The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  Her face was turned from the camera, and Domenica’s voice was a plea of gratitude. “Thank you, mamacita. Thank you. You are so good to me. Thank you.”

  Everyone in the room, including Cruz and Marcela, watched the monitor.

  Just then, the nun clapped her hands over her ears and her face strained with terror. “What is it? Mamacita, what is it? Why are you screaming?” Pirate pulled the camera’s frame out as if he could reveal to Mexico what Domenica was hearing and seeing. Domenica stared into a dark corner of the library behind her, hands over her ears, shoulders hunched. There was nothing in the corner but shelves jammed with books. Finally, Domenica looked back into the camera. Her face was wet with tears, but serene. “All right. All right,” she said, facing the camera.

  Several patients, unable to cross themselves because their hands were tied down, began uttering the prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe.

  In a quiet voice, Domenica said, “The woman in white says that there is an intelligence behind Big Bonebreaker, but it isn’t the Holy Renaissance. And it isn’t the United States. A single scientist, working alone, created this unnatural plague. He’s Hitler and Cortés reborn in one body, an infiltrator, and we’re defenseless against him.”

  No one in the room was watching Cruz except Marcela. She saw him stand in slow motion, like an old man rising on bad knees. The muscle on his wide chin quivered.

  “Cortés?” the cynical young man shouted. “The disease was engineered by a backwoods thug looking for easy gold? Is that it? This is so stupid, people!”

  Everyone shushed him and trained ears to the monitors.

  “The Virgin,” Domenica was saying, “said this scientist means to bring down the Holy Renaissance and Mexico, and he will do it. Because President Orbegón chose to pretend that Big Bonebreaker was a normal disease, this Cortés will succeed. Because Orbegón sees his own indígena citizens as expendable, this Satan will spread the virus. This is the test that the Holy Mother warned us about. And this is the end of her prophecy.”

  “Domenica is whipping los destitutos into a frenzy,” said the woman strapped down next to Marcela. “She’s turning the Minority against the Majority.”

  “We’ll never reunite Aztlán now,” an old man cried. “The reconquista is doomed.”

  “You people piss me off so much. What a bunch of stupid crap!”

  Heat devils seemed to waver before Dr. Cruz. Marcela peered through them, trying to get a clear glimpse of him. I tested it myself, he had said of the food he’d brought from Clinica Primera. How strange, that look of triumph on his face had seemed. Marcela could just make out his profile under the moon suit’s helmet as he stared in awe at the monitor. His pale face and tight dark curls. A Euro. A Spaniard, she thought.

  “Hitler?” Marcela heard Cruz whispering to himself. “Hitler?” Behind him, the man with the crutch and the wounded dog at his side drew closer. Again, he tried to say something to Cruz, pointing at him, but nothing cogent came, just the awful croaking. Allí está, the crippled man seemed to say.

  It’s him.

  Distantly Marcela was aware that her stomach was distending, that her breath was rattling and phlegmy. Her chill was gone, replaced by a burning heat. Marcela now felt like a buoy on a river of lava. They said it was fast.

  “It’s you,” she said to Cruz.

  His helmet remained still, but Cruz’s head whipped in her direction. She could only see one of his eyes. It was wild and round, and he snapped at her like a cornered animal, “What’s that? What did you say to me?”

  Nausea rocked her. Marcela shut her eyes tight, and said, “You’re the Cortés.”

  From the pile of bedding at the foot of her cot, Cruz picked up a pillow. He ignored the other patients, who were staring at him now with curiosity and concern, as he came to stand beside the head of Marcela’s cot.

  The Plague Saint called him Hitler. Satan. Marcela prayed to San Miguel to protect her, and she prayed to the sacred heart of Santa Maria to forgive her for helping to unbalance the world with her unforgiven sin.

  The burning lava flowed and flowed and flowed.

  The man could swear the nun had said his name. He took a step toward the netmonitor to hear better, but she did not repeat it. She used other names that distracted him—Hitler? Cortés?—but the penetrating way the nun looked at him with that wide-eyed amphibian stare, he was sure he’d heard his name.

  “It’s you,” said the young, infected nurse.

