Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

The faint tang of oil breathes from the closet. Lewis holds the lantern into the space to battle back the shadows, and it takes Clark a moment to understand what she is looking at.

She recognizes them from books, from paintings and photographs. An arsenal of pistols and rifles, black barreled, with wooden and plastic grips, dozens of them neatly stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves. “Are those—”

“Yes.” He clears his throat. “I’m not sure what else you have in the way of supplies, but we’ll need stores of water especially and—”

“What does this mean?” She is trying to read something in his face, doubting what he has shown her, doubting him. He does not appear excited or afraid, his expression resigned to a hard frown.

“It means I’ll go.” His face tightens and untightens. He speaks so quietly, as if he barely believes the words: “I’ll go.”

She is not the type to cry, but right then she feels a tear slip from her eye and down her cheek.

“But first, there’s one more thing you need to know.” With that said, he reaches up his sleeve and pulls from it a letter. “It concerns the girl.”

NO ONE KNOWS where the flu came from. Some say a long black car pulled up to a gas station and from it stepped a black-haired man in a black suit, who coughed once into his fist and gripped the pump and muddied it with his phlegm. Others say that late one night — for a few minutes, all over the town of Ames, Iowa — the faucets ran yellow, as yellow and as thick as melted wax, polluted by a terrorist or maybe some parasite loosed from deep beneath the earth. And still others say a featherless crow the size of a child tumbled down a chimney and onto a fire that charred it into a black pile of bones and sent a diseased cloud into the air all over town, one that people breathed into the pink pit of their lungs, where a burning sensation gave rise to a cough.

That was how the sickness began, with a cough, a needling itch at the back of your throat that grew steadily worse until it felt like your chest was clogged with burrowing ants that you must — you simply must — expel, barking raggedly into your hands until they were spotted with blood. Accompanying this was a fever so powerful that a wet washcloth steamed when placed on your forehead. Your brain cooked. Your vision went red, with twirling black flies along its edges. And all this time you were coughing, coughing, until it felt as though your guts might uproot and push out your throat.

One day, it was simply there, among the people of Ames, the virus rooting in their lungs like red-tipped mushrooms. The USDA labs were located there, level-four security clearance and host to every animal-borne pathogen in the world, from anthrax to bird flu to Ebola, and many speculated that it came from there, from an unwashed hand or an open laboratory window or a pricked finger. The deadliest viruses must meet three criteria. They must spread swiftly, by a cough, a kiss, a sneeze, a hand testing a melon at the supermarket or gripping a pole in a subway car. They must be unfamiliar to humans, so that antibodies cannot defend against them. And they must kill the infected. This virus met all three.

On average it took people five days to die. During that time, their chests collapsed inward with every hitching cough. Their throats rasped. Their lips bruised like wilting lilies. The blood vessels in their eyes burst and they wept blood and because they were propped up on their pillows the blood raked down their cheeks.

This was October and the leaves turned a shimmering gold and came loose from their branches and revealed the patterns of the wind, twisting and swirling along the streets, lawns, ballparks, making a clattering music. And when the wind kicked up and the leaves rushed past and clung to the leg of someone’s jeans, like a starfish, damp and splayed, they would hurriedly wipe it away, as if anything the air carried might cause harm.

When parents said, “You’ll catch your death,” they meant it, grabbing their children as they raced out the door to hand them a jacket, yes, but also a surgical mask. “Stay in the yard,” they said. Don’t breathe , they wanted to say.

It was unsettling, not trusting the air, lungs filling up like dark closets that might hide ghosts. Everyone bought masks. Not just surgical masks — because the stores emptied of them almost immediately — but carpenters’ masks, gas masks, even Halloween masks. Anything, no matter how ineffective, to make them believe they were choking away the germs.

Doctors prescribed medicine, but medicine did not help. Scientists gave the virus a name, H3L1—also known as Hell. It wasn’t long before the hospitals were full, before the schools closed, before the sidewalks in Ames crowded with reporters. Three people died. And then, in one night, three hundred. Everyone rushed to the grocery stores and pulled from the shelves cereals, pasta, granola bars, canned fruits and vegetables, bottled water, whatever would last even after the electricity snapped off. “The worst is happening,” they said. “The worst is here.”

In Ames, a Budweiser delivery truck pulled up to a Hy-Vee and an hour later pulled away. A Greyhound grumbled back and forth to Minneapolis, its tailpipe coughing along with its gray-faced passengers. A charter plane. A Japanese hatchback. A bicyclist stopping through on his way across the state. And all those letters licked closed. The sickness spread.

The infected rose from a hundred to a thousand to a million in a matter of days. There wasn’t time for quarantine. There was barely enough time to utter the word pandemic .

For a few days, everyone blamed Ames, so that the town felt like the eye of a black whirlpool with sunken lungs and broken ribs swirling through it. But then the sickness fingered its way across Iowa and into Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri — spreading outward from the heartland — the country, the continent, the world. There was no one to blame anymore. And there was no difference between good and bad, young and old, or at least not that the sickness recognized. Everyone was eligible for death.

At a time when everyone should have stayed home — that’s what the television said, before the channels gave way to static, stay home —people instead went to church. At St. Cecilia’s in Grand Forks and at Trinity Lutheran in Chicago and at the United Methodist in Memphis, people wandered in and out throughout the day. The services and vigils were ongoing. The candles burned down to bubbling pools of wax. Everyone wore their masks, but the masks didn’t always help. They breathed each other’s breath and they tasted wafers and wine and they brought their hands together in prayer and they sang, how sweet the sound, until the coughing overwhelmed them and they hunched over and fell to their knees in awful genuflection.

The power went out. One minute refrigerators were humming, radios playing, lamps glowing, and the next, their mechanical brains went dark and silent. Those who were still alive brought matches to Sternos and sparked on their propane grills to cook. The police spray-painted black X s across doors, the hieroglyphs of the infected, most of whom were already dead. All the windows of all the stores were gaping mouths broken by the bricks of looters, and in the evening the glass caught the last of the dying sunlight so that the streets of the towns and cities seemed to sparkle.

Then the horizon flashed, the air trembled, as if beset by constant thunderstorms. These were nuclear warheads. China was the first to fire. Then Russia. The United States responded in turn. And soon Britain and India joined them. The missiles scorched the sky, made blackened craters out of cities. When New York and then Boston vanished in a fiery pulse, the Atlantic Ocean poured into their smoldering craters and the steam of millions of ghosts blurred the sky. The nukes were meant as a last-ditch inoculation, to cease the spread of the virus, but they only hurried along the death of the world.