Crisper Death
Author’s Note: This story was written in August and September, 2019. It was rejected by four short story magazines September 30 through November 5. It then sat here in draft mode (saved, but not publicly viewable) for weeks while I struggled with the decision to pursue more magazines or simply move on to the next story. By January, 2020, it was apparent that a real pandemic had gripped the globe. At that point, “Crisper Death” seemed too on-the-nose. I finally decided to release it here on June 11, 2020, hoping (against reports) that the pandemic is finally waning, and that the story will seem more like fiction again, and less like a dire version of today’s news.
Everyone left now was immune.
We were told the usual bullshit: it’s under control. Stay inside as much as possible. Don’t travel. The Patch is coming any day now.
That’s what they called it. It wasn’t a shot, or a pill, or a cure. It was a patch. Because this was, at its root, a software bug for humans.
Gretchen and I used to have playful arguments about the end of the world back when it seemed so unlikely. It was a game we had developed during her law school years, when a seemingly endless supply of dystopian fiction overran the entertainment industry. She’d want me to challenge her on pretty much everything just to keep her logic sharp.
I told Gretchen that, movies aside, a truly global disaster was improbable because humans were resourceful and resilient. We’d been on the brink of nuclear war in the past but avoided it. Zombies and vampires remained firmly in the world of fiction. Human ingenuity had defeated polio and smallpox, among other diseases. We even had cancer and HIV on the run.
Gretchen fervently disagreed. When the kids weren’t around, she would punctuate her arguments with profanities, because she wasn’t allowed to do it in court.
“Sure, we’ve had some successes. But where you’re mistaken is that if, God forbid, something like that ever happens, the threat is going to come from some fucked up direction. Our focus is always too narrow. It’ll never be what we think. Never.”
“For example?”
“Oh, so you want examples? Okay.”
She would get a look in her eyes when I provoked her — playful, but fiery. She was dying to tell me more about how I was wrong.
“Example one,” she held up a finger — the middle one. “We have a whole program set up to watch out for near-Earth objects, right? Astronomers locate the dangerous things flying around in space before they’re a threat, so that we can hopefully do something to prevent them from hitting our planet. Great idea, in theory. Yet a few months ago, an asteroid described as — get this shit — a ‘city killer’ suddenly appeared from the direction of the sun, where they couldn’t see it. Within a day of its discovery, it passed closer to us than our moon. You don’t get much closer than that without getting hit. In other words, it was dumb fucking luck that the space rock missed us. To summarize, we had people looking specifically for this kind of threat, but it came from the place they weren’t looking.”
I raised my eyebrows but said nothing.
“Example two,” she held up two fingers — both middle ones. “Using your own argument: Yes, we have great minds working on curing diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and HIV. Yet every few years, some nasty pathogen pops up and gets out of control somewhere, and all that the world’s disease specialists can really do is give it a name, track it, and try to contain it. SARS. Chikungunya. Ebola. And I won’t even start with how viruses are known to mutate, and even jump species. All of which again means we’re probably looking in the wrong direction, or more accurately, not in all directions, as we should be. So, I repeat: if anything happens, it’ll be something everyone will miss completely––and might be missing right now, if you really want me to be a pessimist.”
She was so. Damn. Smart. I miss those debates almost as much as I miss our children.
“Water?” A voice jarred me from my daydream within the nightmare. I turned around on the sidewalk to face the speaker. He was younger than me, but not by much, and sported a thick, red beard that I instantly envied. My brown-gray whiskers were always uneven and patchy.
“No, thanks, I’m fine.” I pointed to my backpack.
“I’m sorry,” the man shook his head. “I was asking if you had any to spare.” He had a distinctly French accent.
“Oh! Yes, of course.” I pulled a few bottles out for him. Fiji – the good stuff. Tŷ Nant was my absolute favorite, but the glass bottles are too heavy for long walks.
He reached into a pocket searching for something, and I noted that his hands, like mine, were clean. One of the many dystopian fiction predictions now proven wrong: it was actually pretty easy to bathe after the apocalypse. We men did let our facial hair go crazy, though. That part was accurate.
He held out a small piece of turquoise for me.
“Don’t worry about it, bud. It’s just water.”
“Hey, thanks.” He put the stone away. “I owe you one…”
“Bill,” I said.
He took the bottles from me and opened one immediately. “I’m Claude. Nice to meet you, Bill.”
