Plague City - By Matthew Milson

-1-

His city rocked with explosions in the waking hours of the morning. Mayor Henry Coal watched unstirred from his office window as each burst of red flame illuminating the low hanging winter clouds left a pillar of black smoke rising in evidence. Coal counted each one―including the rumbles of the bursts his vantage would not allow him to observe.

It was only yesterday he had requested the Purging. Mama Ruth works fast. She always did. Mama Ruthless.

Coal tugged and adjusted the gray wool scarf wrapped around his face, ensuring his mouth and nose remained securely covered. Every blast he counted, nine so far. Now ten. There were a dozen to be expected. Each one struck him as a release of fresh disease to the air. Though the explosions, now eleven of them, had been safely away from his office, farther across the city where the outliers lived―closer to the wall and thus the Plague―an instinctive voice deep down cautioned him: cover up.

The twelfth and final explosion.

Now for the panic. The first act. Coal knew each of the acts well; they would play out in sequence as they always did.

First was worry for the wall. Its existence was paramount. The wall encompassing the city, what fraction they’d managed to spare now more than two-hundred years ago, was what kept the decimated population feeling safe. It’s what kept out the Plague. Yet Coal knew better. There was no keeping it out. There was only trying to control it. His job.

Once the wall was found unharmed, there would be the concerted effort to pin blame. Too often had the city awakened to blasts of unnerving destruction these months of late. Homes, businesses, even a school―destroyed. Rumors would spread through the city almost as the disease itself. It was anarchists. Religious fanatics. The mob. Take your pick. Of course, some rumors would land upon Coal himself―his rise to mayorship had been suspicious enough.

That was the only reason the Purgings worked: There were so many to blame.

Now wait.

His office staff would soon rush through the door reporting what little they knew, throwing about wild speculation as to the culprit. That too, Coal had learned, was part of the process of the Purgings.

Appear upset. Demand answers. Reveal nothing.

Only Coal knew the truth. Coal, and Mama Ruth.

-2-

As evening settled upon the city, his walk home was of a hasty gait, almost a jog, taking careful measures not to make a single unnecessary step that would extend his journey longer than need be. He knew the exact shortest route home, exactly which side of the streets to walk on, how best to avoid the lamplighters seeing to their nightly task, and the alleyways to cut through to bypass the street vendors who would undoubtedly plea for his custom. In fact, he even knew the exact number of steps it would take for him to do it, if done properly―a goal he strived to meet daily. Six hundred and ninety-four.

Every dozen steps he took care to pull on his scarf, afraid his hurried pace might jostle it loose from its place just below the bridge of his nose, exposing his lungs to unfiltered air. He always walked fastest on the day of a Purging.

Streets emptied for days when the Purgings first began. Coal relished every one of them―how easy it was to make the long walk to and from his office on those destitute days. But soon the city grew bold having learned that surviving the morning was as much as surviving the day, and so these days his passing through the city met without break from the populace.

Standing at the stoop of his front door, a two-story home inhabited by only he and his wife, a veritable mansion when compared to the cramped shared living spaces of the old downtown office buildings, he worked to steady his exhausted breathing. It was the shortcoming of his impetuous pace. An extra breath meant only an extra chance to breathe the microscopic toxin that would spell his undoing.

Reaching into his pocket, he produced a ring of three keys: one for home, one for the mayor’s office, and a singular bronze key he’d uncovered a week after inheriting that office. Locked away in a safe hidden behind a painting of a city skyline that no longer existed quite the same, the key had with it a map, pinpointing the door to which it belonged. The key to the city―a way out. So it was written upon the map. Coal had yet to use it,