White Horse

“Do you still do that?”

“Only if my date turns out to be a woman.”

The dimple in his cheek twitches. Am I serious and therefore nuts, or am I the perennial comedienne, stowing my pain under a funny blanket? Am I in dire need of analysis? Would I make a great research paper wedged somewhere between obsessive-compulsive plucking and multitasking personality disorder?

“If this is ongoing, you should be in therapy,” he says.

“Do you think?”

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re here.”

I lean back. Take a small sip. Arrange my lie.

“I’ve been having this dream about a jar. Not the grape jelly kind—the old kind. It’s the color of scorched cream.”

“How does it make you feel, this dream?”

“Terrified….”

“It’s old,” James Witte tells me. Letters trail after his name, interspersed with periods to denote that he’s spent a whole lot of time with his head in books and his mind in the past. He’s an assistant curator at the National Museum. An old friend, although he looks the same as the day we graduated high school: thin, narrow-shouldered, pale. His eyes gleam as he circles the jar.

“Really old.”

“Is that a technical term?”

He laughs. I get a flash of him sucking on a beer bong at a postgrad party. “Yeah, it’s technical. Translation: I don’t know how old it is, but it’s really fucking old.”

“Wow. That is old.”

“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s Greek. Maybe Roman. The curve of the handles, the way they attach to the tapering trunk… But there’s no design. Yet, it’s symmetrical, which would suggest it was made on a wheel. And everything made on the wheel had some design, be it painted or etched.”

A soft shadow bats at the window. My next door neighbor’s cat, Stiffy. Because Ben’s a teenage boy living in the basement of a grown man’s body. The window barely has time to scrape against the frame before the marmalade beast’s squeezing underneath, launching his invasion.

“Can I take it?” James asks. “I’ll bring it back. But I can give you a much better idea of when and where it’s from if I can inspect it in my own space. That way I can get other opinions if I can’t figure it out. Our new intern sorts potsherds like some kind of savant. The other interns call him Rain Man.”

I’d trust James with my life. We’ve been friends since tenth grade when he moved to the area from Phoenix. He’s steady. Loyal. Decent to the bone. So I tell him what I can’t tell Dr. Rose: that someone sneaked into my home and I’m driving myself slightly nuts wondering how and why. All except the fear. I hold that close to my bones lest it seem trite, thin.

He listens intently. That’s how James has always listened. Every so often he asks a question and I do my best to answer it.

“Why don’t you just open the thing?”

“It’s not mine to open.”

On the door, the locks feign innocence. Don’t blame us, the security system failed you. The panel blinks silently. It’s just a robot awaiting instructions from a mother ship in a building downtown.

“Why not toss it in the dumpster?”

“It’s not mine to throw away.”

“Leave it to me.” He grins. “I love a good mystery. Worst case I’ll bring Rain Man here. I’ll tell him it’s a date.”

Stiffy rubs against my skin, his purr vibrating all the way up to my knees as he figure-eights my shins.

“Aha, so he’s cute, then?”

“Tasty. And smart. Can’t beat that with a stick.”

“Bring him over. I’ll make lasagna.”

The cat detaches himself from my legs and saunters over to the jar. He circles it twice, then sits a foot away, tail tucked neatly around him in a protective ring. With a fascination bordering on obsession, he stares at the jar.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” James says.

DATE: NOW

On the second morning after we leave the farmhouse, Lisa vomits. The sky is dim through the thickly leaved canopy that conceals us from the road and sky. Under here, the weather is mostly dry, with a chance of frigid drips.

For once, I don’t. Cold beans scooped from a can with a jagged edge settle in my stomach in a nourishing gelatinous lump.

Up ahead is a village. Maybe two miles away. It’s a black dot on a map, nameless but present. We should go around, avoid contact if there’s any to be made. I look at Lisa bent at the waist, unleashing her beans onto the ground. Her hair is in my hands. Poor kid. Although I run the risk of making myself sick, I glance at the mess she’s made. No blood. At least not yet.

Vitamins. They might have vitamins in the town. We could both use them.

“I’m sorry.”

The retching travels all the way from her toes.

“Don’t be. You can’t help it.”

Her thin shoulders shake. “Do you think I’ve got White Horse?”

White Horse. The plague that killed the world’s population. Some preacher down south with a too-big mouth and a popular cable TV show heard voices from God telling him these were the end-times. Dying people had nothing better to do, so they watched. It was that or listen to the static that used to be daytime television.

That preacher named the virus White Horse.

“The first seal is opened and the white horse has come with its deadly rider to test us with Satan’s disease. Any man, woman, or child who doesn’t believe and accept Jesus Christ as his or her savior will die from this White Horse. The nonbelievers will burn in the pits of hell, wishing they’d had the courage to accept the Lord. They will writhe and burn, their souls thick with maggots. This plague is the white horse. And the other three are coming….”

Everyone assumed it would be a flu-like illness that would knock us out of the evolutionary tree, but it wasn’t anything so merciful. White Horse was like nothing in the medical books except maybe late-stage cancer. The CDC and WHO barely had time to react when people began running to their doctors in droves, toting sick bags and buckets, begging for something to stop the nausea. The vomit turned bloody as the protective cells, designed to stop the stomach acids from burning holes and leaking into the body, sloughed away. Within days the vomiting quit, only to be replaced with nonspecific aches, some more severe than others.

Then a scientist came forward and told us what we had no way of guessing.

“White Horse is not a disease as such. It’s a mutation. Some outside source has flipped switches in our DNA, turning on some genes, turning off others.” He struggled to keep the words simple enough for the public to understand. Speech faded to mumbles when time came for the media to ask their questions. Enlightenment sans illumination.

I could lie and tell her no, or I could lie and tell her yes. So I take the chickenshit truth route.

“I don’t know.”

She speaks through the bile foam. “I don’t want to die.”

I pull a tissue from my pocket so she can wipe her lips.

“We all die sooner or later.”

“Later sounds better.”

“We should make a bucket list,” I say.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a list of everything we want to do before we die at the ripe old age of three digits. Like skydiving. Or