“Likewise. Listen, Claude, there’s a big grocery store in a strip mall about two miles––” I looked around for a moment to get my bearings. “That way, at the next major intersection. It’s got a lot of stock left. I’ve stayed within a few miles of that place ever since The Bug, and it’s practically been my sole source of food.”
“So,” he looked down. “Not many survivors down here, either?”
I shook my head. “How far did you come?”
“Lost track. Where am I?”
“Naples, Florida.”
“Well, farther than I thought, then. I’ve been following either the coastline or the roads south from Tampa. I never really cared for that city when I had to live there, so I thought, why stay now that I don’t have to?”
He shrugged. His accent was especially pleasing, though perhaps it was just the effect of hearing any voice apart from the ones in my head for a change.
“Anything there?” I nodded to a portable radio and other electronic gear he was carrying.
“No. Mostly static or silence. An occasional demented preacher, or one of those looped emergency alert messages that The Patch is coming soon. Stay indoors.“
I sighed and took a sip of my water.
“One day,” he continued with a slight smile, “I found a frequency with a bunch of kids who must have gotten into a radio station, probably one with a backup generator. I listened to them for days. It was like teenage improv sketch comedy. The humor was dark. I mean, what else could it be? But they made me laugh. And then they’d punctuate it once in a while with what they called ‘The Burp and Fart Hour’”.
I laughed out loud, and it felt good.
“I’m not a religious man,” he said, “but here is a good word, a solid word: it was a blessing to hear young people laughing and being kids for a while.”
I nodded but said nothing.
“Other than the radio,” he continued, “just the typical random encounters like this. Mostly positive.”
“How many?”
He quieted his voice significantly. “I don’t know. Maybe forty, after all these miles. I left about a month after the worst was over. So, forty souls plus you in the last ninety days, give or take.”
“Maybe there just aren’t many people traveling long distances. I mean, I haven’t left Naples. So, perhaps folks aren’t taking the big roads.
“Yeah,” was all he said, and it made me feel foolish. Even here in town, I probably had only seen a hundred people.
We both kicked at the ground and drank water for a long minute.
“Alright,” Claude finally broke the silence. “Thank you for the H2O – and the tip about the grocery store. Maybe I’ll head that way.”
“You kind of have to,” I laughed. “You’re running out of dry land to the south!”
* * *
That’s pretty much how it had been post-pandemic. Meet someone here, trade with someone else there. Two very small communities had formed in my area. I went to them on occasion for comfort and human contact, especially when the fear crept back in. This new social structure was another fine point Gretchen had anticipated.
“Billy, this dystopian idea that everyone will grab all the guns they can, then hoard food and water, crouching in concrete bunkers and boarded-up homes, ready to beat the shit out of each other – it’s ridiculous! If there really ever were a global disaster, rest assured that after the initial chaos, people would mostly band together, not fight. We produce and waste so goddamn much in this country, there’d be no reason for the remaining ten percent of the population to stockpile and murder for it.“
I was always glad she got that right. I don’t think I’d have survived long looking over my shoulder all day and night. Unfortunately, there was one detail she had overestimated: ten percent. It was more likely, at least from what I had witnessed, that maybe a half-percent of the population had survived.
We lucky half-percenters watched all the others slowly liquefy while The Bug ran its course.
On my worst nights, the ones when I seek out a community for company, here’s what I think about most: was it the worst for Sara, who lived long enough to watch her mother die from Crisper Death; for Nathan, who lived long enough to see both his mother and his sister melt into a protoplasmic goo; or for me, who survived it all? Who was the lucky winner of the unluckiest lottery?
I usually conclude that Gretchen won. She died before the kids got sick, and could believe on her way out of this world that her offspring would survive her. Plus, while she could still speak, she had the chance to look at me with a twinkle in her feverish green eyes and say not, “I love you,” but, “I told ya so.”
Yes, she had.
While the world continued to fight over whether or not climate change was real, or if Britain should leave the E.U., or whether this president was worse than that president, what we weren’t doing was looking in all directions. Not in the way Gretchen would have done had she been in charge of the world. Because it did come from a fucked-up direction: it started with pigs.
To my right, I heard some movement followed by the distinct click of a gun being cocked. I turned toward it, half-expecting to see Claude again.
