Victor Methos - Pestilence

“Sir, do we have any ideas as to who could have done this?”

“Four chemical weapons simultaneously detonated in the four largest cities? No, Martin. I don’t have a fucking clue who could have done this. I’m guessing it’s not some cave-dwellers in Pakistan. But whoever they are, we better hope they’re not planning something else, ’cause we were just brought to our fucking knees.”

Hank Kraski sat on the bench at the park, watching the pigeons as they flew down. An old man was feeding them stale bread. Hank counted over fifty pigeons and was delighted to watch them flap around and wrestle and peck at each other for dominance.

Before too long, a woman with curly red hair and a black suit came and sat next to him. They were there early in the morning, and in the light of dawn, she looked stunning. Something had been there between them long ago but was gone now.

“Ian’s dead,” she said.

“I know.”

“You trained Greyjoy, and he trained Ian. You guys are becoming an extinct species.”

“We were always meant to be.”

“All four detonations went off perfectly. We had three more in Europe and two in Asia last night. We didn’t feel that Australia and Africa were warranted, and unless you wanted to take out penguins, Antarctica should be obvious.”

“I agree.”

She checked her watch. “I don’t know if they briefed you on this, but a certain percentage of the population has a natural immunity to black pox.”

“What percentage?”

“Point oh-oh-oh one. About seven thousand people on the earth will be completely immune to its effects, and it’s genetic, as well. A dominant gene from what we can tell. It should display in their children, which should push that number up but probably to no more than twenty thousand.”

He nodded. “We’re anticipating ninety-five percent population loss. We can handle another twenty thousand people on top of the survivors.”

She paused. “I couldn’t sleep last night. Do you realize what we’ve done? What we’ve all done, Hank? We’ve changed the course of human history. It was going one way, and we came along, and it will follow a divergent path now.”

He watched the pigeons. “How do you know this wasn’t the path it was supposed to follow?”

Turning to look at her, he felt those old feelings resurface. He couldn’t remember why he hadn’t acted on them when he’d had the chance. Work, maybe. But the memory was so dusty with time, he couldn’t think of a single good reason why they hadn’t spent their lives together.

Her face was perfect-perfect and simple-even without makeup, which he found most people put on too much of anyway. She had been a model in the ’80s, if he remembered correctly. His predecessor had seen her on some runway in Spain and had decided they needed to have her. His predecessor. How odd to say that. He figured every generation would soon have predecessors and be looking back, wondering how the hell they had become the ones in charge.

“If this doesn’t work,” she said, “if we’re betrayed… then we just killed our own species.”

Hank shrugged. “We would eventually die out anyway. Intelligence is counter-evolutionary. The species becomes wise enough to invent more and more efficient methods to kill itself. We were in a very long process of self-destruction.”

She swallowed. “I didn’t think the morning would look so pretty. I thought it would be overcast or raining, something.”

He grinned. “Death on this scale probably has a tendency to surprise everyone.”

Rick Bolton wrapped his tent and rolled the sleeping bag tightly. Early-morning Yosemite always had a certain vibe to it, especially far away from any cabins and parking lots. Something in the pine-scented air or the way the breeze whistled through the trees brought him a sense of calm that he really needed.

He’d been there a lot as a kid and remembered the murders that had taken place. A mother and her fifteen-year-old daughter, an exchange student, and another young woman who worked for Yosemite had been killed. The decapitated body of the fourth victim had led police to Cary Stayner, who was later convicted of all four murders.

The number of visitors to Yosemite had declined when word got out about the Yosemite Killer. When the brutal sexual assault and torture details came out, camping in Yosemite became almost non-existent. Rick still went. His father had said they’d caught the killer, and he had only targeted females, so he and Rick were fine.

Rick was excited he and his father would have the entire park to themselves one summer when he was ten, but he hadn’t enjoyed it much. A darkness, something heavy that seemed to stick to the skin, hung over everything when they were there. Two days into a six-day trip, his father packed up and said it was time to go.

Rick looked over at the final tent and saw the feet of his son and daughter sticking out. His thirteen-year-old son, Marcus, was snoring so loudly that Rick was amazed his daughter, Trudy, could sleep. He peeked in through the lip in the tent. Sure enough, they were both passed out. Taking out a water bottle, he spilled a few drops on each of their foreheads, and they groaned and stirred.

“What time is it?” Marcus asked.

“Seven o’clock,” Rick said, then took a sip of the water before replacing the lid.

The six-day trip seemed to fly by. His work as a professor of anthropology routinely took him out of the state or country for long research projects and sabbaticals, and he tried to take his children with him whenever he could. Since their mother’s passing two years before, he was all they had.

His boy sat up and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Did you get what we came for?”

“Sure did,” Rick replied, taking a small plastic container from his backpack. Wrapped up in cellophane were several arrowheads. “Anasazi. They weren’t believed to be up this far north. They’re mostly found in New Mexico. This is definitely their handiwork, though. It’ll be an exciting paper.”

Marcus swirled his finger in the air and said, “Yay.”

Rick smacked him playfully, and Marcus tried to tackle him. Rick lifted him off his feet and got him onto his back. He pinned him, then held him there while one of his hands went down to his armpit and tickled.

“Eight years of wrestling, boy. You can’t take your old man yet.”

Marcus was laughing. “Stop, stop! I’m gonna piss myself.”

Rick stopped and got off him. He helped the boy up, then smacked his bottom and told him to pack up the tent and his gear.

Trudy got up and went over to the edge of the trees to brush her teeth. When she was done, she got on her phone and mumbled something under her breath when she couldn’t get reception.

“You know, there are other things to look at than a phone screen.”

“I know. I’m waiting for a text from Alexis ’cause Brian asked her to that dance I was telling you about, and I wanna see if she said yes.”

He shook his head. “You’re eleven. You know what I was doing at eleven? I was outside, digging stuff up to see if I could find anything cool.”

“Good for you, Dad. But you guys didn’t have iPhones.”

He grinned and helped Marcus finish packing.

When they were done, they headed out of the national park in their RV. Soon, they were on the I-5, going south, back to their home in Westwood in the heart of Los Angeles.

Marcus watched movies on his tablet, and Trudy played games on her phone. Rick frequently glanced back at them and smiled to himself. But occasionally, a pain would tug at his belly, and he would feel sullen and heavy, as though his thoughts and movements were working their way through water.