The Genesis Plague (2010)

She who holds dominion over beasts and men

She who is the Screech Owl, the Night Creature

She who sows vengeance and retribution on all men

Before the moon had twice come

Fathers and sons, all, were dead

Her hand touched them not

Bathed in blood they perished, destroyed from within

No mother or daughter did she punish

She commanded the rivers to consume the land

The demon who killed the many

The one sent by the great creator to end all

‘Okayyyy,’ Flaherty said. ‘That is creepy.’

‘Tommy, those skeletons Jason found in that cave were all the men in that village. And this is saying Lilith killed all of them,’ Brooke emphasized.

‘How?’

‘If she didn’t use physical force, then I’d assume she spread some kind of disease that made them bleed to death.’

‘What kind of disease kills everyone in two days? And only males?’ The car interior was silent for a moment as they contemplated what they’d just heard. ‘Whoever wrote that must have been exaggerating,’ he suggested. ‘Maybe they all got food poisoning or something and just didn’t know who to blame.’

‘Food poisoning would have killed the women too,’ she muttered, looking back at her notes.

‘Well, at least it explains why all those teeth found at Fort Detrick all came from males. What good are the teeth, anyway?’ But when he looked over, he saw that she was deep in thought. ‘Brooke?’

Teeth. Pestilence. Males. ‘Oh my God,’ she said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Just recently, in an archaeology journal I read about these excavations of mass graves in France and Germany where plague victims had been buried,’ she explained. ‘In ancient specimens, plague leaves an imprint in the pulp of victims’ teeth. These archaeologists had found perfectly preserved Yersinia pestis DNA in the teeth.’

‘Yur-what DNA?’

‘Yersinia pestis is the bacterium that causes bubonic plague. It gets into your lymph nodes, replicates like crazy, and makes you slowly haemorrhage to death,’ she explained.

‘Pleasant.’

‘During the sixth century, it was called the “Plague of Justinian”, killed a quarter of the people in the eastern Mediterranean and stopped the Byzantine emperor, Justinian, from reuniting Eastern and Western Europe under the Holy Roman Empire. And remember from history class when in the fourteenth century the Black Death killed half the population of Europe?’

He nodded. ‘Actually, I do.’

‘That was bubonic plague too. It became a pandemic and killed over a hundred million people worldwide … at that time, almost a quarter of the world’s population.’

‘Jeez, and we’re worried about the lousy flu,’ he said. ‘But the Black Death didn’t just kill men,’ he pointed out. ‘And you’re saying it might have killed half of them … not all of them.’

‘True,’ she admitted. ‘And the Black Death took a lot longer than two days to spread. It took months.’

‘So you think something like the Black Death killed these guys?’

‘With such a high mortality rate, probably something worse. I’m no epidemiologist. I mean, humans have been fighting these kinds of diseases ever since they started living in sedentary settlements. Since Iraq was home to the earliest cities and gave birth to agriculture, Mesopotamians would have been among the first people to transmit infectious disease. They’d have picked up all sorts of germs from domesticated cows, sheep, chickens, you name it. So it makes sense. And these men that Lilith killed belonged to a sizable, relatively isolated population. If they had no immunity to a disease brought in by an outsider, it would have spread like wildfire.’

Flaherty slowed to make a left on to North Hollywood Boulevard. ‘All right, let’s hold off on this for a little while, because we’re almost there. We need to talk about how we’re going to handle this Stokes character.’

‘He may not even be here, Tommy.’

‘He’ll be here,’ Flaherty replied confidently. ‘Remember: he needs that encrypted phone line to talk with Crawford.’

Nestled at the foot of a desert mountain, the modern edifice of the megachurch glinted in the afternoon sun.

‘Holy cow, will you look at that,’ he said.

‘Wow. It’s huge.’

‘Supposedly seats up to ten thousand.’

51

IRAQ

Jason was inside the tunnel entrance when he heard the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire. He dropped the rubble-filled bucket he’d just taken from the marine in front of him, ran to the opening, and squatted low. Then he cautiously poked his head out and scanned the camp. Behind him, four marines queued up.

‘I heard it too,’ one of the marines said. ‘What’s going on?’

Jason held up a fist to signal for them to remain quiet.

In the moonlight, he could see a marine crossing the roadway - presumably the shooter. On the other side of the road, the scout swiftly moved around a hillock with the stock of his M-16 raised up against his shoulder. The other marines stayed back and hunkered down to cover him.

Then the scout lowered his weapon and shook his head, pointing to something that lay on the ground behind the hillock. Jason couldn’t hear clearly what the scout was saying, but saw five marines go out to have a look at what he’d shot. When the scout reached down and held up a limp, bloody fox by its tail, they all lowered their weapons and gave him a good ribbing.

Jason didn’t like the fact that the scout was so quick to shoot a suspicious target. What if instead that had been some curious Iraqi kid who just wanted to see what was going on? He sighed and turned to the others. ‘False alarm.’

Disappointed, they went back to their positions as Jason grabbed his bucket and lugged it outside.

As he dumped the stones down the slope, he was surprised to see that the carefree marines remained out on the open road, clustered together, heckling the shooter. Why wasn’t Crawford or Richards reprimanding them?

‘Not smart, fellas,’ he grumbled to himself.

Jason scanned the area, but Crawford and his officers were nowhere to be found. Probably back in the tent grilling Al-Zahrani again, he guessed. Ten minutes ago, one of the marines who’d been assigned to watch over the prisoner came looking for Crawford, visibly distressed. But another man had redirected him down the hill to where Crawford had gone to check on the men working inside the MRAP. Now Jason was wishing he’d asked the guard if there was a problem.