The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  Stark folded his hands in his lap and looked down. “Got a joke for you guys.”

  Weitzel raised his eyes to the rearview mirror again, and Valesquez seemed relieved to have the mood lightened. “Let’s hear it.”

  Stark said, “Why did the two Mexicans sneak across the river?”

  Both men turned to scowl at Stark. Valesquez sneered with incredulous anger.

  “Don’t know that one?” asked Stark, pasting on a good-natured smile.

  Both men stiffened and glared at the crowded traffic on the highway. By their reaction, they were Texans, and while it might have been years since Americans told “wetback” jokes, the sting of them remained.

  “I’ll repeat it, nice and slow,” said Stark, baiting them with a condescending voice. “‘Why—did the Mexicans—cross the river?’”

  The furious silence in the sedan ticked like a bomb.

  “Give up?” Stark said. He leaned forward so that they both could see him with peripheral vision. “To bring a doctor back home because their people were dying by the hundreds, maybe thousands.” He looked back and forth between the two officers until their smoldering eyes cooled. “Get it?”

  Weitzel turned back to the road and hunched over the steering wheel, choking it. Valesquez didn’t smile, but a shadow of a dimple appeared in his acne-scarred cheek. “Good one.” His eyebrows flashed upward. “Let’s see if you are the concerned doctor you say you are. Credentials, please.”

  Stark wondered why they hadn’t asked for his ID at the airport, but as he passed his card over to Valesquez, he realized it made sense. Now, if they discovered his identification was invalid, they could kill him. Especially after his snide little joke.

  Valesquez fed the card into his memboard. Stark presumed he was processing his CDC identification number. After a moment, Valesquez returned it. “Henry David Stark, you’re clear to travel with us. And by the way,” he said, “El Mono sends his regards.”

  MONDAY, MAY 16. 11:13 A.M.

  WEITZEL MANEUVERED the black sedan through chaotic traffic exiting Houston on the Old Telephone Road, then joined a convoy of twenty Railroad Commission jeeps roaring west toward the Mexican border. After several miles of following their dust, he saluted the convoy, mumbling, “Chíngate,” then left the highway at Rosenberg. A sign at the city limits informed them that the Railroad Commission controlled this town. The Commission’s seal was plastered over a garbage can and hung on the signpost. Below it was scrawled “Blues Go Home” in English, which was crossed out and rescrawled in Spanish.

  “We’re switching vehicles here,” Valesquez told Stark. “We need something faster to cross the border.”

  Steering the sedan away from the military’s point of control at the edge of town, Weitzel took them into an abandoned strip mall, where a dim PAWN AMERICA sign flashed like failing synapses on the edge of the parking lot. Weitzel drove straight into the mall through the gutted Walmart.

  “Get your things,” said Valesquez, leaving the sedan.

  “We’re over here,” said Weitzel. He pointed to a tarp obviously covering a barco beneath a ceiling sign that read HOUSEWARES.

  Stark had seen pictures of barcos del cielo, skyboats, the newest toys courtesy of Pemex-Lockheed International Corp, but he had never traveled in one. They were a favorite of the mundo-wealthy clase de prima living in the Sierra Madre Mountains of central Mexico, too rich to deal with mountain roads and hairpin turns. Only the upper crust in American cities like New York and Miami could afford a skyboat’s fuel consumption.

  Weitzel flicked back the tarp, revealing a black-hulled monstrosity that looked like a fat, 1940s gangster car with clipped, falconlike wings. “Abra, barco.”

  The doors slid aside and Stark tossed his packs into the backseat. Once the other two were strapped into their seats, Stark said, “How long to San Antonio in one of these?”

  Weitzel slipped into the driver’s seat.

  “Thirty or forty minutes,” said Valesquez, “once we’re airborne.”

  Weitzel steered the skyboat out of the mall on a purring cushion of air that blew the garbage out of the Walmart. Once in the parking lot, he told the skyboat to fly—“Vuele, barco”—and the air cushion moaned its increase beneath them. Soon they were soaring fifty feet above the road, racing west.

  Just a few minutes outside of Rosenberg, however, Weitzel swore. “Mierda.” His voice was quiet and urgent.

  “¿Qué hondo?” muttered Valesquez. What’s up?

  Stark straightened, straining to catch their hurried Spanish.

