CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Friday, December 19, 2042
“You’re lucky you didn’t have to see it,” the Marine captain said.
“Cars full of stiffs piled up in the worst traffic jam in history, bodies stuffed in between the vehicles like rag dolls in my kid’s closet, bulldozers shoving loads of corpses off the Arlington Bridge to clear a way out of the city, the parkways along the Mall littered with dead.”
“Is Starak always fatal?” Lessing asked. His N.B.C. suit was hot, tight, and claustrophobic. The worst part was looking out upon a picture-pretty, grey, winter afternoon in Washington, D.C., and knowing that that landscape was as lethal as the naked surface of the moon.
“As far as we know. Botulin poisoning often can be cured if you catch it in time. Still, who’s got the medics or the supplies to treat a couple of million people in greater Washington? And we’re not sure that the toxin generated by Starak is real botulin anyway. The Russians developed this version as a weapon. A little gene-splicing goes a long way.”
“So many people…”
The immensity of the tragedy defied comprehension. Outside their sealed med-van the streets were mostly empty and clean under a lead-hued, frost-rimmed sky. Here and there a car had gone up over the curb, and some of the buildings were fire-blackened shells, but it didn’t look as bad as Lebanon — much less like what the Israelis had left of Damascus during the Baalbek War.
The captain tapped Lessing’s arm. “Keep your fingers off your suit-valve, sir. You probably want to open up and breathe fresh air, but contagion’s still a risk, and the stench is godawful. See all these buildings we’re passing? We haven’t had time to clear ‘em of corpses. It’s been hard enough to get the main arteries open.”
He sounded like a tourist guide warning passengers not to stand up in the bus. Horror had become commonplace, the unthinkable a way of life. Lessing had seen many men like the captain out in Syria.
The captain poked a gloved finger at their vehicle’s windshield. “Two more streets and we’re at the National Defense Research Facility.”
They were in Suitland, southeast of the capital toward Andrews Air Force Base. The Born-Agains had expanded in this direction; later the Rubin administration had erected grandiose office complexes to the northwest, where Columbia Hospital and the old Weather Bureau had stood before the Farm Riots of 2023. Wrench said that some bureaucrat had originally proposed putting Eighty-Five down in the sub-basement beneath the IRS building, but that had struck even the politicians as a little too obvious.
It was just as well that Eighty-Five was not in downtown Washington No tourists drove up Constitution Avenue these days. The armed forces and what was left of the police were still collecting bodies there and shooting looters — and infected survivors — on sight. It had been difficult to get a guide and transport for their mission out to the Eighty-Five facility, but Outram had swung his not-inconsiderable weight around, and this Marine captain, a driver, two paramedics, and one of the precious med-vans had eventually been assigned to them. Lessing and Wrench were to go along as “observers,” while the captain, whose name they had not been told, was “to inspect and secure the facility.” The captain belonged to the Second Marine Aircraft Wing from Cherry Point, North Carolina, and had been on a courier mission to the Pentagon when Starak’s first victims started to stagger and vomit up their guts. The man was a fan of bottled fruit juice and so had not partaken of Washington’s deadly water. That, and the good luck of being ordered to wait for an appointment in a nearly airtight basement office, had saved him.
“How many got away?” asked Wrench. His N.B.C. suit was too big for him, and he had to keep pulling the helmet down to see out. All that was visible was his wavy, dark-brown hair and a pair of eyes. He reminded Lessing of a cartoon character.
“Quite a few. Starak works either by ingestion or through an open lesion, and not everybody drank water, handled dead or dying victims, orsniffed the bacteria-laden fumes coming from the sewers. The stuff in the sewers seems to have been pretty well flushed out by now, but…” His voice trailed off.
“Christ…” Wrench mumbled.
The captain spoke again: “We think there ‘re some real immunes, though we can’t be sure. Just yesterday a squad brought in a ten-year-old kid who’d been living on root beer and stale popcorn since… it… happened. When his parents’ bodies started to stink too bad, he rolled ‘em onto rugs, dragged ‘em out into the back yard, and set ‘em on fire with gasoline. That’s how we found him: the smoke.”
It still hadn’t sunk in. It might never sink in. The greatest tragedy since the Ice Age, and it all seemed so ordinary, so awkward, so simple — so stupidly, whimsically anecdotal. In two days Lessing thought he had heard every miracle story there was, but each rescue worker had a new tale to tell. There was the baby discovered alive after a week in its mother’s rotting arms; the old man who’d found the airport drinking fountain out of order and flew on to Adanta, happily unaware of the tragedy until somebody told him he’d just missed a lethal gulp of Starak — whereupon he had a heart attack; the health nut in Philadelphia who drank only mineral water and brushed his teeth with antiseptic mouthwash; the wimpy, little store manager who’d carried his two-hundred-pound wife five miles through streets choked with mobs of screaming, dying people, got her to the medics in lime, and then went back for his infant son — all three now safe in a shelter outside Washington. If miracles proved the existence of God, then the truth of every religion from Christianity to Banger Satanism had just been proved once and for all. Miracles were as common nowadays as candles in the churches.
Well, maybe not as common as the horror stories. Those, like the fabled demons of Hell, were legion.
Lessing struggled to follow the captain’s example and mm death into a commonplace, make it historical, something that happened somewhere else to people who weren’t people but stick-figures, statistics, names in a book, “subjects” on the police blotter, shapes in a crowd. That way the unspeakable became speakable, the scenes around him no more than epic movies. Never-before-imagined spectacle! A cast of millions! Right before your very eyes! See the parting of the Red Sea, the sack of Rome, the fall of Constantinople, the last days of Pompeii.
The last days of the whole pitiful, rotting, infected world.
The dead refused to cooperate. They kept turning into real faces: grey and sunken cheeks, eyes gone, blackened mouths agape, stinking bundles of purpling flesh and decayed clothing. Real men, real women, real children.
God.
Was God real?
If God existed, then why didn’t He hear? Why didn’t He answer?
One theory was as good as another. God’s phone was off the hook. He’d stepped out for lunch. He was on vacation. After the sixth day of creation, He took the seventh off, decided He didn’t like the work, and went on welfare.
Great theological answers! Two dimes and a nickel would get you a quarter.
Eviclass="underline" there was the stumper. Ever since Cro-Magnon Man first sought relief fondling his chubby, little female fertility statues, humanity had asked, why? If God is good, then why is there evil? Why do the bad guys live forever and the good die young? Why suffering, why pain, why sin?