Instead, I was staring at a woman who was certainly no less than eighty years old. She was visible through a wide break in the overgrown, dark green Podocarpus hedge that separated the sidewalk I was on from the little league field where she was standing. There was a small neighborhood right next to the field, so why she was outside pointing a pistol at me from second base, I couldn’t tell you.
“Get away from me!” she shouted. “Don’t even look at me!”
I held my empty hands in the air and stepped away from the hedge, backed off of the sidewalk, and went all the way to the other side of the road.
I imagined she was one of the countless Neapolitans who might have come here from up north with her husband or partner, back during one of the many Southwest Florida real estate booms. Might have been ten years ago, might have been thirty, or fifty. Planning retirement or already retired, they bought a condo on or near the beach. They played golf on Wednesdays and Saturdays –– got up very early on those mornings to reserve the best tee times. Ate dinner by 5:30 every evening. Managed to get in a game of Bridge or Bingo on Sundays with the other retirees.
Then one day, she, too, woke up to find puddles, bones, and stains where her loved ones had once been.
She yelled after me. “I said stay away!“
I continued west down the sidewalk, four very empty lanes of road now between us. “I’m leeeeaving,” I half sang. “See? Getting smaller means I’m moving away from you…”
She was quiet, and I thought that was the end of it until I heard a gunshot. The damn thing was loud, scared the hell out of me. I ducked into the drainage ditch for cover and reached for the .38 in my holster. I felt my heartbeat throughout my entire body. It had easily been a month since I’d even heard gunfire, and much longer since anyone had fired at me.
But had she actually fired at me?
“The hell are you doing!?” I shouted.
There was no response.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“Ma’am? Why did you shoot?”
I heard running footsteps – too fast to be an old lady’s. I looked over the top of the ditch and saw Claude sprinting down the sidewalk toward the noise, a revolver in his hand.
“Bill? Bill? Are you here?” He was nearing the break in the hedge across the street.
“Get down, Claude! There’s some batshit crazy old lady in the baseball field. She shot at me!”
His footsteps slowed down and then stopped completely. I saw him peek around the hedge.
“No, Bill. Not at you.”
Aww, fuck.
I got up and joined him back on the other side of the road. There she lay, not far from second base, top of her head scattered in the outfield. Next to her body was a crude wooden cross made from broken baseball bats.
“I suppose she had seen enough,” Claude said, his accent somehow making the statement even sadder.
“So have I,” I replied, and put my gun away.
* * *
“Honey! Did you see this motherfu — are the kids in bed? This motherfucker in China, Xian Youqian, used an unproven gene editing technique on two embryos. Human embryos! Twins! He bragged about it at a convention saying that he believes the altered genes will make them immune to HIV. The Chinese government is supposedly condemning him and putting him in prison, but there’s no going back now. This is the stuff that gives me nightmares.”
After the baseball field incident, I lost my appetite for exploring. I asked Claude if he wanted to come back to the house I’d been living in, and he said he’d be happy for the company.
With a few hours to go until sunset, I brought him first to the strip mall where the big Publix grocery store was. I pried the doors open and we stood in the entryway near the shopping carts for a moment. He could see the fully-stocked shelves.
“The stores are untouched like this everywhere I went,” Claude said. “I believe there may be one entire supermarket for every person alive now.”
Perhaps he sensed that he’d burst my bubble a bit, so he tried clumsily to say something positive.
“But, this one is really magnificent, Bill. It does not even stink of rotten foods. How?”
I took his peace offering. “The power grid stayed on here for a good while. Then, after my family—” I grimaced and started over. “Once I was alone, this place was running on generator power, and I knew it was only good for about a week. I started taking all the perishables, like meats, produce, and frozen dinners, back to my freezers at home. What I couldn’t use, I threw over there for the animals to pick at.” I pointed through the glass doors toward a far corner of the large parking lot. “The smell was bad outside for a while, but it kept the store from stinking up when the generators finally failed.”
We continued into the main part of the store. The air was humid and stale from a lack of circulation, but it was not what it might have been had I left everything there to rot.
“So you always knew you were going to stay around here, then?”
“I suppose I did.” I took a box of Little Debbie Devil Squares from one of the “bogo” bins. Claude made a face but said nothing. “I never really saw the point in leaving Naples once it was clear I would survive.”
Claude pulled at his beard. “It was quite different for me,” he said, shaking his head as if the worst memories might fall out of it before he had to speak them aloud.
“Tell me,” I said gently.
