Of Starlight and Plague

by Beth Hersant

  But was it bioterrorism? The locals certainly thought so. Rumors flew of the gringo’s “secret lab” where he was apparently brewing up some doomsday virus. The gringo, Dr. Aaron Pickman, was unavailable for comment. He was currently lashed to a bed in the isolation ward, screaming.

  Caldwell was about to pursue this line of inquiry when Sheriff Abran Manolito requested an urgent meeting. He was a harried-looking man in his early forties, with dark circles under his eyes; and he was quite clumsy — probably, Edwin guessed, due to stress and fatigue. The sheriff, his arms full of brown folders and lugging an old cooler, left a trail of paper down the hall behind him.

  “Take a minute, Sheriff, to get organized,” Caldwell said as he gathered up the errant paperwork.

  “Sorry, things have been crazy.”

  “So I gathered.” The doctor led him to an empty office that had been set aside for his use and Manolito went immediately to the desk to sort the sheets of paper back into their respective piles.

  “Right,” he said. “Have you heard of a Dr. Aaron Pickman?”

  “I’ve seen him.”

  “Then you know he’s beyond the point where he can give us any useful information.”

  “Yes, but what information did he have? I’ve heard all kinds of wild rumors, stuff straight out of Frankenstein. Does he or does he not have any bearing on this outbreak?”

  “I think he’s the cause of it.”

  “You think…”

  “This,” he handed Caldwell the first folder, “is all of the information we have on his immigration status and the rental agreement he signed with the U.S. military for the old airbase on the north side of the island.”

  “Why was he renting an airbase?”

  “It’s derelict. He turned it into a medical research lab, although we did not know that initially.”

  “Right.”

  “This,” Manolito handed him a second folder, “is the first time he appeared on my radar. It is a report filed by two tourists at the end of October who heard terrible screams coming from Pickman’s facility.”

  “Screams?”

  “Animal screams.”

  “Did you search the premises?”

  “Two hikers hearing a noise in the rainforest isn’t enough to get a search warrant. So I drove out there, spoke to Pickman and acquainted him with our animal welfare laws.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he kept rabid dogs at the facility. He said he was studying the disease.”

  There it was: rabies again. It emerged that the recent rabies outbreak on the island occurred after the hurricane damaged Pickman’s lab. Manolito was rattling through the facts quickly now: the four escaped monkeys, the fire that gutted the lab and the hunt in which he managed to kill three of the four escaped animals.

  Caldwell eyed the cooler. “Please tell me that’s one of the monkeys.”

  “Not one of the first three. Those we incinerated because we were still working under the assumption that they were merely rabid. This is the fourth monkey. I found the carcass today down by the docks.”

  “Do you know what killed it?”

  “No, but when we found him, he looked like this.” Manolito handed him a photo of a dead rhesus macaque in the early stages of decomposition.

  “He’s chewed up,” Caldwell murmured.

  “We think rats got at the body post-mortem.”

  “Rats,” Caldwell could not keep his voice from rising. “Rats down by the dock. How many ships have left here within the last couple of days?”

  Sheriff Abran Manolito looked at him with haunted eyes. “My deputy is compiling a list right now.”

  Edwin placed the island under quarantine and four U.S. frigates were en route to patrol the coastline. Cáscara, however, was only part of the problem. He had a team working with the sheriff’s department to trace every boat that had left the island within the last two weeks. And now he turned his mind to the tourists. The Caribbean had just come out of its hurricane season and hence visitor numbers had been down. However, with the Our Lady of Guadalupe Festival and the Festival de la Luz over Christmas, tourist numbers had increased during the outbreak period. He now had to track every single one of them down.

  Not only had a significant number of people dispersed from Cáscara, but information was leaking out as well. A colleague at the EOC forwarded an article to him from the dailymail.co.uk. It sported the headline: “Wounded man with gaping facial wound appears to be ‘possessed by the devil’ as he terrifies hospital staff.” It was accompanied by a grainy picture of Pablo Vasquez, stalking around his room with that weird backward-leaning gait of his. The vacant, almost soulless look on the man’s face was so pitiful that it was almost mesmerizing.

  A soft tap on the door startled Edwin out of these thoughts.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” his assistant Janine entered and handed him a file.

  “The preliminary lab results on the monkey?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but we still don’t have the full picture.”

  “Thanks.” He flipped through the papers. It was rabies. And it wasn’t. The RNA strands of the virus included too many lines of genetic information. The pathogen had been greatly altered. Dr. Pickman seemed to have given it an upgrade and, in the process, created something entirely new.

  “Possible criteria for bioterrorism, number three,” he muttered. “‘Unusual, atypical, or genetically engineered strain of an agent.’”

  He glanced again at the Daily Mail article. Vasquez looked horrific. His skin was waxy, his foam-covered teeth were bared and his eyes were a black nothingness. He did look like a demon from hell. Or a zombie.

  “This, ladies and gentlemen, is the face of the new outbreak.”

