Plague: A gripping suspense thriller about an incurable outbreak in Miami

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Who’s going to massage me?’ she giggled. ‘You?’

  Charles shook his head. ‘No – Kalimba. She’s an absolute expert. I mean she’s really into it. She’s done it for me, and she’s given me a whole new slant on myself.’

  ‘Well,’ said Esmeralda. ‘I don’t quite know what to say.’

  ‘Try it. That’s all you have to do.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Charles checked his expensive wristwatch. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I have to make a phone call to the coast, and tidy up a few papers. That means that you and Kalimba can have a half-hour to yourselves. You can be totally private.’

  ‘I don’t know, Charles. I mean, Kalimba’s kind of threatening, don’t you think?’

  ‘You only feel she’s threatening because you don’t know her. She’s very warm and understanding. Just let her give you a massage session, and you’ll understand.’

  The idea of being massaged by Charles Thurston’s tall and sultry black lady was quirky, but in the mood she was in, it seemed exciting as well. She giggled, and sipped some more champagne, and then finally said, ‘Okay. I’ve done kinkier things.’

  Charles Thurston leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. ‘That’s terrific,’ he said. ‘I’ll go call Kalimba, and I’ll see you later.’

  As he stood up, she tugged his hand. ‘Charles,’ she said. ‘If I tell her to stop, she won’t be offended or anything, will she?’

  ‘Kalimba? Not on your life. She’s a totally sympathetic person. Now, have fun, you hear?’

  Esmeralda sat on a cushion cross-legged while Charles left the room. She heard him talking to Kalimba in the kitchen, but the black girl didn’t speak once. Maybe she was deaf-and-dumb, or maybe she was just the silent type. Whichever it was, it didn’t seem very warm, understanding or sympathetic. Esmeralda drank more champagne, and found she was laughing to herself as she drank.

  She sensed Kalimba’s presence in the room even before she turned around and saw her. The black girl had a kind of smoldering charisma that she couldn’t ignore. Now, the kaftan had gone, and she was nude, except for a thin gold chain around her loins, and gold anklets around her legs.

  Kalimba came softly across the room and squatted down beside her. Esmeralda felt odd tingles of sensation trickling up and down her spine, and suddenly she didn’t feel like laughing any more. Kalimba’s body was inky black, shining and perfumed. It had a sexual warmth that radiated from it and somehow warmed Esmeralda as well.

  Without a word, Kalimba opened a jar of scented oil. Then she pointed to Esmeralda’s dress, and indicated that she should pull it down over her shoulders. When Esmeralda fumbled, Kalimba took over, and unbuttoned the front of the dress for her, all the way down. Then she gently tugged it down around Esmeralda’s waist.

  Kalimba knelt down behind her, and Esmeralda could hear her smothering her hands in the scented oil. Then she felt the black girl’s long supple fingers around her neck and shoulders, slippery with oil, beginning to flex and caress and soothe her.

  Esmeralda, head bowed, felt the gradual warmth and relaxation flow through her shoulders, and closed her eyes. It was the most delicious sensation she had ever experienced, and she couldn’t think why the idea of massage had repelled her so much.

  She felt Kalimba reach for the clasp of her bra. At first she raised her hands to resist, but the black girl gently held her wrists, and lowered her arms again, and she thought: Why not? She’s another woman – an experienced masseuse.

  Kalimba’s slippery hands kneaded and massaged her back muscles, and all the tension poured away. Then she felt the girl’s hands around her breasts, fondling and stroking them. She sleepily opened her eyes, and looked down. The long black fingers were pressing rhythmically into the gleaming white flesh of her breast stimulating them, coaxing and arousing the wide pink nipples into stiffness.

  She closed her eyes again. The feeling was so good that she wished it would last forever. She felt Kalimba’s own rigid nipples brushing against her bare back as the black girl swayed from side to side, and had a strange urge to massage Kalimba’s breasts in return.

  Kalimba tugged Esmeralda’s dress even further down. Her oily hands massaged the white girl’s bottom, her fingertips occasionally brushing her sensitive sphincter. Esmeralda said: ‘Mmmm… that’s beautiful…’ and she reached down between her own thighs to draw Kalimba’s hand against the moist flesh of her vulva.