“I came to Tampa with my wife about seven years ago. Eight? I forget. We both worked for AnthroTec, the BioMed company, and after a merger, they moved us to Tampa. It was one of those ‘take this new position or take a hike’ kind of situations. They never said it that directly, of course, but it was understood.”
“You didn’t like Tampa?”
“Not so much, no. At first, the idea was appealing. A new start in a new place with some new coworkers, but all within the context of a familiar and stable company. There was the added attraction of warm weather and beaches.”
“And being close to the theme parks,” I added.
“No, we didn’t have children, if you’re asking.” He looked at me and I blushed a little for not having asked more directly. My social skills were rusty.
“We were married not quite three years when the transfer happened, and once we were in Tampa, we thought, ah, well, it’s a good time and place to start a family. We were still young and we both had excellent jobs. Good benefits.”
We passed down a long isle filled with bottles of red, white, and rosé from every wine-producing country on the planet. Here were hundreds of wines that would slowly age, undisturbed, until they were either enjoyed or undrinkable.
Claude opted for enjoying. He browsed carefully and then picked one.
“You like white? This is a wonderful sauvignon blanc from the Willamette Valley in Oregon.”
“Sure,” I said. “I don’t know much about wine, so I’ll trust you. You have the French accent.”
“French Canadian accent”, he wagged a finger at me with a smile. “Still, my tastes are very traditional. What I wouldn’t give for some cheese and bread to go with this.”
“I can help you there.”
“Ah? But how?”
“You’ll understand when we get home.”
We walked back outside to a brilliant sky. The remaining light split the clouds into alternating rays of blood orange and sapphire blue – undeniably Florida. Claude saw it and simply whistled. We enjoyed it in silence for a moment, and then I pointed the way home.
“To make a long story short,” he said, “after almost four years of trying, we did not get pregnant, and soon after, we did not get along either. Eventually, we drew straws – literally – and I was the one who had to change jobs. She would leave the house.”
“Wait, you drew actual straws to see who had to leave their job and who had to move out?”
“We worked too closely together, and we argued at home about everything. It was an impossible situation, so drawing straws was a fast way to decide who did what. Believe me, the less time we had to debate something, the better. I picked the short one and one hour later — bing, I handed in my notice.”
Claude snipped the wine bottle with a fingernail to emphasize the bing sound of finality. He looked at me, eyebrows raised.
“Go on,” I said.
“I harbored this notion that absence might make the heart grow fonder, so truthfully, I didn’t really mind leaving AnthroTec. In fact, after a few months of separation, we were able to be civil around each other. I foolishly thought we might be working toward a reunion when one day she brought me divorce papers and told me she was seeing someone else. I will fast-forward through the renewed anger and blaming, the arguing and the divorce and go right to the ‘poor me’ part: the next time I saw her after that, she had a nice, big belly.” He mimicked pregnancy over his own, very flat midsection.
“Ouch!” I felt the pain of it, and the exclamation left my mouth before I could stop myself.
“Yes! A thousand times ‘Ouch!’ In my head. In my soul.”
I didn’t know what to say apart from, “That’s fucked up, man.”
“More than you can imagine, I hope.”
I indicated where to turn. “It’s a few blocks around this curve. A two-story home on the southwest corner.”
“So now you have heard my tale of woe, Bill. Do you wish to share yours?”
I sighed. I did not wish, but I remembered enough about social norms to feel the weight of the obligation. Then I thought of a question.
“Well, wait. What happened to her? To them? Do you know?”
“Dead. All dead. I checked on them after the news that Crisper had spread to the United States. Her new beau thought they could maybe get to Mexico.” He let out a cynical laugh, then went quiet for a few seconds. “She was sick first, then the baby girl, and finally, the man. They never made it out of Tampa.”
I remembered pretty much all of the inevitable rumors and conspiracy theories. The last one was that a real patch had been developed in Mexico City. By then, reliable mass media was gone, the journalists mostly dead. The Mexico rumor was the last tiny whisper of hope. It was something people grabbed a hold of, and a lot of them spent their remaining days or weeks on this planet trying to get there before they got sick.
“Why would she fall for The Mexico rumor? You worked in BioMed. Surely she knew better.”
“We were on the IT support team, Bill. I wouldn’t know a gene from a chromosome if they hadn’t explained it all during the outbreak.”
