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The Plague by Albert Camus

The three amigos did not depart County Memorial at a run, but neither did they simply amble out of the building as if they had nowhere to go and weeks to get there. Spencer could feel things coming to a head.

As they clambered into the Genesis, Bobby in back and Rebecca riding shotgun, they were afraid, as they had been since arriving in Maple Grove the previous day. However, the primary cause of their fear had changed. Initially, their biggest fear was that Ernie was dying and a piece of their hearts with him, but when they realized he was not dying, their greatest fear was that, by embalming him, a mortician would kill him. Once they had stashed precious Ernie in a window seat, where no mortician might find him, their greatest fear became that Wayne Louis Hornfly would behead and eat them. In the interims between those big fears, there were many causes for lesser terror: the half-formed naked men in the church basement, the living molts that had been shed by some slime monster they had never seen, Britta Hernishen, the Nelsoneers, and more. Now, though all those things bubbled in their minds, a witch’s stew of frights, the terror that preoccupied Spencer and also his friends was the possibility that they would die from a mysterious and disgusting disease.

From the back seat, Bobby declared, “What’s happening to Butch and Jim James and Pastor Larry’s brother, this terrible thing—it’s maybe like Camus.”

“What’s camus?” Spencer asked as he drove out of the parking lot, for he was a man of images rather than words.

“Not what. Who. He was a famous French writer.”

Rebecca said, “He wrote a classic novel titled The Plague .”

“What kind of plague starts on the big toe?” Spencer wondered.

“It might sound absurd,” Bobby said, “but Aldous Blomhoff is dead from it.”

“Butch and Jim Jamie James might not be the only people in town who’re infected,” Rebecca suggested. “Remember how each of them was ashamed of the way his big toe looked? They didn’t want us to see their toes.”

Bobby got her point at once. “There could be people all over town, hobbling around in the privacy of their homes, embarrassed for a doctor to see their toes, hoping they’ll heal on their own or with maybe this or that ointment.”

“Meanwhile, they’re rotting from the toe up.”

“Or something worse than rotting.”

“What could be worse than rotting?”

“Dissolving,” Bobby said.

Rebecca shook her head. “Rotting is worse.”

“Now that I think about it, I agree.”

“The smell,” she said.

Their minds were racing along such parallel tracks that they began to finish each other’s sentences.

He said, “Oh my God, what if—”

“—what if they’re becoming—”

“—becoming molting—”

“—slime creatures. Is that—”

“—crazy? It’s no crazier than—”

“—than everything else that’s happened.”

“You know what Thomas Hardy said. ‘Though a good deal is—’”

“‘—is too strange to be believed—’”

“‘—nothing is too strange to have happened,’” Bobby finished.

Spencer was driving a random route through town as his amigos strove to analyze their situation and arrive at a consensus as to the degree of the peril they faced. As he listened, he knew that the development Bobby and Rebecca had been resisting was inevitable. Their love for each other as friends would never fade, but they were layering another kind of affection on top of it. That progression didn’t disappoint Spencer. He didn’t feel marginalized as a friend, and he wasn’t jealous that Bobby was going to win the heart of such a gorgeous and smart woman. He was happy for Bobby and Rebecca, even if they hadn’t quite realized how far along the path of romance they had traveled. Come what may, they would always be amigos, their bonds too strong ever to be weakened. The three of them and Ernie were amigos now and forever—unless one of them died.

If one of them died in Maple Grove, he hoped it would be him. But what if three of them died, and he was the sole survivor? Such a terror of loss thrilled through Spencer that in an instant his palms became sweaty, and the steering wheel slipped through his hands, and he almost lost control of the Genesis. Although they lived separate lives, in places distant from one another, the fact that they were out there, that they stayed in touch, that they cared intensely for one another was the only thing that kept his anxiety at bay. He’d had no friends before them, and the friends he’d made since leaving Maple Grove were, face it, no more than valued acquaintances of whom he was at best fond.

