Of Starlight and Plague
Page 1
Copyright © 2021 Beth Hersant
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
All of the herbal remedies cited in this novel were taken from other sources and the author cannot vouch for their safety or efficacy. Some of the ingredients can be harmful and potentially lethal if used improperly. Hence you should not, on the basis of this novel, try any of the traditional remedies at home. Always seek the advice of a trained professional before using and/or ingesting any of these substances. Likewise the use of drugs and misuse of medications described here are harmful and potentially lethal.
Always follow manufacturer’s instruction for the safe use of NSAIDS.
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To Amelia and Matthew, and my Richard — you are my stars.
Also a thank you to Eleanor and Deborah
for listening to me prattle on about this.
“I will love the light for it shows me the way,
yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.”
Og Mandino
Contents
Prologue
Acorn
Part One
Mighty Oaks
Chapter One
Mourning
Chapter Two
Meaning
Chapter Three
Igor
Chapter Four
Abby Normal
Chapter Five
On the Radar
Chapter Six
Unprecedented
Chapter Seven
El Chupacabra
Chapter Eight
Coming Home to Roost
Chapter Nine
Beginning of the End
Part Two
`Round the World with J. Fred Muggs
Chapter One
New Orleans
Chapter Two
Cáscara
Chapter Three
New Orleans
Chapter Four
Reading, England
Chapter Five
New Orleans
Chapter Six
Globe-trotting
Chapter Seven
New Orleans
Chapter Eight
Postcards From Over the Edge
Part Three
Stars
Chapter One
On the Road
Chapter Two
Zombieburgh
Chapter Three
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Chapter Four
And So It Begins…
Chapter Five
Devil in Disguise
Chapter Six
The Fall
Chapter Seven
Day One
Chapter Eight
Brown Sugar and Cheddar Cheese
Chapter Nine
Leaders
Chapter Ten
Roller Coaster
Chapter Eleven
Interlude
Chapter Twelve
The Lost Boys
Chapter Thirteen
Another Brief Interlude
Chapter Fourteen
Rock of Ages
Chapter Fifteen
Queen Takes Bishop
Chapter Sixteen
Rock of Ages (Reprise)
Epilogue
Acorn
Prologue
Acorn
It is said that terrible omens preceded the outbreak of the Black Death in medieval Europe. Frogs, serpents and scorpions fell from the sky. There was thunder and lightning and then fire rained down from the heavens. It’s a dramatic image — but obvious nonsense. Big events are not heralded by a rain of toads. They have simple beginnings and we often find the germ of great horrors in the ordinary and the small. There is the tiny air bubble in the vein, the microscopic not-quite-alive strand of viral RNA that causes Ebola, that last shot of Captain Morgan before getting behind the wheel. After all, mighty oaks from little acorns grow. This was the case with our own Great Plague. And so our story begins with a little girl and a small red rubber ball.
Rachel Pickman sat in a shady spot where the concrete wasn’t too hot and played Jacks. It was a sweltering August day and she looked longingly at the bright blue water of the swimming pool. She wasn’t allowed to go in by herself. She was not a confident swimmer and so either her father or Mrs. Williams had to be present for her to take a dip. It was Mrs. W’s day off and, well, she knew better than to ask her dad. And so she fetched the game that her babysitter had given her as a treat. It was a cloth bag containing ten bronze-colored jacks and a ball. The aim, apparently, was to toss the ball into the air, scoop up the jacks and then catch the ball all with the same hand. To Rachel this seemed impossible. She could not pick up the little metal spikes before the ball ricocheted away from her. One such bounce sent it flying into the large rhododendron bush that lined the yard’s fence.
“Boogers,” she sighed.
It was going to be impossible to find among all those flowers. A part of her was tempted to just forget a
bout it. It was a cheap thing, after all — a little bit of rubber the color of a cherry-flavored gumball with the word CHINA stamped onto it. She could probably replace it with the few coins she had in her piggy bank. But it had been a gift from Mrs. Williams, and therefore important.
Sighing again, she began to shake the branches and pick her way through the bush — carefully in case there were spiders. That was when she heard the growl.