  She never knew how long the massage lasted. It might have been ten minutes, it might have been an hour. She was more than high on champagne, and all the images of that afternoon were crystal-bright, but disjointed.

  She remembered Kalimba’s tongue lapping insistently between her legs. She remembered holding the black girl’s tight-curled head, and kissing her full sensual lips. She remembered seeing a dark glistening flower, with petals that stickily parted to reveal a moist interior. Music, drumming, lips, eyes, fingers, and magical sensations.

  She was lying on the floor, wrapped in an Indian blanket, when she woke up. Her mouth felt like used glasspaper, and her eyes were stuck together with sleep.

  She lifted her head. Her neck ached. She tried to focus, but the room was dim, and outside, the New York sky was murky metallic green. It felt as if an electric storm was imminent. She looked at her wristwatch and saw it was seven-fifteen in the evening.

  Gradually, unsteadily, she managed to stand up. Her head pounded with pain. Still wrapped in the Indian blanket, she padded across the apartment and called, ‘Charles? Are you there, Charles?’

  There didn’t seem to be anyone around. She crossed the dining-room, with a table that was now cleared of all dishes and decorations, and peered into the main bedroom. The bed was neat and unslept in. It was covered in grayish-brown reindeer skin, and on the wall was a painting of snow in Lapland.

  She went back into the living-room. She called out again, and at that moment the front door of the apartment opened and Charles walked in, beaming and confident.

  ‘Esmeralda!’ he said. ‘You’re awake!’

  She nodded. ‘I just woke up. I feel like hell. Why didn’t you wake me earlier? I have to be home at seven-thirty. Daddy and I are going out to dinner tonight, and he’s going to go crazy if I’m late.’

  Charles kissed her. ‘That’s nothing,’ he said. ‘So you’re fifteen minutes late. That’s nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean – “that’s nothing”?’

  Charles reached in his pocket and produced a small black something, a couple of inches long. Esmeralda tried to focus on it, but couldn’t.

  ‘What’s that?’ she said.

  Charles tossed the black something in the air and smartly caught it again.

  ‘This, my lovely gallery lady, is a roll of film. I have just come back from the photo laboratories, where even at this minute they are printing me up sufficient copies for my needs.’

  She stood there and stared at him for a long, long time.

  ‘Kalimba and me,’ she said dryly.

  ‘You guessed it.’

  She dropped the blanket. She didn’t care that she was naked. She picked her clothes up from the floor and slowly dressed. Charles Thurston bobbed and fidgeted around, tossing the film from one hand to the other, and saying, ‘Well, that’s it, isn’t it? That’s life.’

  Esmeralda finished dressing and tugged a brush through her tangled hair. She collected her pocketbook and got ready to leave.

  Charles Thurston said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask what I want? I mean, us blackmailers always want something.’

  She paused. ‘All right,’ she said tiredly, ‘what do you want?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

  ‘It might be, but I’d prefer you to spell it out.’

  He looked at her almost coyly. ‘What I want, in return for these highly diverting negatives, is for your father to drop his patent action.’

  That was when the reality of the whole day’s work fell into place. She looked around the sparse, Nordi
c apartment and said, ‘This is Sergei Forward’s place, isn’t it? I didn’t think it was your style. And what about Kalimba?’

  ‘Not her real name, I’m afraid. A hired gun, so to speak.’

  She stared at his handsome, disgusting face.

  ‘You won’t take money?’ she asked, softly. ‘Five thousand to say the film didn’t quite come out?’

  Charles Thurston shook his head. ‘A job’s a job, lovely gallery lady. I have a reputation to maintain.’

  ‘I see. How long do I have?’

  Thurston looked at his watch. ‘It’s now seven-thirty. We would like to know how your father feels about the matter in twenty-four hours. Otherwise, every porn magazine in town gets these, along with Scientific American and every journal your father ever wrote for in his whole life.’