“Oh!” I said, a little too surprised. “That’s too bad. I mean, I’m sorry. It’s just, I actually had questions that I was hoping you could answer.”
“You want to know if it was made in a lab like ours?”
“For one thing, yeah.”
“No. It was all China, and my peers said it was all a mistake, an honest, terrible mistake. Once the Swine Fever reached a critical point, they were desperate to stop it, and the bad decisions began.”
We had arrived at the house, and as I turned up the walkway, Claude whistled once again.
“You have chosen a fine place, my new friend!”
“Just wait, Claude.” I opened the front door.
The foyer extended into an immense great room. Kitchen and dining to the right, living area in front. Great glass doors opened to a screened-in lanai overlooking a big lawn where some trucks were parked. All along the inside walls were large metal chests, twelve of them.
“Are those freezers?” Claude asked.
“They are.”
“But…how?”
“Follow me.”
We put our things on the counter, and I led him through the lanai to the back yard. The sight elicited another whistle from Claude.
“You were in tech,” I said. “I was in something a little less exciting: liquid propane gas, or LPG.”
He looked at me with a furrowed brow.
“There’s nothing special about my story. I lost my wife and my two children to Crisper Death, just like billions of others. I couldn’t bear to stay in that house, which is only a few blocks from here,” I nodded vaguely down the street. “I knew about this house because I had supervised the installation of a one-thousand gallon LPG tank here. It powers a whole-house generator around the corner, connected to the main panel.”
“But it’s not running. I hear nothing.”
“It doesn’t have to, for how I use it. I rarely use the air conditioning, for one thing. And I only turn the generator on at night for lights, fans, and the freezers. Those freezers will do their job for days without electricity, but I fire up the generator for about eight hours overnight to keep the temperature consistent.”
“And these giant trucks,” he asked. “They contain more of this fuel?”
“Exactly. Five long trucks, each filled with eleven thousand gallons of compressed propane. I filled and drove them here from our plant myself, one at a time. Each one of those can refill the generator’s tank about a dozen times. The system was designed to run this whole big house, air conditioning and all, for up to two weeks on one tank in case of an extended outage, like from a hurricane. The way I use it, it’s much, much more efficient. In fact, I’ve only refilled it once since the power grid failed.”
I led him back inside. “So you see,” I opened a freezer and pulled out a vacuum-packed brick of sharp cheddar and a plastic-wrapped baguette. “All we have to do tonight is warm things up in the microwave — or the gas oven, if you prefer.”
* * *
“Did you read this, Billy? Over 350 million pigs have been slaughtered in China this year because they were infected with African Swine Fever. Not the Swine Flu — it says here we can’t get it, not even by eating infected pork. But they have to kill the pigs to stop the disease from spreading to every pig in China. They’ve already killed one-quarter of the world’s pork supply.”
Every few weeks, Claude would say he thought it was time for him to hit the road again. I’d tell him I understood, and that he was always welcome to come back whenever he wanted. Then a few days would pass, and he’d come up with an excuse to stay. I should wait for cooler weather. I might need a new backpack before I leave. My knee is bothering me a bit this morning. Eventually, he gave up the charade and seemed content in staying. We had both tried unsuccessfully not to care about someone again.
We continued to explore as much as possible, though at this point, we had pretty much taken inventory of all of Naples. Once in a while, we would drive, as there were plenty of cars and no shortage of gasoline. It felt good to go fast with the windows down for a while. Mostly, though, we walked and talked.
Over time, we had worn some trails through the grassy areas, shortcuts that made the trips to the two local communities faster than following the strict grid of paved roads. Wherever we hadn’t been walking, flowering weeds and small native palms began to fill in the spaces of formerly manicured fields and lawns.
The community that was nearest to the Gulf of Mexico now called itself “Longshore”, and consisted of roughly seventy people. Like me, they had simply taken over houses in an existing neighborhood. They found ways to minimize the use of electricity and maximize its generation with help from hundreds of solar panels that many of the homes had once used for heating their swimming pools. Apparently, someone there had the knowledge necessary to make the panels’ output work for basic alternating current needs.
The other community, several miles east of Longshore, had grown some, but still only counted forty-three people. The newest arrivals were the only known intact family, the Millers. All five of them had survived The Bug.
As Claude and I sat down to lunch with Bruce, the de facto head of the community, we asked about the Millers.
“They don’t know what spared them. They’re a religious family, owned a farm — that’s where we got these animals.”
