"The smell's worse here on the porch. Give us the key."
"Get off my property!"
"The drapes are closed. I can't see through the windows."
"I'm telling you to leave!"
"That smell is…Somebody help me break in the door."
Amid Bingaman's screaming protest, they crashed in, and the stench that made several men vomit came unmistakably from the parlor. Bingaman's wife had been dead for six weeks. Her gray-skinned, gas-bloated corpse was smeared with strawberry jam and camphor oil. Quinine and aspirin pills had been stuffed inside her mouth until her cheeks bulged and her teeth were parted. A dill pickle also protruded from her mouth. Her exposed back resembled a pin cushion, except that the pins were large hypodermics which the doctor had pressed between her ribs and inserted into her lungs, desperately trying to extract the fluid that had drowned her. Several pails contained foul-smelling, yellow liquid.
"Marion." Bingaman stroked her hair. "I'm sorry. I tried to keep them away. I know how much you like your naps. Why don't you try to go back to sleep?"
The pandemic's peak coincided with the armistice in Europe, the declaration of peace, November 11, 1918. Thereafter, as armies disbanded and exhausted soldiers began their long journey home, the flu did not return with them to reinforce the infectious microbes that were already in place. To the contrary, against all logic, the disease began to lose its strength, and by the end of 1919, during the dead of winter, when the symptoms of the flu – exacerbated by cold weather – should have been at their worst, the pandemic approached its end. A few remote areas – Pacific islands and jungle outposts – remained to suffer the onslaught. Otherwise, having scoured the entire world, making no distinction between Eskimo villages and European metropolises, the Spanish influenza came to an end.
Bingaman, whose face would never regain its former ruddy cheerfulness and whose already thinning, silvery hair had fallen completely out because of his intense fever, rested, as did his fellow survivors. Of Elmdale's population of twelve thousand, eight thousand had collapsed with symptoms. Of those, two thousand had died. The remaining four thousand had worked nonstop to care for the sick and to bury the dead. Some, of course, had refused to help under any circumstances, for fear of being infected. They would have to make their peace with God.
Humanity had been tested. During the major outbreaks of the Black Death in Europe during the Middle Ages, it was estimated that twenty-five million had died. The number of soldiers estimated to have been killed during the five years of the Great War was eight and one-half million. The latter figure Bingaman learned from his increasingly long nights communicating with radio operators in America and Europe. But the estimated number of worldwide deaths caused by the influenza was perhaps as much as fifty million. Even more astonishing, the total number of those presumed to have been infected by the disease was two-hundred million, one twentieth of the world's population. If the pandemic had continued at its exponential, devastating rate, the human race might have been exterminated by the spring of 1920. Listening to his fellow radio operators around the country and around the globe, Bingaman shared their sense of helplessness and loss. But he also sympathized with a latent hope in some of their comments. Yes, the cream of American and European youth had been eradicated in the war. What the war had failed to accomplish, the flu had taken care of among the other age groups. Society had been gutted.
But what if… and this idea was almost unthinkable, and yet a few had given it voice, based on their reading of Charles Darwin…what if the pandemic had been a means of natural selection and now that the strong had survived, humanity would be better for it, able to improve itself genetically? Such a materialistic way of thinking was repugnant to Bingaman. He had heard enough about Darwinism to know that it was based on a theory of random events, that at bottom it was atheistic and worshipped accident. For Bingaman, there was no such thing as randomness and accident. Everything was part of a cosmic plan and had an ultimate purpose, and any theory that did not include God was unacceptable. But another theory was acceptable, and it was this that gave him hope -that this plague, one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, had been God's way of demanding humanity's attention, of warning the survivors about their sins, and of granting them an opportunity to learn from their transgressions, to make a fresh start.
"Like the war," Bingaman said to Marion, who had walked into his study three weeks after her funeral. He had looked up from his tears and smiled. He'd been talking to her ever since. "The flu was God's warning that there must never be another war like this one. Isn't that what they've been calling it? The War To End All Wars? I'm convinced this is an opportunity to look ahead."
Marion didn't respond.
"Also, I've been reading about the movement to make prohibition an amendment to the Constitution," Bingaman said. "When the saloons were closed to help keep the flu from spreading, it was obvious how much better society was without them. People have seen the error of their ways. The saloons will stay closed."
Still, Marion didn't respond.
"And something else," Bingaman said. "You know I always try to be optimistic. I'm convinced that society will benefit in other ways from the flu's devastation. We came so close to dying, all of us, the world. So now we'll all learn to cherish life more, to respect it, to be better. This decade's ending. A new one's about to start. A fresh beginning. It's going to be fascinating to see how we recover from so much death."
Marion continued to remain silent.
"One thing troubles me, though," Bingaman said. "On the wireless last night, I heard about a medical researcher in New York City who discovered that influenza isn't caused by a bacteria but by a virus. In theory, that information ought to make it easier to develop a cure. Normally." He frowned. "All things being equal, we should be able to develop a vaccine. But not in this case. Because the researcher also discovered that the influenza virus is constantly mutating. Any vaccine would be effective only for a limited time. Meanwhile the ever-changing virus could come back in an even more deadly form. Or a different and worse virus might come along."
For the first time, Marion spoke. "God help us." She coughed. Blood-tinted saliva beaded her bluish-black lips.
Bingaman shuddered, afraid that he was going to lose her a second time, that the horror would be repeated, again and again. "Yes, that's what it comes down to. An act of faith. God help us. Remember how fervently we tried to have children, how deeply disappointed we were to find that we couldn't? We told ourselves that it wasn't meant to be, that God had given us a burden to test our faith. Perhaps it was for the best." He sobbed as Marion's image faded. "I couldn't bear to lose anyone else."
Outside the study window, snow had begun to fall. A chill wind swept through the skeletal elms, burying the last of their fungus-wilted yellow leaves.
This mini-novel was written For another Al Sarrantonio anthology: 999, NewStories of Horror and Suspense(1999). I enjoy doing Fiction that's intimately connected to the location in which it occurs. when I lived in lowa City, I Europe a number of tales about the haunting expanse of the Midwest. When I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I became interested in the Fictional possibilities of what locals call the Land of Enchantment and the City Different. "Rio Grande Gothic" begins a couple of blocks From where I live and involves a phenomenon that I started noticing about ten years ago-shoes lying in the middle of the road, different ones each day. I later discovered that this isn't only a Santa Fe curiosity. Throughout the U.S. other communities started noticing the same thing. Conspiracy theorists take note.