  Esmeralda ran her hand through her hair. ‘Now I understand the adjournment,’ she said. ‘If Sergei Forward had gone into court today, he would have lost the whole case outright. So he decided to get a little help from his friends.’

  ‘I’m not his friend,’ protested Charles Thurston III, as Esmeralda waited for the elevator. ‘I just work for him. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a cheap Finnish fuck.’

  Esmeralda slammed the concertina gates of the elevator and glared at Thurston through the bars. ‘Anything’s better than being a cheap American fuck,’ she snapped, as the elevator took her down.

  By Friday afternoon – the same afternoon that Esmeralda spent in Sergei Forward’s West 81st Street apartment – the plague zone had officially extended to New Orleans in the south, and with the help of police, National Guardsmen, vigilantes and cadets from summer colleges, it was being held back on a ragged line that stretched northwards to Jackson, Mississipi, Tuscaloosa, Chattanooga, Charleston and Cumberland.

  The President had appeared on television at lunchtime and had said ‘solemnly, and with a heavy heart’ that he had to instruct every American to take up arms to protect the disease-free parts of the nation. That meant anyone from within the plague zone must be shot dead if they attempted to leave it.

  ‘At all costs,’ said the President, ‘we must contain this threat to our national health and heritage, and urgently seek to find some kind of cure. At the present speed of plague within six weeks.’

  A reporter from NBC News asked the President if some people were more susceptible to the plague than others. The President reported that interim figures indicated that adults succumbed more rapidly than children, and that certain groups of workers within the community appeared to be partially or wholly immune. These included some hospital workers, some employees of ConEd, some military and naval personnel, some merchant seamen, some dentists and doctors, and one or two assorted minor professions.

  Was there any clue why these people might be less prone to plague? The President said no, but ‘our best scientists are working on it.’

  The Medical Workers’ Union were still on strike, although in some of the worst devastated parts of Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina, there was radio, TV and telephone blackout, and it was impossible to discover what was happening. Even police helicopters were forbidden to take reconnaissance pictures in case the bacillus was airborne to operational height. The nation was locked now in a terrible paralysis of fear, and in spite of strict highway controls and the banning of westward airline flights, thousands of panicking refugees, in cars and pick-ups and motor-homes, streamed towards the west.

  By five o’clock on Friday afternoon, the official estimate of plague dead was seventeen million. Every Atlantic beach was closed from Key West, Florida, to Portland, Maine. The most explosive story of the day, though, was where the plague-infected sewage had originated. It was being suggested by NBC and CBS, and strenuously denied by the New York Department of Sanitation, that the sewage was polluting the Eastern seaboard from an area twelve miles off the Long Island shore.

  According to official sources, sanitation barges had left Pier 70 every day for longer than anyone could remember, and dumped untreated sewage into the Atlantic. It was supposed to sink to the ocean floor, and slide, in the form of black viscous ooze, down the shelving incline that would take it out towards the mid-Atlantic.

  The New York Department of Sanitation, in a joint statement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, agreed that the sludge was highly infectious, but that it could not have been a breeding-ground for the plague that had ravaged the southern states.

  ‘Ordinary plague, Pasteurella pestis, is one thing,’ said a spokesman for the department. ‘But there is no scientific way in which ordinary plague could have mutated under the ocean into this particularly virulent and fast-growing form of super-plague.’

  The department also denied that the raw sewage on the beaches of Florida and Georgia was anything to do with them. Yes – there had been eccentric winds and tides. But it stretched the credulity to suggest that tides had borne the sewage as far south as Miami.

  A CBS reporter asked if it were possible for a message in a bottle, dropped off Long Island at the sewage-dumping spot, to float south as far as Miami. An oceanographer said that, with climatic conditions as they had been, yes. The CBS reporter then asked why, in that case, a lump of human faeces couldn’t do the same.

  The spokesman for the Department of Sanitation gave an answer that became the morbidly popular catchphrase of the day. ‘What you’re suggesting,’ he snapped, ‘is crap.’

