Journals of the Plague Years Read online

  It seemed crazy to me, and I told him so, exposing yourself to every Plague strain you could. Didn’t that mean Condition Terminal would just come quicker?

  Saint Max shrugged. “Here I am,” he said. “No one’s been exposed to as many Plague variants as me. Maybe it’s already happened. Maybe I’ve got multiimmunity. Maybe I’m a mutant. Maybe there’s already a benign strain inside me.”

  He smiled sadly. “We’re all under sentence of death the moment we’re born anyway, now aren’t we, my dear? Even the poor blue-carders. It’s only a matter of how, and when, and in the pursuit of what. And like old John Henry, I intend to die with my hammer in my hand. Think about it, Linda.”

  And I did. I offered Max a ride up the coast and he accepted and we ended up traveling one full slow cycle of my circuit together. I watched Max giving meat freely to one and all, to kids like me new to the underground, to thieves, and whores, and horrible Terminals on the way out. No one took Saint Max’s crazy theory seriously. Everyone loved him.

  And so did I. I paid my way with the usual interface sex, and Max let it be until we were finally back in Santa Monica and it was time to say goodbye. “You’re young, Linda,” he told me. “With good enough pallies, you have years ahead of you. Me, I know I’m reaching the end of the line. You’ve got the heart for it, my dear. This old faggot would go out a lot happier knowing that there was someone like you to carry on. Think about it, my dear, ‘A Short Life but a Happy One,’ as they say in the Army of the Living Dead. And don’t think we’re not all in it.”

  I thought about it. I thought about it for a long time. But I didn’t do anything about it till I saw Max again, till Max lay dying.

  >

  Walter T. Bigelow

  After two terms in the Virginia Assembly, I ran for Congress and was elected. Capitol Hill was in a state of uproar over the Plague. National policy was nonexistent. Some states were quarantining Plague victims, others were doing nothing. Some states were testing people at their borders, others were calling this a violation of the Constitution. Some representatives were calling for a national health identity card, others considered this a civil rights outrage. Christian groups were calling for a national quarantine policy. Plague victims’ rights groups were calling for an end to all restrictions on their free movements. Dozens of test cases were moving ponderously toward the Supreme Court.

  After two terms watching this congressional paralysis, God inspired me to conceive of the National Quarantine Amendment. I ran for the Senate on it, received the support of Christians and Plague victims alike, and was elected by a huge majority.

  The amendment nationalized Plague policy. Each state was required to set up Quarantine Zones proportional in area and economic base to the percentage of victims in its territory, said division to be updated every two years. Every citizen outside a Zone must carry an updated blue card. In return for this, Plague victims were guaranteed full civil and voting rights within their Quarantine Zones, and free commerce in nonbiological products was assured.

  It was fair. It was just. It was inspired by God. Under my leadership it sailed through Congress and was accepted by three-quarters of the states within two years after I led a strenuous nationwide campaign to pass it.

  I was a national hero. It was a presidential year. I was told that I was assured my party’s nomination, that my election to the presidency was all but certain.

  >

  Linda Lewin

  Saint Max had suddenly collapsed into late Condition Terminal. Indeed he was at the point of death when I finally followed the trail of the sad story to a cabin on a seacliff not far from Big Sur. There he lay, skeletal, emaciated, his body covered with sarcomas, semicomatose.

  But his eyes opened up when I walked in. “I’ve been waiting for you, my dear,” he said. “I wasn’t about to leave without saying goodbye to Our Lady.”

  “Our Lady? That’s you, Max.”

  “Was, my dear.”

  “Oh, Max…” I cried, and burst into tears. “What can I do?”

  “Nothing, my dear…Or everything.” His eyes were hard and pitiless then, yet also somehow soft and imploring.

  “Max…”

  He nodded. “You could give me one last meatfuck goodbye,” he told me. He smiled. “I would have preferred a boy, of course, but at least it would please my old mother to know that I mended my ways on my deathbed.”

  I looked at his feverish, disease-ravaged body. “You don’t know what you’re asking!” I cried.

  “Oh yes I do, my dear. I’m asking you to do the bravest thing you’ve ever done in your life. I’m asking you to believe in the faith of a dying madman. On the other hand, I’m asking for nothing at all, since you’ve already Got It.”

  How could I not? Either way, he was right. The Plague would kill me sooner or later no matter what I did now. I would never even know by how much this act of kindness would shorten my life span. Or if it would at all. And Max was dying. He had lived his life bravely in the service of humanity, at least as he saw it. And I loved him more in that moment than I had ever loved anyone in my life. And what if he was right? What other hope did humanity have? How could I refuse him?

  I couldn’t.

  I didn’t.

  Afterward, as I held him, he spoke to me one last time. “Now for my last wish,” he said.

  “Haven’t I just given it to you?”

  “You know you haven’t.”

  “What then?”

  “You know, my dear.”

  So I did. I had accepted it when I took his ravaged manhood inside my unprotected body. I knew that now. I knew that I had known it all along.

  “Will you take up this torch from me?” he said, holding out his hand.

  “Yes, Max, I will,” I promised and reached for the phantom object.

