Journals of the Plague Years

by Norman Spinrad

  I was goin’ out fast, I was a mess of sarcomas and secondary infections, weak, and feverish, and half out on my feet, taking enormous doses of speed and coke just to keep going. But, fast as I was going, I still knew that this city was gonna go faster, and with me in it, unless I could deliver Bruno to the SP. I mean, one way I had maybe three weeks left, the other only ten days.

  An extra eleven days of life may not seem like such a big deal to you, brothers and sisters, but it sure as shit would if you were the one who knew that was the best you had left!

  Anyway, it was enough to keep me focused on finding Bruno, even spaced and stoned and dying and staggering around in the biggest orgy the world had ever seen. And I started grilling random people on the street and being none too gentle about it.

  I was so far gone I must have beaten the crap out of half a dozen of them before it got through to me that the “Dr. Feelgood” the whole damn city was babbling about was the very guy I was looking for. Dr. Richard Bruno, the son of a bitch who had maybe let loose the worst Plague variant ever and who for sure was gonna get all these assholes vaporized, and me with them; and they were somehow convinced the bastard was some kind of hero!

  Well, after I copped to that, it wasn’t much sweat tracking the famous Dr. Feelgood down. All I had to do was follow my nose and all the talk about him through the bars and streets until I ran into someone who told me he was partying in a certain bar in North Beach right now.

  I got there just as he was walking out with a good-looking momma on his arm and a dreamy smile on his lips. As soon as I saw him, I went into motion, no time or energy left for tactics or thought.

  “Okay, Bruno, you son of a bitch, you’re comin’ with me!” I shouted, grabbing him by his right arm and whipping it behind his back into a half-nelson bring-along.

  Half a dozen guys started to move in, but, far gone as I was, I still had that covered. I already had my miniauto out and waving in their faces.

  “This guy’s comin’ with me, assholes!” I screamed. “Anyone tries to stop me gets blown away!”

  Then everything seemed to happen at once.

  Some jerk got brave and slammed into my knees from behind.

  I kicked blindly backward, fighting for balance.

  Bruno yanked himself out of the half-nelson.

  A circle of angry meat closed in.

  I started firing without caring at what, whipping the miniauto in fanning fire at full rock and roll.

  “Dr. Feelgood” got himself neatly stitched up the back from ass to shoulder by high-velocity slugs.

  Bruno folded as everyone else came down on me like a ton of bricks.

  Next thing I knew, I had had the shit thoroughly beaten out of me, and two guys were holding me up by the shoulders, and Bruno was down there on the sidewalk croaking and looking up at me.

  “Why?” he whispered with blood drooling out of his mouth.

  “Don’t die, you stupid meatfucker!” I screamed at him. “You’re my only ticket out of here!”

  “Kill the bastard!”

  “Tear him apart!”

  I laughed and laughed and laughed. I mean, what else was there to do? “Go ahead and kill me, suckers!” I told them all. “I’m dead already and so are you, gonna nuke you till you glow blue!”

  “Cut his heart out!”

  Bruno looked up at me from the sidewalk with this weird sad little grin, almost peaceful, kind of, as his light went out.

  “No…” he said. “No more…just and loving vengeance, don’t you see…Marge…Tod…it’s nobody’s fault…take him…take him…”

  His voice started to fade. He coughed up more blood.

  “Take him where, Richard?” a woman said, leaning over him.

  “Take him to Our Lady…” Bruno whispered. “Let him take shelter in…in…”

  His lips moved but no more sound came out. And that was the end of that.

  Bruno was dead.

  So was I.

  And in ten days, so was San Francisco.

  >

  Linda Lewin

  They brought Richard’s body back to the House of Our Lady of Love Reborn and laid him out on a couch. Half a dozen Lovers of Our Lady were restraining a wild-eyed young terminal case and being none too gentle about it.

  And they told me what had happened. And Richard’s dying words.

  Only then did I really look at his murderer. His body was a mass of sarcomas. His frame was skeletal. His eyes were red and wild.