  Chapter Three

  New Orleans

  “I pray you all give your audience,

  And hear this matter with reverence,

  By figure a moral play —

  The Summoning of Everyman called it is,

  That of our lives and end shows

  How transitory we be.”

  Medieval Morality Play, Everyman

  “Hippocrates introduced the case history, a description of the natural history of disease…but they tell us nothing about the individual and his history; they convey nothing of the person as he faces, and struggles to survive, his disease.”

  Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

  Emily Hardy’s body lay on a table in the morgue while the coroner examined her injuries and recorded his findings onto an audio file. The cause of death in this instance was hardly a mystery. The occipital bone at the back of her head was the only bone in her skull left intact. Her skull had been fractured in a dozen places and the resulting brain damage was too complicated to fully catalogue.

  “List the cause of death as catastrophic trauma to the brain. The neck is broken at the second cervical vertebrae. A preliminary scan of the torso and limbs shows massive bruising and a wound, partially healed, on her right hand. It appears to be a human bite mark.”

  As the autopsy continued, he identified internal injuries and broken bones. The catalogue of damage was so severe and so extensive that he paused and took a deep breath. Usually he could remain wholly detached during a post-mortem, but this was just relentlessly grim. And she’d done it to herself.

  “What on earth were you dealing with that prompted you to choose this?”

  Emily Hardy had sat on the old battered couch in her apartment and watched the clock. She had a hell of a fever. A moment ago she’d been so hot, she could not abide even the weight of her nightgown on her skin. Now she was freezing and had wrapped herself in an old fleece blanket. Her throat was on fire and her thudding head made her feel nauseous. But she had bigger problems than a case of seasonal flu.

  It was two o’clock in the morning a
nd Nick hadn’t come home yet. He never stayed away from her like this. But then, they were doing a lot of things they had never done before. They were snapping at each other and fighting over nonsense. She’d gotten so angry with him earlier that she actually took a swipe at him. She had hooked her hand into a claw and slashed it across his arm. It landed about four inches below the other gouge, the one from that crazy lady on Cáscara. The woman had darted from the crowd at the Guadalupe parade and had sunk her teeth into Emily’s hand. Nick had stepped in, pulled the woman off her and had gotten clawed up in the process. And now Emily was lashing out at him? Horrified and ashamed at her behavior, she’d run to her bedroom and cried herself to sleep. When she awoke, Nick was gone.

  Where was he? She grabbed her phone and flipped through her contacts. Would he have gone to any of their friends? Or hit a bar? Or met someone? The insidious little voice that whispered that gem was also new. She’d never been afraid of him cheating on her before. But now she could not shake the feeling of distance between them, of strangeness. And with these thoughts swirling around and around in her head, she eventually drifted into an uneasy sleep. In her dreams, she was surrounded by people she knew (mom and dad and cousin Toby and her history teacher from high school), but she didn’t really know them, did she? Because there, before her eyes, they were changing into animals and monsters and she ran and ran, all the while knowing that she was never going to be able to run far enough.

  Nicholas Durand had walked away from the apartment building, and from Emily, as quickly as he could. His arm was still bleeding from where she scratched him and he was so angry that he literally shook with rage. If he didn’t get away from her, he was going to pound her through the wall. He stopped abruptly. Where the fuck did that come from? He had never hit a woman in his life — would never hit a woman — and yet, God, he wanted to. This wasn’t him. He was a good man and proud of that fact and so he picked up the pace, putting as much distance between himself and his girlfriend as he could.

  He dove into a bar, The Chart Room, but it was so hot and crowded that he bought a Budweiser and took it outside. The scattering of tables under blue awnings were all occupied and so he sat down on the curb and took a long swig of beer. His throat instantaneously rebelled and passersby gave him a wide berth as he choked and spluttered. God, his throat hurt. He really did not feel well and had just made up his mind to go home. And that was when he saw the girl.

  She was wearing a pair of painted-on blue jeans with a series of rips down the front that showed a hint of brown skin. A tight white shirt (no bra) was tied at her waist and her hair was piled up in a carefully constructed “do” that was meant to look casual and a little sloppy. She was smiling at him. He got up and went over to talk to her.

  The talking bit did not go so well. Nicholas found that he was uncharacteristically tongue-tied. He kept losing words and having to stop and search for them before completing his sentences. Luckily the girl, who’d been drinking since three o’clock that afternoon, wasn’t particularly eloquent herself. The two, however, did manage to communicate one essential thing to each other and they swiftly made their way down a side alley. They had barely gotten out of sight before Nick was fumbling with the button of her jeans. After a lot of frustrated tugging, he managed to peel the denim off her.

  “You’re eager,” she laughed.

  Then, without a kiss, a touch or a caress, he was inside of her. She’d dated a guy like this before — the type that just barrels in and so she shifted beneath him, drew her knees back and finally got him where she wanted him. And it was like fucking Tarzan. He was more animal than man and a group passing the alley laughed and applauded as she screamed and pulled him to her.

  That scream and his own climax brought a moment of clarity to Nick. He looked at her, unsure of how he’d gotten there: physically inside a stranger in a back alley. Emily. Oh my God, Emily. He had just cheated on her and that was something else he thought he’d never do.