  He turned away from the monitor and found Marcela glaring at him, just as the nun had. The man wondered if the nurse had heard Domenica say his name too. “What’s that?” he said to Marcela, clearing his throat and trying to sound calm. A moment ago, everything had been airtight. “What did you say to me?”

  The nurse screwed her eyes shut as though she were trapped on a diving swoop jet and didn’t want to witness her plummet. “You’re the Cortés.”

  He felt like a tower struck by lightning. He felt like little needles were poking him in the cheeks. Things were falling down. The nurse had no reason to say what she said. The nun had no way to know what she knew. Below his whirling anger, he knew that he ought to ignore Marcela, that it was time to abandon his façade as a medical worker but he couldn’t control his rational mind’s need to make sense of this.

  “¡Tu chingado Hitler!” The nurse’s fever was cresting and she was about to start hemorrhaging. He could tell by the size of her stomach. “No, you’re worse! You’re worse! Hear me, Archangel Michael! Save me in this desperate hour from the devil Reynaldo Cruz! Oh Sacred Heart of Jesus! Grant the grace that I ask! Pour your—”

  The man saw that he had a pillow in his hands. He didn’t remember picking it up, but it felt good to hold. It felt good to fit it over Marcela’s face—so satisfying to silence her ridiculous plea. “No. No, grant the grace that I ask,” he whispered, completing Marcela’s prayer to the Sacred Heart. It felt like a good cough to be able to say that prayer aloud, to hold the nurse’s face under this pillow. “Pour your blessings and mercies over me.”

  The nurse began to convulse beneath the pillow. The man struggled to keep his grip on her and saliva shot through his teeth, hitting his face shield.

  “So that I may be worthy of your divine Sacred Heart,” the man whispered, “for I am acting in your cause, in the cause of nature and God. Please give me a sign that you understand.”

  He couldn’t feel wetness through his gloves, but he could sense moisture in the pillow, so he lifted his hands and gave out a little cry of surprise. The pillow was soaked through with blood from her hemorrhaging. He backed away from Marcela’s bed. His hands trembled so hard that he had to make tight fists in an effort to control them. He stood in the central aisle, staring at Marcela’s cot as if her corpse might decide to lurch to its feet and call him Hitler again.

  Down the row of cots, those who were able sat up and watched him. They’d heard and seen everything. Their swollen lymphs and sores gleamed wet in the dark, and their terrified faces flickered in fire.

  Fire?

  The man turned and looked at the other end of the infirmary and saw leaping flames through the clinic’s thick, airtight windows. Outside, a riot was in full gallop, with skytrucks and cloud-boards hovering overhead. The avenue was jammed with people, some trying to leave the city in cars loaded down with boxes and suitcases. A group of young men ran past the sealed windows. Soldiers chased them with charged stunsticks.

  “It’s all falling down,” he said in wonder, watching searchlights cut pretty arcs over the sea-green towers of La Alta.

  “Nurse Marcela was right,” a teenage boy said. “You’re the one Domenica was prophesying about!”

  In a bed near him, a haggard cadaver of a woman folded her hands, and said, “Hear me, Santa Domenica, protectress of the infected. The devil is here. Bring him to justice before almighty God!”

  Two men argued whether they should leave the clinic or not. “We’ll infect the city even worse if we go. Besides I’
m strapped down!”

  “The pilone is dead. Someone, find a telephone. Tell the world who that man is!”

  The man turned and walked to the front door of the clinic. He un-snapped the wrist and neck airlocks on his suit, then removed his helmet. He returned the stare of each patient, all of whom looked at him with their haunted, hating eyes as he shrugged out of the suit and stepped from its leggings. He scrubbed his palms over his face as if wiping himself clean of the nun’s accusations.

  “He’s not afraid of the disease!” cried the old woman, interrupting her prayer to Domenica.

  “No. He’s immune.”

  The boy’s voice was shrill with horror. “Why? Why would you do this, señor?”

  The man turned to the door and opened the air lock on the ALHEPA. The bedlam of riot boomed into the old bathhouse. The patients flinched in their beds as the din hit them. Sirens. Shrieking barcos. The searing hiss of rapid-fire plasma-injected guns. A Saint John’s Procession of fifteen masked flagellants shuffled past the field clinic’s window, whipping themselves as they staggered by.

