Journals of the Plague Years

by Norman Spinrad

  They didn’t.

  Tod got caught in an SP raid on a meatbar again.

  But they didn’t drag him home this time. Instead, the news came on the telephone, and it was Marge who chanced to take the call. Tod was being held at the Palo Alto SP headquarters. Other detainees had told the SP that he had been a regular. Black-carders had admitted having meat with him. He was undergoing testing now and his card was sure to come up black.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her when she relayed this information in a state of numb, teary panic, “they’ll have to let him go. He’ll test out blue, I promise.”

  “You’re crazy, Richard, that’s plain impossible! You’re out of your mind!”

  “If you think I’m crazy now,” I said, pouring her a big drink, “wait till I get drunk enough to tell you why!”

  I gulped down two quick ones myself before I found the courage to begin, and kept drinking as I babbled out the whole story.

  “Now let me give the dreadnaught to you,” I woozed when I was finished, reaching out for her in a state of sloppy inebriation.

  She shrieked, pulled away from me, ran around the living room screaming, “You animal! You’re crazy! You’ve killed our son! Stay away from me! Stay away from me!”

  How can I explain or excuse what happened next? I was drunk out of my mind, but another part of me was running on coldly logical automatic. If there could be such a thing as loving rape, now was the time for it. Marge was certain that I was a sinkhole of the Plague, and there was only one way I could ever convince her of the truth. I had to infect her with the dreadnaught, and I couldn’t take no for an answer.

  The short and nasty of it was that I meatraped my own wife, knowing I was doing the right thing even as she fought with all her strength against me, convinced that she was fighting to keep herself from certain infection with the Plague. It was brutal and horrible and I loathed myself for what I was doing even as I knew full well that it was ultimately right.

  And left her there sobbing while I reeled off into the night to retrieve Tod from the SP.

  I was in a drunken fury, I was a medical heavyweight, I demanded that they run a full battery of tests on Tod and myself, and I browbeat the tired SP timeserver who ran them unmercifully. When they all turned out blue, I threatened lawsuits and dire political recriminations if Tod were not released to my custody at once, and succeeded thereby in deflecting his attention from the “anomalous organism” he had noticed in our bloodstreams long enough to get us out the door.

  But the “anomalous organism” would be noted in his report. And Sutcliffe would be keeping close tabs on my data file, and there were certainly people on their end who would put one and one and one together. It was only a question of how much time it would take.

  And we couldn’t stay around to find out. We had to run. Tod, myself, Linda, and Marge. But where? And how?

  We drove to Linda’s and had to wait outside for half an hour till the man she was with left.

  >

  Linda Lewin

  “There’s only one place we can go,” I told Tod and Richard. “Only one place we can hide where the SP can’t come after us…”

  “The San Francisco Quarantine Zone?” Richard stammered.

  I nodded. “The SP won’t go into San Francisco. There isn’t a Fuck-Q alive who’d be willing to do it.”

  “But…San Francisco…?”

  “Remember, we have nothing to fear from the Plague,” I told them. “Besides…can you think of anywhere where what we three have is more needed?”

  “But how can we even get inside the Zone?”

  I had to think about that one for a good long while. I had never even heard of anyone trying to get past the SP into San Francisco. On the other hand, neither had the SP…

  “Our best bet would be by boat from Sausalito. We wait for a good foggy night, then cross the Golden Gate through the fog bank in a wooden rowboat, no motor noise, no radar profile. The patrol boats stick in close to San Francisco and they’re watching the coastline, not the Bay. The helicopters won’t be able to see us through the fog even if they are flying…”

  “Sounds like risky business,” Richard said dubiously.

  “Any better ideas?”

  Richard shrugged. “Let’s go collect Marge,” he said.

  >

  Dr. Richard Bruno

  The three of us piled into Linda’s car—they’d be looking for mine once they were looking for anything—and drove back to our house.

  Marge was still in a state of shock when we got there. Even when she saw Tod, even when he and Linda backed up my story, she still couldn’t quite believe me. She started to come around a bit when I showed her the enormous balance in my secret account.

  But when I told her we had to flee to San Francisco, she fell apart all over again. There was no time for further persuasion Tod, Linda, and I were forced to wrestle her into the car by brute force, with my hand clamped over her mouth to prevent her from screaming.

  We drove around the rim of the bay to Sausalito, bought a rowboat, rented motel rooms, and waited.

  The fog didn’t roll in good and thick until two nights later. During these two days, with Tod and Linda and myself talking to her almost nonstop, Marge slowly came to believe the truth.

  But accepting the fact that all of us had a moral duty to spread the dreadnaught in the only way possible was a bit more than she could swallow. She could accept it intellectually, but she remained emotionally shattered.

  “I believe you, Richard, truly I do,” she admitted as the sun went down on our last day in Sausalito. “I can even admit that what you’re doing is probably the right thing. But me, I just can’t…”

  “I know,” I told her, hugging her to me. “It’s hard for me too…” and I made tender love to her, meat on meat as it was meant to be, for what was to prove to be the last time.