I looked around and realized that there were now dairy cows, chickens, and goats. A welcome addition to any community.
“So the Lord saved them, then?” Claude asked.
“Sure,” Bruce said, rolling his eyes. “If that makes ‘em happy. I didn’t ask why the Lord saw fit to decimate every other religious family on the planet. Anyway, it was Patricia – the mother – who decided they needed to seek out a community again. We’re glad they chose The Jewel.”
“The Jewel?” I smiled. “What kind of post-apocalyptic name is that? How are you going to scare away the bad guys?”
We laughed. “It’s okay,” Bruce said. “I don’t think we could come up with anything scarier than reality anyway.”
* * *
“For fuck’s sake! Oh, I’m so sorry, kids. Ignore Mommy’s language. Where’s Dad? Billy? That Chinese doctor, remember Xian Youqian, the freak who was playing with human embryos a bunch of years ago? Apparently, the Chinese government has released him from prison — as if he was ever there — and given him permission to use the same technology to put an end to the latest outbreak of African Swine Fever. They think he can use this ‘CRISPR’ thing on pig genes to make them resistant to the virus, or… I don’t really understand. Basically, it’s viruses and gene editing, and they chose that guy to do it because, you know, there’s no better example of biomedical ethics in the entire country of China than the guy who practiced on humans first!”
On one cooler, drier night, Claude and I sat in the front yard by a fire pit, and I grilled some steaks. Someday, I imagine, I’ll have to learn how to kill and butcher a cow myself, or ask one of the Miller family to do it for me. Until then, I have frozen beef that should be good for a while.
As the first bites delivered on what the delicious aroma had promised, I asked Claude what he remembered about Crisper Death.
“Well, I only worked on the computer networks at AnthroTec, but we were required to learn a lot about what people were doing there in order to meet their software and hardware needs. So, I probably knew more than most when it happened. I also had people I could ask about it even after I left — not that knowing anything made a difference.”
We hadn’t talked much about it after we first met. Survivors generally didn’t find it necessary, except when remembering those we lost. Still, as we approached the anniversary of the first human deaths, it was on our minds.
“So what did all of your illegal hacking uncover?” I asked with a smile. He laughed.
“No hacking required. It really was all about pigs. The African Swine Fever of 2018-2019 was horrible in China.”
“You mean 2022.” I picked at some fat between my teeth. “I think that’s when Gretchen told me about it.”
“No no no, it happened first in 2018 and continued into 2019, but with everything else going on at that time, no one outside of the pork trade really paid attention. The Chinese had to slaughter over three hundred and fifty million pigs — about one-quarter of the world’s pork supply — to prevent the fever from spreading. But the Chinese didn’t exactly tell the truth about eradicating the disease. The virus persisted, especially in smaller, rural farms, where people didn’t have the resources to sterilize their pens and equipment properly. They’d slaughter their sick pigs, do an inadequate clean-up, then buy more pigs which would just end up getting infected.”
“So wait, the 2022 outbreak was just a continuation from 2019?”
“Absolutely. Only worse.” He took a sip of wine — an Australian red he chose earlier in the evening. “That’s the one you probably remember, because it was right before The Bug. More than half of the world’s remaining pork was destroyed that year as the virus spread throughout Asia.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Do you remember the name Xian Youqian?”
“Yeah, the fucker who played around with modifying human embryos. Instead of putting him in prison, the Chinese put him in charge of trying to eradicate African Swine Fever.” I hoped my memory, and my language, honored Gretchen.
“Exactly. What everyone eventually called ‘Crisper Death’ came from the acronym ‘CRISPR’, which stands for some shit I can’t remember. It basically allows for targeting specific gene pairs, and doing a cut-and-paste on them, just like a word processor.”
He paused for more wine and grinned. “See? I still think like a computer guy. ‘Cut and paste’. Anyway, CRISPR was actually a DNA sequence from a bacteria that showed promise in preventing viral infections — and yes, even the HIV that Xian said he was working on. The thinking was, let’s use this to create an acquired immunity to Swine Fever.” He stopped, looking for the words he wanted. “It was like any vaccine that makes your body’s immune system recognize an invader and destroy it, but on the genetic level. It wouldn’t even give the virus a foothold.”
I hesitated, then surprised myself by saying, “That’s actually brilliant, isn’t it?”