  The man raised his hand to his mouth, kissed his fingertips, and blew the kiss into the clinic. “I’m sorry. Good-bye. I’m sorry.”

  Then he stepped outside and opened the outer air lock’s memboard. A line of army ground trucks rolled toward the clinic; rioters in gas masks fled in every direction. No one even looked at what he was doing. On the door’s memscreen appeared options for levels of containment. The man chose CONDEMNED.

  ASCENSIÓN IS UNDER MARTIAL LAW! RETURN TO YOUR HOMES! a cloud-screen over the clinic read. A low haze, which veiled the bulbed crowns of La Alta, flickered orange with fires and explosions.

  Down the avenue, sprawling crowds had encamped at the base of Chapultepec Hill. High above, he could see the marble castle that surveyed the city. Emperor Maximilian Hapsburg had built the castle two hundred years ago. Beside it now loomed Torre Cuauhtémoc, the castle of a greater king than Hapsburg had ever been. Torre Cuauhtémoc, whose base sat in Chapultepec Park, had become Orbegón’s tower dubbed “The Majority Cloister,” a quarantined stronghold that protected the Holy Renaissance from the outbreak. Shrill bullhorn voices of the Minority Party’s armed radical wing, Los Hijos de Marcos, screamed at the troops massing around Torre Cuauhtémoc. A command van hovered over the square in front of the Cloister’s main gate. The crowd of thousands sounded poised on the edge of mass fury, and it seemed ready to vent its emotion on the Holy Renaissance troops.

  He stood on the granite steps of the clinic. The avenue before him was clogged with flagellants. At the avenue’s other end, Holy Renaissance jeeps and trucks came to a halt. The man watched, dazed, as the crazed, bloody parade swarmed the olive green ground trucks.

  “Move or you’ll be shot!” a rodent-faced lieutenant shouted over the top of his jeep’s windshield.

  The man stepped back until he felt the clinic’s air lock at his heels.

  A bare-chested old man with sagging pectorals threw his head back and shouted the Ave to the Virgin of Guadalupe at the lieutenant.

  “La Baja is under martial law,” the lieutenant shouted. “Get out of the way. Now!” Another set of sirens howled from down the avenue, from Ascensión’s main square. The lieutenant put his hands over his ears, listening to his headset, then shouted at his driver, “Tell the rear guard to back up!” He turned and screamed at the truck behind him. “Reverse! Revolutionaries are burning the banks and cathedral!” Farther down the avenue, the man could hear gears shifting in diesel trucks.

  Somehow the revolutionaries had warning, the man thought. Somehow, they knew to attack when the pilone went down.

  The answer set his teeth grinding. Domenica.

  She troubled him. Somehow, she knew what he was doing. She knew about the outbreak before it started. She began this prophecy of hers two days before Zapata Hospital was quarantined. She began it a day before Diego Alejandro had ordered a field team to investigate the dengue outbreak. In fact, she began it the very moment that he himself began the epidemic by infecting Dolores. And Domenica had been there, too, on the old television set, as if Dolores herself had summoned the nun. She had. She had. She had conjured the nun. Dolores insisted the Plague Saint be onscreen while they made love. It didn’t make sense but it had happened. He felt his mind fluttering over these mad thoughts like a bird looking for a place to perch.

  Before him, the convoy began lurching into reverse. The sound of gunfire and screaming skyboats ripped across the city. The man followed the ground convoy toward the other riots in the National Square, the zócalo. The man thought, A force of some kind looked into the future and told her what it saw.

  In the streets, the infection was spreading not only as a virus, but as something worse, something human. Fires tongued the walls of old buildings. Kids smashed windows. A circle of rioters separated a Holy Renaissance soldier from his unit and shredded his moon suit, spitting and urinating on him once he was exposed.

  The man stopped near the exposed soldier and bowed his head. He prayed as he had prayed to Mother Mary his whole life. Santa Maria? Are you here? Are you with me? You have given a sign to the nun. Would you do me the great favor of telling me what you want from me?

  Ten young men, none of them wearing masks or gloves, overturned a police ground car. But before they could remove the driver and his screaming passengers, a red-and-black hover van descended over the street from high above, the shepherd’s staff symbol of the Holy Renaissance printed on the underbelly of its hull. A loudspeaker voice said, “Disperse immediately!”

