Yael Dragwyla and Richard Ransdell First North American rights

email: polaris93@aol.com 6,800 words

The Eris War

Volume 1: The Dragon and the Crown

by Admiral Chaim G. Resh, USN detached

Book 2: This Devastated Land

Part 1: Deep Impact

Chapter 10: And the Tide Rushes In

Shocked to the core of her being, dropping the blanket she’d been trying to drape over the curtain rod
and jumping down from the chair she’d been standing on, Janet rushed over to her friend. “Jeanie! Oh,
Jeanie . . .” Putting her arms around Jeanie, she held the other woman until the nurse’s sobs finally began
to slacken, murmuring “it’s all right, it’ll be all right, we’ll get through this, it’s all right” in tones as
soothing as she could muster.
Finally, Jeanie looked up at Janet, her cheeks sheeted with tears. The wracking sobs had ceased, but
Janet felt they could start up again at any time. Jeanie Buckley had been carrying an impossible burden of
apprehension and responsibility for the last two days, and their toll on her was finally showing. “Jan – Jan,
when I went into Critical, it wasn’t just, just your people dead. Dr. Pellis was, too – he’d fallen between
two beds, and a syringe he’d been carrying was lying there on the floor beside him, cracked open, whatever
was in it spilled all over the floor. I don’t know what he was doing there – normally he only comes in once
a week, on Friday. I guess he was rotated in from the tent hospitals – they’ve got everyone in town out
there with any sort of medical skills at all they can find, you know.
“I also found, found Betty Jordan there, too. She was in the bathroom . . . She’d carried somebody’s
bed-pan in there, and the contents were spilled all over the floor.”
“Betty’s dead?” Betty Jordan was one of the best nurses the area had ever had. Now that she was a
supervisor for several medical centers in the county, after a quarter of a century of working as a regular RN,
she was one of the very last people Janet would have thought would have been slinging bed-pans in this or
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any other hospital – the fact that she had been spoke volumes about just how bad the situation here really
was. The fact that she was dead was even worse – Betty knew more about medicine than many of the
brightest young doctors, and her loss would be a terrible blow for them all, for with her would be lost
incalculably valuable treasures of technical knowledge and wisdom they could not afford to lose now.
“Yes,” Jeanie said, sniffling and dabbing at her red eyes.
“Here, let me get you a tissue, sweetie,” Janet told her, going over to the cupboard and retrieving a
packet of them from it. Bringing it with her, she came back to Jeanie. Handing it to her friend, she said,
“Why don’t you keep that in your pocket, in case you need it later?”
“Er, thanks.” After wiping her eyes with a tissue, then blowing her nose, Jeanie asked the other
woman, “Honey, could you bring that waste-can over here to me? – Thanks,” she told Janet gratefully
when the younger woman brought her the waste-basket that had been sitting by the door.
“There are . . . five people dead in Critical?” Janet asked the nurse.
“Six. Andy was the other one.”
“Andy? What happened in there, anyway?”
“Lord only knows, Janet. Andy – well, I think he had the same thing your poor friend Chloe Hamilton
did. His belly burst. It looked like his last few minutes were just absolute hell.”
“Oh, my God . . . And the others?”
“Well, Dr. Pellis had just sort of . . . collapsed. He’d been dead for awhile, I think. His face was
white, real white, like he didn’t have any blood left in him. He hadn’t hemorrhaged or anything, though. I
had this funny feeling that maybe something happened to his red blood cells, as if . . .”
“What?”
“Oh, you’ll think I’m silly or something.”
“No! Jeanie, you’ve got years of experience on me, and I’m just a student, not even really in pre-med
yet!”
“Have you ever heard of something just . . . dissolving away someone’s red blood cells? Doing it
fast?”
“M-maybe . . . I’ve heard of some nerve-gases that could do that. But how could he have been hit
with chemical weapons here? Nobody else has been!”
“A lot of those chemicals were developed from things they found various critters can make, like some
bacteria and fungi. Maybe . . . maybe whatever these plagues are include some pathogens that produce
poison gases like that. That might explain . . .”
“What?”
