The Genesis Plague - Michael Byrnes [89]
‘Done?’ Flaherty said. He glanced over at her and saw concern in her eyes.
‘All done,’ she said. ‘My God, Tommy.’ Flipping to the first page, she shook her head in disbelief. ‘You’re not going to believe this.’
‘Try me.’ He hit the GPS’s mute button.
‘Probably best to just read this to you first,’ she said. ‘This is all a bit rushed, so this may not be 100 per cent …’
‘Just let me hear it, will you.’
Brooke cleared her throat. ‘It starts with this passage.’ She began reading:
She came from the realm of the rising sun
She who holds dominion over beasts and men
She who is the Screech Owl, the Night Creature
She who sows vengeance and retribution on all men
Before the moon had twice come
Fathers and sons, all, were dead
Her hand touched them not
Bathed in blood they perished, destroyed from within
No mother or daughter did she punish
She commanded the rivers to consume the land
The demon who killed the many
The one sent by the great creator to end all
‘Okayyyy,’ Flaherty said. ‘That is creepy.’
‘Tommy, those skeletons Jason found in that cave were all the men in that village. And this is saying Lilith killed all of them,’ Brooke emphasized.
‘How?’
‘If she didn’t use physical force, then I’d assume she spread some kind of disease that made them bleed to death.’
‘What kind of disease kills everyone in two days? And only males?’ The car interior was silent for a moment as they contemplated what they’d just heard. ‘Whoever wrote that must have been exaggerating,’ he suggested. ‘Maybe they all got food poisoning or something and just didn’t know who to blame.’
‘Food poisoning would have killed the women too,’ she muttered, looking back at her notes.
‘Well, at least it explains why all those teeth found at Fort Detrick all came from males. What good are the teeth, anyway?’ But when he looked over, he saw that she was deep in thought. ‘Brooke?’
Teeth. Pestilence. Males. ‘Oh my God,’ she said suddenly.
‘What?’
‘Just recently, in an archaeology journal I read about these excavations of mass graves in France and Germany where plague victims had been buried,’ she explained. ‘In ancient specimens, plague leaves an imprint in the pulp of victims’ teeth. These archaeologists had found perfectly preserved Yersinia pestis DNA in the teeth.’
‘Yur-what DNA?’
‘Yersinia pestis is the bacterium that causes bubonic plague. It gets into your lymph nodes, replicates like crazy, and makes you slowly haemorrhage to death,’ she explained.
‘Pleasant.’
‘During the sixth century, it was called the “Plague of Justinian”, killed a quarter of the people in the eastern Mediterranean and stopped the Byzantine emperor, Justinian, from reuniting Eastern and Western Europe under the Holy Roman Empire. And remember from history class when in the fourteenth century the Black Death killed half the population of Europe?’
He nodded. ‘Actually, I do.’
‘That was bubonic plague too. It became a pandemic and killed over a hundred million people worldwide … at that time, almost a quarter of the world’s population.’
‘Jeez, and we’re worried about the lousy flu,’ he said. ‘But the Black Death didn’t just kill men,’ he pointed out. ‘And you’re saying it might have killed half of them … not all of them.’
‘True,’ she admitted. ‘And the Black Death took a lot longer than two days to spread. It took months.’
‘So you think something like the Black Death killed these guys?’
‘With such a high mortality rate, probably something worse. I’m no epidemiologist. I mean, humans have been fighting these kinds of diseases ever since they started living in sedentary settlements. Since Iraq was home to the earliest cities and gave birth to agriculture, Mesopotamians would have been among the first people to transmit infectious disease. They’d have picked up all sorts of germs from domesticated cows, sheep, chickens, you name it. So it makes sense. And these men that Lilith killed belonged to a sizable, relatively isolated population. If they had no immunity to a disease brought in by an outsider, it would