  Whose side are you on, Holy Mother? The man prayed.

  A young indígena boy aimed a Sangre de Cristo rifle at the hull over his head and squeezed the trigger. A spurt of bullets hit the van and ricocheted back into the street, scattering the rioters.

  The man watched while he prayed. Aren’t I acting out God’s natural will, Santa Maria?

  He could not understand why she’d oppose him. The city of Ascensión was ungodly, unnatural. It was unnatural in Montezuma’s day, with so many living on Lake Texcoco that the Aztecs began filling it in to make more room for their growing numbers. And now. Now natural diseases could do nothing—dengue, smallpox, cholera—all too weak to leap past the walls of human defense even in such a large, vulnerable city. Pollution and violent crime were ineffectual. War. Nothing could stop this city from growing in its unnatural numbers, expanding at a rate equivalent to adding another city every year into this poor little valley. Earthquakes. Volcanoes. Mudslides. Nothing stemmed the human infection here. By the time the Holy Renaissance came along, admonishing its people to “Be Fruitful and Multiply in the Cause of God,” the city had been forced to thrust upward. It balanced populations atop quake-proof towers. It domesticated its people, leashing them with wetware and implants. The man said to the flashing haze overhead, “Am I not God’s response to the profane fascism of the Holy Renaissance? Am I not a natural response, Virgen?”

  The man continued walking up La Reforma, through the death throes of Mexico’s capital. The Virgin is against me, he thought. The Virgin is against nature. He could see the zócalo ahead and hear the thunderous rioting. I am nature and God is against me.

  When the man finally reached the zócalo, he stood at the intersection of La Reforma Avenue and the National Square, watching a full-fledged revolt. Thousands upon thousands seethed in the great space before the cathedral and the old National Palace. Their voices banked off the old Viennese-style buildings in deafening clamor, while a squad of Holy Renaissance elite soldiers stood before the high double doors of the cathedral. The lieutenant’s small platoon had formed a barrier of vehicles before the Banco Real. Overhead, a cloud-board floated: CEASE AND DESIST!

  “I thought I was acting in God’s cause,” he said softly, explaining himself to the ancient cathedral across the great expanse of flagstones. The Ascensión National Square was the largest city square on the planet, so it dizzied the eye to behold so many people here. The cr
owd roiled toward the glass banks one moment, met the resistance of troops, then sloshed toward the cathedral a moment later. Makeshift Vatican and Minority Party flags swooped over their heads.

  “I thought I was one with God.”

  The man heard bubbling, just loud enough to catch his attention. Musical water. He looked down at his feet and saw a bubble of blood pulsing up between the cobblestones.

  Pressed between colonial edifices and Holy Renaissance glass-and-steel bank towers, an arm of the riot coiled out from the main crowd and stretched toward the banks. Troops fired from the bank lobby and several people fell.

  One of the trucks in the cordon lurched forward as the driver shifted into first and knocked four people down. They scrambled away as it plowed forward.

  At the man’s feet, blood continued to shoot like a slim ribbon from the earth. The bubbling became a beat, as bright, red blood seeped in rills through the pavement.

  Through a bullhorn, a panicked voice screamed from the cathedral, “Captain! These people are all infected!”

  Amazed, he watched blood spread over the volcanic rock of the paving stones like a silk sheet. He bent down and touched his finger to the little fountain, tasted it. It was real. It was there.

  “This is me insane,” he thought, examining the blood on his fingertip, and yet he could not discount the possibility that this was a vision. He had just asked for a sign, after all. He stood up, still staring down at the blood.

  The crowd rushed the Holy Renaissance troops guarding the cathedral. Wave after wave of protesters fell until the crowd poured into the church. The bullhorn screeched, “We need septic troops, Captain! Now!”

  The man turned back to the embattled cathedral and folded his hands again. “Madness or divinity, I am ready for you.”

  In the burning church, gunshots thudded. Black smoke wreathed the cathedral’s bell tower and twin spires, curling into a mysterious gesture.

  He held his breath, waiting, praying.

  The curtain of smoke over the old church parted and twisted like a hand in benediction.