  “Tenemos amigos,” said Weitzel, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “Tres barcos del cielo detrás de nosotros.” We have friends. Three skyboats behind us.

  “¿Quién es?” asked Valesquez, looking back and seeing nothing.

  “Tienen los faros del Ejército Mexicano.” They have Mexican Army beacons.

  Stark looked over his shoulder but saw nothing out of the rear window, just the rapidly retreating town of Rosenberg clouded by the barco’s heat exhaust.

  Valesquez tapped a screen awake on his dashboard console. “Are you strapped in, Dr. Estarque? Good.” He swore and dropped a lever, then told Weitzel to head all out for the border. “Don’t worry about their drones, Sergeant. Rosa got us good code. We’ll sail through.”

  “Who’s back there?” Stark buckled himself with every strap he could find. He heard a deep, rocketing noise, looked out the rear window, and saw two vapor trails fire out from the back of the barco. “Why you firing? Didn’t you just say they Mexican Army?”

  Weitzel said, “Mexican Army wouldn’t use their own beacons this side of—”

  Suddenly, fire flashed and burst against the driver’s door.

  “What the hell?” screamed Stark.

  The explosion sent the skyboat into a fast plunge. At fifty feet, there wasn’t much room to plunge. Weitzel dropped the landing air cushion and the barco caromed off of it, and up into the sky. Stark gagged as his stomach surged to the back of his throat. Weitzel dropped landing gear, but not before another explosion had rocked them from below, jarring Stark’s bones.

  “Bajo, bajo, Sargento,” growled Valesquez, his thin body forced back into his seat.

  The skyboat lurched toward the abandoned highway again and this time it skated neatly atop the air cushion below. But as the cushion diminished, a sickening, boat-vibrating scrape began. Something bad was happening to the landing gear.

  When the barco came to a stop, the silence that followed was brief, the whine of three landing skyboats soon split the air. The vehicles Stark saw through his window bore Mexico’s traditional emblem, the eagle-eating-rattlesnake, but the men within appeared Anglo.

  Stark looked at his two escorts in the front seat. He assumed they were armed and hoped they were prudent. “When does my flight leave from San Antonio?”

  Men wearing uniforms that Stark didn’t recognize poured out of the three skyboats. They aimed rifles at Stark, Weitzel, and Valesquez.

  “Three,” Valesquez said without turning his head, “but I don’t think you’re going to make it, Doctor.”

  The thought of missing that flight made Stark want to vomit. He felt as if he were racing against a slowly exploding bomb. If he didn’t make the flight to Ascensión, the explosion of this outbreak would keep expanding, keep burning up everything in its path until it immolated North America. “No. Promise me right now,” Stark shouted, “that you won’t do anything to make me miss that flight!”

  “Get out of the vehicle,” a voice came from behind the barco. “Hands over your head! If you have weapons, throw them out first!”

  “Bueno. But remember, Stark, it’s black letter that we came to get you,” Valesquez hissed.

  “The hell that? Black letter? What that mean?”

  “Just relax and let me do all the talking!”

  Valesquez and Weitzel opened their doors. Stark opened his and immediately found three guns jutting in his face. “I American!” Stark shouted. At
the sight of gun barrels, he rolled his eyes away from them in terror, and said, “Centers for Disease Control! CDC! I a doctor!”

  Valesquez glared at Stark, then shut his eyes in anger.

  “On the ground! Now!”

  Valesquez and Weitzel struggled down to their knees, then onto their bellies.

  A man walked alongside the prone Mexicans. His voice was high, almost cracking with stress. “Ho. Lee. Crap! Texas Rangers. The hell Texas Rangers doing this far south in Free Texas?”

  A pair of muddy black boots stepped up next to Stark’s face, the boots of a very big man. “They ain’t Rangers, Luther.”

  “They got stars on. They got the hats.” Luther sounded like he didn’t want to consider who the “Rangers” really might be.

  “Look under they hats, boss,” said the big man.

  Luther, a hard little man built like a crowbar, bent down and knocked off Valesquez’s starch-brimmed Ranger hat. It rolled away like a hubcap. A white, zigzagging scar, stretched from Valesquez’s temple into his thin hairline.

  “He hooked up,” breathed Luther.

  “I thought so,” said the big man.

  “¿Quién están, amigos?” said Luther with a bad accent, shouting down at the two Mexican officers.

