Sometime: the Plague World

By Meredith Mason Brown

Dan Floyd, a retired and widowed lawyer, is doing his best to fill his timeattending church, keeping in touch with his two adult sons, and reading up on epidemics.

When he comes down with what seems like garden-variety flu, he amuses himself by studying plagues, both modern-day varieties and the biblical kind. Dan and his sons, one of whom is a doctor, share information and speculate about epidemics. Meanwhile, in the community around him, he begins to hear of people dying from complications brought on by the flumany of whom attend his church. Dan soon finds himself investigating members of the Starkherz family, three generations of doctors; it seems the Starkherzes were working with the H1N1 influenza virusthe source of the flu epidemic of 19181919in an attempt to neutralize it. Could their work serve as the source for a twenty-first-century flu pandemic?

In this novel, a retired lawyer works with his sons to discover the source of a deadly influenza epidemic that threatens their lives and the lives of everyone around them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480821637

Meredith Mason Brown

Meredith Mason Brown, a graduate of Groton, Harvard, and Harvard Law School, was a lawyer at Debevoise and Plimpton, primarily in New York City, for nearly forty years before he retired in 2004. He is the author and coauthor of several nonfiction books and numerous articles on American history. He currently lives in Stonington, Connecticut.

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Copyright © 2015 Meredith Mason Brown.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a novel, a work of fiction. The author is not a doctor of medicine. Names, characters, places and incidents in the book are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. But it is manifest that for thousands of years there have been in the past, and are likely to be in the future, plagues and pestilences which have killed large numbers of human deaths—numbers which could well grow sharply, in light of the steep growth over time in the human population.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-2162-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-2163-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015949528

Archway Publishing rev. date: 8/31/2015

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Contents

Death of the Firstborn

Acknowledgments

1. Sunday Service

2. Biblical Plagues and Pestilences

3. Emerods in Their Secret Parts; Pestilence in Mesopotamia

4. Plague in Athens, Flu All Over

5. The End of Grace

6. The Passing of the Rector

7. Bleak Midwinter

8. I Wish You a Merry Christmas

9. If All Els

10. Three Wise Men?

11. Helping Can Be Fatal

12. Spuyten Duyvil

13. Quarantine

14. Birdfall

15. To Every Thing There Is a Season

16. Threescore Years and Ten

17. Afterword

18. Bibliographical Note

For my wife Sylvia, our son Mason, our daughter-in-law Karen,

and our grandchildren John and Alison

Death of the Firstborn

Moses said, Thus says the Lord: About midnight I will go out through Egypt. Every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on the throne, to the firstborn of the female slave who is behind the handmill, and all the firstborn of the livestock. Then there will be a loud cry throughout the whole land of Egypt, such as has never been or will ever be again. (Exodus 11:4-6)

*     *     *

Then I said, "How long,

O Lord?" And he said:

"Until cities lie waste

without inhabitant,

and houses without people,

and the land is utterly desolate;

Until the Lord sends everyone far away,

and vast is the emptiness in the

midst of the land.

Even if a tenth part remain in it,

it will be burned again,

like a terabinth or an oak

whose stump remains standing

when it is felled." (Isaiah 6:11-13)

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without access to the copious notes taken by Daniel Floyd in the years after the death of his wife Elizabeth, and the painstaking transcription (decipherment would be a more accurate description, in light of Floyd’s small left-handed scribble) of those notes that was undertaken by Daniel Floyd’s sons Nathaniel and Michael, after their father died.

This shall be the plague with which the LORD will strike all the peoples that wage war against Jerusalem: … (Zechariah 14:12)

1.

Sunday Service

A young man’s T-shirt did not put the fear of God into Daniel Floyd, but it did give him something to think about. On a bright Sunday morning in late October, Dan, wearing a well-pressed blue suit, had been walking to St. James Church, Rockinam’s only Episcopal church, to attend the 10 o’clock service. He walked past the firehouse, and, several buildings beyond it, past a charred stone chimney. The chimney was all that was left of a colonial house that had burnt to the ground a few months earlier, after being set on fire by a young apprentice fireman who had recently joined the fire department. The novice lit the fire in an effort to impress the veteran firemen with his skills by starting the fire, issuing an alarm, and putting the fire out all by himself, before the fire trucks could come. It turned out that it was not easy for a single inexperienced would-be firefighter to extinguish a fire started in a centuries-old dry wooden house. The young man ended up badly burned, jobless, and in jail for arson. Daniel’s younger son Michael, who enjoyed being a wise-ass, referred to the young firefighter/firelighter as What’s-his-name? Is it Arson Welles?

When Dan was half a block from the church, a different young man, maybe in his mid-20s, came towards him down the sidewalk, carrying in his arms a smiling boy who was no more than 2 years old. The young man wore denims and a black T-shirt – clothes that clashed with Dan’s church suit. Dan had not seen him before.