  *

  Herbert Gaines walked into the conference room at the Summit Hotel with his hands raised like a successful candidate for the New York presidential primary. Flashguns blinked in the crowded entrance, and he had more pictures taken for the press in the space of twenty seconds than he had in the last twenty years. He was wearing orangey panstick make-up to make himself look healthier on color TV, and his white hair was combed into a flowing mane.

  ‘Welcome back, Herbert,’ said a fat reporter in a creased blue suit. ‘It’s nice to have a hero around for a change.’

  Beside Herbert Gaines, sticking close, was Jack Gross – all glossy suit and carnivorous teeth. He piloted his figurehead through the throng of pressmen and television cameras, and up towards a red-white-and-blue platform. More flashguns flickered, and Herbert tried hard to keep smiling.

  Jack Gross waved his hands for silence.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jack Gross and I’m the agent for what we call the FTT. Now, does anyone here know what FTT stands for?’

  It was meant to be a rhetorical question, but a New York Post reporter said, ‘Fart Tunefully Tonight?’ There was a general guffaw of laughter.

  Jack Gross, his smile a little strained, waved his hands for silence again.

  ‘FTT,’ he said, quickly, ‘stands for Face The Truth. And Face The Truth is what we call our particular group of dedicated Republican senators and congressmen, all of whom are totally committed to the revival of honest, no-nonsense, straight-down-the-middle politics.’

  ‘Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?’ asked the lady from Time, sardonically.

  ‘It has been up until now,’ said Jack Gross. ‘But let’s think why American politics has gotten such a bad name. It’s gotten a bad name because it’s been the province of men who won’t Face The Truth. That’s what our group is all about. We’ve decided that no matter how unpalatable or unpleasant the true facts are, we’re going to have to face up to them, and speak our minds no matter how unpopular our voice might be.’

  He lowered his voice, and spoke with intense sincerity.

  ‘Maybe, in the past, refusing to Face The Truth didn’t matter so much. But today – right this very evening – America faces a disaster of hideous and unprecedented proportions. The plague has already laid waste our southern states, and the last we heard it was infecting parts of Jersey. We are right up against the wall, ladies and gentlemen, and we can’t keep our eyes blinkered any longer.

  ‘The crisis is so serious that an American hero has returned to speak the truth about it. A man whose voice
once spoke out on the movie screen for honesty and purity and the preservation of the American way, and who has now emerged from honorable retirement to take up our cause. Ladies and gentlemen – Captain Dashfoot, better known as Herbert Gaines.’

  There was a light smattering of applause. Herbert’s movies were still doing the rounds of art houses and late-night TV channels, and most of the pressmen there had seen at least one of them.

  Herbert Gaines stood up. With the TV lights on him, he hardly seemed to have aged. He could have dismounted from his Civil War horse just a few moments ago, flushed with success from his famous ride in Incident at Vicksburg. He raised his hand for silence.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, in his rich, deep timbre. ‘I never thought the time would come when I would feel it my bounden duty to ride once again in defense of the American people.’

  There was clapping, and someone said, ‘Dashfoot to the rescue!’

  Herbert Gaines smiled ruefully. ‘I wish Captain Dashfoot could come to the rescue, but we’re shooting from a different script today. Our nation is being scythed to the ground by a foul and terrible disease, and what we need is not lone heroes on horses but quick and effective federal action.

  ‘What we need, ladies and gentlemen, is someone who will speak the truth about this plague. Someone who will tell us where it really originated. They say sewage. All right – but whose sewage? Are any of you infected with plague and hepatitis? Is your sewage infected?’

  Herbert grasped the lectern in front of him, and lowered his leonine head.

  ‘What we are saying here today, friends, is unpopular. It’s unpopular,’ he repeated, raising a rigid finger, ‘but it’s true. I know it’s true, and you know it’s true, and I dare any man in the continental United States to prove it aint so. That sewage – that infected sewage – has come from the bowels of the black man, from the bowels of the Puerto Rican, from the bowels of the shiftless vagrant and the unwashed hippie. Not only have they poisoned our society with their subversive politics and their revolutionary mania, they have actually physically poisoned our American sons and daughters with their excremental filth!’