“It was! But it wasn’t even close to ready for prime time, as we found out. The scientific community was mostly horrified by what Xian had done with the twin embryos — it was way too early for human experimentation. Once again, science was far ahead of ethics, morality, and law.”
I put a fresh pile of oak twigs on the fire and stoked it a bit. Claude continued.
“But the Chinese allowed Xian to use CRISPR again anyway, before their pork industry collapsed completely. In the end, using a bacterial defense mechanism that wasn’t yet fully understood as a way to stop a virus that also wasn’t fully understood was, to use a technical phrase I picked up at AnthroTec, fucking dumb.”
I couldn’t bring myself to laugh, but I’m not sure Claude was joking anyway.
“I’ll put on my computer guy hat one more time: Xian accidentally inserted bad code — a bug, just like in a computer program. It replicated, just like a virus. The software patch wasn’t released in time. And remember, The Bug is still out there.”
“But why did it…” The images in my head wouldn’t let me finish the question. Claude saw my anguish and understood.
“Why did it do the horrible thing it did? The best theory I was given was that whatever Xian created was great at the cutting part, but somehow forgot the pasting part. The virus probably mutated. It caused DNA to denature until all that was left was the hell we witnessed.”
I decided to let the fire die down as we sat in the night air for a while.
“Claude, do you remember that show New Science on PBS?”
“Yes, I watched it once in a while. Loved the ones about space exploration.”
“They had an episode right around the beginning of the pandemic. It was about the origins of life. I can’t get this one video sequence out of my head. They were discussing the ‘primordial soup’ that existed in the oceans of Earth. All of the different elements that were necessary to form DNA were just floating around for millions of years until something happened to bring them together and spark life.”
Claude closed his eyes. “Right. That primordial soup…”
“Yeah,” I said. “Primordial soup and bones.”
* * *
Spring arrived. There was not much of a difference in Southwest Florida’s seasons, but the humidity was returning and the days were growing longer. The real rainy season hadn’t started yet, but the warmer days and occasional drizzle had gotten things growing again. Our trails were still mostly dry, but once in a while, we’d come across an unexpected mud puddle.
Claude and I had been to Longshore and The Jewel many times over the winter months. As they developed their own identities and slang, we began to think of them more as villages than informal communities. We theorized that others like them probably existed around the country, and that sooner or later, there would be contact.
There was a little bit of bartering in the villages now for the handmade things, but most people willingly continued to share what they had. I always thought of Gretchen when someone handed me a bottle of fresh milk to enjoy, or when Claude and I walked miles back to our house without worrying about roving gangs in armored Hummers shooting at us with mounted machine guns. What was left now was mostly good.
Until one day, it wasn’t.
That day, we went to The Jewel to see if they had any fresh chèvre to spare. Bruce greeted us, pale and nervous.
“What’s up, Bruce? You look like you’ve seen a goat!” I joked. “Get it? Goat?”
“I have,” he said. “I’ve seen a sick goat.”
My heart dropped.
Claude and I followed him to the pens. Even though it was in the early stages, there was no denying what it was.
“Jesus. Why now?” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry.
“I think because it is inevitable,” Claude said, his voice shaky. “Viruses want to survive, too. So they must adapt.”
We decided to stay in one of the many spare homes at The Jewel. The mood there was understandably the worst we’d ever seen. People went about their business, but there was no joy again, only anxiety. The Millers tended to the animals, praying often. It didn’t seem so laughable to me now.
By the next morning, the goat was, for lack of a better description, melting from the inside out. The Bug was confirmed.
Over the next week, one by one, the goats each died the same horrible death. We waited in fear for another week. The cows remained healthy. The chickens laid eggs. The people were alarmed, but alive.
Claude and I seized the moment of budding optimism to leave. We asked Bruce to send for us should anything else happen.
For hours, Claude and I walked in silence along one of our trails. Then he stopped and asked a question.
“I don’t want to make a problem where there isn’t one, Bill,” he started, “but did you happen to notice if it rained at all while we were at The Jewel?”
I thought for a minute, unconcerned by the question. “Hmm. Not that I recall. Perhaps a sprinkle or two while we slept. Nothing like we’ll be getting soon, though. Why?”
He looked down at his feet. I did the same.
At first, I didn’t see it. Or at least, I didn’t want to see it. Our trail wasn’t muddy. It was…gooey.
The flowers, the palms, the weeds, the grass.
They were melting.