Rant

outlaw the sun. They market clothing and bumper stickers emblazoned with their slogans. For example: “Ban the Sun.” Or “Moonlight Is Enough Light.” Unfortunately, I can see how this might worry the powers that be. The last ordeal this nation needs is a civil war pitting night against day.
    Another common bumper sticker says: “Take Back the Day!”
    One man’s joke can very easily become another’s call to arms. Historians speculate that Mein Kampfwas created as a rather cunning satire, a parody that the general public interpreted far too literally.
    Lynn Coffey: It was Thomas Jefferson who warned us that any nation would always need a frontier as an escape valve or a place to store the perennial tide of lunatics and idiots. That’s not anywhere in the official propaganda, but nighttime is the big trash bin for your mental defectives. Your angry loners. Your cripples. Nighttimers get free health care. It’s part of the incentive program. The clinics are shitty and crowded, but they’re free. The housing is subsidized. The jobs are more likely to be low-skilled, but they offer a wage differential of a couple bucks over the same dead-end job in the daytime. It’s no surprise the misfits of society wash up as Nighttimers.
    From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: In hindsight, we had no idea of the events taking shape. Naturally, one read about the deaths in the newspaper, but I never gave them a second thought. We were far more concerned about preparing for the next Honeymoon Night, or decorating a Christmas tree for the upcoming Tree Night. An ominous shadow was falling over Rant, and we were debating whether to hang white or multicolor lights on our tree. Pontiac versus Dodge? Pine or spruce?
    Officer Romie Mills: The third victim died in the same manner as the first two. An autopsy turned up encephalitis and myelitis of the brain, including Negri bodies in the pyramidal cells of the hippocampus, and Purkinje cells of the cerebellum. The short and sweet version of that is rabies. All three of the victims died of undiagnosed, untreated rabies.
    Irene Casey: Buster wrote to us, saying he was so in love and courting somebody. His dad and me, we only prayed it was the girl, not the boy.
    Officer Romie Mills: According to the Centers for Disease Control, the most recently diagnosed case of rabies in the area had been a twenty-six-year-old male named Christopher Dunyun.
    It was during our preliminary investigation that the fourth victim collapsed and died of previously undiagnosed rabies-related encephalitis. Our fear was that the disease might be spreading exponentially. We could be looking at a hundred or ten thousand people unaware they’d been infected.
    Shot Dunyun: It could’ve been an earthquake that got Rant Casey. Or a fire. Or a bullshit strain of some killer flu.
    It’s comforting to know, after all the Party Crash accidents I’ve survived, that, the day I finally meet Death, the two of us will be old, long-lost friends.
    Me and Death, separated at birth.
    24–Werewolves II
    Vivica Brawley ( Dancer): See how, my one foot, the skin looks smooth and white as a bar of soap? Before the attack, I used to have beautiful feet. Tons of men said so. Didn’t matter was I naked, all I needed to do was slip off my shoes and some customers would fork over their tip money.
    Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D. ( Epidemiologist): At the height of the Peloponnesian War, in 431 B.C., Thucydides wrote of a plague that spread north from Ethiopia, through Egypt and Libya. In Athens, the citizens suffered fevers, sneezing, and a violent cough. Their bodies glowed red with lividity, until thousands threw off their clothing, and an unquenchable thirst drove them to drown in the deep, cool water of public wells and cisterns. The city-state was demoralized, its navy crippled. This is how measles destroyed the civilization of the ancient Greeks.
    In the first century B.C., a virulent strain of smallpox drove the Huns west from their homelands in Mongolia, toward Rome. For Napoleon’s Grand Army, the ultimate foe would be the bacteria Rickettsia prowazekii, otherwise known as typhus.
    Our greatest civilizations have always been destroyed by epidemic disease.
    Carlo Tiengo ( Nightclub Manager): Viv? Mind you, back then all the dancers boosted some effect to stay high, at least while they were performing. Most our dancers indulged in an opiate effect the club knew to provide.
    Not exactly legal, mind you, but easy to make.