James Axler - Plague Lords

Okie raised the binocs, taking in the bow of the vessel. Surrounded by a rapt, deck-seated audience, the Fire Talker was perched on a bitt, waving his arms and talking animatedly.

Giving the droolies more to slobber about, no doubt.

The islanders’ usual practice was to securely tether the triple stupes, staking them at least three yards apart to keep them from playing hide the slime eel. When droolies mated with droolies of the opposite sex, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: more droolies. In camps elsewhere in the Deathlands, these unfortunates were not so tenderly cared for. The moment the symptoms surfaced—the slack lower jaw and vacant stare—heads were smashed in. The Nuevo-Texicans kept their little flock alive, not out of compassion or a sense of parental duty, but because the droolies were so damned amusing, even if the camp dogs failed to get the joke. Having someone around visibly more messed up than you were had another benefit, as well. It made a person feel instantly better about him or herself. “At least I’m not a droolie,” was the unspoken but ever present refrain.

Okie was struck by a sudden chill that started at the base of his spine and rippled up his back and neck, and crab-crawled over the top of his scalp. Which he found very strange, given the air temperature even with the wind was in the high eighties. As the shudder passed through him, the steel rod behind his eye probed deeper into the nerve bundle. He saw bright, dancing spots of light and once again felt the urge to spew. Worse, there was a simultaneous, uncomfortable pressure building deep down in his bowels. Had to be something he ate, he thought. Underdone rat on a stick, mebbe. Closing his eyes and gripping the rail in both hands, Okie tried to will the sensations away. He still had another couple of hours before he was relieved of the watch.

“TIME DILDO-LATOR! TIME DILDO-LATOR!” The seated droolies rocked their hips, scooting their behinds on the deck in time to the gleeful chant. “Time dildo-lator! Time dildo-lator!”

Daniel Desipio sat back and basked in their adoration. They couldn’t get enough of his backstories and technical explanations, although it was unclear if they understood a single word of the complex scientific and philosophical concepts that underlaid his narratives.

Still, the frenzied attention buoyed his spirits.

From the Yoko Maru’s bitt, Daniel surveyed the squalid little ville spread out below. Construction had started in the most weather-protected spot, in the lee of the freighter’s bow. The first cluster of single-story huts used the ship’s hull for their rear walls. Building materials had to be salvaged and ferried from the flooded ruins of Corpus, so subsequent structures shared both side and rear walls. Nothing in the ville was straight, not roofs, not doorways, not lanes, not side yards. Everything was made of accumulated scrap, unpainted or covered in peeling layers of paint. Over three decades the slapdash habitations had spread to the shore of the anchorage on the north side. The islanders had built monuments to themselves, expressing their personalities, desires, artistic senses with found materials, the restricted pallette of the rubbish heap. It could have been a village on the edge of a garbage dump in predark India or Brazil. Or a squatter camp in South Africa.

That said, the grounded container ship’s bounty had provided every ramshackle hut with its own Taiwanese knock-off Weber kettle and fancy barbecue tools, and its own plastic lawn furniture.

The Nuevo-Texicans were damn proud of their little corner of the world.

Daniel Desipio, twentieth-century freezie, had a different perspective: a shithole by any other name.

For what had to have been the thirtieth repetition in as many hours, the Fire Talker recited the story of how the Vikings acquired the time dilator, the desperate bargain they had made with the Martian hordes, and their combined exploitation of the ancient Norse Runestone Concatenation. That terrestrial-extraterrestrial plot had been frustrated by the intervention of the Iroquois Ninja princess—proud, statuesque, with raven hair and slanted black eyes, and spots of blushing rose in the centers of her buckskin-colored cheeks—and of her singing katana, and her coterie of cloud operatives that moved from one human mind to another like stops on a subway line.

As he mechanically regurgitated the pulp fiction series’ canon—something he could have done in his sleep—Daniel watched his audience for the initial, subtle signs of infection. A growing restlessness. A flushing of the face. A sensitivity to light. He visualized the viruses invading individual host cells, commandeering reproductive machinery, replicating until their sheer volume burst cell walls, then spewing forth in a torrent, hardwired to penetrate and infect new cells: an unstoppable, rising tide of the submicroscopic, leading to debilitation, agony and horrible death. All of which derived from the poison that lurked in his 137-year-old blood, and to which he was happily immune.

Whenever Daniel reflected on what had led him to his most peculiar fate, the answer was always the same: the blind pursuit of Art. It was what had animated and enthused him since the third grade when he started reading and collecting various pulp action series from second-hand bookstores. He had pored over the “Golden Age” titles until the yellowed, musty pages dropped from the bindings, absorbing the nuances of style and content. All Daniel Desipio had ever wanted to do was to write adventure books like those. Doggedly determined, he had eventually achieved his goal, but in the twenty years between his introduction to pulp and his first sale of a novel, the industry had changed. Series action fiction had become a franchise operation, produced by hamsterwheeling, faceless ghost writers; it was in effect a dead-end career.

Slaughter Realms, the house-owned pulp series he had slaved upon for seven years, had had several nameless authors and had run to well over 250 titles. All nagging questions of artistic control and continuity had been resolved by Armageddon, by more than a century of elapsed time, and by his unlikely survival.

Even before the nukecaust, individual books in the series had been forgotten, consigned to landfills and bonfires, and along with them Daniel’s contributions to the canon. He had come up with gemlike, signature exclamations for two of the main running characters, Ragnar the Viking and Nav Licim, the wilted but defiant patriarch of the celery people. In return for his devotion to his Art, Daniel Desipio received no author credit, an hourly wage well below the established national minimum and no royalties on book sales.

The turning point for him had come on March 13, 1998, when after finishing his twenty-ninth book in the series he had asked the publisher for a hundred-dollar raise and was denied. Crushed and mortified, for the first time Daniel actually considered abandoning his lifelong dream. He considered becoming a Realtor. If he had taken that career course, he would have certainly perished along with almost everyone else in the U.S. on that January day in 2001. But in a moment of pure inspiration, fueled by the depths of his outrage and despair, Daniel had decided to do something truly radical in the name of his craft, for the sake of fresh experience, of something truly unique and exciting to write about. Without a thought to the possible consequences—not that even he could have imagined them—he had thrown himself into the meat grinder of Science.

More than a century post-nukeday, the world’s values had taken a hard U-turn, and a turn for the better as far as he was concerned. The idea of bottom-rung fiction or bottom-rung consumer merchandise lost all meaning when there was nothing left for either to be compared to. Which is why the cargo of the Yoko Maru was worth fighting and dying for.