"Norman Spinrad - JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

Perhaps because I was young, perhaps because I was the first convert to Saint Max's vision daring enough to put it into practice, perhaps because I was so much more naively earnest about it than he had been, perhaps because I appeared to be in such robust health, there were those who believed in it now, who believed in me, in the Faith of Our Lady. If Saint Max had been our Jesus, and I was our Paul, now there were disciples to spread the Faith, no more than scores, maybe, but at least more than Christianity's original twelve.
Spreading the Faith of Saint Max and Our Lady. Gaining converts with our hope and our bodies as we wandered up and down California. The Plague strains would spread faster now. Millions might die sooner who might have lingered longer. But were we not all under sentence of death anyway, blue-carders and black-carders alike?
Millions of lives might be shortened, but out of all that death, the species might survive. We would challenge the Plague head-on, in the only way we could--love against despair, sex against death. We would force the pace of evolution and/or die trying.
And while we lived, we would at least live free, we would live, and love, and fight for our species' survival as natural men and women. Better in fire than in ice.

WALTER T. BIGELOW

I had done as God commanded, I was doing His work, but the Devil continued to torment me. Elaine remained distant and cold, the Plague continued to spread despite my best efforts, and then, at length, Satan, not content with this, reached out and put his hand upon my Billy.
Billy, the son I had raised so carefully, the son who to my joy had Found the Light at the age of fourteen, began to act strangely, moping in his room at night, locking himself in the bathroom for suspiciously long intervals. I didn't need to be the director of the Federal Quarantine Agency to suspect what was happening; any good Christian father could read the signs.
I was prepared to find pornography when I searched his room one morning after he had left for school, but nothing could have prepared me for the vile nature of the filth I found. Photographs of men having meatsex with each other. With young boys. Photographs of naked young boys in the lewdest of poses. And, worse still, hideous cartoons of boys and girls having the most impossible and revolting intercourse with sex machines, automated monstrosities with grotesque vulvas, immense penile organs, done up to simulate animals, robots, tentacled aliens from outer space.
I reeled. My skin crawled. My stomach went cold. Worst of all, the Devil caused my weak flesh to become loathsomely aroused as all those terrible and tantalizing memories of Gus came rushing back between my legs to haunt me.
Revolted, appalled, shaking with outrage and confusion, I was
forced to wait until the evening to confront him, and the Devil struck me a second blow in the office, for that was the day when the first reports of the Satanic cult of Our Lady of the Living Dead appeared in my electronic mailbox.
Of course I was aware that there were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of black-carders living underground outside the Quarantine Zones on bogus blue cards, and spreading their filth among the innocent. We caught hundreds of them every week.
But this . . . this . . . this was Satan's masterstroke!
Out there in California was a woman, or perhaps several women, known as Our Lady of the Living Dead, clearly possessed by the Adversary and doing his work quite consciously, recruiting others into her Satanic cult, spreading his lies and the Plague in ever-wider circles.
Black-carders were openly offering their meat to their fellow black-carders, spreading multiple strains of Plague virus throughout the underground. Interrogations seemed to indicate that these slaves of Satan actually believed that they were the saviors of the species, that in some mystical manner they were speeding the course of evolution, that somehow out of their unholy and deadly couplings a strain of humanity would evolve that was immune to the Plague.
He is not the prince of Liars for nothing. He had apparently quite convinced these poor doomed creatures of this one, cunningly using their despair-maddened lust and turning it against us all, giving them a truly devilish excuse to wallow in it until they died in the conviction that they were doing God's Work in the process.
And laughing at them and at me by causing his servant to wrap himself in the cognomen of the Mother of Jesus!
I gave the necessary orders. The stamping out of the cult of Our Lady was to be the SP's number one priority. Arrest these people. If any resisted, shoot to kill. Close as many meatbars as possible. And do it all as conspicuously as could be managed. Spread the fear of God's wrath and that of the SP among the denizens of the underground.
After a day like that, I was constrained to return home and confront Billy. There was denial, sobbing confession, promises of repentance, and strong penances set. I had done my patriotic duty and my fatherly duty. It had been hard, but I had done God's will and was as at peace as one could be under the terrible circumstances.
But Satan was still not finished with me. He seized Elaine, my good Christian wife, and caused her to launch into the most appalling tirade. "How can you be so hard-hearted?" she demanded. "Aren't things bad enough for young people growing up these days? At least you shouldn't try to keep Billy from a little safe masturbation."
"It's against God's law! Besides, you saw that revolting, unnatural--"
"Of course it's unnatural, Walter! What else can you expect when the most natural thing in the world is the one thing none of us can do anymore!"
"Elaine--"
"If you were a real man, Walter T. Bigelow, if you were a real Christian, if you were a real loving father, you'd take the poor boy to a sex machine parlor and show him how to get some harmless release!"
I could hardly believe my ears for a long moment. This could not be Elaine! But then I understood. This insinuating blasphemy was coming from her lips, but my poor wife was only an instrument. The voice saying these awful things through her had identified itself by the very act of causing a good Christian woman to mouth them.
"I know you . . ." I muttered.
"No you don't, Walter Bigelow, you don't know me at all!"
"Get thee behind me--"
"Have it your own way!" she shouted. And she locked herself in the bedroom, leaving me to spend a sleepless night in the living room, praying to Jesus, demanding to know why He had so forsaken me in the presence of the Enemy.

