By late summer, the papacy learned that the pestilence had advanced as far south as Persia, Egypt, and the Levant, and as far north as Poland, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, and Romania. While these reports cannot be verified, all of us live in fear of Death’s impending arrival.
On 14 November, the Pope summoned me to his chambers to inform me that plague had struck Sicily. The Holy See’s contact, a Franciscan friar named Michele da Piazza, claimed the sickness arrived on European shores a week after twelve Genoese galleys made port early in October. Belowdecks were found dozens of dead crewmen — all infected. Those still alive entered Messina, spreading the sickness to everyone they came in contact with before they, too, died. The friar reported black boils on the necks and groins of the inflicted, along with the coughing of blood and fever, usually followed by violent, incessant vomiting. Within days of being infected, every victim had died.
My own dread is compounded by anger. Despite the approaching Death, the Holy See remains more occupied by its ongoing feud with the King of England, who seeks to rule the Iberian Peninsula one French coastal city at a time; as well as Clement’s ongoing quarrel with Rome, from which the papacy was removed several Popes past.
It is inarguable that the greed of an elite few has kept Europe cast in decades of endless war. Corruption has taken the Church, and the people have lost trust. Bouts of famine continue to ravage the countryside, — a result of decades of failing crops due to incessantly harsh weather conditions that began when I was but a child.
Many say we are cursed, suffering God’s wrath. I say our corruption, greed, and hatred for our fellowman, spewed through religious dogma, has paved the way for our own self-destruction.
Decadence now rules the Palais des Papes, war the papal states. Roving bands of condottieri attack Europe’s villages, while the fortified cities have become cesspools of neglect. Influenced by politics, the Holy See has ruled it a sin to bathe, its orthodoxy backed by a conservative medical faculty of Paris, their determination made not on scientific fact but by their desire to remain in conflict with the more liberal traditions of Rome and Greece, who consider personal hygiene a cardinal virtue.
There is nothing virtuous about living in Avignon, where the commoner shares a bedchamber with his livestock. Each day, animals are slaughtered in the public streets by butchers, the blood and feces left to feed the flies and rodents. Rats are everywhere, their scourge feasting in the filth of Avignon and Paris and every city under the influence of the Holy See, overwhelming the homes of peasants in the countryside.
It is amid this stench of corruption that the Black Death approaches our once-great city.
May God have mercy on our souls.
— Guigo
Guy de Chauliac, also known as Guido de Cauliaco, was attending physician to five Popes during the late thirteenth century and is regarded as the most important surgical writer of the Middle Ages. His major work, Inventarium sive Chirurgia Magna (The Inventory of Medicine), remained the principal didactic text on surgery until the eighteenth century.
BIO-WARFARE PHASE I: INSEMINATION
“Well, I just got into town about an hour ago…
Took a look around, see which way the wind blow
Where the little girls in their Hollywood bungalows
Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light,
Or just another lost angel… city of night
City of night, city of night, city of night…”
Manhattan: an island Mecca, surrounded by water.
The Harlem River rolled south past the Bronx, widening into the East River — whitecapped behind a fierce four-knot current. The Statue of Liberty beckoned to travelers across New York Harbor. Farther north, the waterway became the mighty Hudson, the river separating the Big Apple from the northeastern shoreline of New Jersey.
Urban waters, frigid and gray. Eye candy to Realtors and sightseers. Ignored on a daily basis by commuters, nature’s barrier neutered by a dozen bridges and tunnels.
Not today.
A winter sun splashed Manhattan’s skyline in fleeting shimmers of gold. Endless construction slowed traffic to a crawl. Tempers flared. Ten thousand new text messages launched into cyberspace. Steam rose from grates. Islands of heat drew the homeless like moths to a flame. Their indignity ignored by waves of pedestrians. Like the rivers.
Cold bit at exposed earlobes, sniffling noses. Last night’s snow, already trampled into slush. Christmas trees. Festive lights. The scent of hot Danish and cinnamon.
Thursday before Christmas. The approaching holiday energized Manhattan’s returning workforce. Human sardines packed subways and trains. Half a million vehicles turned highways into rush-hour parking lots. Deal makers and hustlers. Shoppers and sellers. Lawyers and layman and parents escorting children to school. Fueled on caffeine and dreams and survival instincts honed after years in the urban jungle. Two million visitors entered Manhattan every day. Add to that figure another 1.7 million residents — all sharing twenty-eight square miles of island.
One hundred thousand human beings occupying every frozen city block. Good and bad, old and young; men, women, and children, representing every age group and nationality on the planet. A slice of humanity, poised on a precipice too large to comprehend, their indifference to the world’s plight soiling any innocence, their deniability culpable.
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
Commuters inched their way west across the congested Queensboro Bridge — rats preparing to enter the maze. Ignore the drivers whose vehicles bear tri-state tags. Focus instead on the white Honda Civic with the Virginia license plate. The car was a rental, the driver an academic who had always preferred the suburbs to the temptations of big-city life. Yet here she was, having driven all night just to be in Manhattan on this chilly Thursday morning at this precise moment in human history. A virgin to New York, one might expect a case of rush-hour jitters. But the smile on Mary Louise Klipot’s angular face was serene, the thirty-eight-year-old cranberry-apple redhead exuding a calm that only came through inner peace. Hazel eyes, void of makeup and rimmed red from lack of sleep, glanced at the gridlocked drivers to her left. Troubled faces all, she told herself, bearing the constant fear that came from uncertainty.
Mary Klipot was neither afraid nor uncertain. She was in a place beyond worry, beyond the human stain. Faith was a wellspring that drove her convictions, and it ran deep, for she was traveling along a road paved by the Almighty Himself—
— and she was traveling with His child.
Of course, Andrew had tried to convince her otherwise, her fiancé insisting that he was her unborn child’s father. His argument held no sway, coerced by his clear intent to sell Scythe to the military, or to the intelligence community, or to some other rogue black ops group vested in its own geopolitical perversions. Did he think the microbiologist a fool? Baby Jesus his? When had this supposed “act of copulation” taken place? Why couldn’t she remember it?