The Plague of Blood

Prologue - The Hour of Lead

"This is the Hour of Lead –

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons recollect the Snow –

First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –"

Emily Dickinson, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes -"

~Prologue~

June, 2013

     The sensationalists in the newspaper called it ‘the plague of blood.' They said it was the greatest biological threat humankind had ever known. That was back when they still thought there was something that could be done about it, before the scientists knew that it was airborne and no amount of washing hands or limiting contact would help. That was back when there were still newspapers.

     It was a month into the summer holiday when the first news story broke about the Ukrainian town with an epidemic of hemorrhagic fever. Only a few people were sick, then, and only one had died, and officials had quarantined the hospital and were ‘certain it would be contained quickly.’ And it might have been. There had been other epidemics just as serious of diseases just as deadly that had burned their way through one or two towns before being contained. Vinnytsia was a large city but not a metropolitan one, and it had no tourist trade or beautiful churches or any reason for tourists. Had the virus stayed in Vinnytsia a little longer things might have been very different. But by the time the Ukrainian government became aware of what was happening it was already too late for containment.

             **

       Yakiv Pasternak was very drunk.

     It was a Wednesday night in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. Yakiv, who had been born in the city but immigrated to London, where he now owned a chain of successful restaurants, had returned to his homeland for the funeral of a cousin. After the funeral some of his old friends had convinced him to go drinking with them. They'd been at it for hours, buying rounds and recounting old stories, becoming louder and more maudlin with each round.

       "No, I remember, that was when he was dating Marko's little sister!" one of Yakiv's friends was shouting. "Oh, she was so beautiful! And when she went off with the big shot from Moscow - how he cried!"

       Yakiv's own eyes were getting misty. "We've all become so old," he mumbled, shaking his head. "Everything has changed, hasn't it."

       "Everything but the beer, Yakiv! Come on, have another." One of his friends stood up, calling "this round's on Yakiv, everybody!" He stumbled and half-fell into the lap of a man sitting nearby.

       This man was Demyan Adamovich, a laborer at a shipping facility that processed lab animals and sent them around the world. Recently he’d been bitten by a monkey, which wasn’t an unusual occurrence in a warehouse that combined caged wild animals with unskilled workers and insufficient safety procedures. Still, Adamovich was worried. The monkeys of that particular shipment were all listless and ill, and some of them had died. He knew some diseases could be passed from primates to humans.

     That night he was at the pub, drinking away his worries as the virus, unnoticed, multiplied inside him. He was drunk and combative by the time Yakiv's friend tripped and landed on him.

      Adamovich jumped up, shouting. Beer went everywhere. He grabbed the man by his shirt and slammed him backwards into a table. After a moment of stunned silence Yakiv and his friends jumped up to defend their pal. Several other bar patrons joined the fray, and it was chaos. Punches were thrown, and someone broke a chair over someone else's head. Yakiv felt more alive than he had in years. The fight was broken up as quickly as it was started, and the brawlers were thrown out into the street. Adamovich went back to his apartment, already beginning to feel the headache and fever that were the first signs of the disease. He died a week later after passing the virus to family and friends.

     Yakiv staggered home with one of his friends and woke on the sofa with a blinding headache and a vague memory of being kicked in the solar plexus. He never even noticed the scrapes on his knuckles from punching Demyan Adamovich in the face. Blood from Adamovich's split lip had smeared over the cuts, and the virus has entered a new host. While he visited his family, did some sightseeing, and  traveled home to London it multiplied and took over until he was little more than a vessel of the plague.

     The disease had an average incubation period of two weeks, during which the virus inside the body multiplied continuously until a drop of the infected person’s blood contained billions of copies, each ready to infect anew.

     So, two weeks later, when Yakiv Pasternak fell to his knees in the middle of Heathrow airport and vomited a liter of black-speckled blood on the floor and the feet of the people near him, it was less of a containment problem and more the beginning of the end.

     Planes fly from Heathrow to every major airport in the world. The virus traveled with businessmen and homebound tourists, flight stewardesses and honeymooners. It went with them to Beijing, Boston, Cape Town and Perth. It multiplied and infected via handshakes, kisses, coughs. By the time word was getting out about the epidemic in Vinnytsia, it was much to late for containment. The disease was everywhere.

     Yakiv Pasternak was taken to Hillingdon Hospital and died five days later, after infecting countless patients and medical personnel. London was one of the first cities to fall in the early days of the disease. By the time the government ordered the citizens to stay inside their homes, cease all travel outside their neighborhood, and quarantine their sick, it had already traveled the city. People huddled inside and waited for death to come.

      **

     It was the second month of the summer holiday. In the small northern town of Becket Green, in a prestigious boarding school called St. Augustine’s, the students and staff who had not gone home for the summer sat in assembly and listened to the news on the radio. They heard that London had been declared a highly infectious zone and that the prime minister and his cabinet had been taken to ‘a safe area.’ An emergency law had been issued forbidding any inter-city travel.

     "Army forces have been stationed along major roads and highways, and anyone found on those roads will be shot on sight," the radio announced gravely. The teachers gave each other worried looks.

     Death tolls, the radio announcer continued, were now estimated to be eighty percent of those infected. All citizens were urged to conserve supplies and wait for further directions via radio.

     The headmistress turned the radio off and surveyed the assembly. The students were uncharacteristically quiet. They looked up at her as if waiting for assurances, answers. She had little to tell them.

     “You are all confined to school grounds until further notice. Meals will be served in the dormitory common rooms. If anyone begins to feel ill, they must report to the infirmary immediately.”

     That night eight students disappeared from their dormitories. Three staff members also left, either hoping to run from the virus or get to their families. One boy, a sixth-former, was discovered on the steps of the school chapel. He appeared to have jumped from the bell tower.

     A week later one of the teachers was taken to the infirmary with a fever.