“Rufus?” Forgetting all about the bugs, she squeezed behind the rhododendron to welcome her best friend. Rufus was a small Jack Russell Terrier who belonged to Mrs. Winslow, the old lady next door. Her dad said that Mrs. Winslow had something happening to her brain that made her confused and forgetful. And so Rachel had started feeding the dog, just in case Mrs. Winslow forgot. This was accomplished through the “Doggie Door” — a hole in the wooden fence that separated the two properties. Rachel had widened it to allow Rufus to sneak through and she would meet the dog there, screened from view by the pink flowers of the bush. She didn’t have any dog food to give to the animal, so she saved bacon from her breakfast and chicken from her sandwiches at lunchtime. As you can imagine, Rachel and Rufus were great friends.
Today, however, Rufus did not welcome her with a wagging tail and a belly ready for scratching. The dog hung back and squinted at her through puffy eyes that were little more than slits. His muzzle was wet with thick, white strands of drool. His legs trembled.
“Are you ok, boy?” the child asked.
Rufus answered her with a low growl.
“Hey,” Rachel cooed to him. “Maybe you’ll feel better when you’ve eaten.” She fished the napkin containing morsels out of the pocket of her shorts. “I get grumpy when I’m hungry too.”
Her eyes were not on the dog now, but on the napkin as she extracted a strip of bacon, careful not to drop it onto the loose earth at her feet.
“Here…”. She looked up as she held out the treat.
Rachel froze. A terrible change had come over the dog. His eyes were now wide, crazed and so, so angry. His teeth were bared and they seemed really big for such a small animal. With a snarl, the terrier lunged forward and bit. Rachel yelped and jumped back as Rufus staggered sideways and fell face-first into the wooden fence. He lay there snarling — a wet, choking sound that modulated from a low growl of fury to the high keening of an animal in distress. The sound drove the child from her hiding place behind the bush. His terror was infectious — that awful cry brought out goose pimples on her arms and made her heart pound wildly in her chest. She ran sobbing, not so much from pain, but from fear and the shock of betrayal. Rufus, her friend, had turned on her.
Once in the cool, dim shadows of the house, she stood there sniffling and debated what to do. She wanted to run and tell her father what had happened, but decided not to. He had become increasingly impatient with her since her mother’s death. The last time she hurt herself, he got really mad at her. She’d been playing swamp — a game in which the floor of the living room was a deadly marsh filled with piranha, leeches and alligators. To make it to safety, you had to jump from the couch to the big chair to the footstool to the piano bench. It was at the piano where it all went wrong. The bench tipped; she fell and whacked her head on the corner of the coffee table. A gash in her forehead bled all over the carpet. Summoned by her wails, her father had cleaned her up and put a butterfly bandage on the cut; but as he did so, he yelled at her for the mess, for the interruption, for her stupidity.
Therefore she went to the downstairs bathroom and cleaned the wound herself. The bite was not large, nor was it deep, but it had broken the skin on the fleshy part of her arm above the elbow. At eight years old, she was used to dealing with skinned knees, brush burns and the odd cut. So she washed the bite with soap and water, put a dab of Neosporin on it and applied an unnecessarily elaborate array of Band-Aids. (The Disney princess ones her mother bought for her were still in the medicine cabinet).
The wound healed and she forgot all about it. And then three months later, when she came down with what seemed like the flu, she did not connect the illness with the dog bite.
Rabies, once introduced into the body, foregoes the blood stream where it may be detected and attacked by the victim’s immune system. Instead it creeps along the peripheral nerves at a rate of three millimeters per hour. The virus traveled along the radial nerve of Rachel’s arm to her central nervous system finally reaching her brain. This marked the visible “beginning” of her illness, essentially the moment she first displayed any symptoms.
It was now two weeks shy of Thanksgiving and the children of Abraham Lincoln School were already busy sharing the autumn’s crop of germs. There were runny noses and sore throats enough to go around. Therefore when Rachel presented with a low-grade fever, headache and cough, her father (a doctor at Eastern Maine Medical Center) did the only logical thing. He gave her Children’s Tylenol, kept her fluids up and installed her on the couch to watch Bugs Bunny.