“Well, maybe what happened to Betty. Though in her case it would be more like a real nerve-gas, one
that goes for the nervous system rather than one that attacks the blood. She looked like she’d had one hell
of a fit there in the bathroom. She’d clawed the walls, literally – you could see where her fingernails had
gouged the wall, and there were bloody streaks running from them where her fingertips had bled. The
lower part of her face and the floor under it where she’d fallen were covered with foam. Her poor head was
resting against the bottom of the commode – I guess I shouldn’t say ‘resting,’ because there were big cracks
in the porcelain there from where she’d apparently banged her head against it several times, and there was
blood all over the side of her head there, and her head there felt pulpy to the touch, so you know she’d hit it
hard (I found a pair of disposable gloves in there and put them on to check). Her eyes were rolled up like
an epileptic’s often are during a grand mal seizure – but Betty was no epileptic! I looked for tracks there to
indicate that maybe somebody’d come in and done that to her, but there wasn’t a sign that anyone else had
been in there – and with as much of her blood as there was spread around her, if anyone had done that to
her, you’d have seen his or her footprints and hand-prints all over the place!”
“Are you sure she didn’t have what Dr. Pellis did?”
“Her skin was so dark that I couldn’t have been sure – her face was kind of a light ashy brown, but
you’d expect that, as much as she’d bled out. And of course I’d’ve had to take samples of Carl’s blood to
see if I was right about what I think happened to him, and then compare it to Betty’s, and I really didn’t
want to stay there that long. I made sure that they and your dad and Tom’s dad and Mr. Hamilton were
dead, then I got the hell out of there. I’d rather not go back, but we really need to get those bodies out of
here before they . . .” Clearly she really didn’t want to finish the thought.
“You mean, before they begin to decompose?” Janet asked her gently.
“Y- yes,” Jeanie gulped.
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“I agree. We can put them outside, then maybe say a service over them later. I know I’ll want to say
one over my dad, and Tom will want to do the same for Martin.
“Okay, let’s do that, then,” she said, rising to her feet. “In the meantime, it’s going to get very cold in
here if that blizzard keeps up. Any ideas about what to do about that?”
Grateful for the distraction from the ugly, ugly thoughts running around her mind, the nurse said,
“Maybe. We’ve got a portable generator here – it’s heavy, but you and I can manage it, and with Adelle’s
help, we should do fine. There’s some diesel for it in a tank outside, and it should last awhile. Since there
aren’t many of us left in here – why the hell the people from the tent hospitals haven’t decided to break in
here and get in out of the cold and the snow, I don’t know, maybe enough of them have died so that the rest
can fit in the schools and other big buildings out there, and they don’t need this space – we could move all
of us who are left into this room and the one next to it and put electric space-heaters in the rooms we use
and the kitchen and run them off the generator. I know where they keep the space-heaters, so that won’t be
a problem. And the Colemans we’re using in here,” she said, gesturing to indicate the two Coleman
lanterns on top of the cupboard and the third on the stand near Rachel’s bed, “will help keep us warm, too.
I’ll hunt down all the Colemans and white-gas we have here, and get those set up,” she said as she rose to
her feet.
“Okay, let’s do that. On the way, let’s go by the room where Mom and Adelle are staying and see if
Adelle can help, too,” Janet said. “And stop in to see Tom – he’ll want to know about his dad.”
As they headed out of the room, in response to Janet’s questions, Jeanie told her that both Martin and
Fred seemed to have simply bled out somewhere in the last few hours, both lying in beds filled with
gelatinous ponds of clotted, decomposing blood. Martin’s temples, face, and throat were covered with
huge dark-purple blotches like enormous blood-blisters; while Fred’s features had seemed to cave in on
themselves, and his torso had been bloated and lumpy, the skin encasing it the same bruise-purple that
Martin’s face had been. A hideous smell had emanated from both their bodies – “Not like anything I’ve
ever run into before,” Jeanie told Janet wonderingly as they headed for Adelle’s room. “Like rotten meat
but all mixed up with other things even worse – and they’d only been dead a few hours at most, not nearly
enough time to start decomposing!”
When they got to Adelle’s room, they found her sitting next to Elaine’s bed, staring at her friend’s
wasted features with haunted eyes.
