The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  “Mira,” Stark spit. “I read all that. My epidemiological team wrote all that. ¡Vámanos!”

  Her mask remained aimed at La Alta. “Touchy.”

  “Look, I just want to get off this street and find the nun.” The black plume from Carlos IV’s bonfire sailed over Filomeno Mata so that Stark couldn’t avoid seeing it in his peripheral vision.

  “Oh,” said Rosangelica, following him toward the street sign that read Mata. “I get it. It’s the pyre that bothers you. It’s all finally getting past your filter.”

  Stark glared at the sabihonda, but she was right. He shouldn’t have looked at that bonfire. The afterimage (red as coal skin liquefying) was still on his eye, and he could feel it stiffening him like clay in a kiln.

  Rosangelica led the way down Filomeno Mata, looking for addresses set above narrow doorways of these seventeenth-century buildings. “You’d think these places would be more clearly marked. Bajador inefficiency. Que triste.”

  Stark fanned the air in front of him though the smoke was high overhead. “Shocking. The safe house doesn’t have a street address.”

  “Tss,” Rosangelica hushed him. “Take. Sencillo. Plátano. Pulled up another map.” She sounded exasperated. “Bueno. I see it now. Eleven is right there.” Rosangelica pointed to a building that might have once housed a telegraph office or an old Internet café, Stark imagined.

  He followed the sabihonda to the unmarked door and stepped into a small lobby. A stack of unopened liquor crates leaned against one wall, and black tables and chairs were piled in the little foyer, as if this were a restaurant’s private storage and not a storefront. They could hear chains and gears cranking to life behind the foyer’s shut elevator doors.

  “Someone’s coming to greet us?” suggested Stark.

  Rosangelica unshouldered her Matador. “They must have been watching us from above.”

  The doors opened and revealed an empty elevator car—empty except for a ratty Christmas poster of Orbegón with graffiti glasses and horns, and a balloon coming from his mouth saying “¡Feliz Navidad, puta!”

  Just as Stark was trying to make sense of this message, a gun fired. The lobby’s plate-glass window shattered behind them, and suddenly, Stark’s face was pressed against the clear shield of his helmet after throwing himself on the ground.

  “Down! Lie down!” shouted a man from the staircase.

  Rosangelica scrambled to the ground next to Stark.

  Several people entered the lobby, boots crunching over the shattered glass of the window. A tall man with curly red hair appeared in the doorway, and wearing an old black-rubber gas mask that shoved his hair back into a clownish halo around his head. He came to stand next to Rosangelica and kicked her hard in the ribs. “Stop accessing your sats right now!”

  Stark glanced at the sabihonda. He didn’t understand how the man knew she had satellite access, but he feared she would jeopardize their chances of meeting Domenica if she didn’t do as the men asked. “Rosangelica, don’t—”

  “Hey!” The red-haired man looked at Stark. “So it is Rosangelica!” He jammed the gun barrel into the back of the sabihonda’s neck, crinkling the fabric hood. “I’ll blow you right into the ground, right down to hell where you belong, whore of Babylon!” Then he swore a litany so creative and biblical that Stark couldn’t follow him.

  Rosangelica screamed. She sounded like a cat getting doused with water. “Stop it! Stop it! I’m not accessing!”

  “What’s happening?” shouted Stark. “What are you doing to her?”

  Rosangelica groveled, clutching at the man’s boots. “Stop it, please!”

  “Satan’s little whore,” he said, flipping her over with the toe of his boot so that he could aim the gun in her face. “Came for the bounty you put on my head, is that it? Think you can bag me like a rat?”

  Rosangelica’s screaming continued until a second man appeared next to the redhead, looking down at the woman and glancing at the gunman under his eyelids. “Pirate, stop.”

  The gunman grabbed Rosangelica by the Racal suit bunching at her shoulders and hauled her to her feet. “I should kill her. I should kill her. It’s the right thing to do. I should kill her. She’d have killed me. I should.”

  “Pirate,” whispered the gunman.

  “If I don’t, Orbegón himself will show up to arrest the saint.” Pirate’s eyes were white Ping-Pong balls, bugging at Rosangelica through the goggles of his mask. Stark could see that, like worms beneath the surface, the skin around his eyes rolled and puckered.

