The Proper Thing and Other Stories by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64524-193-5
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2024-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

The first pandemic—never did get a catchy name, like the only thing about it that wasn’t contagious was what people ought to call it—started somewhere on the other side of the world, in a place Americans had to ride a plane to visit, and then it spread everywhere in a matter of months, and wherever it went, it killed people. Wasn’t the first time, if you looked at all of history, but was the first time in over a hundred years, and even though doctors and scientists and smart people had been saying for years that this was going to happen, it still managed to take basically everyone by surprise.

Everyone except the doctors and scientists and smart people, but back then, it was almost a point of pride to be about as stupid as you could manage when it came to things like that. People would brag about not believing what the science said unless their favorite politician said it too, and that meant a lot of true things got swept to the side because they were believed first by a less-popular politician. If one person said a thing was so, the other would say it wasn’t, even if anyone who looked at the thing could see the answer for themselves.

Lots of people died before the folks in charge stopped trying to argue and point fingers and pass blame around. Lots of people wanted the disease to be somebody’s science project, so they’d have someone they could haul in front of the cameras and present as the villain to end all villains. But that first disease happened because a natural disease figured out how to move from animals into humans, through a process called “zoonotic spillover” that we’d known about for centuries. Someone got infected first, but they probably also died first. There was no villain. There was no trail to follow to a convenient bad guy. Not that time.

Because see, that first disease killed a lot of olds. Like, a lot of olds. They had more olds back then, because there wasn’t anything killing them, and lots of people had the money to put their olds in special places called “care homes” when they couldn’t do for themselves anymore. And turned out that first disease loved olds, and loved care homes. It got in them and it spread like anything. So a lot of the people who died were somebody’s beloved parents or grandparents or whatever. Back then, folks even had great-grandparents.

And one man, Dr. Christopher Bitterman, was lucky enough to have the full set when the pandemic began. He had his parents, who lived near him in a house he’d paid for after he became established in his career; he had grandparents, who lived in a very nice care home nearby, where they could visit every weekend; and he had one surviving great-grandmother, who lived in a slightly more distant, much more expensive care home.

From what they teach us in history, no one knows whether Dr. Bitterman’s parents

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