  “Then this old faggot can go out happy,” he said. And died in my arms with a smile on his lips.

  And I became Our Lady. Our Lady of the Living Dead, as they were to call me.

  >

  John David

  San Diego was crawling with SPs, and they probably would have sent in commando units to hunt us down, if they weren’t so terrified of what would happen if the citizens were to find out that hundreds of us zombies were loose and on the warpath in the good old U.S. of A.

  And we were, meatfuckers, better believe it! Wouldn’t you? Sooner or later they were going to get us all, and if they didn’t, the Plague would, and in my case, sooner than later. So we scattered. I don’t know what the others did, but me, I stayed drunk and stoned, and meatfucked as many of the treacherous blue-carders as I could lay my hands on. And tracked down all the pally pushers I could find. I don’t even know what half the stuff I shot up was, but something in the mix, or maybe the mix itself, seemed to slow the Plague. I didn’t get any better, but I seemed to stabilize.

  But the situation in Dago didn’t, brothers and sisters. It became one close call after another. Finally I got caught by a couple of stupid SPs. Well, those Unholy Rollers were no match for a zombie with my combat smarts. While they were running one of my phony cards through the national data bank and coming up null, I managed to kill the meatfuckers.

  I picked my IDs off the corpses, but now the national data bank had me marked as a zombie on the run, and when they found these stiffs, they’d fax my photo to every SP station in the fifty states. The Sex Police took a real dim view of SP killers, and nailing me would be priority one.

  I had only one chance, not that it was max probability. I had to disappear into a Quarantine Zone. San Francisco was the biggest, hence the safest. Also the tastiest, or so I was told.

  So I snatched a car and headed north. How I would break into a Zone, I’d have to figure out later. If, by some chance, I managed to avoid the SPs long enough to get there.

  >

  Walter T. Bigelow

  Congress set up the Federal Quarantine Agency to administer the National Quarantine Amendment. It would have enormous power and enormous res
ponsibility. It was the wisdom of Congress, with which I heartily concurred, that it be entirely insulated from party politics. The director would be chosen in the manner of Supreme Court justices—nominated by the president, approved by the Senate, serving for life, removable only by impeachment.

  After the president signed the bill, he called me into his office and pleaded with me to accept the appointment. It was my amendment. I was the only political figure who had the confidence of both Plague victims and blue-carders.

  All that, I knew, was true. What was also true was that many insiders blanched at the thought of a Bigelow presidency. This was the perfect political solution.

  It was the most important decision of my life and the most difficult. Elaine had had her heart set on being First Lady. “You just can’t let them take the presidency away from you like this,” she insisted. Ministers and black-carder groups and politicians of my own party, some sincere, some otherwise, begged me to accept the lifetime directorship of the FQA. For weeks, they all badgered me while I procrastinated and prayed.

  It seemed as if the voices of God and the Devil were speaking to me through my wife, party leaders, men of God, men of power, saints and sinners, battling for possession of my soul. But which was the voice of God and which the voice of Satan? Which way did my true duty lie? What did God want me to do?

  Finally, I went on a solitary retreat into the Utah desert, into Zion National Park. I fasted. I prayed. I called on Jesus to speak to me.

  And at length a voice did speak to me, in a vision. “You are the Moses I have chosen to lead My people out of the wilderness,” it told me. “Have I not commanded you to become a leader of men? Those who would deny you power are the agents of the Adversary.”

  But then another stronger and sweeter voice spoke out of a great white light and I knew that this was truly Jesus and whose the first voice had really been.

  “I saved you from the Plague and your own sinful desire in your hour of need,” He told me. “I raised you up from the pit so that you might do God’s will on Earth. As I gave up My life to save Man from sin, so must you give up worldly power to save the people from their dark natures. As God chose Me for My Calvary, so do I choose you for yours.”

  I returned from the desert to Washington and I obeyed. I put the thought of worldly glory behind me. There were those who snickered when I accepted this appointment. There were those who laughed when I told the nation that I had done it at the bidding of Jesus.

  Even my wife told me I was a fool, and a breach was opened between us that I knew no way to heal. We became strangers to each other sharing the same marriage bed.

  Oh yes, I paid dearly for my obedience to God’s will. But while I may have lost my chance at worldly power and hardened my wife’s heart against me, I remained steadfast and strong.

  For God had saved me in that dormitory room with Gus and granted me Grace and salvation. And Jesus spoke truth to me in the desert in the presence of the Adversary and saved me again. And so in my heart I knew I had done right.

  >

  Dr. Richard Bruno

  How could I have done such a thing? How could I, of all people, have been naïve enough to Get It from a meatwhore? As the ancient saying has it, a stiff dick knows no conscience, and they don’t call a fool a stupid prick for nothing.

  For my fortieth birthday, I got royally drunk and righteously stoned, and I demanded a special birthday present from Marge. Was it really too much to ask from one’s own wife on the night of the rite de passage of my midlife crisis? Tender loving meat for my Fateful Fortieth? We were both blue-carders. Marge had hardly any sex life at all. The only times I had been unfaithful to her were with radiation-sterilized sex machines.

