Manel Loureiro - The Wrath of the Just

Like so many things in life, that leg of the journey started by chance.

For a year and a half, nothing unusual happened on the Atlantic Ocean midway between America and Europe. A few whales and some trash floated by, but not a single ship or sailboat or column of smoke loomed on the horizon. Nothing. It had never been part of a major trade route, but the absence of humans was even more pronounced now. It was as if every human had disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving no one to give a thought to the unusual things happening there.

Over several days, the August sun heated up the water’s surface by four or five degrees. Tons of water evaporated, then cooled and formed a dense layer of clouds. At the same time, the atmospheric pressure plummeted, causing the wind to move in giant, lazy circles and pick up speed.

Had a meteorologist been there (only about forty were still alive around the world, and they were too busy trying to survive to worry about isobars), he’d have said that a convective storm cell—a supercell—was brewing. But no one was monitoring the storm, so no one posted a warning. Meteorological satellites had gone dark or crashed into the atmosphere. Thirty hours later, no one witnessed the moment the supercell became a Category 5 hurricane headed for the coast of Africa.

And no one alerted the crew of a small sailboat, four hundred miles to the east, that all hell was about to break loose.

“What’s for dinner?” Prit demanded to know as he stuck his head into the Corinth II ’s cabin.

“Guess,” I said with a wry smile and turned toward the voice.

My old comrade Viktor Pritchenko was short, wiry, and in good shape for a guy nearly forty. His piercing blue eyes watched me from the cabin door as the wind tore through his long blond hair. The sun had tanned the Ukrainian a deep copper and bleached his mustache the color of straw.

“Let me guess—fish. Again.” Prit groaned. “I’m sick of fish!”

“Me too, but we’re sailing through a good fishing area and we have to take advantage of it. Who knows when we’ll we reach land or what we’ll find to eat when we get there. Besides, our supplies are for emergencies.”

I could tell my old pal was mentally licking clean the cans of food stored in the cabin there. He groaned again and let out a string of Ukrainian curse words. As he started back up the steps, a large ball of orange fur bounded over him and sent him reeling backward. He cursed louder and grabbed for my cat, who by then was watching him from the top bunk, his tail twitching. But it took a lot more than that to make Prit lose his cool.

“Control your damn cat or, I swear to God, I’ll throw him overboard!” he said with a half smile.

“I don’t believe you.” I didn’t look up from the mackerel I was cleaning. “Deep down, you’re really fond of him. Besides, he’s not my cat; Lucullus thinks we belong to him.”

As if agreeing with me, Lucullus let out a long, loud meow and then jumped off the bunk and swaggered toward me in his feline way, waiting for some fish guts to land in his bowl. Pritchenko shook his head and went back on deck, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

I looked at my calloused hands covered in fish scales and laughed bitterly. A year and a half ago, my life was completely different. I was a respected lawyer living in Pontevedra, in northwest Spain. I had a family, friends, and a cushy, very middle-class life. I was tall, thin, and handsome (some said), with a great future ahead of me. The shining offspring of baby boomers. Born with a flower up my ass, as my family used to say.

But my little world had had its downsides too. Not long before the pandemic, my wife died in a traffic accident. I slid into a black hole of depression and almost didn’t climb out. Despair and guilt had me in a choke hold. Why’d I let her drive on such a stormy night? I almost turned my back on my job, my friends, and my family. Those months were an alcohol-soaked blur. Looking down the barrel of a shotgun sounded like a good idea. It’d be easy, fast, and, if I did it right, painless.

Then Lucullus came along. Worried about my descent into a personal hell, my sister gave me an orange Persian kitten. What the hell happened to my sister? Where the hell could she be? Surprisingly, her gift did the trick. Taking care of that kitten helped me get over my self-pity and move on.

Then at Christmastime a year and a half ago, the hell unleashed in Dagestan dwarfed everyone’s petty problems. Like most people in the West, I’d never heard of the former Soviet republic deep in the Caucasus Mountains in central Asia. The tiny country’s ministry of tourism should get a fucking prize—posthumously, of course. For two weeks, while the planet still had media, that little republic was all anyone talked about.

Anyone still alive knows the story all too well. A group of extremist lunatics from neighboring Chechnya got it into their heads to steal some Soviet-era weapons for their jihad. They successfully broke into a munitions compound, but all they got was worthless shit. Instead of AK-47s, grenades, RPGs, and ammunition, they found a nearly forgotten Cold War–vintage laboratory, guarded by a dozen soldiers. All it contained were test tubes, flasks, and some high-security freezers plastered with warning labels in Cyrillic. In frustration, the pissed-off Chechen leader ordered his men to trash the place, including the freezers.

That was the stupidest—and the last—order he gave. Less than fifteen minutes later, he and his men were infected with the TSJ virus that had been waiting quietly for over twenty years in a flask inside that freezer. Just forty-eight hours later, the virus had spread throughout Dagestan; in just two weeks, it was racing out of control across the globe. By then the guerrilla leader was dead—or rather undead—unaware that he’d unleashed the Apocalypse. Humanity was wiped off the map all because a band of wannabe jihadists couldn’t read the warning labels on a freezer.

As the TSJ virus swept throughout the world, things happened fast. The little virus proved to be the worst kind of bastard. It was extremely contagious and lethal, plus it was genetically programmed to keep spreading even after it destroyed its host.

TSJ’s creator was one of the top virologists in the Soviet Union, but he’d been dead and forgotten for a couple of decades. He’d had a brilliant career as a bioengineer; the TSJ virus was the apex of his scientific legacy. After he died fleeing to the West through West Berlin, the project was purged and all his experiments were stored away in freezers, pending a reevaluation. Because of the heavy-handed Soviet bureaucracy and, later, the fall of the USSR, his work was forgotten. Until that fatal day.

Dying of the TSJ virus was a hard way to go. First its victims languished in terrible pain, with violent convulsions similar to Ebola; hours later, they arose like murderous sleepwalkers. After they were clinically dead, they attacked every living thing that crossed their path. The Undead, the press started to call them… until the press ceased to exist. Most of the journalists succumbed to the infection too.