Graham Masterton - Plague

'Not her real name, I'm afraid. A hired gun, so to speak.'

She stared at his handsome, disgusting face. 'You won't take money?' she asked, softly. 'Five thousand to say the film didn't quite come out?'

Charles Thurston shook his head. 'A job's a job, lovely gallery lady. I have a reputation to maintain.'

'I see. How long do I have?'

Thurston looked at his watch. 'It's now seven-thirty. We would like to know how your father feels about the matter in twenty-four hours. Otherwise, every porn magazine in town gets these, along with Scientific American and every journal your father ever wrote for in his whole life.'

Esmeralda ran her hand through her hair. 'Now I understand the adjournment,' she said. 'If Sergei Forward had gone into court today, he would have lost the whole case outright. So he decided to get a little help from his friends.'

'I'm not his friend,' protested Charles Thurston III, as Esmeralda waited for the elevator. 'I just work for him. As far as I'm concerned, he's a cheap Finnish fuck.'

Esmeralda slammed the concertina gates of the elevator and glared at Thurston through the bars. 'Anything's better than being a cheap American fuck,' she snapped, as the elevator took her down.

By Friday afternoon — the same afternoon that Esmeralda spent in Sergei Forward's West 81st Street apartment — the plague zone had officially extended to New Orleans in the south, and with the help of police, National Guardsmen, vigilantes and cadets from summer colleges, it was being held back on a ragged line that stretched northwards to Jackson, Mississipi, Tuscaloosa, Chattanooga, Charleston and Cumberland.

The President had appeared on television at lunch-time and had said 'solemnly, and with a heavy heart' that he had to instruct every American to take up arms to protect the disease-free parts of the nation. That meant anyone from within the plague zone must be shot dead if they attempted to leave it.

'At all costs,' said the President, 'we must contain this threat to our national health and heritage, and urgently seek to find some kind of cure. At the present speed of plague within six weeks.'

A reporter from NEC News asked the President if some people were more susceptible to the plague than others. The President reported that interim figures indicated that adults succumbed more rapidly than children, and that certain groups of workers within the community appeared to be partially or wholly immune. These included some hospital workers, some employees of ConEd, some military and naval personnel, some merchant seamen, some dentists and doctors, and one or two assorted minor professions.

Was there any clue why these people might be less prone to plague? The President said no, but 'our best scientists are working on it.'

The Medical Workers' Union were still on strike, although in some of the worst devastated parts of Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina, there was radio, TV and telephone blackout, and it was impossible to discover what was happening. Even police helicopters were forbidden to take reconnaissance pictures in case the bacillus was airborne to operational height. The nation was locked now in a terrible paralysis of fear, and in spite of strict highway controls and the banning of westward airline flights, thousands of panicking refugees, in cars and-pick-ups and motor-homes, streamed towards the west.

By five o'clock on Friday afternoon, the official estimate of plague dead was seventeen million. Every Atlantic beach was closed from Key West, Florida, to Portland, Maine. The most explosive story of the day, though, was where the plague-infected sewage had originated. It was being suggested by NEC and CBS, and strenuously denied by the New York Department of Sanitation, that the sewage was polluting the Eastern seaboard from an area twelve miles off the Long Island shore.

According to official sources, sanitation barges had left Pier 70 every day for longer than anyone could remember, and dumped untreated sewage into the Atlantic. It was supposed to sink to the ocean floor, and slide, in the form of black viscous ooze, down the shelving incline that would take it out towards the mid-Atlantic.

The New York Department of Sanitation, in a joint statement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, agreed that the sludge was highly infectious, but that it could not have been a breeding-ground for the plague that had ravaged the southern states.

'Ordinary plague, Pasteurella pestis, is one thing,' said a spokesman for the department. 'But there is no scientific way in which ordinary plague could have mutated under the ocean into this particularly virulent and fast-growing form of super-plague.'

The department also denied that the raw sewage on the beaches of Florida and Georgia was anything to do with them. Yes — there had been eccentric winds and tides. But it stretched the credulity to suggest that tides had borne the sewage as far south as Miami.

A CBS reporter asked if it were possible for a message in a bottle, dropped off Long Island at the sewage-dumping spot, to float south as far as Miami. An oceanographer said that, with climatic conditions as they had been, yes. The CBS reporter then asked why, in that case, a lump of human faeces couldn't do the same. The spokesman for the Department of Sanitation gave an answer that became the morbidly popular catch-phrase of the day. 'What you're suggesting,' he snapped, 'is crap.'

Herbert Gaines walked into the conference room at the Summit Hotel with his hands raised like a successful candidate for the New York presidential primary. Flashguns blinked in the crowded entrance, and he had more pictures taken for the press in the space of twenty seconds than he had in the last twenty years. He was wearing orangey panstick make-up to make himself look healthier on color TV, and his white hair was combed into a flowing mane.

'Welcome back, Herbert,' said a fat reporter in a creased blue suit. 'It's nice to have a hero around for a change.'

Beside Herbert Gaines, sticking close, was Jack Gross — all glossy suit and carnivorous teeth. He piloted his figurehead through the throng of pressmen and television cameras, and up towards a red-white-and-blue platform. More flashguns flickered, and Herbert tried hard to keep smiling.

Jack Gross waved his hands for silence. 'Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jack Gross and I'm the agent for what we call the FTT. Now, does anyone here know what FTT stands for?'

It was meant to be a rhetorical question, but a New York Post reporter said, 'Fart Tunefully Tonight?' There was a general guffaw of laughter.

Jack Gross, his smile a little strained, waved his hands for silence again.

'FTT,' he said, quickly, 'stands for Face The Truth. And Face The Truth is what we call our particular group of dedicated Republican senators and congressmen, all of whom are totally committed to the revival of honest, no-nonsense, straight-down-the-middle politics.'

'Isn't that a contradiction in terms?' asked the lady from Time, sardonically.

'It has been up until now.' said Jack Gross. 'But let's think why American politics has gotten such a bad name. It's gotten a bad name because it's been the province of men who won't Face The Truth. That's what our group is all about. We've decided that no matter how unpalatable or unpleasant the true facts are, we're going to have to face up to them, and speak our minds no matter how unpopular our voice might be.' He lowered his voice, and spoke with intense sincerity. 'Maybe, in the past, refusing to Face The Truth didn't matter so much. But today — right this very evening — America faces a disaster of hideous and unprecedented proportions. The plague has already laid waste our southern states, and the last we heard it was infecting parts of Jersey. We are right up against the wall, ladies and gentlemen, and we can't keep our eyes blinkered any longer.