JOHN DAVID

I made my way up the coast toward San Francisco real slowly, spending nearly a month in Los Angeles, which was big, and sprawling, and a hell of a town for a zombie to party in. There were plenty of meatbars, my latest batch of pallies seemed to be holding up real well, I was lookin' good, I had umpteen phony blue cards, and I was able to meatfuck myself near to exhaustion. It was almost to easy.
And then one night I found out why.
I let myself get picked up on the street by this sexy space case who told me she'd give me free meat if I was a black-carder, if you can believe that one. Well, she was beautiful, I was real stoned and in a kind of funny mood, so I shoved her into an alley, Gave It to her, and then announced my wonderful secret identity as a black-card-carrying zombie of the Army of the Living Dead, expecting to get my jollies watching her freak.
Only she didn't. She smiled at me. She fuckin' kissed me, and she told me I was doin' the Work of Our Lady whether I knew it or not.
Say what? Say who?
And she told me.
She told me that whether I knew it or not, I was a soldier in a different army now, an army called the Lovers of Our Lady. Whose mission it was to have meat with as many people as possible in order to save the species, if you can believe that one, brothers and sisters! That somehow by all of us Giving as many strains of It to each other as we could, we might end up with multiimmune humans.
Believe it when they tell you L.A. is full of all kinds of weirdos, brothers and sisters!
But soon the weirdness began getting ominous. All of a sudden the SPs were swarming all over the meatbars like flies on horseshit, running every last customer they caught through the national data bank no matter how long it took. The underground safe houses were no longer so safe. They were grabbing people at random on the streets and blowing away anyone who showed any resistance. I mean, suddenly the Sex Police were real agitated.
I never did find out whether they were hot after me and my fellow zombies or what, I mean after a few close calls, there was clearly no percentage in sticking around to find out. Especially since the pallies were starting to wear off once more and I was getting to lookin' obvious and ragged. San Francisco was beginning to look like my best bet again after all.
I snatched me another car and headed north again, staying away from the population centers, meatfucking my way slowly up the center of California, following a kind of secret underground circuit.
I was real easy, once I got the hang of it and picked up on the stories. That weirdo back in L.A. had given me a good steer. All I had to tell these assholes was that I was doin' the Work of Our Lady and they'd do me anything.

Dr. Richard Bruno

It was arduous, but my little dreadnaught was ready with five days to spare, and it was even more elegant than my original concept. Like the Plague itself, it infected via the usual sexual or intravenous vectors, colonizing semen, blood, and mucous membrane. Unlike the Plague, however, it did not interfere with T-cell activity or production. Lacking an antigen coat, it was "invisible" to the host immune system.