by Steve Alten
My penance is to remain free of the infection while I treat the afflicted. In truth, I have tasted so much suffering that my heart has become numb, my veiled existence creating perpetual darkness — a darkness that awaits the light of the Angel of Death.
He watches me, this reaper of souls, for I have seen him lurking by the grave sites, his face shrouded by his hooded gown, his bony hand clutching his staff — a common sickle used by the farmer to slice through fields of wheat. That he senses me watching him I have no doubt, for he comes to me often in my dreams, his presence weighing cold on my soul.
I am not alone in my observations. Others speak of his presence, this merchant of death, greeting him with la Danse Macabre. When first witnessed, I thought the gesture to be one of hysterics… the infected mind of the survivor unable to cope with the sudden, painful loss of so many loved ones, but now I am not so sure. When there is nothing left to live for… when every breath is torturous and every heartbeat bitter, then the living welcome death with open arms and beg his merciful embrace.
One day soon, I, too, may beckon the Grim Reaper, but not now — not when my work remains unfinished. Until then I will carry on, recording my observations, attempting to find a way to curb the Great Mortality, if only to justify my own wretched existence to my Maker.
— Guigo
Second Circle
Lust
“This way to the city of pain. Thru here ceaseless agony awaits. All lost souls must enter here. Justice inspired God to make this place. It was built with three tools: Omnipotence, Wisdom, and Love. When only eternal things were made. And it, too, shall remain immortal. Abandon all hope upon entering here.”
— Dante’s Inferno
December 20
Henry Hudson Parkway South
Inwood Hill, Manhattan
8:32 P.M.
(11 hours, 31 minutes before the prophesied End of Days)
Patrick Shepherd followed Virgil through a clearing onto Riverside Drive. The deserted access road led them down to the southbound lanes of the Henry Hudson Parkway, an eleven-mile highway that ran along the west side of Manhattan, offering scenic views of the Hudson River.
Stretched out before them was a sea of vehicles, wedged bumper to bumper and door to door between the parkway’s concrete dividers. The three northbound lanes were submerged beneath a blinding wall of stagnant headlights. The three southbound lanes merged into scarlet trails of taillights that paralleled the river before looping higher in the distance as it rounded an access ramp to reach the now-destroyed George Washington Bridge.
Nothing was moving. The urban chaos was eerily silent, violated only by an occasional gust of wind and a few engines still purring in neutral, burning their last gallons of fuel.
“Virgil… what happened here?”
The old man pressed his bearded face to a passenger window, peering inside a stalled SUV. “Plague.”
Clutching the vaccine box, Shep moved from car to car, the scenes within each vehicle varying, the implications inarguable. Trapped together in endless gridlock, a diverse community of tens of thousands of strangers had mingled along the roadside to vocalize their grievances, discuss options, perhaps even to share a snack or beverage. As the sun had faded into dusk and their anger had turned to desperation, they had retreated back to their mobile shelters against the plunging temperatures, the infected among them condemning the rest.
Scythe had been swift and merciless, each vehicle serving as its private incubator, equipped with a recirculating ventilation system that ensured a saturation of toxic bacilli among its passengers.
The images were as gruesome as they were heart-wrenching: parents clutching their children in a final embrace. Grandparents wrapped in blankets. Pale complexions frozen in fear and anguish. Blue lips pasted with blood. Family pets and cargo spaces overloaded with personal belongings.
Human desperation. A highway of death.
Everything suddenly so familiar. Shep swooned, his vision swirling from the vaccine—
— as night became day, winter retreating into summer.
Patrick Shepherd’s sweater evolves into body armor, the remnants of his bladelike prosthetic arm morphing into flesh, securing his M16A2 rifle.
The passenger vehicles on the Iraqi highway are charred, smoldering beneath the desert sun. The scent of scorched flesh mixes with gasoline. Black smoke drifting above orange flames. Body parts are everywhere, the car bombs having turned the public bazaar into a bloodbath. Date palms line the Shiite enclave, the thick tree trunks chewed apart with shrapnel from rocket-propelled grenades. Their shade wasted on twenty-one bullet-ridden corpses. The men, all local farmers, had been dragged from their homes by gunmen wearing Iraqi military uniforms before being shot.
Sergeant Shepherd searches the dead, his gun barrel trained to swivel toward anything that moves. He pivots to his left, the tip of his right index finger flirting with the M16's trigger, the crosshairs of his gun sight homing in on the Shiite woman. Cloaked in a traditional black burka, she weeps and babbles incoherently as she clutches the torn body of her dead son, wiping his blood on her charred face.
He moves on, as useless to the bereaved mother as is his English.
Paranoia fuels a body overweighed with equipment. Confusion fills a mind deprived of sleep. In the distance, he hears the cries of another female, only these screams are different, reflecting a present tense.
Separating from his men, he enters the charred police headquarters, ignoring the commands coming through his earpiece. The building, riddled with shrapnel, had been one of the targets of the Sunni insurgents’ raid. He moves through the rubble-filled interior, his assault rifle drawn as he approaches the back room.
There are three of them… and the girl. She is in her early teens, her shirt torn open and bloodied, her lower body naked, stretched belly down across a desk.
