Black Virus

For more stories by Michael Sean Erickson, check out www.michaelseanerickson.com. 

            Jack Ross stares blankly out his living room window. He lives in a downtown apartment on the thirtieth floor, and the skyline is usually breathtaking at this time of the evening. Instead of a clear moon ascending out from behind the buildings, and casting the glass towers around him in a softly romantic glow, there are again those black clouds above that have made every night this week a nightmarish vision from a muggy, fly infested hell. It is like the underbelly of a swamp is spreading out across the heavens from every horizon. Before long, the swamp will clamp over everything as far as the eye can see, and the flies will descend like locusts on the quivering flesh beneath them.

The image is like something from Sunday school, and it has been many years since Jack cracked a Bible. He is a real believer, though, not so much in Jesus and the saints, but in the homicidal tenacity of that Black Virus out there. Like everyone else in this city, he has been in self-isolation for twelve days straight, watching non-stop cable news reports about the global pandemic, and then when that is too much bad news switching over to an old favorite on Netflix.

Jack has done everything the government has told the public to do: He stays indoors, orders food to be delivered, washes his hands compulsively, and sprays at anything that even resembles a black fly. He did so begrudgingly at first, since like a lot of people he presumed that the whole thing was overblown. He snickered at the "end of the world" madness that seemed to spread even faster than the virus, and in that vein he thought of Bill Murray in Ghostbusters: "The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria."

Then, a few nights ago, he became a believer. What first caught his attention was the static noise of a police radio in the hallway. He looked through the peephole in time to view several paramedics and a cop stepping into the apartment across the hall. Like all first responders since the pandemic hit the front pages, the paramedics and the cop wore identical HAZMAT suits and helmets. The only difference was that the paramedics had stitched red crosses on their chests, and the cop with the walkie talkie had a stitched police badge.

Jack felt his heart beating hard against his chest, while watching through the peephole. He hardly knew the kindly, old woman across the way but always sensed her goodhearted nature. She was one of the "good ones," which is a rare enough find in big cities too often peopled by the fast and the furious.

Jack's heart dropped when he saw her strapped to an ambulance stretcher. In the seconds before they all passed from view he observed an ashen grey woman just consumed with anguish and pain. Her eyes were bloodshot, and in contrast with her near colorless skin they looked like the eyes of a convulsing demon. Jack could see at once why in past centuries men associated viral infections with demonic possession.

Most dishearteningly, he saw the stark fear in her eyes. She looked like a tiny, fragile soul about to be pushed over the edge. She saw the abyss, but she did not see the end. Moreover, she did not see anyone about to take the terrible plunge with her.

Jack cried all that night. He had no idea if the kindly, old woman would live or die in the hospital before dawn. Whatever happened to her she would be alone then. Even if she had family, she would need to be quarantined from them.

No one deserves that; certainly not one of the "good ones." The Black Virus is impartial. As someone said on the television, it is the great equalizer. It does not care if the victim has been a saint or a scoundrel. Whomever it infects will suffer horribly, and many will die. The survivors will observe all of this unfold in front of their cable television sets or from behind peepholes. In a less dramatic way, they too will be left isolated, frightened, and alone.