  “Why?” I asked him in a strange imploring voice that surprised even me.

  “My ticket out of here before they drop the Big One, Lady but it’s all over now ain’t it do your damnedest we’re all dead zombies anyway brothers and sisters…”

  He wasn’t making sense, nor would he, I knew then. This poor creature was no more responsible for his actions than Richard had been when Marge and Tod died. I had heard of this sort of thing before. Condition Terminals turning berserker on the way out, taking as many as they could with them. He too was a victim of the Plague, as were we all.

  And I understood Richard’s last words now too, perhaps better even than he had in the saying of them. His life had been in a sense over already, and all this poor creature had done was set his tormented soul free. I understood why he had forgiven his assassin, for in that act of forgiving, he had at last found forgiveness for himself for the deaths on his own hands, or so at least I prayed to whatever gods there be.

  “What should we do with the bastard?”

  “Kill him!”

  “Tear his damn heart out!”

  “No!” I found myself saying. “I’ll do it for you, Richard,” I whispered, and I took his murderer’s hand. “He forgave you, and so must I.”

  “Go ahead and kill me, don’t want your forgiveness, it don’t mean shit, I’m a dead man already and so are you!”

  “No, you’re not,” I told him gently. “Let me take you upstairs and give you the good news.”

  >

  John David

  And she did, though of course I didn’t believe a word of it at the time, not even after Our Lady gave my disgusting dying flesh the gift of her meat. Not that I was exactly in any mental condition for deep conversation anyway.

  But days later, when the sarcomas began to disappear and my head cleared, I knew that the whole damn story that Linda had told me over and over again was all true.

  I mean, I had sure done my share of evil, but what those meatfuckers at Sutcliffe had done was enough to make a combat medic puke! I never had no use for Walter T. Bigelow—and less so after the number he had run on me—but I was willing to bet that the old meatfucker had believed what he told me about poor Bruno. Those Sutcliffe creeps must have fed him their line about Bruno to get him to nuke the evidence of what they had done out of existence. And the dreadnaught virus along with it! Just to line their own pockets and save their own worthless asses!

  And oh shit, Bigelow still believed it!

  “What day is this?” I asked Linda when my head was finally clear enough to realize what all this meant and what was about to happen.

  It was two days till the Big Flash.

  “You’ve given me the good news, now I’ve gotta give you the bad news,” I told her. And I did.

  I had never seen Our Lady break down and cry before, but now she did. “Then poor Richard died for nothing…And everyone here is doomed…And no one will even know…And the Plague will go on and on and on…”

  While she was moaning and sobbing, I did some fast thinking. I still had the Very pistol, and that SP chopper was going to circle Golden Gate Park at three for two more days. I had the means to bring it down, and if I could take it…

  “You gotta find me a guy who can fly a helicopter,” I said.

  Our Lady stared at me blankly. I shook her by the shoulders. “Hey, you gotta snap out of it, Linda, and listen to me! I got a way to get us out of here before they drop the Big One!”

  That brought her around, and I laid it
out for her.

  It was simple, really. We’d dress the helicopter pilot up in a trench coat and a slouch hat or something so no one could see he wasn’t Bruno until I got us aboard the SP chopper.

  “I’ll take care of the rest,” I promised. “Probably be just a pilot and a copilot, piece of cake. Then you come aboard, and we take off like a big-assed bird for the Marin side, ditch the chopper, and disappear. You saved my life, now I’ll save yours.”

  >

  Linda Lewin

  “But what about San Francisco?” I said. “We can’t just…”

  John shrugged. “San Francisco is gonna be nuked out of existence anyway,” he said. “Nothing we can do about that, our asses is all we can save.”

  “But all these people…and the dreadnaught virus…”

  “Look at it this way—at least there’ll be you and me left to spread it…” He leered at me wolfishly. “I’ll do my part to spread it far and wide, you better believe it, sister!”