The sadists are part of Iraq’s patchwork security force, a renegade bunch long accused of protecting sectarian death squads. One man violates her doggy style, his trousers around his ankles, his fingers entwined in her onyx hair. His two companions, both heavily armed, await their turn like animals in heat.
Dark eyes and rifles greet him as he enters the den of iniquity.
A tense moment passes. The men grin nervously at the American, emboldened by their shared gender. “You wish a taste of this Sunni dog, yes?”
The voice in Shep’s earpiece urges his retreat. “…not our battle, Sergeant. Leave the premises… now!”
His conscience, stained yet still functioning, says otherwise. His mind negotiates with his tongue to speak.
The girl cries out to him. The Farsi needs no translation.
Shep’s pulse pounds in his ears. The injustice demands he take action, yet he knows his next move will set off a chain reaction that could end his own life and possibly the girl’s.
His right hand quivers against the M16's magazine, his index finger sliding toward the trigger. The dark eyes watching him grow antsy.
“Sergeant Shepherd, report at once.”
God, why am I here?
“Shepherd… now!”
He hesitates, then backs out of the building—
— day returning to night, the frigid December wind causing his sweat-laced body to shiver.
“Sergeant?”
He turned to Virgil, his eyes glassy with tears. “I didn’t act. I should have killed them all.”
“Killed whom? Whom should you have killed?”
“Soldiers. In Baladruz. They were raping a young girl. I stood by… I let it happen.”
Virgil said nothing, weighing his response. “These men… they deserved to die?”
“Yes. No… I don’t know. It’s complicated… a Shiite village, there were bodies everywhere. The insurgents were Sunni, so was the girl, but there has to be rules. But there were no rules, no sides. One day you’re fighting a Sunni, the next day a Shiite… all the while innocent people are dying… butchered like sheep. They look at you like
it’s your fault, you try not to think about it, but inside you know you’re a part of it… maybe the cause of it… a million people dead since this whole thing began. Why am I here? They didn’t attack us. They weren’t a threat. Saddam… sure, he was an evil bastard, but were we so much better? Killing is killing, no matter who fires the bullet.”
“Was there hatred in your heart on that day?”
“Hatred? I was numb. I found myself walking on a road covered in body parts, my boots drenched in the blood of children. Then something happened, I heard a scream. Instinct took over, I mean, what if it was my daughter they were raping? Hatred? Yeah, there was hatred. You should have seen their eyes… like wild animals, filled with lust. I should have stopped them. I should have blown their fucking heads off!”
“Three dead men for one dehumanized soul. One act of evil begetting another.”
“Yeah… I mean, no. It’s just… I was ashamed. It’s like, by not acting, I became a part of it. I mean, what should I have done?”
“It’s not for me to say. You could have taken action, perhaps you should have. Sometimes there are no clear answers, sometimes innocent people suffer. You told me you were deployed how many times? Four?”
“Yeah. This happened on my first deployment, my third week out.”
“There are interesting parallels here. Life is a test, Patrick. Some souls, like soldiers, must be redeployed over and over, condemned to repeat their journey until their lessons on Earth are learned. The ancient wisdom I spoke about earlier calls this tikkun, the process of spiritual repair. It is said that a soul may travel to the Malchut—the physical world — up to four times to correct its misgiving. Perhaps the Creator was offering you an opportunity for transformation.”
“Come on, Virgil. Are you saying God purposely had me witness an innocent girl being sodomized so I could learn some lesson? What possible lesson is worth all that?”
“That’s for you to discover. The Creator operates on a level beyond our perception. Just remember that a single act of evil, like a drop of plague, can infect a million people, but so too can one good deed. What happened to the girl?”
“She died. Badly.” Shep moved to the southbound lane’s concrete barrier, his eyes drawn to the Hudson River. He paused, his blood running cold as he spotted the figure standing by the Amtrak train tracks sixty feet away.
“Oh… geez.”
The blinking red train signal illuminated the gangly figure every twenty seconds. Dark hooded garment. Long staff, curved sickle. Shep could not see the Reaper’s face, but he could sense the cold stillness of the being’s presence.
“Virgil, we need to go… we need to get off this highway, now!”
“Calm yourself, Sergeant—”
Shep wheeled around to confront the old man. “Don’t call me that anymore! It’s Patrick or Shep, not Sergeant. I’m no longer in the military.”
“Understood. Patrick, the vaccine… is it affecting your senses?”
“The vaccine?”
“It causes one to hallucinate. Are you hallucinating?”
“Yeah. Maybe.” He searched for the Grim Reaper but saw only shadows. “There’s too much death around us, Virgil, too much plague. Unless you intend to immunize yourself with the vaccine, we need to get you away from this highway of death. Look, there’s a bunch of exit ramps just past the bridge. Are you up for a quick jog? Come on, I’ll help you.”
With his right arm, Patrick Shepherd swept the older man around his waist, hurrying him through the southbound lane’s jigsaw puzzle of vehicles, the smoldering George Washington Bridge looming ahead.
Governor’s Island, New York
Building 20
8:43 P.M.
The cellar walls were gray cinder block, the floor concrete and damp.