  He a sabihondo!

  “If I kill her, I bet the whole war in Tejas grinds to a halt,” Pirate shouted.

  “Domenica won’t like it if you kill anymore—”

  “This sabihonda probably just alerted the whole city’s militia to where we are, José!”

  “I didn’t access! No one knows we’re here!” said Rosangelica, going limp in Pirate’s grip. “You got inside my sats too fast!” She caught her breath, and said, “I swear. Check my path. I swear it.”

  Stark raised his helmet off the ground and looked at the two cyborgs. Who this guy? He some sort of radical Rosangelica?

  Pirate’s gun went off. Plaster rained down on Stark’s head. He covered his helmet with his hands.

  In the echoing quiet after the gunshot, Pirate said, “OK. Aborted path. But I got a node-dog on you, whore. It bites. You felt that. You know this gun, too, don’t you?”

  Rosangelica shut her eyes as if the gun were a blinding light. “I know that gun.”

  “Shut up. You don’t know this gun,” Pirate said. “I installed i.a. in its injection magazine. Me and the gun are brothers and we’re twice as fast as you and your little Matador. Oh. But you found that out already. Access in my presence or mess with the tracer I put on your node, and the gun will target you and fire before I can even think,” he said. Then a light from the gun’s targeting eye blinked twice in her face, as if winking, identifying her. “Got the rules straight? OK. Who’s with you, Rosangelica?” She relaxed in his grip and opened her mouth to speak, but he shook her again, as if to remind her how frightened she should be. “Who did you bring me?”

  Stark had never heard Rosangelica sound so feeble, so terrified, as if she might burst into tears. “That’s Dr. Stark—of—of the Centers for Disease Control.”

  “What? Henry David Stark?” Pirate handed Rosangelica to a third man. “Turn over, Dr. Stark.”

  Stark rolled onto his back. He was shaking as he looked up into Pirate’s goggled and masked face.

  “A Dr. Stark just checked out of docking bay nine in Torre Cuauhtémoc twenty minutes ago. Destination: hot zone.” Pirate sighed and the barking pit bull in his voice softened. “All right. Why are you here, Dr. Stark?”

  Stark wasn’t sure what the right thing to say was. So he decided to try the truth. “I asked Rosangelica to help me find Sister Domenica. I need Domenica to help me end the outbreak.”

  In a low voice, Pirate said, “How do you expect Santa Domenica to help you?”

  Stark shook his head. “I’ll say what I have to say to Domenica herself.”

  “I’ll hear you out. If it’s worthwhile, I’ll contact her.”

  Stark figured Pirate would never let them see the nun if Stark told him the whole, dangerous plan, so he reverted to the lie that he had told Rosangelica. “I need to stop two outbreaks. One is viral. The other is violent. I need Domenica to join ranks with the Holy Renaissance and ask for an end to the civil unrest in Ascensión. The Holy Renaissance has already agreed to offer her clemency.”

  The five other men and women in their makeshift suits scoffed loudly. One woman laughed like a mule and another man whistled his derision with a single piercing note.

  But Pirate was listening. By his worried eyes, he saw the situation more clearly than his confederates did. He stepped closer to Stark and spoke low, “How many have died in the fighting?”

  “I have absolutely no way of knowing who is dying of the virus,” s
aid Stark quickly, seizing on Pirate’s question, “or who is dying in the street war.” Which was true. “Until I can discern between the two outbreaks, I can’t stop Big Bonebreaker.” Which was only partially true.

  Everyone in the room fidgeted, annoyed. The insurgents seemed to be losing patience with Stark, and Rosangelica clearly wanted to do the talking but her metallic eyes kept drifting to the gun targeting her.

  Pirate shook his head in displeasure. “You came here with the most politically dangerous person in Mexico. I’d be doing Los Hijos a huge favor by killing her and I could include you in that execution for good measure, guero.” His eyes blinked rapidly with uncontrolled anger. “Why should I believe a thing you’re telling me, Dr. Stark?”