“How is she?” Janet asked Adelle.
“She stopped breathing all of a sudden. She was here one minute, then – gone. She’d been running an
impossibly high temperature, according to the digital thermometer it was 108, and at that rate she couldn’t
have lasted long. Some of her other symptoms suggest she had dengue fever, only whatever it was she had
acted about 10 or 20 times faster than dengue ever could have – and as you can see, large sections of her
skin are already rotting, and were before she died, which isn’t remotely like dengue in any way.”
Janet exchanged a long glance with Jeanie. She felt sand-bagged with grief and horror, yes – but after
all the hideous deaths and tragic losses that had occurred in the last two days all around them, something in
her had been expecting this. She felt herself beginning to go numb. “Mom, oh, Mom . . .” she moaned,
putting her hands to her mouth. She started to move forward, to give her mother one last kiss, but Jeanie
blocked her way, shaking her head. “We don’t want you coming down sick with the same thing, Jan,” the
nurse told her. Then, continuing on to Adelle, Jeanie said to the older woman in a gentle voice, “Adelle.”
“What?” The older woman whipped around to glare at Jeanie, as if furious at her.
“We should take her body outside, you know. Y- -- uh, there’ve been several deaths, and we were on
our way there to do the same for them. We want to say a service over them later, but we need to get them
all outside so they – so they’ll be in good shape when we do.”
“So they won’t rot in the meantime,” Adelle said tiredly, the rage disappearing from her eyes. “I’m
sorry, Jeanie, I’m not angry at you or Janet. It’s just – oh, God damn whoever was responsible for that, that
balls-up over there on the coast! I never did vote for any of the Presidents we’ve had since 1996, and I’m
glad I didn’t! My daddy’d be spinning in his grave if he’d heard me say that, he was a die-hard, dedicated
Democrat since way before 1972, thanks to Nixon (God, listen to me! When you hear me using
alliteration like that, you know I’m at the end of my tether!), but if Daddy’d seen what a monster Clinton
and the bastards that followed him turned out to be, he’d have agreed with me. We never should have –
well, that’s all a great deal of water under a very high bridge now, isn’t it? Be that as it may,” she said,
sighing and getting to her feet, “we will have to do something with poor Elaine’s body, won’t we? Janet,
Janet, I’m so sorry, so sorry,” she said, reaching out and taking Janet into her arms to comfort her.
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Then Janet finally began to weep, her sobbing seeming almost to tear her apart, her throat going raw
with her grief. “Oh, Adelle, what are we going to do?” she wailed against the older woman’s shoulder.
Gently patting Janet on the back, Adelle murmured the same sort of phrases to her that Janet had to the
nurse earlier. Finally, somehow smiling through her own tears, releasing Janet and stepping back, Adelle
told her, “We’ll muddle through, somehow, I expect. – Jeanie.”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Martin’s dead, isn’t he?”
“I –”
“The hospital’s been emptying out all morning. I saw you go hurry down the hall to Critical, then you
came back looking as if a vulture were picking at your soul. Critical was where Martin was. And Fred.
And John Hamilton. They’re all dead, aren’t they?”
Biting her lip against the sobs that threatened to overwhelm her now, Jeanie could only nod her head.
“All right. It’s all right. I knew this was coming. I – felt Martin go. And the other two men were in
pretty bad shape, so it was likely they wouldn’t last too much longer, themselves. At least this way, we
won’t have to tell poor John that Chloe died – or how she died.
“So, then, we’d better get busy and get them outside. Are there any body-bags anywhere here, do you
know?” she asked Jeanie, a little more brightly.
“There are plenty in the cupboard in Critical, and more in the storage-room off the kitchen.”
“Well, let’s go start taking care of our dead, then,” Adelle said, sighing again. “Come on, let’s go to
Critical, that’s where the supplies are. – Janet, is Tom back in your room, do you think?”
“I – I haven’t checked.”
“Well, that’s all right, we’ll do that after we, ah, take care of the others,” she said, gently herding the
other two women before her as she headed out of the room.
