The four horsemen of the apocalypse. The skinny one is called’ Plague. Just so you know.

Depending on your point of view, it sounds exactly like the beginning to either a really good or really bad sci-fi horror movie.

Deep within the confines of two separate government-funded research facilities, under constant watch by armed guards, locked away behind stone and steel and glass, frozen at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, a monster sleeps. A brutal killer, it is a monster in the truest sense of the word. Cold, callous, devoid of such human ideals as compassion, morality, motive or thought, over unknowably numbers thousands of years it has slaughtered tens of millions of people, sinners and saints and plebian and patrician alike, and left nothing but the stench of death and the horror of hideous mutilation in it’s path. It has caused the downfall of one of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world, unwittingly used as a weapon that decimated entire kingdoms of man, leaving the survivors broken, subdued, helpless children lost and alone amidst a sea of death caused by a hellish beast that just doesn’t care.

It is, beyond discussion, beyond debate, without the shadow of a doubt the single most insidiously destructive and impossibly dangerous endangered species on this planet, and none of the men in white coats tasked with the unenviable occupation of simply holding it in check, buried away within hopefully impenetrable walls, have even the slightest idea of what to do with it. It’s almost farcical, attempting to discuss the morality of wiping a monster that does nothing but kill and maim from the face of the earth, but despite our considerable track record, causing the deliberate extinction of an earthly lifeform, no matter how demonic in form and cruelly cold in function, is something our species has never done.

Clinically, the monster is called the Variola virus. The name it was called when it ravaged the world, leaving broken dreams and shattered lives, millions upon untold millions of lives, is Smallpox. As of 1977, the year I was born, humanity won a final victory over a monster that had been terrorizing it since before the second century, BC, as the use of vaccination had finally beat back the monster to where the last naturally-occurring cases were recorded, and the monster was battered down, frozen and tucked away, where it now resides, sleeping patiently, in Atlanta and Moscow.

Waiting.

You are not safe, my best beloved.

This is the way your world ends. Not with a bang, but with a handful of agonizing nights that rape your brain, ravage your body and leave you twisted and broken, so that not only will your own mother not recognize you, she will be far to terrified of what is left of you and what may still live inside you to touch your tormented face. Have a nice day.

You cannot hide from a demon that lurks, invisible, in the air, waiting for you behind soft eyes and tender lips, lurking away in the dark recesses of your own body, just.. living. Just eating. Just growing. Just… waiting. In other Guides I have written with the intention of scaring you into paying attention, I would begin by saying ‘THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.’ There is no point in mentioning such niceties this time.

We’re not talking about massive hornets that spray poisons that dissolve your flesh this time, my best beloved. There will be no curtains pulled free to reveal a fly you will likely never meet whose maggots burrow into human flesh. I don’t need to tell you that the monsters in this article are everywhere. I don’t.

Because they are.

And you already know.

In the 1980s, the virulence of a horrific killer, the Human Immuno-Deficiency Virus, or HIV, and the resulting Auto-Immune Disorder Syndrome, or AIDs, came to bask in the light of day. It ravaged the country, reducing strong men and beautiful women into husks, barely able to lift their heads or open their eyes. It rages still, in Africa, raping the lives of women and children away, carried by transient workers making use of destitute whores and wreaking havoc on the population.
Every so often, someone will refer to it as the worst epidemic – no, fuck that, PANdemic, the modern world has seen in decades.

And all I can do is laugh.

The HIV virus is incredibly picky. It cannot survive in oxygen (though it may one day evolve, in which case we are all fucked), and thus is only transmitted through direct fluid-to-fluid contact. In terms of contagiousness, that’s fucking mild. Imagine a virus that rapes your life away in the space of days, leaves you a miserable, bloated black corpse, swelling in the harsh sunlight, food for worms and teeming with potential death, that you caught simply by breathing at the wrong time, in the wrong place.

This is not to say HIV/AIDS isn’t horrific, nor am I saying that the act of keeping it under wraps for so long was anything short of demonically cruel. I am not, by any means, trivializing the untold hundreds of thousands, millions of people who should not have ever had to leave this world in such a horrible manner.
What I am saying is, if HIV/AIDS is the worst epidemic we’ve currently got, we are, in the grand scheme of things, pretty fucking lucky.