Happy-looking kid you’ve got there, Dan said to the young man.

Thanks, the young man said. He’s a born smiler.

The young man walked past Dan. Dan turned to look at the back of the man’s black shirt, which bore something white on it. The white on black made the shirt look like a Halloween costume, which was timely, since Halloween was less than a week away, and many in Rockinam liked to dress up as Halloween drew near. Was the shirt design meant to look like a wild Goth’s display? Was that a skull and cross-bones on the back of the shirt? Dan circled back and stared. A glaringly white skull and cross-bones stood out from the back of the black shirt. The writing on the back of the shirt was Gothic script, boxy, replete with curlicues. Was it written in German? Squinting his eyes, Dan read large white letters that proclaimed in street English: "We All Gotta Die Sometime."

Dan turned around and went on into the church. Because it was only 9:40 A.M., only a handful of people had by that time arrived in the pews for the 10 o’clock service. William Templeton, the Rector of the church, hailed Dan at the church door. You’re bright and early once again, counselor, the Rector said.

I don’t want to miss a single one of your utterances, Bill, Dan said, with less than total truthfulness. And I’m not a counselor any more. I retired from lawyering eight years ago. In fact, Dan was early at church because he had time to kill, and he liked seeing other people from time to time. For almost two years he had been a widower, and both his sons – Nathaniel and Michael, Dan’s only children – had moved with their families away from the Northeast and out to California before Dan’s wife died. His sons preferred the warm temperatures and the glitz of coastal California to New England’s wide-ranging heat and cold, its winter ice and weeks and months of snow, its humid summer heat, and its proliferating ticks and mosquitoes.

Dan went into the church, picked up a service sheet, and sat where he always sat, next to the aisle, on the right side of the church, four rows of pews in from the door – close enough to the door to be able to sprint out early at the end of the service, before the departing congregation was slowed to a crawl by the Rector’s stream of pastoral pleasantries to each of the departing congregants. In the middle of the pew Dan sat down in was a woman almost as old as he was, a big shapeless woman in a green dress. She smiled at him. Dan knew her by sight, but didn’t dredge up her full name, and didn’t try hard to do so. He thought her name was Grace something – although, looking at her ballooned body, Grace was a clear misnomer. Dan nodded to her politely, bent himself forward as if in earnest prayer, and pulled out a Bible – a New Revised Standard Version – from the back of the pew in front of him, so he could play a game he had made up, something he thought of as Bible Bingo. It was a form of augury he had created to pass time and seek divine guidance. With eyes closed, he opened the Bible, put his right forefinger blindly on a page, and opened his eyes to see what the finger-touched words were, and what they might portend.

His finger had landed on a passage from the book of the prophet Zechariah, the next to last book in the Old Testament. The passage was Zechariah 14:12, a text that Dan didn’t remember as being part of the Episcopal lectionary. Here is what Dan saw and read:

This shall be the plague with which the LORD will strike all the peoples that wage war against Jerusalem: their flesh shall rot while they are still on their feet; their eyes shall rot in their sockets, and their tongues shall rot in their mouths.

Dan wondered what this Bible text could betoken. It didn’t sound friendly and good, even though the book of Zechariah elsewhere included more promising developments, among them the return of the Jews from exile, and the prophecy of a coming day on which the Lord will become king over all the earth. What kind of plague was foreseen in the passage Dan’s finger had landed on? That sort of plague sounded hideously corrosive, and often fatal. Was the plague predicted in Zechariah’s book the Black Death? Smallpox? Ebola virus? Hantavirus? Tuberculosis, which seemed recently to be building up resistance to medicines that had worked well in prior years? Some kind of superflu? Dan wondered idly if the adjectival version of superflu was superfluous. Since late September, when seasonal flu typically began, the local pharmacies in Rockinam had been urging their customers to have flu shots. Was that because a strong form of flu was spreading and was vaccine-preventable, or just because the pharmacies hoped to profit from charging for the shots of vaccine? Without trying to answer that question, Dan early in October went to a nearby pharmacy for a flu shot. He experienced no flu symptoms following the shot, though he knew of some people in town who had contracted a kind of flu that was more unpleasant and lasted longer than in most recent years. Dan had heard of fevers and headaches and painful limbs and joints, and also of liquids that dribbled down from noses. He did not remember hearing of any local flu patients having flesh that rotted out, as appeared to be the case in the plague portrayed by the prophet Zechariah – but Dan remembered reading that over fifty million people had died of flu at and soon after the end of World War I. While Dan was born more than twenty years after that war was over, Dan’s parents had told him that he had had a great-uncle who had survived fighting in France in that murderous war, only to die of flu in December 1918, barely a