It took at least two hours to do the job of removing the corpses from the hospital. On the one hand,
they were in luck – there were plenty of gurneys available for transport, and all they had to do was roll the
bodies onto the gurneys, push them to the back door of the hospital, and lay the bodies on the great drifts of
snow that were beginning to accumulate there. They dared not go far from the back door; the snow was
coming down too fast, in spite of the fact it was the middle of a Summer’s day it was just too dark, and it
would’ve been far too easy to get lost out there and freeze to death before being able to find one’s way back
in.
On the other, however, besides the six bodies in Critical and Elaine’s rapidly cooling body in Adelle’s
room, they also discovered the bodies of three little girls and an older boy huddled in the kitchen, and those
of two men who might have been tramps sprawled on the floor of the hospital pharmacy. “Probably
looking for codeine,” Jeanie muttered when they discovered them there.
“Maybe not – they might have been just wandering around, looking for a doctor,” Adelle commented.
“Whatever it was, looks as if they died hard – look,” she said, gently rolling over one of them with the toe
of her sneakers.
The man’s face was covered in huge, greenish-brown blisters, many of which had burst, so that they
had leaked an ugly, oily, yellowish-brown fluid all over his face and the floor beneath where his head had
lain. The body of the man next to him, on the other hand, was covered with long purplish-red weals that
looked like the claw-marks of some giant cat. A dark, reddish-brown fluid had oozed out of them in many
places; through deep cracks that had opened in their bodies to release the fluid there could be seen
greenish-gray things that didn’t look like organs or normal tissues at all, but rather like something from a
mulligan stew long since gone very bad in the back of someone’s refrigerator.
“My God, they stink worse than the bodies in Critical!” gagged Jeanie, covering her mouth with her
hands as she turned away from them with a retching sound.
“That they do,” Adelle agreed as she stepped back from the bodies. “I think perhaps we ought to find
some masks and douse them with Lysol or something, then put them on while we handle these bodies – that
way we’ll be spared most of the stench.”
“That sounds like a very good idea,” Jeanie agreed. “The surgical masks are down this way. Come on
and let’s get some . . .”
Using the masks they were able to get close enough to the bodies in the pharmacy to bag them up
properly. Once inside body-bags the bodies weren’t much of a problem, and the three women got them
outside as quickly as possible. Then they did the same for the four children they’d found, every one of
whom seemed to have died of something different from the others – one with a burst belly like those of
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poor Andy and Chloe, another bled out much like Fred, a third with her eyes turned to green jelly, a similar
jelly oozing out of her nose and mouth as well, and the fourth looking as if she’d simply fallen asleep,
almost angelically beautiful in her stillness, her features peaceful, not a mark on her.
“What do you suppose she died of?” Adelle asked the nurse concerning the fourth child as the three of
them began bagging up the bodies.
“Who knows? We’d have to autopsy her, and frankly, after handling those others back there, I think
I’ve had all I want right now of other people’s insides. Could have been something that hit her heart, or the
breathing centers in her brain, say, without damaging much of anything else first. But that’s just a guess.”
“Poor little thing,” Adelle murmured as she scooped up the child’s body and then laid her gently down
in a thick drift of snow. “Poor little girl . . .”
The other two women watched as Adelle pushed snow up over the little girl’s body, almost as if she
were tucking her in for the night. Then, brushing her hands off, Adelle told them, “Come on, let’s get these
gurneys back inside. We may need them again at some point – maybe to bring food and other supplies in,
if the Army gets here and starts helping us get back on our feet again,” she added, knowing the chances the
Army or anyone else would show up to bail them all out was less than zero, at this point.
When they had finally gotten the last of the bodies out into the snow, where they would likely freeze
hard and not begin putrefying, at least until it finally began to warm up again, they headed back for
Rachel’s room.
“Oh, damn!” Janet exclaimed.
“What, sweetie?” Jeanie asked her.
“We forgot to check on Tom!”
“He’s on the way, so let’s go there first,” Adelle said.
When they went by Tom’s room, he wasn’t there, and neither was the wheelchair he’d used earlier. A
note on his pillow said, “Mom, Jan, I’ve gone to Rachel’s room to get the rig ready to transmit. See you
there. Love, Tom.”