Here’s why.

BUBONIC PLAGUE (Pasteurelle pestis, bacterium)

Carrier: Fleas on infested rats
Symptoms: Buboes (swollen lymph nodes, fever, prostration, delirium)

Let’s start out on the right foot with a virulent pestilence commonly referred to by a delightfully quaint, almost cuddly name, ‘The Black Death.’ Three times this disease has erupted amongst the fields of mankind, over the course of 1,200 years, removing an estimated 137,000,000 people from the face of this world.
That’s a pretty fucking big number right there.

Anyone else hungry? Man, I could really go for a pizza right about now.

Once you realize that all three major outbreaks, occurring in the Justinian times of Rome (540-590 AD), the really famous explosion in Europe (1346-1361 AD) and one last time for a year in London (1665-1666 AD), occurred during periods of time in which the human population of the world was far, far less than it is today, that number seems to loom all the more larger, more monstrous, devastating and impossibly deadly.

What we are dealing with is a disease with a mortality rate of 90%, one that could destroy you, from first onset of symptoms until the moment your body simply stops feebly trying to live, in the course of a handful of days. Spread by infected fleas riding on the backs of Rattus Rattus, the common black rat, the pestilence entered the bloodstream through flea bites, causing deadly temperatures, cooking your brain, or septicemia, blood poisoning. Unless your lungs were infected first, causing a pneumonic form of the plague, in which case fuck the fleas, your lungs have just become a viral cannon and everyone breathing anywhere near you is at risk. Risk, when dealing with something like this, equals death. One single case of pneumonic bubonic plague can cause a hellish epidemic, and did. Three times.

It’s very difficult to understand, in these modern times we live in, what such a monstrous thing as an epidemic of the likes of the Bubonic Plague is actually like. While the Black Death outbreak is by far the most famous, with school children learning quick and meaningless factoids like ‘wiped out a third of Europe’ while sparing the gruesome details, the Justinian plague was by far the most severe.

This is a doctor, believe it or not. They wore these leather masks, the long ‘noses’ filled with rancid-smelling herbs, because they thought it would save them from the plague. HEY GUESS WHAT IT DIDN’T FUCKING WORK.

One hundred and thirty-seven million people over twelve hundred years is a rough number to wrap your brain around. Let’s try a smaller number, shall we? Ten thousand. Can you imagine ten thousand? Ten thousand people. Is that easier? Okay, good. During the height of the fifty-year-long Justinian plague, ten thousand people were simply falling away into nothingness.

Every single day.

Imagine waking up one morning and your entire family is lying, motionless, crawling with insects, black and bloated and foul smelling, eyes bulging, tongue swelled, oozing dark liquids from every orifice. Last week they were full of life. Five days ago they took ill. This morning they are pestulant lumps of diseased flesh, their throats and armpits and groins swelling with ‘buboes’, enlarged lymph nodes, and the stench would drive a God to drink. You stumble from your home, crying for help, but no-one is left alive to hear you. Your entire village has been completely wiped away. Families, lineages, entire bloodlines, stricken from the record in one fell swoop. Ten thousand people every single day. Individual graves could never be dug fast enough, not even mass graves could accommodate the dead. At first, the corpses, teeming with contagion, were stacked into high towers until they neared overflowing and then lye was poured within. When that wasn’t enough, when no more towers remained that were not stuffed full of the dead, in the end, they simply took large ships, loaded them up with bodies, set them to sea and either abandoned them or burnt them.

Cities vanished. Agriculture just… stopped. A hundred million people in fifty years, a hundred million people in a period of time in which the total human population of the globe was a fraction, a tiny sliver of its current state. By 590 AD, when the plague died away, it was not because a cure was found, nor had the bacillus vanished. The germ had simply slaughtered too many for it’s own good, wiping out the critical mass of carriers until no-one was left to hold it within them. Fifty years of torment, horror and death. The plague that put the final nail into the coffin engulfing the Roman empire, eventually, because it had killed too much, simply petered away.

And then came back, a thousand years later, in a particularly vicious form, a pneumatic adaptation to the same old bug that produced dark hemorrhages beneath the skin and around the eyes, causing gangrene of the lungs and spread like the flu, with a mortality rate exceeding 90%, destroying 27,000,000 people in fifteen years.