  Because I’m on your side! Stark wanted to say. I want these bloodsuckers to pay for their policy of genocide and I want to see Orbegón dead from massive DHF hemorrhaging! But Stark needed to get through this with Rosangelica alive and trusting him, so he composed himself, saying, “Mexico is currently dying at a rate of nearly one thousand people per day, so you have no choice but to listen to me.” Stark wasn’t as defiant as he would have liked to sound. He was too scared that Pirate would ignore him. “The Holy Renaissance understands this. They know that they have to close ranks with Sister Domenica to stop this outbreak.”

  “You’re a fool,” said the woman who had laughed like a donkey. “The Holy Renaissance sees you as the means to imprison the Plague Saint forever. Or worse.”

  “No,” Stark said. “With the virus running rampant through Ascensión, the Holy Renaissance sees that neither you nor they can win.” Stark swallowed, and said, “Which means they apparently understand the situation better than you do.”

  Pirate was all bluster. The sabihondo considered Stark’s words, large eyes scanning the ground, blinking rapidly. Pirate didn’t want to be an insurgent. Stark could see he had taken on the role against his will. That was obvious in his little-boy posture and sad expression. After a pause, he gave Stark his hardest, most macho look, but the truth had already been revealed. “You know what happens when the epidemic ends, don’t you, yanqui?” He pointed to Rosangelica with his gun. “You know what Orbegón has planned for the United States?”

  “I was in Tejas before I came here,” said Stark.

  “And still you work on the tyrant’s behalf?”

  “I’m saddened by what Mexico has allowed itself to become, but, Pirate,” said Stark, feeling hot in his cool Racal suit, “Big Bonebreaker will eat until it dies of natural causes if I don’t stop it, and I can’t do that without Domenica’s help.”

  Pirate adjusted the gas mask. Then his goggles. He glanced at his compatriots, who were poised, practically on the balls of their toes, waiting for him to decide. Finally, Pirate’s sigh whistled through his filter. “José, take my gun and keep it trained on the puta primera,” Pirate said, handing the rifle to his second.

  Stark wondered if Pirate was making a mistake, leaving Rosangelica out of his sight. But by the way Rosangelica stared at Pirate’s gun in the other man’s hands, she wasn’t wondering the same thing.

  “Get in, Stark,” Pirate said, pointing to the elevator’s open doors. “I’m taking you to see the saint.”

  The elevator creaked with rust and disuse and came to an abrupt halt that almost knocked Stark off his feet. When the doors opened, he found himself face-to-face with a Lockheed-Pemex pyramid logo. A door-sized air lock prevented him from leaving the elevator. “Where did you get the ALHEPA?” he asked, impressed.

  Pirate opened the air lock for his guest. “Got it from an abandoned field clinic by Chapultepec Park.” Beyond the air lock was a little room whose other exit was yet another cutting-edge air lock. “Be so kind as to remove your suit.”

  This was Stark’s second suit of the day. “Will I get it back?”

  Pirate removed his gas mask. He was a good-looking young man with a Roman nose and a week’s worth of beard. The subcutaneous wires around his eyes veined and shifted as he grinned like a wolf. “I don’t steal, I forage.”

  Stark unlocked his cuff and collar locks, letting hisses of air into the room. “Some might call taking ALHEPAs stealing.”

  “That’s the chief benefit of working for a saint,” said Pirate. “Instant absolution.”

  “You keep calling her a saint, but …”

  “A title of affection,” Pirate said, waiting as Stark shed his suit. “Neither Cardinal de Veras nor the Vatican has officially recognized her, but the people know what she is to them. La Patrona de los Plagos,” he said. “Domenica has just one rule for visitors and comrades. Don’t ask her about the prophecies.”

  “Why not?” Stark asked, draping his suit over a bench. He found a spritz bottle marked bleach and disinfected his suit and helmet.

  “They are precious to her and not up for debate. That’s part of why she has not been canonized. She refuses to verify or renounce her visions,” said Pirate. “Believe them or don’t, it’s all the same to her. Now. One last question.”

  “Yes.”

  “Whose side are you really on, Doctor?”

  In the clean, neutral protection of the air lock, all viruses, wetwared spies, and fascist officers of the Renaissance at bay, Stark finally felt safe enough to tell the truth. “I always appreciate,” he said, “a spirited struggle against superior force.”

  Pirate smiled his wolfish smile. “Then let’s go.”