  “We just can’t leave a whole city to die!”

  “You got any better ideas?”

  I stared at this poor savage creature, at this killing machine, at this ultimate victim of the Plague, and I thought and thought and thought, and finally I did.

  “We’ll capture the SP helicopter,” I told him. “But we won’t just escape. We’ll fly down to Sutcliffe—”

  “And do what?”

  “Capture Harlow Prinz and Warren Feinstein. Take them to Bigelow.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t you see? When they tell Bigelow the truth—”

  “Why the hell would they do that?”

  I did my best to imitate John David’s own fiercest leer. “I think I can leave that one up to you, now can’t I?” I said.

  He stared at me as his face slowly twisted into the mirror image of my own. “Yeah…” he said slowly. “I think I could enjoy that…”

  He frowned. “Only this is getting mighty dicey, sister. I mean, grabbing the chopper should be no sweat, and if all we was doing was putting it down in Marin and disappearing on foot, our chances would be pretty good. But faking the radio traffic long enough to fly the thing to Palo Alto and snatching the Sutcliffe creeps and getting them to Bigelow…Hey, the SP ain’t the Legion, but they ain’t that far out to lunch either…”

  “We’ve got to try it!”

  “We wouldn’t have a chance!”

  “What if we had a diversion?” I blurted. “A big one…”

  “A diversion?”

  My blood ran cold as I said it. It was monstrous. Thousands might die. But the alternative was a million dead for no good cause. And monstrous as it was as a tactic, it was still the only just thing to do. Morally or practically, there really was no choice. It was the only chance we had to save the city, and the people had the right to know.

  “What do you think would happen if everyone in San Francisco knew what you’ve just told me?” I said.

  “That they were all going to be nuked in two days? Are you kidding? They’d go apeshit! They’d—”

  “Storm the Quarantine Line en masse? Swarm out into the Bay in hundreds of small boats? Try to get across the gaps in the bridges?”

  “Jeez, it’d be just like TJ, only a thousand times bigger, the SP would have its hands full, we just might be able to…”

  He studied me with new eyes. “Hey, beneath all that sweetness and light, you’re pretty hard-core, you know that, sister? I mean, using a whole city as a diversion…”

  “These people have a right to know what’s going to happen anyway, don’t they, John?” I told him. “Wouldn’t you want to know? This way, even if we fail, they get to go out fighting for something and knowing why. Better in fire than in ice.”

  >

  Walter T. Bigelow

  Satan held me on the rack as I waited fruitlessly for David to extract Richard Bruno from San Francisco. Three and four times a day Harlow Prinz called me to demand in shriller and shriller tones that I have the city nuked. Was this the voice of God or the voice of the Devil? What did Jesus want me to do?

  And then Satan put my back to the final wall.

  Reports started coming in to the Daly City SP station, where I had ensconced myself, that a huge ragtag flotilla of small boats was leaving the San Francisco shoreline. Fighting had broken out all along the landward Quarantine Line.

  It was becoming all too apparent that I could procrastinate no longer.

  Mobs with bridging equipment were swarming onto the San Francisco ends of the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges. The whole city was trying to break out of the Quarantine Zone, and they couldn’t all be stopped by conventional means. Only a thermonuclear strike could prevent the new and far deadlier Plague strain from entering the general populace now.

  I was forced to put in my long-delayed fateful call to the President of the United States…

  >

  John David

  I had wanted the Big Breakout to start sharply at three to make damn sure the SP chopper wasn’t scared off, but Linda had told too many people, and the Lovers of Our Lady were out in the streets whipping things up for hours beforehand, and the action began to come down raggedly an hour early.

  But the fighting was going on at the borders, not the center, and Golden Gate Park was just about empty. The SP chopper pilot must’ve been over the city already, or maybe he was the sort of righteous asshole who followed the last order no matter what.

  For even with half the city already throwing itself against the Quarantine Line, the chopper appeared over the park right on the money at three sharp.