HEY LOOK THE BLACK DEATH IS STILL. FUCKING. HERE.

The dread Black Death, a pestilence that simply ended everything it touched and created panic the likes of which we cannot come close to comprehending. Doctors refused to see the dying. The holy men turned away the near-dead, refusing to hear their last confessions, lest the monsters riding the breaths of those words find them and rip their lives away, too. Jews were blamed for poisoning wells, creating a more familiar plague of ignorant rage, thousands of Jews murdered by fire for their imaginary crimes as the plague ravaged the known world.

“I buried with my own hands five of my children in a single grave,” wrote Italian author Agnioli di Tura. “No bells. No tears. This is the end of the world.”

It was not, of course, eventually the plague subsided, like a fire that simply burned too much fuel and died away, stealing back into the night for one last grand hurrah, an outbreak in London that lasted a matter of months and murdered 2,000 people per week at its peak, before stealing away into the night. There have been scattered outbreaks here and there over the years, but as of 1971, the demon seems to have been controlled, though no actual cure has been found. Antibiotics seem to help and controlling the rat population doesn’t hurt, as the report of the World Health Organization reported – 965 cases in 1971, only 47 deaths (a 5% mortality rate, which is close to the Justinian plague’s SUVIVAL rate). By the late 70s, the death rate was down to about 3% of cases. This is not because of modern medicine. This is because the bacillus has become far, far more mild – an adaptation to assist in the bacillus’ own life cycle.

The demon has not been beaten, best beloved. We did not defeat it.

It is still there. It still lives, infects, eats and procreates.

Waiting.

MALARIA (Plasmodium Vivax)

Carrier: The female Anopheles mosquito
Symptoms: Chills, fever, anemia, enlargement of the spleen

The word means ‘bad air,’ which was thought in ancient times to be the cause of the single greatest killer of mankind since its inception into this world. It is impossible to even begin to estimate how many millions of people the disease has slaughtered, coldly, callously, ripping away their strength first, then hope, and finally their lives, untold millions of people throughout the course of human history. It’s thought that tribes of humans from the dawn of man fled upwards into the colder climates of Europe and Asia in order to escape the dread affliction, thus causing the existence of white people. Hatas, you may thank the mosquitoes for the presence of The Man. Malarai is very likely the cause of the eventual fall of the Roman empire, which spread out over almost the entire known world, weakening it severely, ravaging the population and reducing scores upon scores of people into shivering mounds of doomed flesh, a fate the empire could never recover from, as it was, in its weakened state, soon pulverized by the Justinian Bubonic Plague.

Presenting the single most deadly Nightmare Monster Bug From Hell on the entire fucking planet, responsible for untold hundreds of millions of deaths since the dawn of the human race, the female Anopheles mosquito. Take a bow, princess, you’ve earned it.

Malaria was there, waiting impatiently for fresh blood at ever stage of human history, tearing civilizations asunder and leaving behind shaken, terrified survivors who could do barely more than wait for the other shoe to drop. Malaria swept from the ruins of Rome and took over the world, carried by dying Romans, their conquered people and the conquerors who tore in to take their share of the once-great kingdom, obliterating untold millions as it engulfed three-quarters of the world, outbreaks cropping up so frequently it would be useless to try to list them all in this space. Malaria raped the Crusaders. It waited for the settlers in the New World. It assaulted American troops in the Pacific island of World War Two, a more terrifying opponent than the Japanese suicide bombers, and in Sicily, it took more lives than the guns. It has always been there, and it will always be there, causing its wracking chills, taking its horrific toll.

Malaria stands atop the human race to this day. It has shrugged off all attempts to produce a vaccine, and has laughed away any attempts at a cure, rapidly adapting to create immunity to new drugs and slamming back into the population with a mighty vengeance. Caused by a protozoan and carried by an insect, any moist place is a potential breeding ground. There is no cure. For over five thousand years, the total sum of recorded Human history, it has been the most dreaded and virulent disease this world has known. It has caused evolution, it has shaped history, it has murdered more people than any estimate can count.

