This is the opening to my novel, Hellikon, the sequel to Carybdis & the Boy. I’m about half way through writing it.
- Butch Dante, February 11th, 2023
Welcome Pilgrim, to The Bit Just Before the End of The World.
Mankind’s eventual nemesis enters humbly, in the form of a homemade microbial biotoxin (not a blinding nuclear conflagration, or an ungodly mil-tech nerve agent).
Here we see its creator: a young savant; a saddo; an aspiring terrorist — as brilliant as he is anonymous.
He sits – bad hair, anoraked – at the kitchen-table-cum-laboratory in his mum and dad’s dour suburban maisonette.
His name is Joseph (AKA ‘Joey,’ AKA ‘Joey-no-mates’).
Outside, a half-hearted rain falls, gives up and leaves. Inside, our man leans over his work, focused on putting the final touches to his viral creation. The genes are already spliced, the DNA programmed. Now all that remains is to mix the batch.
And here, at last, the lethal confection is ready: just a few brackish drops, born of a petri dish. He presses the lid down firmly, sealing the slim circular vessel, removes his respirator, and sits back.
*
And here is the dish later that same day, left unattended to warm in the spring sunlight spilling onto the worn window sash of a dining nook.
The solution sits in silent suspension. Nothing happens.
Then, something happens.
*
“And here’s one I prepared earlier,” says the young maker quietly to himself as he returns to inspect the progress of his pathogen, not expecting anything (this is a serial effort, and each prior attempt has ended in disappointment). He stops, eyes widening, and stares. The sepia slime has taken on a greenish aspect…
It lives!
With unsteady hand he reaches out and, in his elation – calamity – he drops the dish. It shatters on the worn linoleum with a musical tinkle.
Turning, he makes a grab for his mask – too slow, Joe.
Already a half dozen deadly necrotic microspores have entered his lungs.
He dies a ghastly death, puking up the lining of his lungs onto green linoleum tiles; the first bone domino to topple in mankind’s clattering collapse.
*
And so it comes to pass that almost the entirety of the human race succumbs to the same bloody fate.
The bio-disaster emerges slowly at first – like a Victorian strangler from a London fog – before spreading inexorably, exponentially into an irresistible global onslaught of spewy, blood-gargling, giga-death.
The toxin, a trillion lethal molecules to each gram, spawning and flying and floating and killing and dying, if only to rise gauzily again (Christ-like!) from the ashen husk of whatever organic vessel offered itself unwillingly as the poison’s last home, to live once more (a Phoenix!), to take wing once more (Gaia fulget!) across the dying planet.
Amidst so much death, all decency is abandoned. Nations expend what’s left of their militaries in fruitless campaigns to wrest control of illusory resources from former allies, while their citizens snarl and claw and gouge at each other over the last scraps of food.
Endless millions of abandoned and putrefying corpses carpet the landscape and clog the waterways. Terror tightens its hold on the planet; society is forsaken; even the most stoic are unnerved.
Surely these are the end days?
*
No. Not yet. Not… quite… yet…
Fickle fate has kept one last revelation in reserve, and one person in each thousand now finds themselves immune to the planet-busting pathogen.
For a while, these raffle winners roam aimlessly through abandoned lands, starving and dispirited, in a miasma of mourning. But then, slowly, like raindrops melding on a windowpane, they start to accept their inheritance: a plague planet devoid of all mercy.