Five days passed, then seven, and she didn’t get any better. Disturbed by the flashing lights of the TV, Rachel retreated to her bedroom. Her body ached and her throat felt as if shards of broken glass were lodged there. They seemed to cut her every time she swallowed. She was even hurt by light. Her bedroom was a bright, south-facing room that her mother had decorated with white furniture and pastel accents. It was a beautiful room but now the sun, glaring off all that white, stung her eyes and made the pain in her head pulse with every heartbeat.
In his novel, When the Lion Feeds, Wilbur Smith described the headache that accompanies rabies as “a hundred hobgoblins doing a cossack dance around the roof of my skull.” The hobgoblins drove the girl from her bed. She slid underneath it and used her pillows and a big plush dog named Bo to block out the light.
Bo was a huge stuffed animal, luxuriously soft, with big floppy ears and a nose fashioned out of brown leather. It felt cool so she pressed her burning forehead against it and lapsed into an uneasy sleep. She dreamt that she was in the backyard watching the rhododendron bush twitch and shake as if a large animal was hiding behind it. The garden had always been safe and yet she was afraid. Whatever lurked just behind the long green leaves and clusters of pink flowers had teeth.
Then it leapt. Bo came at her out of the hedge, his white fur streaked with dirt. His big floppy paws landed on her shoulders, driving her to the ground. And then that great body was on top of her and she couldn’t see and she couldn’t breathe and she’d die. She knew she’d die there in that smothering darkness. The scream she couldn’t give voice to in the dream finally tore itself from her tortured throat.
“Rachel?” Her father was there. “What are you doing under the bed?”
The child wept and clung to him as he pulled her out. Her head, from her eye sockets back to the base of her skull, pounded out beats of pain that made her stomach roil. As she gagged, her father managed to fetch her wastepaper basket to her before she got violently sick. Vomiting, oddly enough, often brings people some relief. The physical act of regurgitation releases endorphins which are the body’s natural painkillers. But Rachel cried out hoarsely, “It hurts!”
“What hurts?”
The child grabbed her throat and wept in loud, shuddering croaks. He scooped her up and ran for the car.
Rachel Pickman was admitted to the Eastern Maine Medical Center with a high fever, severe vomiting and loss of muscular coordination down her right side.
Outside her room on the isolation ward, her father stood at the nurses’ station, leaning against the counter for support. Dr. Edmund Brubaker, Head Consultant for Pediatric Infectious Diseases, put a reassuring hand on his friend’s shoulder.
“It’s not time to panic yet,” he said gently.
Aaron Pickman nodded. “But what is it?”
“My best guess is encephalitis.” He studied her chart for a moment. “Let me just verify her medical history. She’s had all her vaccinations? Her
MMR?”
“Absolutely.”
“And there has been no sign of vaccine failure? No indication of measles or mumps?”
“No.”
“When was the last time she was out of the country?”
Pickman shook his head, “She’s never been abroad.”
“All right. I’ve already ordered blood tests to rule out EBV and look for any autoimmune response. The blood work should also give us an answer about measles and mumps.”
Pickman was reading over his shoulder now. “You’ve ordered a lumbar puncture,” he said quietly. “You’re looking for?”
“Rabies.”
The girl’s father tried to laugh that suggestion off, but he only managed a sharp exhalation of air. “That’s ridiculous. There are — what? — two cases a year?”
Brubaker nodded, “And most of those are contracted outside the U.S. I’m just being thorough. You know that in half of our encephalitis cases we never get to the bottom of what caused it in the first place. I’m just trying to cross everything I can off the list.”
Pickman drew in a juddering breath. “You’ve started her on antivirals?”
Brubaker nodded again, “Acyclovir.”
“And…”
The old doctor held up a placating hand. “… and corticosteroids and a sedative and I’ve ordered anticonvulsants to be kept on standby in case of seizure. We’ll monitor her respiration around the clock and get the test results back asap.”