See those red splotches? That’s where five hundred million people are currently infected with malaria, two hundred million new cases will be reported this year, and 2-3 million people will die. GOD BLESS NOT LIVING IN THE RED FUCKING SPLOTCHES.

To this day, two hundred million people are infected every single year.

To this day, millions of lives are shaken to death by it, every single year.

A culprit, the female Anopheles mosquito has been found, yes, in 1894, by British physician Ronald Ross. A culprit was found.

But not a vaccine.

US Troops in malaria-risk areas – which are almost entirely sub-equatorial nations, Africa, southern Asia, South America, are given, apparently, a “promising candidate” for a vaccine, but an iron-clad proof against the disease has yet to be found. Two to three million people, every single year die in agony, their bodies striped of strength and then life, perishing in agony you really don’t want me to describe. The best ‘candidate’ currently boasts ‘tantalizing’ results, reducing the chance of infection by an OH MY GOD HOLY FUCK 30%. It’s a start.

After five thousand years of recorded human history and only God knows how much longer, after uncounted, untold hundreds of millions of deaths, it’s a start.

SMALLPOX (Variola Virus)

Carrier: Flakes of dead skin from an infected person.
Symptoms: Fever, scarring pustules, blindness

Imagine, if you will, being a citizen in the greatest nation of the world you know, ruled by a king who was not set there by the Gods, he IS a God. Your king’s will is the will of the Gods. His words is their law. The blood of the divine runs in his veins, beating in his heart, and he controls the world you live in from the top of a palace that looms over a magnificent city of stone that grows like a forest up from the very top of a mountain, his words reaching the clouds long before the reach you.

Smallpox.

Now imagine, one day, setting down on the eastern shore of your world, white men in metal clothing and great wooden fortresses that glide across the water. Men wh speak in strange tongues that ride massive beasts the likes of which exist only in nightmares, they carry tubes that spit fire and thunder, and they tell you that your Gods are dead, and that their one God has conquered them. Your own King seems to fear them, fear what they represent, but you’re not so sure. They cannot be gods, they bleed like all men, don’t they? And as fearsome as their weapons are, as monstrous as the beasts they ride may be, if they bleed, they can die, is this not so? You are legion, they are so few… aren’t they?

And then, not like a thief in the night, not like a dagger between the ribs, not so much like a whisper and so much more like nuclear warhead, it strikes. A weapon far, far worse than the muskets, a demon far, far more terrifying that the horses, a demon the Spaniards, those self-important Conquistador bastards, did not themselves know they had brought with them. It strikes fast, furiously, and harder than a hammer made from entire worlds. Three times, the men in metal come, and three times, that hammer strikes, and each time it strikes, the shock from the blow is like a wave that begins on the eastern coast and courses through your people, tearing a path to the western banks.

The year this begins, the year your world begins to end is 1519. Your people are called Aztec, and are numbered at an estimated 25 million. By 1596, a little under 80 years later, 18,500,000 of your people are dead, gone and forgotten, twisted human wreckage, the scars that ravaged their bodies right down to the bone marking them as victims of the blight brought over on Spanish ships. Of your great nation, six hundred and fifty THOUSAND remain, 650,000 out of what was once a great nation of 25,000,000. And those six hundred and fifty thousand survivors, who have watched their nation crumble away into dust under this horrific disease, this blinder of children and destroyer of everything it touches, watched as the men in metal clothing, those men who claimed their God was GREATER than yours, walk amidst the death untouched. You do not understand the phrase ‘built up a resistance’. You do not know that six hundred years prior, the same blight descended upon Spain, brought by the Moors and nearly decimated them. All you can see is that they are alive, and everyone you know is dead.

It is easy to understand why the survivors cast away their old religion so quickly, and why they embraced Christianity with fervor far more passionate than even the Spaniards who brought it to them.

Smallpox.

The plague is called Smallpox, and the name is a reference meant to differentiate it from the ‘Great Pox’, which was Syphilis, a once omnipresent killer that forced values into a more chase mindset, once a mass murderer and creater of madness, now controlled to the point where it has become a visit to the free clinic and a shot that’ll be sore for a while. Syphilis could be concealed for decades, until the third and fatal stage of the illness. Smallpox, though…

It’s impossible to understate the effects this disease has had upon those who lived within its grasp. Mummified Pharaohs have been revealed to have scars on their bones, on their fucking bones that show they were touched by it. Their bones. It cuts through your skin, disfiguring you to the core of your being, carving patterns into your bones and devouring your eyes. “Disfiguring” is a funny word. It’s hard to put it into perspective. I am at a loss for words to explain, precisely, the ravaging scars left behind on the survivors, so I’m hoping that the included pictures can do a better job than my descriptions.