  In the silence, turkey buzzards screamed overhead.

  “Nobody got nothing to say,” said Luther.

  “Maybe they want us to turn them over to the real Rangers, huh?” said the big man.

  “Yeah, you right, Kevin. Texas Rangers would love to see a couple Holy Rollers wearing they precious hats and stars. We can arrange that pronto!”

  Stark heard Valesquez rolling onto his back. “We are from the Holy Renaissance but this is a humanitarian mission. There is a typhoid fever outbreak outside San Antonio and that man is Dr. Henry David Stark from the CDC.”

  The men inspecting the captured barco stopped what they were doing. They looked at Valesquez with a mixture of fear and excitement.

  “Holy crap,” Luther said. “Mexican officials, huh? Kevin, check the American. See if that hunts.”

  The muddy boots stepped closer to Stark. “I got a gun pointed at your head. You got a card or something?”

  Stark reached into his breast pocket with thumb and forefinger and tossed his card’s envelope at Kevin’s boots.

  “Dr. Henry David Stark,” read Kevin. “Central Command Chief Coordinator and Special Pathogens Consultant. Centers for Disease Control.”

  Luther waved at his men to keep searching the barco. “America still got a CDC, huh? All right,” Luther said. “Get up, Doctor. Sorry to treat you so rough.”

  As Stark stood, Kevin grabbed Stark’s black-leather brain-gear bag. On instinct, Stark lunged for it.

  Kevin kept him at gun’s length.

  Stark hadn’t been apart from his brain gear in nearly two years. “What are you doing? I need that!”

  Kevin grinned at him. “Don’t fret, Doctor. I keep it safe for you.”

  Stark shouted, “Who the hell you guys, anyway?”

  Luther said, “We the People’s Army of Texas. East Texas,” he said as if this should evoke something different for Stark than “West.”

  Stark could feel himself turning red. “Why didn’t you announce yourselves before firing?”

  Kevin’s face hardened. Beneath his beard, his lips barely moved. “We fired when the Mexicans fired on us.”

  Luther strolled from behind the skyboat, watching the Mexicans as he spoke. “I ain’t sure what to do about this. Holy Roller attachés. This real hot, Kev.”

  “Forget about the attachés for a minute,” said Stark, raising his eyes from the black bag in Kevin’s hand to glare at Luther. “What about me?”

  Kevin and Luther looked at Stark as if he had just appeared on the highway. “What about you?” said Luther.

  “How the US gonna feel when they find out you kidnapped an American?”

  “We didn’t kidnap you. We saved you,” said the giant Kevin, making Luther laugh. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you back to Houston.”

  “I don’t want to go to Houston!” Stark said, on the verge of hysteria. “I have to get to San Antonio.”

  A big idea seemed to light up in Kevin’s eyes. “We could ransom these boys to just about any interested faction. Hell, even the Choctaw Separatists up in Oklahoma might pay decent for em if—”

  “Hell with the Choctaw,” spit Luther. “The Choctaw callin themselves Anahuacs now. Callin their land Aztlán. They want the Holy Rollers to take Texas.”

  “Just sayin,” Kevin continued with patience, “maybe we should think bigger than Texas factions.”

  Luther’s eyes widened in suspense. He clearly couldn’t imagine anything bigger than Texas. “What you mean, Kev?”

  “Maybe we go straight to the Holy Renaissance.” Kevin looked west, squinting under the high sun as if he could see Emil Orbegón standing over there.

  “Prisoner exchange? Yeah, a couple attachés ought to be worth about every PAT prisoner in Mexican Texas.” Luther nodded. “OK. Let’s take em home and talk this over with the Chairman. At least we got one fine Mexican skyboat out of the deal.” Luther rested his hand on the barco’s roof.

  Stark felt as though he could hear a plane engine revving in far away San Antonio. “You can’t take this skyboat. You can’t delay this mission.”

  Luther seemed amused by Stark, blue eyes twinkling below black eyebrows. “And why not?”

  Stark tried to remember the lie Valesquez had told. “Because I have to consult with the Mexican physicians regarding—the typhoid fever outbreak.” Stark felt absurd saying it. There hadn’t been a typhoid outbreak in Texas in centuries. “If I don’t get to San Antonio, the disease will spread all over Texas. And to stop it,” said Stark, pointing at the brain gear bag in Kevin’s hand, “I need my computer so I can connect to the CDC. And I need this skyboat. And I need those two men to drive me. Let’s let this whole thing just go by as a misunderstanding, OK?”