“He must’ve just left,” Janet said. “Otherwise he’d probably have come back here when he found her
asleep.”
“She may not be asleep,” Adelle said. “The ascorbate may have brought her out of it, at least
temporarily. Let’s go see.”
The three of them hurried to Rachel’s room. They found Tom sitting beside her bed in his wheelchair,
looking at her in concern as she tossed and turned in a delirious sleep, whimpering and calling out her
husband’s and children’s names every now and then.
“Tom-cat!” Janet exclaimed. “Have you been waiting very long here?”
“I got here about five minutes ago. Where is everybody? Why isn’t someone with Rachel? She seems
to be running one hell of a fever – I put my hand on her head and it was hotter than hell, anyway. I was just
about to try the digital thermometer to double-check.”
Adelle, Jeanie, and Janet exclaimed glances. It was Jeanie who finally stepped forward and, putting a
gentle hand on his shoulder, told him, “The five of us are sort of it, now, Thomas.”
“Just us – where’s Dad? He’s in Critical, isn’t he? – Oh,” he said in a low voice as sudden realization
came to him. “Dad’s . . . he died, didn’t he?”
“Yes. I’m so sorry, Thomas,” Jeanie told him, her voice rich with compassion. How odd, Janet
thought, how odd that we can be so strong for others in the midst of our own sorrows and tragedies! I
guess that’s what makes a good nurse: the capacity to shut away your own pain and loss while you’re with
those who need you. I hope I can do that when – if – I’m finally practicing.
Reaching up with his hand to cover the one Jeanie had placed on him, Tom said in a tired voice, “It
wasn’t . . . unexpected. I just hope he wasn’t suffering much when he went. Should I go see him, do you
think, Mom?” he asked, turning to look at Adelle.
“We’re going to say a service over him and the others later, Tom,” she told her son, somehow
managing a smile for him. Blinking away the tears trying to start in her eyes, she said, “Jan and Jeanie and
I got him out into the snow, along with the others. We’ll do a service for them all in a bit. For now, let’s
stay inside where it’s warm, see what we can do for Rachel.”
“Who else died besides Dad and, and Jan’s parents and Mr. Hamilton?” he asked her.
“Carl Pellis, Betty Jordan, Andy Metcalf, plus four youngsters we found in the kitchen, plus two men
on the floor in the pharmacy who may have been tramps or just lost. I have no idea who the children are –
were – or those two men. Maybe they were all from out of town, because I know just about everyone who
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lives here in Eltonville – their parents may have come here from someplace else, for whatever reason, then
died here, and the children were alone and went looking for shelter.
“Other than them, and us, no one else is here. We’re the last ones here in the hospital.”
“Why?” Tom asked, shaking his head as if having trouble believing it. “Why would they have left?”
“Probably everyone still alive besides us is out in the tent hospitals they started setting up yesterday
when it started to overflow here,” Jeanie said. “Maybe so many have died off that they were all able to
move inside the schools – those are big and warm and very secure, and they got just about all the drugs we
had last night and this morning, so they really don’t need anything here.”
“Except a safe environment and the tools for surgery,” Janet reminded her.
“I really don’t think that conditions requiring surgery are there primary problem right now, Jan,”
Jeanie told her with a sigh. “Anyway, whatever these pathogens are everybody’s come down with, they
move so fast and kill so quickly that I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t more than a few other people
left in town besides us now, and those too sick to move. – Tom, what’s that you have there in your lap?”
“This? Oh, it’s somebody’s diary, I think. I found it on the floor out there in the hall by the door of
my room,” he said, picking the book up and handing it to her.