  He rose quickly, pulled up his trousers and, without a word to the girl, walked away. He paced the streets, angry (again) but this time at himself. What the hell was wrong with him? Why all of a sudden was he being such a dick? And, dear God, why did he want to jump on every woman he passed on the street? The sight of an old dirty bag lady gave him a hard-on and he quickly crossed the street to avoid her because he didn’t think he could stand the temptation.

  What Nick did not, could not know in that moment was that he was infected with New Rabies. Unlike the old virus, it would not kill him, but it would treat him to all of the classic symptoms including aggression and hyper sexuality. According to the literature, the virus can kick the human libido into overdrive with some patients engaging in intercourse up to thirty times a day. The reason is simple: rabies concentrates heavily in bodily fluids and hence any form of exchange, erotic or violent, is merely a way to pass the virus on. This may account for an odd fact that greeted Durand when he got home. Emily was asleep on the couch; the blanket she was wrapped in had slipped down to reveal one naked breast and yet he was unmoved. Having lusted after every woman he saw on the walk home, the sight of his girlfriend meant nothing. The infected male looked upon the infected female and realized there was nothing for him to do there. He shrugged and headed off to bed.

  Emily awoke the next morning, feeling groggy and sick. She saw Nick’s shoes by the front door and went to look for him. He was passed out naked on their bed. Quietly, she picked up his discarded clothes with the vague idea of doing some laundry today. That is when she saw the lipstick on his collar. It was not the dusty rose color of her gloss, but a bright, garish red. Her balled fists shook as she stood there and watched him sleep. She wanted to kill him. But then she remembered her outburst of the night before — she wasn’t herself. Wasn’t thinking clearly. So she forced herself to walk away.

  Nick surfaced two hours later and while she had planned to quiz him about last night, Emily found that she was too ill to bother. The pair spent the afternoon dozing on the living room couch, with the curtains drawn. When the phone rang, the answering machine picked it up and the principal of Benjamin Franklin High School inquired why she hadn’t shown up for work today. To Emily his words were mere noise devoid of meaning. She shrugged and went back to sleep.

  When night fell, Nicholas went out again. Emily dressed quickly. She would follow him this time and see what he got up to. But he didn’t really do anything. Her boyfriend wandered aimlessly, occasionally stepping off the sidewalk and into traffic. Emily was not alarmed by this, but she was disturbed by the blare of car horns as they swerved to miss him. Nick shied away from the noise too, cutting down quieter streets and alleys. In this way, the pair weaved their way through the city, until their search for dark and quiet led them to a parking lot behind a big store.

  “Listen pal,” a large black man was saying to Nick, “a lot of trucks will be in and outta here tonight. It’s really not safe for you to be here.”

  He said some other stuff too, but it was all just noise in Emily’s ears and more than anything she just wanted to be in bed. She was about to head home, when her man — her good and gentle man — went for the stranger’s throat. She watched, open-mouthed, as the two men fought, as Nick snarled and growled like a wild animal and as the stranger hit and bit him in a desperate attempt to break free. And in that moment she was two people. What was left of Emily Hardy was shocked and appalled not by the violence, but by her reaction to it. She knew she should be frightened; and the sight of Nick attacking this man should shake her to her very core. But that was not what she felt. She wanted to join in. Nick was not getting the job done, but while the stranger was distracted she could sneak in there and …

  “Oh my God,” she whispered and ran. As she fled the parking lot, she too was surrounded by temptation. She saw people all around her and she wanted to get right in there next to each of them and fasten her teeth on their flesh.

  “What is the matt
er with me?” Her voice was a sob that caught the attention of a teenage boy nearby.

  “Are you ok, lady?” he asked.

  She ran away before she hurt him. She knew that she was sick and yet her mind rebelled at the thought of hospitals and doctors. She could not stand the idea of being touched and poked and prodded and having bright lights in her eyes. She just wanted to be somewhere dark and alone. But it was hard to be alone in New Orleans. It was a city of 400,000 people. How did she know that? She had a vision of teaching her students that fact and she knew that if she was with them right now, she’d tear their fucking throats out. But you love those kids, a quiet voice inside her insisted. Love, however, was something she could only dimly remember. And then she saw the truck. She stared at it as it advanced down the street and a little smile played across her lips. She waited for her moment and then stepped off the curb.

  Chapter Four

  Reading, England

  “‘What a curious feeling!’ said Alice. ‘I must be shutting up like a telescope.’ And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high…she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; ‘for it might end, you know…in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?’ And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after it is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.”

  Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

  “I was continuing to shrink, to become … what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future?”

  Scott Carey, The Incredible Shrinking Man, (1957 film)

  Janet Howarth gave up waiting on the doctors at the local hospital and returned home. The Accident and Emergency Department of the Royal Berkshire had been absolutely heaving. A monitor on the wall had informed her that, due to unusually high demand, there was a five and a half hour wait. That was ridiculous even by normal standards.