Plague: A gripping suspense thriller about an incurable outbreak in Miami

on some aftershave, and turned back to his stepdaughter with a serious face.
‘I guess we are. Strange, I mean. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s really happening.’
‘Isn’t that the way with everything wonderful?’
Ivor nodded. ‘It is. But it’s the same with terrible things, too. When something truly terrible happens, you can never believe it’s for real. You keep smacking yourself and hoping that you’ll wake up.’
Esmeralda stretched luxuriously. ‘Pa,’ she said. ‘What in the whole world could possibly happen to us that’s terrible?’
*
On the floor above, in apartment 110, a tall man of sixty years old sat in a large Victorian spoonback chair, in almost total darkness. The heavy drapes were drawn over the windows, and the condominium was rank with cigarette smoke. The man had a handsome but heavily wrinkled face, a white mane of leonine hair, and he was dressed in a light blue nylon jersey jumpsuit that was absurdly young for his age. He held his cigarette in a long ivory holder, and the ribbon of blue smoke rose rapidly up to the ceiling.
He had been watching home movies. An expensive projector on the small inlaid table beside him had just run through, and the stray end of the film was still flicking against the spool. On the far wall of the sitting-room was a blank movie screen – an incongruously modem intrusion in an apartment that was crowded with antiques.
The man seemed to be paralyzed, or frozen. His eyes were focused into some remote distance, and he let his cigarette burn away without lifting it once to his lips. His name was Herbert Gaines, and he had once been Hollywood’s hottest new property.
If you ever saw The Romantics or Incident at Vicksburg, you’d remember the face. Or at least a smoother and younger version of it – a version that remained confident, and open, and bright. Herbert Gaines had just been watching that face, and those movies, for the thousandth time. It no longer hurt, but on the other hand it no longer anaesthetized the present, either.
The door from the bedroom opened, and a diagonal slice of light lit up the ageing actor, in his antique chair, like a movie spot. A young man of twenty-two, with denim shorts and bare feet, his chest decorated with tattoos of eagles, came padding into the sitting-room. He was drying his short-cropped hair with a yellow towel.
The young man looked at the blank screen. ‘Have you finished sulking yet?’ he asked. ‘Or are you going to watch the other one as well?’
Herbert Gaines didn’t answer, but there was a subtle change in his expression. His attention was no longer fixed on the faded memories of 1936, but on the present, and on the careless intrusion of his lover, Nicholas.
The young man came and stood between Gaines and the blank screen. A rectangle of white light illuminated his tight denim shorts, with their suggestive bulge, and the fine plume of hair that curled over the top of them. Herbert Gaines closed his eyes.
‘I don’t know why you’re sulking,’ said Nicholas. ‘I never said anything unpleasant.’
Gaines opened his eyes again. He reached over and switched off the projector, and as he did so, a long column of ash fell on the pale blue jumpsuit.
‘You’re so sensitive,’ Nicholas went on. ‘This is supposed to be an open, man-to-man relationship. Least, that’s what you called it when it first began. But all we do these days is argue, and fight, and then you go off in a sulk and play those terrible old movies of yours.’
Gaines’ mouth turned down at the corners in bitterness. But he still refrained from answering.
‘I sometimes think you want to fight,’ said Nicholas. ‘I sometimes think you take umbrage on purpose, just to get me upset. Well, it won’t work, Herbert, ft won’t. I’m not the vicious kind. But damn it all, I’m the kind that gets tired of fights.’
Herbert Gaines listened to this, and then took the burned-out cigarette from his ivory holder and replaced it with a fresh one. He lit up, watching Nicholas with one limpid eye.
‘When you’re tired of fighting me, Nick,’ he said, in a rich, hoarse, cancerous voice, ‘then you’re tired of loving me.’
Nicholas finished rubbing his hair and threw his towel on the floor. Herbert Gaines smoked listlessly, with his holder clenched between his teeth.
Nicholas paced from one end of the room to the other. Then he stopped beside Gaines’ chair – tense and exasperated.
‘You won’t understand, will you? You’re too busy wallowing in forty-year-old memories and uneasy nostalgia. Why don’t you try looking outside yourself for a change? Open up the drapes, and realize what year it is? Christ, Herbert, I wasn’t even born when you made those movies!’
Herbert Gaines looked up. ‘You were there though,’ he said, in his throaty voice.
Nicholas was about to say something else, but he stopped and looked quizzical. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Precisely what I say. You were there. Haven’t you seen yourself?’
‘Seen myself? I don’t—’
Herbert Gaines put down the cigarette holder and laboriously got out of his chair. Nicholas watched him uneasily as he walked across to the bookshelves, and took down a large Film Pictorial Annual for 1938. The old man put the book on his desk, and opened it out. Then he beckoned Nicholas over.
‘Look,’ he said, pointing with his pale, elegant finger to a large black-and-white photograph. ‘Who does that remind you off?’
Nicholas took a cursory glance. ‘It’s you. It says so, underneath. “Herbert Gaines plays young Captain Dashfoot in Incident at Vicksburg”.’
‘Cretin,’ said Herbert Gaines. He gripped Nicholas by the back of the neck, and forced him over to the large gilt Victorian pub mirror that hung on the wall beside the desk. Then he lifted the open book and held it up beside Nicholas’ face.
‘Well,’ said Nicholas. ‘I guess there’s a kind of passing resemblance. But we’re not exactly the Wrigley Doublemint twins, are we?’
Herbert Gaines let him go, and tossed the annual back on the desk.
‘You don’t think