The prospect of being the lone amigo proved so intolerable that he fled his thoughts, rushed into the conversation between Rebecca and Bobby, and heard himself say, “Hey, nobody’s turning into a slime creature from the toe up. They said the disease—infection, virus, whatever—killed Aldous Blomhoff. If that wasn’t true and he became a monster, they would have had to take him away somewhere and hide him, lock him up, maybe study him later. That’s what they do with monsters. But then the nurses, three shifts of them and lots of other people, would be aware of what really happened to him. With that many people in the know, you can’t keep a secret. Besides, the moment they saw Aldous changing, they would’ve taken Jim James and Butch and hid them away, too. Until Aldous died today, they thought it was a weird infection, something that could be treated with antibiotics and standard procedures. Maybe they continue to believe this. The molting slime creature was its own thing, not some guy who woke up one morning with a strange toe and went werewolf.”

When Spencer finished, his passengers sat in amazed silence, and then Bobby said, “That makes perfect sense. But how did you picture it all together so fast?”

Spencer had surprised himself. “I didn’t. It came out of me in words like ... like the way words just spill out of other people.”

“We’re all under a lot of stress,” Rebecca said.

“You can say that again,” Spencer agreed. “I’m sweating here.”

After a mutual thoughtful silence, Bobby said to Rebecca, “You didn’t go to college.”

“Thank God, no. I still have common sense.”

“But you read The Plague. People only read it if it’s required for a course or they want to torment themselves.”

“I read a summary. You didn’t go to college, either.”

“Thank God, no,” he said. “I read it because I was in a bad mood and wanted to torment myself. Why would you read a summary?”

Rebecca sighed. “I was offered the lead in a film adaptation. The studio changed it so it wasn’t fleas, carried by rats, that spread the black plague. It was a plot by alien invaders living secretly in England in 1665. My role was a time traveler going back to London of that era to foil the aliens. There were problems with the script, the director was arrested for keeping llamas for sexual purposes, and they deep-sixed the project.”

Spencer thought he was turning from street to street without purpose, going nowhere with conscious intention, but perhaps his unconscious knew better. A block ahead, Saint Mark’s rose fundament to spire. It looked like a thousand other churches, a noble tribute to the sacred. No dark cloud hung over the place, nor did the stained-glass windows glimmer with demonic light.

The rectory, on the other hand, appeared no less ominous than an outpost in the coldest region of Hell, a place where those who slaughtered innocents were tortured for eternity with everything from red-hot branding irons to episodes of the 1960s TV sitcom My Mother the Car. To Spencer, the bricks looked like blocks of frozen meat. The windows might have been the blank eyes of demons that were blind to the existence of Goodness. He could well imagine that the basement was filled with blood to a depth of ten thousand feet and that, in December, the hallways were hung with entrails to mock Christmas holly. If the hateful house radiated evil—and it did—then it must surely be Pastor Larry who emitted particles of dark energy as deadly as those flowing out of the fissile element known as plutonium, saturating the walls and spraying into Maple Grove, mutating all with which it came into contact. Because Spencer could not draw, were he to risk painting this residence on a large canvas, he would have to do so by getting into a fugue state and rendering it in symbolic shapes and colors, which he feared doing out of concern that every patron ever to lay eyes on it would die. Perhaps because of the sudden and colorful collapse of his family when he was fourteen, Spencer often exhibited a tendency to overdramatize events.

As they sat in the Genesis SUV, in the public parking lot next to the courthouse, across the street from the rectory, Bobby and Rebecca found the residence far less ominous than did Spencer. To them, it appeared to be an ordinary brick house with a slate roof and white trim. In light of what they knew about Pastor Larry, the very ordinariness of the place is what chilled them.

Rebecca said, “More than twenty years ago, Hornfly said Pastor Larry hates humanity and thinks the Earth can be saved only when no people are left in the world. Now we know his brother, Aldous, was the CEO and chief research scientist at the institute. Why the heck are we still sitting here? Why aren’t we over there, in that house, having tea with the reverend, tea and tea and more tea, and more damn tea, until he can’t take any more tea, until the very idea of more tea terrifies him and he tells us everything he knows.”

Spencer was pretty sure that by the word “ tea, ” Rebecca was not talking about tea. She looked very much like Heather Ashmont at the end of Shriek Hard, Shriek Harder , when at last, after three movies, she managed to kill Judyface with his own pickax, industrial nail gun, acetylene torch, and box of dynamite. For the first time since they had become amigos, Spencer was a little bit afraid of Rebecca.