  That night a big bank of fog rolled in through the gap in the Golden Gate Bridge, a tall one too, that kept the gunships high above the San Francisco shoreline. It was now or never.

  Tod hesitated on the pier.

  “Scared?”

  He nodded.

  “Me too, Tod.”

  He clasped my hand. “I’m scared, Dad,” he said softly. “I mean, I know we don’t have much of a chance of making it…But if anything happens…I want you to know that I wouldn’t have it any other way…We had to do what we did. I love you, Dad. You’re the bravest man I’ve ever known.”

  “And I’m proud to have you for a son,” I said with tears in my eyes. “I only wish…”

  “Don’t say it, Dad.”

  I hugged him to me, and then we all piled into the boat, and Tod and I began to row.

  The currents were tricky and kept pushing us east and the going was tougher than I had anticipated, but we steered for the lights of the city and made dogged progress.

  We couldn’t have been more than five hundred yards from the shore when a spotlight beam suddenly pinned us in a dazzling circle of pearly light. “Rowboat heave to! Rowboat heave to!”

  So near and yet so far! If the SP caught us, we were finished. We had no choice but to row for it.

  We pulled out of the spotlight and zigged and zagged toward the shore while a motor roared back and forth behind us and the spotlight flitted randomly over the flat waters. The fog was quite thick, and they had trouble picking us up again.

  When they finally did we were within two hundred yards of the shore. And then they opened up with some kind of heavy machine gun.

  “We’re sitting ducks in this boat!” Tod shouted. “Got to swim for it!” And he dived overboard and down into the darkness of the waters under a hail of bullets.

  Everything seemed to happen at once. The boat tipped as Tod dived, Linda rolled over the side, Marge panicked and fell overboard, the boat turned turtle—

  And we were all in the cold water, swimming as far as we could under water before surfacing for air, catching quick breaths, swimming for our lives benea
th a random fusillade of bullets and a skittery searchlight beam.

  There was no room for thought or even fear as I swam for my life with aching lungs, no time or space to feel the horror of what was happening. Until, gasping for air, exhausted and freezing, I clawed my way up a rocky beach.

  Out across the dark waters, the searchlight still roamed and the machine-gun fire still flashed and chattered. Linda Lewin crawled up beside me, panting and coughing. We lay there, not moving, not talking, not thinking, for a long time, until the gunboat finally gave up and disappeared into the fog.

  Then we got up and searched the beach for at least an hour.

  Tod and Marge were nowhere to be found.

  “Maybe they made it farther up the beach,” Linda suggested wanly.

  But I knew better. I could feel the void in my heart. They were gone. They were gone, and I had killed them as surely as if the hand on the machine-gun trigger had been mine.

  “Richard—”

  I pulled away from her comforting embrace.

  “Richard—”

  I turned away from her and let a cold black despair roll like a fog bank into my mind, erasing all thought, and filling me with itself, wondering whether it would ever roll out again.

  And hoping in that endless bleak moment that it never would.

  >

  John David

  I suppose I knew it had to happen sooner or later, brothers and sisters, but at least I thought I’d be able to go down fighting and take some of the meatfuckers with me.

  It didn’t happen that way. They got me while I was asleep, would you believe it!

  I was going downhill fast, I was feverish, weak, and I wasn’t really thinking, I mean I was wandering the streets like an obvious zombie for real. I got picked up by some people whose faces I don’t even remember who took me to an Our Lady safe house in Berkeley, where I passed out as soon as I hit the mattress.

  Some meatfuckin’ safe house!

  I got woke up in the middle of the night by a gun butt in the back of the neck and another in my belly. They rounded everyone in the joint up and hauled us to the SP station. They ran everyone’s cards against the national data bank.

  Everyone but me. Me, they didn’t have to bother, seeing as I was an obvious Condition Terminal and they had caught me with about a dozen assorted phony blue cards in my kit. Me, they just took my finger and retina prints and faxed ’em to Washington.

  “Well, well, well,” the SP lieutenant purred after no more than half an hour. “John David, recently of the Legion, wanted for about ten thousand counts of murder, meatrape, and ID forgery, not to mention robbery, insurrection, border crashing, and treason. You’re a bad boy, aren’t you, John? But I’m real pleased to meet you. I get the feeling you’re gonna get me a nice promotion. Tell you what, if you do, the night before they do you, your last meal’s on me.”

  >

  Walter T. Bigelow

  Not content with possessing my wife, Satan pursued me to my office. First the blasphemous cult of Our Lady and then a series of anomalies in the San Francisco Bay Area that seemed to indicate that the national data bank had somehow been compromised.

  It was common enough for phony blue cards to come up black against the national data bank. But it was unheard-of for anyone caught with a forged blue card not to prove out black upon actual testing for the Plague, for of course it made absolutely no sense for someone with a valid blue card to use a forged one.

  But it was happening around the Bay Area. There were almost a dozen cases.

  And now this truly bizarre incident last night in the same locale. Four people in a rowboat had actually tried to run the Quarantine blockade into San Francisco! Two of them seemed to have actually made it.

  When the bodies of the other two were fished out of the Bay, they proved to be Tod and Marge Bruno, the son and wife of one Dr. Richard Bruno, a prominent genetic synthesizer with the Sutcliffe Corporation.