She began flipping pages. “Hmm . . . This looks like Dr. Pellis’s handwriting – yeah, here’s his name,
written on the flyleaf: ‘Journal of Carl Pellis, begun July 16, 2022. My God, this is a log of events here
since the War started!” she exclaimed, instinctively capitalizing the word in a way that survivors
everywhere would eventually do. “—Here’s last night’s entry. He says here:

More and more, members of our local churches huddle in their respective houses of
worship, signing ‘spirituals,’ both black and white, that first appeared in the 19th century,
including such all-time favorites as ‘No Hidin’ Place (Went to the Rock),’ ‘O Sinner
Man,’ ‘Abide With Me,’ ‘Now the Day is Over,’ etc. At one church, I’ve just heard, the
minister gave a ringing sermon drawn almost exclusively from Revelations, with great
emphasis on Chapters 5-21, mostly having to do with the opening of the Seven Seals and
the effects thereof and with the coming of “a new heaven and a new earth.” That was
not, Mind you, a Pentecostal Church, but the Episcopal Church of the district, which
previously had been known as one of the more staid, if not downright stuffy, in our area.
Betty Jordan, who came in this evening to help fill in for nurses who are too ill to work,
even though she herself is now an administrative head, rather caustically referred to these
hymns as “survival hymns” – as opposed to “revival hymns” – because those singing
them seem to be thereby trying to enchant themselves into a belief that they themselves
will somehow prove to be immune to the plagues that are killing everyone else. (Of
course, that term came from the patter that the comedian-mathematician Tom Lehrer used
to introduce one of his songs, ‘We Will All Came Together When We Go,’ when he did
his nightclub routines and on that album of his songs, That Was the Year That Was. But
it sure fits what Betty was describing! Trust Betty to be at least as hip as anyone else
around here – as a matter of fact, she has the complete collection of everything put out by
Dr. Demento, not to mention CDs of just about every cool classic rock-and-roll, heavy
metal, and punk music album ever cut. – Forgive me, I digress. I think it’s this cold or
whatever I have that’s been trying to come on all day.) Though almost everyone now left
alive can be found in one or another house of worship, the memberships of the latter are
down by more than 50%, thanks to the appalling rate of illness and death in the area, even
though it hasn’t even been 48 hours since the war started and these God-damned plagues
started popping up here. I would guess that perhaps 25% of our town’s people are dead
now, maybe more, and another 25% are sick unto death themselves with a huge variety of
completely unknown epidemic diseases. As for everyone else, they – we, dammit, that
includes me, too – are all starting to show symptoms of the same things that have already
felled their neighbors.
And, of course, we have no vaccines against any of this. Whatever got turned loose
on the coast was nothing anyone could have prepared for, except maybe the government.
In fact, come to think of it, the government probably has huge stockpiles of vaccines
against some of this, because I’d bet money that those rumors about that Army research
site near Lewiston that wasn’t supposed to exist in this state weren’t just rumors – Tom
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was on the shortwave last night and he heard from somebody that tidal waves from the
asteroid impact just off our coast that started the war washed crap from at least two major
illegal dumping-sites from the St. Lawrence Seaway down through Eastern Maine and
the rest of New England clear down to Cape Cod. According to Tom’s sources, those
sites apparently contained a tremendous amount of biohazard waste, including that from
various biowarfare research facilities all up and down the coast. That research facility
probably had all the vaccines in the world against whatever they were handling, and the
CDC might have had others on hand, say. But somewhere in that ghastly mix kicked up
by the tsunamis there must have been a lot of things that came about accidentally, as the
result of mutations of known pathogens due to contact with toxic waste in the dump-sites,
or conjugation of different strains of whatever weird tailored bacteria the Army site
created, things like that against which nobody could have prepared because there was no
way to know beforehand that they existed or that we’d need to protect ourselves against
them.
If we were still well-stocked with ascorbate and colloidal silver like we used to be, if
our machine for generating hydrogen peroxide and ozone hadn’t just broken down – if, if,
if! What a freight of tragedy hangs on such a tiny word! What it comes down to is,
we’re out of almost everything now that we desperately need to fight these diseases,
because they’ve taken almost all of it to use in the tent hospitals they’ve started to set up.
I couldn’t stop them – there must have been 30 or 40 great big men came in here, many
armed with handguns and rifles, accompanying Dr. Vanette, damn him to hell, to take
that stuff down there. Vanette said they ‘needed it desperately’ there in the tent hospitals.
Whether they did or not, I don’t know – I wasn’t about to go down there to check. Not
after what I heard from Vanette and the goons with him about the things people were
coming down with!
