Journals of the Plague Years

by Norman Spinrad

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Plague's origins were mysterious, but its consequences were all too obvious: quarantined cities, safe-sex machines, Sex Police, the outlawing of old-fashioned love. Four people hold the fate of humanity in their hands...A sexual mercenary condemned to death as a foot soldier in the Army of the Living Dead; a scientist who's devoted his whole life to destroying the virus and now discovers he has only ten weeks to succeed; a God-fearing fundamentalist on his way to the presidency before he accepts a higher calling; and a young infected coed from Berkeley on a bizarre crusade to save the world with a new religion of carnal abandon. Each will discover that the only thing more dangerous than the Plague is the cure.

Release date: July 25, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 147

Sample

It was the worst of times, and it was the saddest of times, so what we must remember if we are to keep our perspective as we read these journals of the Plague Years is that the people who wrote them, indeed the entire population of what was then the United States of America and most of the world, were, by our standards, all quite mad.

The Plague virus, apparently originating somewhere in Africa, had spread first to male homosexuals, and intravenous drug users. Inevitably it moved via bisexual contact into the population at large. A vaccine was developed and for a moment the Plague seemed defeated. But the organism mutated under this evolutionary pressure and a new strain swept the world. A new vaccine was developed, but the virus mutated again. Eventually the succession of vaccines selected for mutability itself, and the Plague virus proliferated into dozens of strains.

Palliative treatments were developed, victims might survive for a decade or more, but there was no cure, and no vaccine that offered protection for long.

For twenty years, sex and death were inextricably entwined. For twenty years, men and women were constrained to deny themselves the ordinary pleasures of straightforward unencumbered sex, or to succumb to the natural desires of the flesh and pay the awful price. For twenty years, the species faced its own extinction. For twenty years, Africa and most of Asia and Latin American were quarantined by the armed forces of America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union. For twenty years, the people of the world stewed in their own frustrated sexual juices.

Small wonder then that the Plague Years were years of madness. Small wonder that the authors of these journals seem, from our happier perspective, driven creatures, and quite insane.

That each of them found somewhere the courage to carry on, that through their tormented and imperfect instrumentalities, the long night was finally to see our dawn, that is the wonder, that is the triumph of the human spirit, the spirit which unites the era of the Plague Years with our own.

—Mustapha Kelly

Luna City, 2143

 

JOHN DAVID

 

I was gunfoddering in Baja when the marks began to appear again. The first time I saw the marks, they gave me six years if I could afford it, ten if I joined up and got myself the best.

Well what was a poor boy to do? Take my black card, let them stick me in a Quarantine Zone, and take my chances? Go underground and try to dodge the Sex Police until the Plague got me? Hell no, this poor boy did what about two million other poor boys did, he signed up for life in the American Foreign Legion, aka the Army of the Living Dead, while he was still in good enough shape to be accepted.

Now you hear a lot of bad stuff about the Legion. The wages suck. The food ain’t much. We’re a bunch of bloodthirsty killers too bugfuck to be allowed back in the United States fighting an endless imperialistic war against the whole Third World and our combat life expectancy is about three years. Junkies. Dopers. Drooling sex maniacs. The scum of the universe.

For sure, all that is true. But unless you’re a millionaire or supercrook, the Legion is the best deal you can do when they paint your blue card black and tell you you’ve Got It.

The deal is you get the latest that medical science has to offer and you get it free. The deal is you can do anything you want to the gorks as long as you don’t screw up combat orders. The deal is that the Army of the Living Dead is co-ed and omnisexual and every last one of us has already Got It. We’ve all got our black card already, we’re under sentence of death, so we might as well enjoy each other on the way out. The deal is that the Legion is all the willing meat sex you can handle, and plenty that you can’t, you better believe it!

Like the recruiting slogan says, “A Short Life But A Happy One.” We were the last free red-blooded American Boys and Girls. “Join the Army and Fuck the World,” says the graffiti they scrawl on the walls about us.

Well that too, and so what?

Take the Baja campaign. The last census showed that the black card population of California was entitled to enlarged Quarantine Zones. Catalina and San Francisco were bursting at the seams and the state legislature couldn’t agree on a convenient piece of territory. So it got booted up to the Federal Quarantine Agency.

Old Walter T., he looks at the map, and he sees you could maintain a Quarantine line across the top of the Baja Peninsula with maybe 2000 SP troops. Real convenient. Annex the mother to California and solve the problem.

So in we go, and down the length of Baja we cakewalk. No sweat. Two weeks of saturation air strikes to soften up the Mexes, a heavy armored division and two wings of gunships at the point, followed by 15,000 of us zombies to nail things down.

What you call a fun campaign, a far cry from the mess we got into in Cuba or that balls-up in Venezuela, let me tell you. Mexico was something like 50% Got It, their armed forces had been wiped out of existence in the Chihuaha campaign, and so it was just a matter of three weeks of leisurely pillage, rape, and plunder.

The Mexes? They got a sweet deal, considering. Those that were still alive by the time we had secured Baja down to La Paz could choose between deportation to what was left of Mexico or become black card citizens of the state of California, Americans like thee and me, brothers and sisters. Any one of them who had survived had Gotten It in every available orifice about a hundred and fifty times by us zombies by then anyway.

Wanna moralize about it? Okay, then moralize this one, meatfucker:

The damn Plague started in Africa, didn’t it? That’s the Third World, ain’t it? Africa, Latin America, Asia, except for China, Japan, and Iran, they’re over 50% Got It, ain’t they? And the It they Got keeps mutating like crazy in all that filth. And they keep trying to get through with infiltrators to give us the latest strain, don’t they?

The Chinese and the Iranians, they kill their black carders, don’t they? The Japs, they deport them to Korea. And the Russians, they nuked themselves a cordon sanitaire all the way from the Caspian to the Chinese border.

Was I old Walter T., I’d say nuke the whole cesspit of infection out of existence. Use nerve gas. Fry the Third World clean from orbit. Whatever. They gave us the damn Plague, didn’t they? Way we see it in the Army of the Living Dead, anything we do after that is only a little piece of what the gorks got coming!

Believe me, this poor boy wasn’t shedding any tears for what we had done to the Mexes when the marks starting coming out just before the sack of Ensenada. Less still when they couldn’t come up with a combo of pallys that worked any more, and they shrugged and finally told me it looked like I had reached Conditional Terminal in the ruins of La Paz. Like I said, when I first Got It, they gave me six years, ten in the Army of the Living Dead.

Now they gave me six months.

I shot up with about 100mg of liquid crystal, chugalugged a quart of tequila, and butt-fucked every gork I could find. Think I blew about ten of them away afterward, but by then, brothers and sisters, who. . .