Free Plague: Death was only the beginning! by Donald Franck, Francine Franck Page B

the bill as he used clothes off the rack to wipe away the smell. Then he wandered through the darkened store until he found something he liked. New shoes, shirt, pullover sweater, and woolen slacks covered his thin frame. He topped it off with a leather jacket and felt hat that he set at a rakish angle. Now, that was better! The king needed to look like a king and not some lowly pickpocket—that was before.
    Two hours later, he was using a crowbar to open a locked high-rise front door. People pay all that money and the bloody doorman takes the day off. Go figure! The lock resisted before failing with a loud crack. Inside, he stepped into a large lobby area with dying potted ferns and junk mail. Someone had been slipping on the cleaning again, and he walked toward the stairwell and looked up at the glass-enclosed walkup. This was better. There wouldn’t be any more darkness for him. He now carried three big flashlights just to be sure.
    Reaching the top floor, he popped the condo’s front door in seconds and looked inside. Nothing seemed out of place. Mail was still lying on the hall table, and no keys were in the dish that would normally hold them. Walking quickly, he cased the entire apartment and found it empty. Dropping his backpack on the hardwood floors, he opened doors and cabinets in the kitchen, taking stock. The refrigerator was toast and smelled it too. He found a trash bag and bagged the bad food up in seconds. This place, he liked! The view was great, and the apartment sported a balcony, just like the room at the hotel.
    He spent the rest of that day rummaging through the other apartments and local shops until his arms gave out from moving his haul. He had found a camping stove and green bottles of propane for it at one place, and cases of expensive bottled water in another. Now he could heat up cans of soup and stuff. He never did learn to cook for himself. But, now he had time to learn. He had all the time in the world as he was the King of New York and he ruled.
    Far away in the Missouri Ozarks, Heather, the surviving RN in the ICU unit at Ozark Regional Hospital closed the door to her last patient. He had been a local author with cardiac issues. His scarred lungs were easy prey for the Yersinia Pestis bacilli, and he had tried hard to warn everyone that it was coming this way. But fate, or chance, had selected him as the first to fall. Heather shed a single tear for this proud man as his struggle ended. He had always brought smiles and laughter to the ward on his other visits. She remembered the time when he had tears in his own eyes for a simple kindness she had done, un-asked. She had opened the condiments package for him because his hands were so crippled. The only one, besides his wife, to ever do so. And his thanks was deep and heartfelt.
    The rest of her ward was filled with the sick and dying as the plague spread like a wildfire through the hills and valleys of the Ozarks. Heather pulled down her mask and took a deep breath before she moved on. Lights were flashing for nearly every room, and she was already getting hardened to what she would find. Room 106-1 didn’t need her anymore, and she had work to do here.
    It was seven hours later before she could take another deep breath. Her rounds had revealed six more dead and three going downhill fast. Only oxygen was being given to her patients as nothing in the pharmacy was working on this bug. Even some of the new experimental drugs that had fought well against Ebola in 2014 had not worked. Something had changed, maybe the new environment of New York, had induced a genetic change in the Pestis bacilli’s makeup. As in its normal environment of Madagascar, it had remained deadly but stable. Now it had drastically changed and had mutated only after the plague had mixed with the New York City rat population. Even the micrograms had shown the different hair-like structures that seemed to repel antibodies quite effectively. And it may have allowed the