Leigh Nelson lay curled in a fetal position on the bare mattress beneath an olive green wool Army blanket. Her body ached from the impact of the rubber bullets. Her stomach growled with hunger. The shackles around her ankles had rubbed the skin raw. Her mascara was smudged from crying. She missed her family. She wanted desperately to call her husband and ease his worry. Most of all, she tried to convince herself that her worst fears were unwarranted, that an outbreak of plague could never become a worldwide pandemic, and that her captors knew she was a physician — one of the good guys.
Try as she might, she was losing this psychological battle. After being shot, handcuffed, and strapped down in a portable isolation unit, she had been airlifted to Governor’s Island, then stripped and doused with a green bactericide before being subjected to a ninety-minute medical exam. Blood tests confirmed she was plague-free, but the indignity she had felt from one MP’s lust-filled eyes had unnerved her, fueling her resolve not to cooperate.
She heard the front door opening upstairs. Several people entered the building, their presence registering along the squeaking floorboards above her head. Crossing the expanse, they reached the cellar door.
Leigh sat up, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders as the men made their way down the basement stairwell.
The MP led the way, his commanding officer descending two steps behind him. He was a big man, his body language revealing fatigue. “Ms. Nelson?”
“It’s Dr. Nelson. Why am I being held like some prisoner of war? We’re supposed to be on the same side.”
“Is that why you allowed your friend to flee aboard the medevac chopper with the Scythe vaccine?”
“Your commandoes assaulted our hospital like we were a terrorist camp. You killed my boss!”
“We used rubber bullets.”
“How the hell was I supposed to know that? Haven’t we had enough shock and awe for one day? Why couldn’t you have just introduced yourself properly? I would have gladly handed over the vaccine, along with the redheaded woman who created it. We could have worked together to save Manhattan.”
“Manhattan can’t be saved.”
She felt light-headed. “What are you talking about? Of course it can be saved.”
“The president can be saved. The diplomats at the UN under triage — most of them can be saved—if we locate the vaccine in time. Most important, the world can be saved from a global pandemic, assuming the quarantine holds up through morning. Everyone else on Manhattan…” He shook his head.
“Are you insane? There are two million people—”
“Three million, including the daily workforce, all sharing twenty-eight square miles of urban jungle, exposed to a highly contagious form of bubonic plague that kills its victims within fifteen hours. Even if we had the vaccine, we’d never be able to produce enough of it in time.”
“My God…”
“Yeah.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Everything I have to in order to keep this nightmare contained to Manhattan. We estimate upward of a quarter of a million people are already dead, half of them on the access routes leading out of the city. We’ve sealed the tunnels and blown the bridges, but as the remains of the dead become more visible and the people more desperate, we stand a far greater chance of a few creative individuals slipping through unnoticed. Your family… they live in New Jersey?”
“Hoboken.”
“That’s a short boat ride, or an hour’s swim across the Hudson. Most of them won’t make it, of course, but New Yorkers are a pretty resilient bunch, so maybe we lose Jersey, too.”
“What is it you want?”
“I want that vaccine. Your pilot made it as far as Inwood Hill before he crash-landed in the park. Who is he? Where would he go?”
“Sergeant Patrick Shepherd, he’s one of my patients.”
Jay Zwawa typed the information on his BlackBerry. “He’s a vet?”
“Yes. As of this morning, he’s wearing a prosthetic for a left arm. His wife and daughter are living somewhere in Battery Park.”
“What’s her name?”
“Beatrice Shepherd.”
“Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir?”
&n
bsp; “Release Dr. Nelson. She’s coming with me.”
Battery Park
Manhattan
9:11 P.M.
Beatrice Shepherd exited the northern stairwell of the twenty-two-story apartment building, her mind in a state of panic over her daughter, who was still not home. She made it as far as the lobby entrance, then froze, remaining hidden in the shadows.
Death had taken Manhattan, rotting the Big Apple to its core. It lay spread-eagled on the curb beneath the building awning and bled on the sidewalk. It lurked in the driver’s seat of a still-purring taxi. It infected a city block of buses and mobilized the living dead… desperate, frightened tourists with nowhere else to go.
Across the street, a father of three smashed a brick paver through the plate-glass door of a darkened pawnshop. A visitor from England seeking shelter for his family. The shotgun blast was blinding and lethal, the store owner, huddling in the dark, firing into the night.
Beatrice backed away from the lobby. God had given her a sign. Her daughter had a better chance of finding her way home than she did of locating her in this chaos.
She would remain in her apartment and pray.
158th Street Ramp
Henry Hudson Parkway South
9:47 P.M.
It had taken them twenty minutes to reach the George Washington Bridge’s underpass, the closer they got, the louder the chaos. Screams and cries for help rang hollow in the frigid December air, interspersed with the staccato popping sounds of distant gunfire. Strange whirring noises echoed across the Hudson as unseen aerial drones soared overhead. Patrol boats passed in the darkness, their searchlights trained on the river, their engines growling. High above their heads on the Cross Bronx Expressway, bonfires turned the night into patches of glowing orange. Dozens of vehicles burned, illuminating silhouettes of a gathering mob.