Smallpox is of the same viral family as Chickenpox, which means that resistances can be built, minor immunities that will leave vicious, grotesque scars but leave your life more or less intact, though your social graces are effectively at an end. Those who were lucky or unlucky enough to live free of the disease, however…

The Aztecs were obliterated.

The Native American tribes at war with the European and Proto-American settlers for the land they inhabited since time immemorial were crippled and finally washed away.

The Spanish, in 710, were nearly annihilated by it.

And resistances do not mean immunity.

Sixty million Europeans fell prey to it, ravaged unto nothingness by the disease in the 18th century alone, and the surviors were left as hideous, malformed abortions of nature for the rest of their lives, shunned by society, their prospects for healthy, normal lives evaporated by the touch of a microscopic organism that does not have the capacity for malice or remorse.

It was not until 1796 that the war against this virus reached a turning point, a three-thousand year losing streak just turned right the fuck around when an English country doctor named Edward Jenner hit upon a vaccine, the very first vaccine in history of medicine, and even this weapon would have failed – nobody really wanted to have a live serum of Smallpox injected into them – if not for Catherine the Great of Russia, who submitted to the procedure as an example to her subjects. The disease had finally met its match, as more and more and more of the world inoculated itself against it. By 1948, the last natural case in America had been recorded. South America, which had been altered politically, religiously, completely and forever reported its final cases in 1971.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD, BABY GIRL

By 1977, the year I was born, the very last naturally occurring cases were recorded. Twenty-nine years have gone by, an entire generation has come into this world without the barest hint of fear of this virulent monster, this demon that lives in two places and two places only, Moscow and Atlanta, under armed guard, debated over by scientists who no longer work with the disease.

Secreted away, frozen in time.

The beast is not dead.

It merely sleeps.

And then there is Typhoid, an intestinal killer, over a hundred cases and thousands of deaths of which can be attributed to a single cook named Mary. And then there is Tuberculosis, called consumption, which wasted it’s victims away to a state that, ironically or not, was considered to be the feminine ideal of beauty – weak, fainting, reddened lips and ruddy cheeks as the lungs of the victims were eaten away. And then there is the Spanish Influenza, which exploded out of thin air and devoured eighteen million people in eighteen fucking months, and then vanished as quickly as it came. And then there is Syphilis, a destroyer of ‘the immoral’, which damned the dying as they slowly went mad, their minds eaten away.

And now, there is AIDs.

In comparison to the great pestilences of bygone years, it seems almost mild. Transmitted only through direct trading of fluids, like syphilis, a disease that marks the dying as immoral waste, prompting the ignorant to consider it vengeance of God upon the sinners they despise.

All things considered, you know, it’s rather hard to catch it, isn’t it? I mean, there must be blood involved, really. It lives in the blood, doesn’t it? Anal sex, blood and semen. Sharing needles, blood to blood. It’s in the blood and only in the blood, in the semen, dying in the air, such a horrific disease and yet so fragile, so hard to transmit… isn’t it?

That’s the problem with viruses.

It’s easy to forget that they are living things, belligerently living things.

And like all living things, they adapt.

Take the Pasteurella pestis bacterium that causes the Bubonic plague, for example. It has most assuredly adapted, evolved, it has become milder. Less deadly. Less willing to destroy its hosts, so that it might live longer, not burn away its stock of hosts as it did in Rome and Europe. It has adapted.
And so, I read, is HIV.

An HIV infestation. Say goodnight, Gracie.

It’s adapting, too.

Growing new spines along its microscopic carapace, evolving to meet the demands of its life cycle. One day, sooner, later, it may complete its adaptation, so that it no longer needs the blood to infect.

Those adaptations it’s growing? They appear all too similar to those found on other sorts of viruses.

Airborne viruses.

Sweet dreams.