  I was loaded and raving, but she was entirely irrational. She refused. When I attempted to get physical, she locked herself in the bedroom and told me to go stick it in one of my goddamn sex machines.

  I reeled out into the streets, stoned out of my mind, aching with despair, with a raging fortieth-birthday hard-on. But I didn’t slink off to the usual sex machine parlor, oh no; that was what Marge had told me to do, wasn’t it?

  Instead, I found myself one of those clandestine meatbars. To make the old long story modern and short, I picked up a whore. We inserted our cards in the bar’s reader and of course they both came up blue. Off I went to her room and did every kind of meat I could think of and some that seemed to be her own inventions.

  I staggered home, still loaded, and passed out on the couch. The Morning After…

  Oh my God!

  Beyond the inevitable horrid hangover and conjugal recriminations, I awoke to the full awfulness of what I had done. In my present sober and thoroughly detumescent state, I knew all too well how many phony blue cards were floating around the meatbars. Had I…?

  I ran the standard tests on myself in my own lab for six days. On the sixth day, they came up black. When I cultured the bastard, it turned out to be a Plague variant I had not yet seen.

  By this time I had prepared myself for the inevitable. I had made my plans. As fortune would have it, I had ten weeks before my next ID update, ten weeks to achieve what medical science had failed to achieve in twenty years and more of trying.

  But I had motivation. If I failed, in ten weeks I would lose my blue card, my job, my mission in life, my wife, my family, and with no one to blame but myself. At this point, I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that I was under sentence of eventual death. What would happen in ten weeks was more than disaster enough to keep me working twenty hours a day, or so at least it seemed.

  And, crazed creature that I was, I had a crazy idea, one that, in retrospect, I saw I had been moving toward all along.

  My work on cassette vaccines was already well advanced, so might it not be possible to push it one step further, and synthesize an automatic self-programming cassette vaccine? It might be pushing the edge of the scientific possible, but it was my only hope. A crazy idea, yes, but was not madness just over the edge from inspiration?

  I stripped a Plague virus down to the harmless core in the usual manner. But I didn’t start hanging on the usual series of antigen coat variants. I started crafting a series of nanomanipulators out of RNA fragments, molecular “tentacles.”

  What I was after was an organism that would infect the same cells as the Plague. That would seize any strain of Plague virus it found, destroy the core, and wrap the empty antigen coat around itself, much as a hermit crab crawls inside a discarded seashell in order to protect its nakedness from the world.

  In effect, a killed-virus vaccine that could still reproduce as an organism, an organism continually reprogramming its antigen coat to mimic lethal invaders, that would use the corpses of the Enemy to stimulate the production of antibodies to it, a living, self-programming cassette vaccine factory within my own body.

  The theory was simple, cunning, and elegant. Actually synthesizing such a molecular dreadnaught was something else again…

  >

  Linda Lewin

  The story of what happened on Saint Max’s deathbed became a legend of the underground. And whereas Max had been old and had long since outlived any rational expectations of survival, I was young, I appeared healthy, and so what I was risking was readily apparent.

  Like Saint Max, Our Lady gave the comfort of her meat to anyone who asked her. I gave freely of my body to young black-carders like myself, to rotting Terminals, to every underground black-carder between.

  Perhaps because I was young, perhaps because I was the first convert to Saint Max’s vision daring enough to put it into practice, perhaps because I was so much more naively earnest about it than he had been, perhaps because I appeared to be in such robust health, there were those who believed in it now, who believed in me, in the Faith of Our Lady. If Saint Max had been our Jesus, and I was our Paul, now there were disciples to spread the Faith, no more than scores, maybe, but at least more than Christianity’s original twelve.

  Spreading the Faith of Saint
Max and Our Lady. Gaining converts with our hope and our bodies as we wandered up and down California. The Plague strains would spread faster now. Millions might die sooner who might have lingered longer. But were we not all under sentence of death anyway, blue-carders and black-carders alike?

  Millions of lives might be shortened, but out of all that death, the species might survive. We would challenge the Plague head-on, in the only way we could—love against despair, sex against death. We would force the pace of evolution and/or die trying.

  And while we lived, we would at least live free, we would live, and love, and fight for our species’ survival as natural men and women. Better in fire than in ice.

  >

  Walter T. Bigelow

  I had done as God commanded, I was doing His work, but the Devil continued to torment me. Elaine remained distant and cold, the Plague continued to spread despite my best efforts, and then, at length, Satan, not content with this, reached out and put his hand upon my Billy.

  Billy, the son I had raised so carefully, the son who to my joy had Found the Light at the age of fourteen, began to act strangely, moping in his room at night, locking himself in the bathroom for suspiciously long intervals. I didn’t need to be the director of the Federal Quarantine Agency to suspect what was happening; any good Christian father could read the signs.

  I was prepared to find pornography when I searched his room one morning after he had left for school, but nothing could have prepared me for the vile nature of the filth I found. Photographs of men having meatsex with each other. With young boys. Photographs of naked young boys in the lewdest of poses. And, worse still, hideous cartoons of boys and girls having the most impossible and revolting intercourse with sex machines, automated monstrosities with grotesque vulvas, immense penile organs, done up to simulate animals, robots, tentacled aliens from outer space.