  The air lock opened into what was either a dance club converted into a church or a church that had crossbred with a nightclub. An old bar ran the length of one wall on the left-hand side of the room, and an ancient disco ball lay broken like a cracked egg on the right. The windows were sealed up with thick gobs of plaster over the glass and frames and black wooden floors and black walls made it look late-nineties American noir. The far wall was devoted to the Virgen de Guadalupe as she had once been worshipped in Mexico, before the Holy Renaissance: A kind image of the dark-skinned Madonna, as she had appeared to the Nahuatl Indian Don Diego, seemed to beatify this dark disco. In an arc over her head were painted roses, and spikes of gold suggesting a halo crowned her. Candles lit the altar before the Madonna’s painting, and before the altar sat twenty-five young men and women. Most were praying, though many sat with plates of food and bottles of water. A shocking number of US M-32 machine guns sat piled against one empty black wall.

  Los Hijos de Marcos, Stark thought.

  Pirate turned to Stark. “This used to be a gay bar. The oldest in Ascensión. Can you believe that?”

  “Gays in Mexico come well armed.”

  “Part of life in the hot zone,” Pirate said. “We shelter the contralunas here, the street fighters who take on the Holy Renaissance moon troops. Have you heard about los ejércitos de la luna?”

  “Someone mentioned them to me earlier today.”

  “They’re conducting a pogrom in La Baja, murdering the poor and los indígenas who survive Big Bonebreaker.” He raised his finger. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: The Mexican government has been fighting its own Indian populations since the arrival of the conquistadors.” He nodded to the guns as he stepped away from Stark. “There’s our spirited struggle.”

  Stark watched as one man, a slender indígena with a deeply lined face, counted the weapons and boxes of ammunition. He looked rather old, but tough and resilient like a bullwhip. He had an unlit cigarette between the fingers of one hand while he wrote down numbers on paper with the other. Stark noted a black ski mask in the man’s back pocket, a symbol of Mexican rebellion as old as Stark’s own grandfather.

  The man caught Stark looking at him and gave a slight wave with the hand holding the unlit cigarette.

  Pirate whistled sharply through his teeth. “Everyone, we’re packing up! We’re not in immediate danger, but I’ll be breaking down the particle arresters and air locks in forty-five minutes.”

  The crowd of people before the painting of the Virgin stood and swarmed toward Pirate. “¿Qué pasó, q
’pasó?” What happened? They emphasized the O so that it sounded like a chorus of “oh-oh” to Stark. They gawked at Pirate and Stark, waiting for explanation.

  The old indígena turned to Pirate, held the hand-rolled cigarette as if he were about to smoke it, and considered the sabihondo through squinting eyes.

  “You all know where the next safe house is.” Pirate clapped his hands, but no one moved.

  The indígena lifted his cigarette and called out, “¡Vámanos! You heard the know-it-all.”

  At once, the room boiled into action, but before they dispersed, Stark could see heads turning as someone pushed through the crowd. When the force that cut that wake appeared, Stark immediately recognized her, but he wasn’t prepared for her presence. Standing before her was like standing in the presence of a queen, though she was shorter and older than Stark expected, with streaks of gray in her long, braided hair.

  “Antonio, what is this?” she said to the weapons man. She had reading glasses that hung on a chain around her neck. “You give the order without telling me?”

  Antonio gestured to Pirate with his cold cigarette. “The know-it-all has been out hunting.”

  Domenica spread her hands and shrugged, looking back at Pirate. Her eyes flicked like wet matches on his face, but when she met Stark’s eyes: fire. “Dr. Stark?”

  How does she know me? He nodded to the nun, unable to form a greeting or an introduction.

  “Dr. Henry David Stark came here with someone who was helping him track you down,” Pirate said.

  “A sabihondo?” asked Antonio, stepping closer to Pirate on well-oiled work boots. “Or should I say, a sabihonda?”

  Pirate nodded. “That’s right.”

  Domenica crossed herself.

  Old Antonio looked like he really wanted a drag off his cigarette. “I’ll get the weapons packed,” he said, loping away on his long stride.

  As Domenica looked at Stark again, her eyes went from black and blazing to two wet drops of ink. “Why?” She implored him with a voice filled with sadness. “Why would you bring Rosangelica straight to us, Dr. Stark?”