Chris Mooney - World Without End

"A young gentlemen here at the wake," Murray said.

"He asked specifically to give this to you when you were alone. I'm sorry for your loss," he said and left the room.

The New England Holocaust Memorial runs parallel to Boston's ever-busy Congress Street. At the far end is Curley Memorial Plaza, an area of benches that holds the sitting bronze of the Boston Mayor James Curley.

Another bronze statue of the controversial mayor stands in the center of red brick, his hands folded behind his back, his eyes permanently cast over the architectural splendor of Fanueil Hall and beyond it, the towering, monolithic skyscrapers that comprise the heart of downtown Boston.

Outside in the cold November air, Amon Faust walked down the blue-gray granite path, his gloved hands clasped behind his back. Six rectangular towers of glass stretched beyond the trees and reached up into the hard blue sky as if they were conduits to heaven. It was a quarter to eleven on a Friday morning, the air crisp and cold but still lacking the bite of winter. No one was inside the memorial, and Stephen Conway wouldn't be here until eleven.

Faust entered the tower for the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and stood on the venting grate that hissed white clouds of steam.

Etched in the glass were thousands and thousands of prison numbers the enormity of a human life and its soul compressed into a cold, random number. Faust wondered if these numbers held any meaning anymore.

Fifty years had passed since the great beast Hitler unleashed his evil, and people were no longer afraid. What if Hilter had technology on his side? What if he had armed his troops with blinding laser weapons and military suits that rendered them invisible to the enemy? Could Hitler then have carried out his world vision?

Look at these people, bundled in their coats as they rushed to meetings and important lunches. This new generation didn't mourn history; they were no longer haunted by it. Time had wiped the slate clean and filled fresh new minds with MTV and empty TV talk shows and programs like Survivor laughable, given where he stood right now and the talk of money, it was always money, they were consumed by their spreadsheets and financial projections.

The time was ripe for their downfall.

Faust's skin tingled. The glass towers seemed to give off a charge, as if the screams of the dead had been sealed inside the glass. He reached out and ran his gloved hand against the glass. To feel it all, to actually connect to the beauty of Hitler's vision of a sanitized world, Faust would have to touch the glass with his bare hand. The thought made him dizzy with anticipation.

Two specialized sterilized wipes were inside his jacket pocket one to clean, one to wipe. He could use one to clean the glass and touch it with his bare hand, and then use the other wipe to disinfect. The small bottle of hand sanitizer he carried with him at all times would destroy any lingering germs.

Faust unwrapped the wipe from its foil container and cleaned off a good section of glass, committing the area to memory, and then carried the infected wipe to the barrel and threw it away. He would burn the gloves later.

He walked back to the same spot and then removed his glove, the cold air washing across his warm, damp skin. Alone inside the memorial, Faust pressed his palm against the glass, closed his eyes and in his mind saw this street in the vivid, singular vision of his brave new world.

The winter sky is the color of blood. The sun has started to set; a light snow is falling over the bodies of the dead, hundreds of them, their twisted, mangled corpses line the streets and steps leading up to Government Center. Some have collapsed against the hoods of their cars or against the steering wheels, others are hunched over restaurant tables, sprawled on the street. Some clutch the cell phones they used to call 911 for help. Their faces are the color of eggplant; blood dribbles from their mouths and noses. They have drowned in their own fluid.

The virus is called Chloe Six, a genetically engineered strain of influenza created in Russia that had, at one point, been designed as a bio weapon against the U.S. It was intended to re-create the 1918 influenza epidemic which, in only a few months, killed more that twenty million people worldwide. Only a few knew of Chloe Six's existence, or its antidote, both of which are stored in the sacred vaults of the Centers for Disease Control.

Faust knows the CDC's layout quite well. For years, he has been preparing for this moment. He knows the security measures and how to bypass them. When he slips outside the CDC and walks through the darkness, he is invisible to the world. He is wearing the military suit. Stored inside a special pack are the Chloe Six specimens and the world's only antidote.

Faust walks down the bloody street, smiling as he breathes in the wonderfully cold air, the snow a pleasant tingle on his scalp. He has nothing to fear. Like Gunther, like all the ones Faust has chosen for his brave new world, he is inoculated, safe from the deadly virus. The dead look up at him, their mouths frozen open in horror; some look away, their hollowed-out eyes pointed toward the heavens. The cellphones and pagers clipped to their belts and clutched in their hands and strewn about the street are still alive, glowing with power and waiting for a command. Nothing will come. The old world now lay dead. A new god has emerged, about to rule a new world.

"JUST SELL THE FUCKING THING!" a man shouted.

Faust's eyes flew open. His hand still pressed against the glass, he turned around and saw a tall man with slicked-back black hair, pacing around the bronze statue in Curley Memorial Plaza with a cell phone pressed against his ear.

"Yeah, Alex, I read the fucking P/E report," the man said into his cell phone. The man's other gloved hand held a Starbucks coffee cup; he took a long draw from it and then yanked it away from his mouth, nearly spitting out his coffee.

"Forget the long-term growth, I'm talking about the here and now, Alex, and I'm telling you I'm not going to take a bath on that stock, so sell the fucking dog before it fucking tanks."

"Do you mind, sir," Faust said.

The young man stopped pacing and stared from behind his designer sunglasses, his mouth parted open, insulted and shocked that someone had interrupted him.

"Show some respect," Faust said.

"You're in the presence of the dead."

"Mind your own business," the man snapped and then turned around and went back to his noisy conversation.

Oh so oblivious. They couldn't see that the center of their world was already falling apart, that the great rough beast had already slouched its way toward Bethlehem to be born and was now lurking in their midst, the darkness about to drop again and unleash the blood-dimmed tide.

Quote them Yeats and could they claim the beauty of the poem and grasp its meaning? Not unless it was rapped by an illiterate black street gangsta with a mouth full of gold teeth on MTV Time to flush and begin again. Time for a new world. A world without end. Amen.

"Mr. Cole?"

Faust turned around and saw Stephen Conway standing on the venting grid in the second tower of glass, his face mournful.

Faust smiled. Time for the lesson to begin.

"Good morning, Stephen," Amon Faust said, "Am I interrupting?" The man's tone was low, his sad eyes moving toward the glass where Faust's hand was still pressed.

"Of course not. But thank you for asking," Faust said and his hand slid away. The hand wipe was already gripped in his other gloved hand.

He started scrubbing his bare skin. Stephen watched.

"One cannot be too careful with viruses. Especially this time of year."

Stephen nodded. His eyes moved around the prison numbers etched into the glass, his head tilting up into the sky.