They’re seeing every imaginable and some unimaginable symptoms down there,
from sloughing, horribly inflamed skin, the sort of thing caused by virulent staph (AKA
flesh-eating bacteria) infection; to the symptoms of smallpox and anthrax; to something
like rapidly progressing leprosy, where the victim rots away alive; to something like
Mad Cow disease crossed with raging septicemia (systemic blood-poisoning) followed by
gangrene that strikes virtually everything in the body, including the brain. What on earth
could do that? All I can think of is those microbes, many of them things engineered in
US Army biowarfare labs or evolved in the face of overuse of antibiotics and antiseptics
at major hospitals, brought together in the presence of so many ghastly mutagens (toxic
wastes + retroviruses), forming a microbial witch’s brew in which disease organisms
never seen before on Earth came into existence and others long familiar get an edge on
things they never had before. The results of such a disaster could include plague
organisms deadly not only to human beings, but to a host of animal, plant, fungal, and
bacterial species, as well, and I firmly believe that’s just what we’re seeing here.
There’s no high ground as far as these plagues go, either. Not here, not anywhere
else – I have a feeling my own life-expectancy is going to be very short, and certainly
what I’ve been seeing around me today bears that out. For example, Ian Clarke, our
resident OB-GYB man, who was just fine yesterday, died this morning of something that
made his belly explode – I’m not kidding! Around noon he was just fine. A few minutes
later he began complaining of a violent stomach-ache. Soon he was lying on the floor of
the lounge, screaming his lungs out, clutching his belly, while several of us tried to calm
him down and others ran to get a gurney, and one nurse tried to inject him with
tranquilizers, even then thinking he was simply hysterical from what we’d been seeing
happen to our town. Then, while he screamed and screamed until he didn’t even sound
human any more, his eyes rolling in their sockets, his mouth distended like that of some
deep-sea fish that can swallow fish larger than it is, his belly suddenly began to swell up
until it looked as if he were about to give birth to an elephant any minute now, except that
the bulge was just above his pubis rather than just below his heart. Meanwhile,
somebody brought me some syringes filled with Valium and morphine, and I gave him
enough of both to knock a charging rhino to its knees, and it had no effect on him at all.
 Day of the Dragons
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 8 of 9

When this had gone on for maybe 25-30 minutes, suddenly there was this sound – I
don’t really know how to describe it. The closest I can get is something like a cross
between the sort of fart a Tyrannosaurus rex or a Titanosaur might have made crossed
with the way a bagpipe in full cry shot with a .22 would sound, all mixed up with a wet
ripping sound. Ugliest noise I’ve ever heard in my life. Then, after one last horrifying
shriek, Clarke went limp. Clearly he was dead, and it was easy to see why: his belly had
burst. Literally. From the region of his gall-bladder down to his pubis his belly had burst
open like a balloon stuck with a pin, so that his guts spilled all over the floor and his
blood was spraying in all directions. The smell was simply unbelievable, so bad that it
had me and everyone else there retching and many of us openly vomiting. We couldn’t
help ourselves. When I finally got myself under control and was able to take another
look, I could see that everything inside his pelvic basin had gone all rotten, as if he’d had
Marburg or something – and yet not an hour before the man had been just fine! I’ve
never seen or even heard of anything like it in all my life, and my daddy was a medic in
Vietnam who saw every godawful horrible disease in the world over there – or so I
thought until now.
Then Leda Morris, a nurse who was working in our surgery, suddenly began
shivering and shaking and complaining that she was starting to hurt all over. I rushed her
into a room and we got her undressed and went to take a look to see what was wrong –
and she had these tumors popping out all over her body, everywhere, growing at a
fantastic rate! They seemed to be growing by cannibalizing the non-cancerous portions
of her body. We put her to bed, with another nurse to stay with her, and I kept checking
on her every few minutes – the room she was in was right down the hall from Critical, so
it wasn’t hard to do so. Within about four hours she was gone. By then she was down to
little more than skin and bones, most of the rest of her body having been turned into
giant, festering carcinomas – even her brain had them, they told me after Pathology
autopsied her.
