Pestilence

56

Hank Kraski sat on the bench at the park, watching the pigeons as they flew down. An old man was feeding them stale bread. Hank counted over fifty pigeons and was delighted to watch them flap around and wrestle and peck at each other for dominance.

Before too long, a woman with curly red hair and a black suit came and sat next to him. They were there early in the morning, and in the light of dawn, she looked stunning. Something had been there between them long ago but was gone now.

“Ian’s dead,” she said.

“I know.”

“You trained Greyjoy, and he trained Ian. You guys are becoming an extinct species.”

“We were always meant to be.”

“All four detonations went off perfectly. We had three more in Europe and two in Asia last night. We didn’t feel that Australia and Africa were warranted, and unless you wanted to take out penguins, Antarctica should be obvious.”

“I agree.”

She checked her watch. “I don’t know if they briefed you on this, but a certain percentage of the population has a natural immunity to black pox.”

“What percentage?”

“Point oh-oh-oh one. About seven thousand people on the earth will be completely immune to its effects, and it’s genetic, as well. A dominant gene from what we can tell. It should display in their children, which should push that number up but probably to no more than twenty thousand.”

He nodded. “We’re anticipating ninety-five percent population loss. We can handle another twenty thousand people on top of the survivors.”

She paused. “I couldn’t sleep last night. Do you realize what we’ve done? What we’ve all done, Hank? We’ve changed the course of human history. It was going one way, and we came along, and it will follow a divergent path now.”

He watched the pigeons. “How do you know this wasn’t the path it was supposed to follow?”

Turning to look at her, he felt those old feelings resurface. He couldn’t remember why he hadn’t acted on them when he’d had the chance. Work, maybe. But the memory was so dusty with time, he couldn’t think of a single good reason why they hadn’t spent their lives together.

Her face was perfect-perfect and simple-even without makeup, which he found most people put on too much of anyway. She had been a model in the ’80s, if he remembered correctly. His predecessor had seen her on some runway in Spain and had decided they needed to have her. His predecessor. How odd to say that. He figured every generation would soon have predecessors and be looking back, wondering how the hell they had become the ones in charge.

“If this doesn’t work,” she said, “if we’re betrayed… then we just killed our own species.”

Hank shrugged. “We would eventually die out anyway. Intelligence is counter-evolutionary. The species becomes wise enough to invent more and more efficient methods to kill itself. We were in a very long process of self-destruction.”

She swallowed. “I didn’t think the morning would look so pretty. I thought it would be overcast or raining, something.”

He grinned. “Death on this scale probably has a tendency to surprise everyone.”