going to do with him?”

  How far would they really go to protect their own interests?

  “Perhaps Dr. Bruno has met with an unfortunate accident in the lab…” Prinz said slowly.

  My God, were they deadly serious?

  “Surely you’re not suggesting…?” Feinstein exclaimed, quite aghast.

  “The organism is being destroyed, we can wipe his research notes from the data banks, no one else knows, we can hardly afford to leave loose ends dangling,” Prinz said. “You have any better ideas, Warren?”

  “But—”

  Did I panic? Did I become one of them? Was I acting out of ruthless self-interest myself, or following a higher imperative? Or all four? Who can say? All I knew then was that my life was on the line, that I had to talk my way out of that room, and the words came pouring out of me before I even thought them, or so it seemed.

  “One million dollars a year,” I blurted.