  The local SP commandant was due for a promotion or at least a commendation.

  He had run all three names through the national data bank. Tod Bruno had been caught in a meatbar sweep three days previously. Although many witnesses claimed he was an habitué, he had come out blue under a full spectrum of tests. The commandant had had the wit to dig deeper and found that some “anomalous organism” had been noted in the actual report.

  Instinct had caused him to order the bodies of Tod and Marge Bruno to be given a thorough and complete autopsy down to the molecular level. And it was that report that put me on a plane for San Jose.

  There was a strange “pseudovirus” written into both of their genomes. It shared many sequences with the Plague virus but resembled no known or extrapolated variant, and it had other sequences that could not have evolved naturally. The bodies had been dead too long to try to culture it.

  An unknown “pseudovirus” in the bodies of the family of a prominent genetic synthesizer…It could only be one thing—an unreported Condition Black incident at Sutcliffe. And the ultimate handiwork of the Devil had been released—some kind of horrible artificial human parasite, a manmade Plague variant. We had two corpses that had been infected with it, and I was virtually certain that Bruno at least was also infected, and was alive somewhere in San Francisco.

  What might happen in that cesspit of Satan was none of my affair, but Tod Bruno had been infected when he was picked up in a meatbar outside the Quarantine Zone, and he had passed through a full battery of tests and come out blue.

  Meaning that this monstrous thing was invisible to all our standard Plague tests. What had the Devil wrought at the Sutcliffe Corporation?

  As I flew westward, I had the unshakable conviction that I was flying toward some climactic confrontation with the Adversary, that the battle of Armageddon had already begun.

  >

  Linda Lewin

  San Francisco was not what I had expected. I’m not sure what I had really expected, a foul Sodom of ruins and rotting zombies, maybe, but this was not it.

  The streets were clean and the quaint buildings lovingly cared for. The famous old cable cars were still running and so were the buses. The restaurants were open, the bars were crowded, and there were cabarets and theaters. There were even friendly cops walking beats.

  Food and various necessities were allowed in through the Daly City Quarantine Line and sterilized products allowed out, so the city did have an economy connected to the outside world. The place was poor, of course, but the people inside it held together to see themselves through. Food was expensive in the restaurants but artificially cheap in the markets. Housing was crowded, but the rents were kept low, and the indigent or homeless were put up in public buildings and abandoned BART stations.

  Oh yes, there were many horrible Condition Terminals walking around, but many more people who could have easily melted into the underground life outside. And there was something quite touching about how all the temporarily healthy deferred to and showed such tender regard for the obvious Living Dead, something that reminded me of dear old Max.

  Indeed his spirit seemed to hover over this doomed but fatalistically gay-spirited city. Of necessity, everyone was forced to be a Saint Max here, and although the Lovers of Our Lady did not exist as such, everyone here seemed to be doing the Work.

  No one here had to worry about Getting It, or being carded, or picked up by the SP. All of that had already happened to all of them. So, while there were more open gays here than I had ever thought to see in my life, stranger still to say, there was less…perversion in San Francisco than anywhere else I had ever been.

  No meatbars as such, for every bar was a meatbar. Hardly any sex machine parlors, for the people of San Francisco, already all under sentence of death, could give one another love freely, like what natural men and women must once have been. Even the obviously terminal had their needs tenderly cared for.

  No place I had ever been seemed more like home.

  Only the pall of Plague that hung over the city marred the s
weetness of the atmosphere, and that seemed softened by the fogs, pinkened by the sunsets, lightened by the death-house gaiety and wistful philosophic melancholy with which the citizens confronted it. “Everyone’s born under a death sentence anyway,” went the popular saying. “Here at least we all know it. There is no tomorrow sooner or later, so why not live and love today?”

  Uncertain of what to do next, I began doing the Work of Our Lady in the usual manner, offering myself to anyone and everyone, spreading the dreadnaught slowly, but unsure as to whether or when to spread the glorious news.

  I would have been happy there—indeed the truth of it was that I was happy—even while I sorrowed for poor Richard.

  Richard, though, was like a little child whom I had to lead around like a creature in a daze. All his energy and motivation seemed to have vanished with his wife and son. I could understand his grief and guilt, but this couldn’t last forever.

  “We’ve got work to do, Richard, glorious and important work,” I kept telling him. “We’ve got to spread the dreadnaught among these people.”

  Mostly, he stared at me blankly. Sometimes he managed a feeble, “You do it.”

  After a few days of this, I decided that I could no longer wait for Richard to come around. I had to make the fateful decision on my own.

  This spreading the dreadnaught by myself clandestinely was just too slow. If there were evil men out there intent on stopping the dreadnaught, they’d be tracking us down. I needed to infect thousands, tens of thousands, before they could act, and the only way that could happen would be if the people of San Francisco knew what they were spreading and set out to do it systematically.

  First I began revealing myself as Our Lady to my lovers and in the bars, and there were enough people in San Francisco who had once done the Work on the outside—even some I had once known in my circuit-riding days—so that my claim gained credibility.