  Two men who had been searching the damaged skyboat shut its doors and hood. “Skyboat in good shape, but ain’t nothing here ’cept a couple handguns, Luther.”

  Luther seemed to have a long conversation of looks with his troops. Finally, he nodded. “Let’s take them all back to Bastrop and we’ll contact Mexican Texas.”

  “You ain’t listening!” Stark shouted. “I have to get to San Antonio in less than five hours.”

  Luther pointed to the Mexican officials. “Kevin, you take them. I’ll take Dr. Mile-a-Minute in my boat.”

  Luther put his hand on Stark’s shoulder and steered him toward another skyboat. “Can I at least have my bag back please?” Stark pleaded.

  “Why? What you got here?”

  “My computer,” Stark said. “I need it to communicate with the CDC.”

  “I’ll keep it safe for you.” Luther guided him gently but firmly into his skyboat. “I promise.”

  After Kevin took Valesquez and Weitzel away in his skyboat, Luther led Stark inside the People’s Army of Texas “retainment facility,” as Luther called it. The heat was smothering in the makeshift jail, originally the Bastrop Opera House. The large, dark theater evoked “gymnasium” more than “opera” or “jail,” but Stark wasn’t about to criticize.

  A good-looking young man with red-blond curls sat playing solitaire at a desk near three giant chain-link “cells,” locked by padlocks. The young man’s rifle leaned against the wall by the farthest cage.

  Stark’s eyes hadn’t adjusted from stepping out of the sunlight, but he could make out a silhouette in the middle cell, either a woman or another young man seated on a chair, elbows resting on knees.

  Luther said, “Howell, this here Dr. Henry David Stark, a doctor of dermatology.”

  Howell stood and fumbled for the keys in his pocket, turning to the empty cell on his right.

  “No, no,” Luther said, grabbing the kid’s arm. “Say hello to him, Howell. He our guest.”

  Stark nodded in gree
ting to Howell. “Epidemiology, actually, not dermatology.”

  Unimpressed, the kid slouched back into his chair and looked at the third card off his deck, curls bouncing before his eyes.

  “We gonna head up to comm with a couple Pee-Oh-Double-Youse,” said Luther, taking off his shirt and gun holster. He slipped them over the back of a chair and pulled out a clean shirt from the desk drawer, shrugging it over his wiry frame. “We’ll come back within the hour, Dr. Stark.”

  Kevin had taken Valesquez and Weitzel to the People’s Army communication center, presumably to arrange a swap or ransom with the Mexican Army. If they really could arrange a prisoner exchange that quickly, and presuming they would let Stark go, he would have less than an hour and a half to get to San Antonio once Luther returned. Stark said, “Come back soon.”

  Luther peered into the one occupied cell. “You feed her today, Howell?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good,” Luther said. Then he whispered something in Spanish that Stark couldn’t hear. The person within, an androgynous woman in black jeans, black boots, and a dirty denim jacket, folded her arms and didn’t respond. With his eyes on the jailed woman, Luther said, “You look after Dr. Stark now, Howell, and give him anything he needs. So long, Doc. Lemonade in the icebox.”

  Luther left and the skyboats screamed away. The quiet they left behind was suffocating.

  Howell looked up from his game of solitaire, gathered the cards into a pile, then offered the deck to Stark. “Rummy?”

  Stark shrugged and took the deck. His game was poker but he sat down across from the boy. “How about some of that lemonade? It like a steam room in here.”

  “I drank it all,” said Howell. “I get you a water.”

  Shuffling the deck, Stark glanced into the occupied cell. The woman leaned her long frame forward, illuminated by bounce-light from the Opera House’s open door. Stark stopped shuffling and stared at what he saw. Her ratty black hair was pushed back from her brow, revealing a hairline that had been shaved back several inches from her face. Unnatural wrinkles distorted her exposed scalp and temples, as if thick twine coiled just below the skin. She looked briefly at Stark, then away, and Stark realized who, what she was. Her eyes shone in the dark but the gleam wasn’t happiness. It was an augmented optic nerve and silicon lens, which turned that organ into another brain, or rather, a computer. Or so Joaquin had once told Stark. She was a sabihonda as the Mexicans called them. A cyborg.