Ah, Shaffery! How disappointed he would have been in his Times obit, two paragraphs buried under the overhang of a pop singer’s final notice. But afterward…
The first victim was Larry Nesbit, airsick in his Learjet all the way back to New York, overcome during the taping of his TV show, and dying the next day. The next victims were the Board of Directors, every man. They started home, by plane and boat. Some of them made it, but all of them died: en route or in Las Vegas, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Long Branch, New Jersey. Some of the “assistants” died and some were spared. (Briefly.) The reason was not a mystery for very long. The source of the new plague was tracked down quickly enough to Mr. Nuccio’s antipasto, and particularly to the preserved mushrooms that Shaffery had borrowed for his experiment.
The botulinus toxin was long recognized as the most deadly poison known to man. The mutated version that Shaffery and his dentist’s X-rays had brought into being was not much more deadly, but it had another quality that was new and different. Old, established Clostridium botulinum is an organism with a feeble hold on life; expose it to light and air, and it dies. B. shafferia was more sturdy. It grew where it was. In anything. In Mr. Nuccio’s antipasto, in a salad in a restaurant kitchen, in Mom’s apple pie on a windowsill to cool, in the human digestive tract. There were nine deaths in the first five days, and then for a moment no more. The epidemiologists would not have bothered their heads about so short a casualty list if it had not been for the identities of some of the victims. But the bacteria was multiplying. The stain of vomit under the boardwalk at Long Branch dried; the bacteria turned into spores and were blown on the wind until they struck something damp and fertile. Whereupon they grew. The soiled Kleenex thrown from a Cadillac Fleetwood on the road leading from O’Hare to Evanston, the sneeze between flights at Miami, expectorations in a dozen places—all added to the score. From the urine and feces of the afflicted men, from their sweat, even from their bed linen and discarded clothing, enspored bacteria leaped into the air and were inhaled, eaten, drunk, absorbed into cuts, in every way ingested into the waiting bodies of hundreds, then thousands, ultimately countless millions of human beings.
By the second week Detroit and Los Angeles were declared disaster areas. By the fourth the plague had struck every city in America and had leaped the oceans. If it had any merciful quality at all, it was that it was quick: an upset stomach, a sweat, a few pangs, and then death. None were immune. Few survived. Out of a hundred, three might outlive the disease. But then famine, riot and lesser ills took their toll; and of the billions who lived on the Earth when Shaffery exposed his antipasto in the dentist’s office, all but a few tens of millions died in the outbreak that the world will never forget of the disease called Shaffery’s Syndrome.