And Tom says that he’s heard over the radio that people all over both sides of the
Appalachians are sickening and dying of countless brand-new diseases never seen
anywhere before, or newly virulent ones which, though familiar to the medical
community, are wildly alien in their viciousness and lethality. How can this be? How
can the pathogens act so fast? In a couple of days all those people have become ill and
many of died of brand-new, utterly weird, pathogens. From onset to death, at most 50
hours? How? And why have so many died?
The answer to that must, of course, be that many of the pathogens were tailor-made
by the Army to act that fast and be that deadly. Others arose from accidental mutations
and symbiosis among the Army’s bugs, things in the biohazard waste dump, etc. None of
them are things we’re used to – not just we Americans, or people in the Western
Hemisphere, but any human beings, I’d bet. So we have no defenses against them, and
consequently they go through us like a bullet through wet kleenex.
As deadly and fast-acting as those pathogens clearly are, will they kill off our entire
species, and maybe most mammals and other vertebrates? Apparently they’ve been
finding the bodies of everything from dogs and cats to livestock to wild animals such as
deer and wolves and badgers all over the place, many of them in conditions at least as bad
as those here at the hospital who suffered the horrifying deaths I have just described, and
plants seem to be hard-hit, too. No plague ever kills off everything, but we’re being hit
by a plague of plagues, far worse than anything we faced during the Plague Years! Those
were mostly known diseases, some of them mutated into virulent forms or become highly
resistant due to overuse of antibiotics and that sort of thing, yes, but we knew how to deal
with them, and generally no more than two or three, if that many, ever hit any given area
of the world at a time. These, though – they hit everything, not just non-human animals
but plants, too, and maybe even fungi, given some of the stories I’ve heard! They’re
brand-new, and if, indeed, the Army was responsible for the creation of some of them,
likely those don’t have the sort of built-in biological limits hammered in by evolutionary
ecology that make for at least one tender Achilles’ Heel by which our immune systems,
 Day of the Dragons
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 9 of 9

with or without the aid of antibiotics or antivirals, has a fighting chance to defeat a
pathogen. So we may be screwed, not just here and now, but everywhere, and not just
our species, but all multicellular terrestrial life.
One hope we have is the results of recent research on wild retroviruses. These
frequently transfer genes from one sort of creature into another, sometimes into the
second creatures’ sex-cells or even its eggs or sperm. When that happens, depending on
what has been transferred in that way, the second organism can gain strengths and/or
weaknesses built into the first one at a genetic level. So as these horrifying plagues move
east and west, north and south, as they inevitably will, carried in the bodies of human
beings, in those of birds and dogs and deer, in wind-borne protoctistans, ahead of them in
many areas will come whatever survivors there may have been of those plagues. And
retroviruses could well transfer whatever genetic resistance or outright immunity to the
plagues those survivors might have had to uninfected organisms much farther away,
before the plagues get there. For example, if, say, an eagle or hawk should encounter one
or more of those pathogens but either not become ill or, if it does become ill, somehow
recovers, it could then travel hundreds of miles away from that location using the power
of its wings. Wherever it comes to earth, retroviruses it has on board could then be
transferred, via its normal cargo of mites and other commensals (assuming they haven’t
succumbed to their own versions of plague by then!), to other, different types of
organisms,, who could then become beneficiaries of the eagle’s genetically underpinned
resistance to the plagues via retroviral transfer of genes from the eagle to them.
By hops and skips, then, going from one type of organism to another, to another,
eventually those genes could end up inside human beings. If the genes in question could
get along with the normal human genome as a whole, in that way we could gain the
eagle’s resistance to plagues that would otherwise kill us just as the plagues are swiftly
and surely killing us here. At least it may be possible, given some of the tantalizing hints
that have been coming out of research on the epidemiology of wild retroviruses lately. . . .

“Is there more, Jeanie?” Adelle asked, her eyes desperate with hope.
“Oh, there’s plenty more, but a lot of it is just notes on personal stuff, and then here, toward the end, it
starts getting kind of confused, as if he were coming down sick himself with something. – Thanks, Tom,”
the nurse said as she handed the journal back to him. “I wonder why he dropped it there?” she mused.
“Who knows?” Tom asked her, shrugging. “—Uh-oh,” he said, turning back to look at Rachel.