“Look, Harry, stop it; we can’t fit another.”

“Whaff?” came Harry’s muffled reply as eyebrows angled into concentration behind the paper mask.  Every muscle in his shoulders ached as they pitched the limp, cold black trash bag into the waiting garbage truck.

“I’ve had it, Harry. I’m 24 coffees into a 36-hour day, you can’t pay me enough to,” his voice faded as an unfortunate sound troubled his ears.  Somewhere close behind him, a black trash bag hit the sidewalk with a leaden thump and a stiff crinkle.

Governor’s orders, he thought, 3mm black plastic bags for all disposals.

Harry and he turned towards the sound and stared. Harry pulled his mask down over his small chin; his blue glazed gaze stared at the motionless bag.  The men watched the hollow manifestation that should have been a woman turn and tread away from the discarded heap.  Her mess of blond hair was knotted into a shag carpet.   She climbed brick stairs, up each step, each burdened step, each mountainous, mutinous step.  She climbed away from them, not wanting to see anymore.  She climbed as if she were a broken toy being dragged back into the brownstone building.  An unhurried decay of dusk followed her inside as the door clunked shut.

“What are we gonna do? Leave it?” Harry asked.

His mask dangled around his neck as Harry walked over, picked the bag up, and gave thanks that it was a small one.  Some of the larger ones took both of them to lift and toss. Harry lifted and tossed. The bag dropped into the overfull maw of the blue and rust garbage truck.  He grabbed the metal handle, gave the beast a couple knocks. “Let’s go!” he shouted as he looked forward to the next block.  The bags lay in front of every doorway.  A never-ending windrow of black bags.  

Harry tugged his mask back up for no other reason than to unsuccessfully cover the anguished downturn of his purpled lips.  A mask might conceal a human face, but no mask could suppress the suggested stench that grew inside each of the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, the hundreds of millions of black bags that piled to the sky in landfills across the world.  

The truck lurched forward, belching diesel and lumbered along with its overflowing load.

---

Online lectures.  They were nearly as dull as in-person ones except for one key difference: the pleasant sound of a crisp cold can of beer snapping open in his hands.  On most every day, whether the lecture was on RNA or DNA, whether on the Kreb cycle or the structure of a cell wall, whether on the mystery of fermentation or, this beer tastes pretty awesome and it’s 10 o’clock somewhere.  Oh, wait, it’s 10 o’clock here.  Permission to drink?  Thank you, sir.  To be fair, it wasn’t the first beer of the day.  Forget RNA, the cold can of IPA made fantastic company in the morning’s hot shower.  

“…nobody knows how it jumped so quickly.  It defies any previous pattern…” on and on, every lecture became the same thing with a daily update on what isn’t working, why it isn’t working, what might not work next. “…a possible extinction event unless…”

The disease spread faster than fire through a parched field of wheat.  No, he thought, more quickly than that.  It moved so fast there was no tracking.  It was lightning. It was decisive. It was universal.

He couldn’t shake his own opinion, not shared by any of his professors.  We did this, he thought. Our need. Our rush.

We had to get a vaccine for the pandemic.  The pressure to perform was unbelievable.   Instead of the predicted year, within months the urgency had provided a sudden and surprising success.  It was decided that there was no time to run the vaccine through a barrage of tests.  “It works!” the President declared us victorious.  Through executive order and marshal authority, he kicked America’s industry into overdrive. No vaccine had ever been manufactured so quickly and administered around the world, in every corner, to every single person, so successfully. 

Front pages declared, “Our Miracle of Government and Science!” “Man’s Mightiest Moment!” “One Small Shot, One Giant Leap!”  “The First Wonder of the New World!”  “America’s Greatest Moment!”

And then it happened. 

Worldwide.  Unprecedented.  All at once.  It was as viciously lethal as it was horrifyingly immediate.

“…if we’re to have a hope…” his professor droned on “…people need to stop hiding them…”

The hiding.  Everyone knew people were hiding them.  Everyone knew what would happen when they were found out.  Science wanted to know, to try, to make an attempt, to hope against hope, to ignore the facts, to pretend that the first touch was not the final.  Science hoped that this time our first touch will be the touch of life.  It never was.

The first touch, the very breath of man, brought with it the kiss of death.

Every lecture turned to this.  He was tired of it.  Tired of hearing about the theoretical incubation.  How we’d been “used by the disease.”  The virus was “never intended for us.”  The virus just “wanted to use us.” 

“Bullshit.  It wasn’t the virus,” he seethed.  Occam’s razor. “It was the cure.”

That beer went down too quickly. “Beer me,” he called.  He took a deep breath and sighed.

He got up from the lecture, headed to the fridge, pulled the red rope.  The door swung open.  He grabbed another beautifully cold can of IPA.  Returning to the lecture, he nearly tripping on a ragged tennis ball.

Under the Hill