FORGOTTEN BOOK: A NECESSARY END

A Necessary End by Sarah Pinborough & F. Paul Wilson  (2013)

This may be how the world ends.  No, that's not right.  This may how our world -- humanity's world -- ends.

A plague, spreading rapidly, unceasingly, killing everyone in its path.  ASs the Black death was carried by fleas, this new horror is carried by flies. Genetically modified flies.

It's suspected that the flies were brought about by a research project in the Congo that used gamma rays to sterilize the male tsetse fly.  Something went wrong.  A genetic freak accident.  Perhaps one fly's DNA was altered by the rays.  Perhaps that fly managed to avoid being eaten by a predator, or swatted by an irritated human, or whatever.  Perhaps that fly managed to infect one person, and when that person died, perhaps the fly laid her eggs on the corpse.  Perhaps that started the deadly snowball rolling.  Perhaps.  What is known is that, six months after the research facility closed down, the first cases were reported -- just five miles away.  So that could have been what happened.

The director of the research facility was Rajiv Singh, an Oxford entomologist who lived with his wife and young daughter in a Georgian rowhouse in Camden.  An angry, frightened mob gathered in front of Singh's home, pelting it with rocks, as police tried in vain to keep them at bay.  Molotov cocktails were thrown, and when Singh and his family tried to leave, they were forced back into the burning home by the mob.  When Singh and his wife opened a side window to drop let their little girl escape the flames, one man who had just lost his own wife and daughter to the plague earlier that day, grabbed the girl and threw her back into the burning inferno -- if his daughter could not live, why should the daughter of man responsible live?

Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, North and South America -- anywhere flies could live, humanity died.

And the people began to question.  What this all an accident, or could this be Divine intervention?  God had sent a flood and the plagues of Egypt before.  Is this an example of His wrath?  Some of those dying appear to have visions of God welcoming them, including the wife and daughter of Henry, the tortured man who threw the Singh girl back into the inferno.  And Abby, a hospital volunteer with lupus and the wife of reporter Nigel, has become convinced that the plague is God's will, an opinion she calmly accepts as fact.  (Last names for the major characters in the book are meaningless, which gives them a universality.)

A fly bites you and you die.  After you die -- unless your body is burned -- the maggots appear.  And so it goes.  And with it goes humankind.  Or does it? Is there anyway to stop this biological nightmare?  Or will the clock keep ticking?

An uneasy read from Sarah Pinboropugh (prolific British author of horror, fantasy, and thrillers for both adults and young adults) and F. Paul  Wilson (author of The Secret History of the World, The Adversary Cycle, the Repairman Jack Stories, and the LaNague Chronicles).