Alex Lukeman
Black Rose
Ring around the rosie,
A pocket full of posies,
Ashes, ashes,
All fall down.
Prologue
The city was dying.
Smoke and ash from the funeral pyres drifted from a metallic grey sky, covering everything with a layer of fine black soot, even the dome of the emperor's magnificent church. The dead and dying lay in rotting heaps throughout the city. The stench reached to the heavens.
A lone figure made his way through the deserted streets, a rag held over his mouth and nose. He stepped around a decomposing corpse. Fat, green flies swarmed around the body, crawling over the dead man's eyes and into his open mouth. The fingers of the corpse were black and rotten.
Andreas cursed the day he'd come here. At first it had been good. His reputation as a maker of good copper pots had spread and in a few months he'd started to earn decent money. Then the plague had come.
Some said it came from Egypt, some said from the underworld itself. Wherever it came from, there were not so many people now to wonder about it. Those that were left had given up any pretense of morality. They copulated in the streets, drank until they were unconscious, attacked the weak and defenseless. The thought made Andreas feel for the comforting shape of the dagger he kept under his tunic.
A sudden headache made him stumble. He felt thirsty, tired, and his stomach was uneasy. His throat burned. Fear rippled through his body. He lifted his tunic and searched for the outward signs of the disease, the black patches that spread like poisonous flowers over the doomed.
He found nothing and breathed a sigh of relief. It was probably just a headache. Who wouldn't be tired? He couldn't remember when he'd last had a good night's sleep or eaten a good meal. He'd been hiding with his wife and son. They should have left the city while they were still healthy but his wife had been afraid and now it was too late. The emperor had ordered the gates sealed before he'd died and no one had countered the order..
Hunger and the cries of his child had driven him into the streets. His destination was a bakery in the next alley. Andreas turned the corner and saw three men standing drunk in front of the shop. Through the open door of the shop, he saw the baker lying on the floor. The stones were stained red around him. Beyond the body, there was still a single loaf of bread on one of the shelves.
One of the men saw Andreas approaching and nudged his comrades. He raised a wineskin to his lips, swallowed and threw the empty skin to the side.
"What do you want?" he said. His words were slurred.
Andreas felt for his dagger. "Bread. A loaf of bread for my family."
"Go away," the man said. "This is our shop, our bread."
The second man peered at him through bloodshot eyes. "That's a nice tunic you're wearing," he said. "Give it to me."
Andreas drew his dagger. "All I want is bread for my child. Let me pass."
"Ooh," the leader said. "A pig sticker."
Suddenly the three men didn't seem so drunk anymore. The leader drew a long curved blade from behind his back. The second man drew a dagger from his belt. The third reached for a stout cudgel standing against the wall of the shop.
Andreas coughed, a deep. racking cough that shook his body in a violent spasm. He tasted blood, a sudden rush of warm liquid inside his mouth. He bent over and vomited a thick, red stream onto the cobbles.
The three men backed away in fear. Without another word, they turned and ran.
Andreas wiped his lips. He retched again, then staggered into the shop, stepped over the body of the baker and took the stale loaf from the shelf.
My poor family, he thought. What will you do when I'm gone?
In the broad central square of the city, the funeral pyres burned.
CHAPTER 1
The biological weapons lab where Kim Bong Cha worked was deep inside an abandoned gold mine in North Korea's Pinandok Mountain Range, invisible to the spy satellites of the West. Cha had been given a lot of responsibility for her twenty-seven years. Her superiors often praised her dedication. It was hard to find much to criticize about her, even in a society where criticism was a way of life.
If Cha had a flaw, it was bad judgment in men. She lived with a petty criminal named Hyo who made his living smuggling recordings of foreign television programs out of China and into the Democratic People's Republic. When he pulled off one of his deals there was good money and Hyo was happy. Hyo was always happy with money in his pocket and enough to drink. But the money never lasted and he would become surly and abusive until he found his next big score. Now he'd found it and he needed Cha to make it possible.
Hyo had been urgent this morning as Cha was getting ready to go to work, even scary. She could smell the first drink of the day on his breath. There was menace in his voice when he'd told her what he wanted.
She’d argued.
"Hyo, it’s dangerous. If I’m caught, they'll take me to one of the camps."
"You won't be caught. All you have to do is open the door."
It was his promise that they'd use the money to escape to the South that persuaded Cha to do what he'd asked. She’d always wanted to go to the South, away from the grim paranoia and poverty of the North. The forbidden television programs made it look like a magical place where everyone was happy and wealthy.
She looked at the clock on the wall. Almost time, she thought.
Cha was part of a team responsible for creating new biological weapons using genetic mutations in bacteria and viruses. She was working with a sample identified only as E495. At 200 X magnification, E495 looked like a rod-shaped clump of safety pins entwined in sticky strands and filaments. The bumps and filaments told her that the sample was from the family of Yersinia Pestis, bubonic plague. She'd worked with plague before but she'd never seen a sample like this. It was a mutation resurrected from the dead and given new life with the best genetic enhancements science could devise.
North Korea's scientists had manipulated genomes from the teeth of three skeletons unearthed in Turkey to bring it back to life. The sample under Cha's microscope hadn't come from a skeleton, though. It had been taken from the blood of a rat living in her laboratory.
The rat wouldn't be among the living for long.
The most common form of bubonic plague was well understood, the famous Black Death that had ravaged Europe and London in the Middle Ages. It responded to modern antibiotics and was seldom fatal, if caught in time. But E495 came from victims of an extinct strain that had swept through the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century. It was different from the common varieties. It always emerged as the pneumonic form, becoming airborne soon after the host was infected. All the rats and monkeys used for tests had died or were dying. They coughed and sneezed a lot before they died. The fatality rate was one hundred percent. So far, E495 had resisted all efforts to find a cure.
Cha tried not to think about why her country wanted to experiment with the lethal plagues and viruses she saw on a daily basis. It's not my concern, she told herself. She often told herself that things were not her concern. In the People's Democratic Republic of North Korea, the words were a mantra of survival.
Doctor Park would make the final evaluation, but she could see that this particular sample was different. The shape of the deadly bacillus was highly unusual. The bacteria were mutating. She made a final note, removed the specimen from her microscope and placed it back in its secure container. Once inside the container, the plague was isolated and safe.