  I fired off the Very pistol, and down it came. I stuck my miniauto conspicuously in our pilot’s back and frog-marched him to the open chopper door.

  As I had figured, there were only a pilot and a copilot in the cockpit. The moment we were inside, I jammed the muzzle of my piece into the back of the pilot’s neck.

  “Outside, assholes!” I ordered. “But strip first! One word out of either of you and I blow you away!”

  “Hey—”

  “What the—”

  “I told you, no lip! Out of those uniforms! Move your asses!”

  They took one look at the miniauto and another at me, and stripped down to boxer shorts and T-shirts muy pronto, you better believe it!

  “Out, assholes. Better run till you drop, and don’t look back!”

  I booted them out of the chopper and fired a long burst over their heads as Linda climbed aboard, and they ran for the nearest bushes.

  Then me and our pilot put on their uniforms, which I figured would come in mighty handy if we ever made it to Sutcliffe, and off we went.

  The skies were empty as we headed south over the city at about three thousand feet, but things started getting hairy as we approached the Quarantine Line.

  I could see ragged mobs of people moving toward the SP positions below, the SP troops were using heavy machine guns and some light artillery, and the air beneath us was thick with gunpowder smoke, through which I could see sparkles, laser-straight tracers, occasional explosions.

  All hell was breaking loose on the ground, and the airspace below us was full of helicopter gunships making low, slow strafing runs with cannon and rockets.

  But all the thunder and lightning and confusion made it easier for us in the end, seeing as we were one chopper out of many.

  “Bravo five three seven Charlie, what the hell are you doing up there?” a voice screeched at us over the radio.

  “Don’t answer!” I told our pilot. “Take her down into the traffic!”

  When we had dropped down into the cloud of gunships, I screamed into my microphone, “Motherfucking black-carder faggot bastards!” And fired off a few rockets.

  “Hey, those are our people down there!”

  “And our asses up here! You just fly this thing, and let me worry about tactics, okay!” And I fired off a couple more blind shots into the confusion.

  It worked like a charm. Every time we got static on t
he radio, I cursed and screamed like a good combat animal and fired a few random rockets at the ground and nobody challenged us as we threaded our way south over the combat zone.

  Once we were well clear, we went back up to three thousand feet, and the only traffic we saw between Daly City and Palo Alto was a few more gunships heading north into the mess far below who probably didn’t even see us.

  We landed inside the Sutcliffe compound right in front of the administration building and sat there with our rotor whumping as company rent-a-cops poured raggedly out of the building and finally managed to get us surrounded.

  “Stay here, and fer chrissakes keep the engine running,” I told Linda and the pilot. And climbed out of the chopper to make like a modern major general.

  “National Emergency!” I barked at the bozo in charge of the rent-a-cops. “Direct orders from Walter T. Bigelow, director of the Federal Quarantine Agency. He wants Harlow Prinz and Warren Feinstein in his headquarters half an hour ago, and we’re here to get ’em!”

  “Hey, I got no orders to—”

  “Argue with Bigelow if you want to!” I snapped. I gave the sucker a comradely shrug. “But I don’t advise it. I mean, there’s already been some kind of screw-up over this with all the heat going on, and he ain’t exactly being reasonable just now, if you get me.”

  “I don’t take my orders from the SP!”

  “Your funeral, pal,” I told him, nodding toward the chopper. “I got orders to blow the shit out of this place if I meet any resistance, and there’s five more gunships orbiting just over the ridgeline in case you got any dumb notions…”

  “Hey, hey, don’t get your balls in an uproar,” the head rent-a-cop soothed much more politely, and trotted off into the building.

  I waited there outside the chopper surrounded by rent-a-cops for what seemed like ten thousand sweaty years but couldn’t have been more than ten minutes by the clock.

  Finally the head rent-a-cop appeared with two middle-aged bozos. One of them seemed to be staggering toward me in a daze, but the other was the sort of arrogant in-charge son of a bitch you want to kill on sight.