The parishioners sat quietly before their cherished preacher, listening to him dispel comforting lies about grand plans and god’s love, while Dr. Harold Winters ascended the creaking, decayed wooden stairs within the red-brick bell tower north of the church entrance. On his ascent, he would briefly glance out the stained-glass windows placed periodically up the side of the structure, many of them broken or otherwise losing their vibrant sheen, and look upon the world he would soon depart wistfully.

    His beautiful wife, Marsha Winters, had the night prior succumbed to the fever which now shook the world. She had gone loudly into the night while Harold stood by, unable to ease her pain despite his successful career working over the same virus which tore her insides to shreds. She cried out in pain as her innards were twisted and deformed. Red-hot liquid seeped from every orifice, soaking the crisp white sheets dark brown-red. Her eyes, once a beautiful blue like the New England skies on a warm summer night, had first glossed over in an opaque hue before turning a deep sickly yellow.

    But when she went, he recalled, they had been blood red.

    Harold sighed and glanced at the Timex watch on his left wrist, knowing that mass would soon end and that he should move a little bit faster to avoid a scene, and tears came to his eyes. Marsha had purchased the brass piece for him years ago on the sixth month anniversary celebrating their relationship. They had been in college at the time and funds were tight, but she’d set aside two-hundred and fifty-nine dollars in a special savings account separate her usual just to be safe. All because she recalled the night they’d gone to the cinemas to see yet another Dracula reboot film.

    Harold had always possessed a grim fascination with monsters and ghosts and expressed that interest by voraciously consuming any piece of horror cinema that graced the silver screens. He’d always been fascinated by the dark and grim inner workings of the human mind; that which lay behind the pretty facades people erect around their inherent inner ugliness. His younger brother, a major in classic literature, namely gothic, had often jokingly called him the ‘Master of the Macabre.’

    It had been years since Harold had seen Jake. Years since he watched the uncaring eyes of the rent-a-preacher as they lowered his brother’s coffin into the damp cemetery ground.

    That night back home with Marsha had been perfect, he recalled. It had been a late night showing, around midnight, on a breezy August evening. The moon had been full in the sky, its light reflecting back eerily in the residual puddles from the rains earlier in the day and the air exuded an aura of a kind that absolutely oozed a sense of mysticism and mystery. Harold anxiously awaited the film’s release, being a fan of the original novel since reading through it in high school, and the film had finally come late into the month, nearly October. The leaves on the small maples trees lining Main Street had already begun to turn hues of orange and red.

    While many of his friends’ parents had gifted them cars, his parents weren’t quite so well off and he had focused exclusively on his educations, opting out of working part-time. His father had been a steelworker until the union demanded a penny too much and they’d been locked out. His mother had gotten a job at the local salon to help, but her nine an hour barely made up for the twenty-eight his father had been bringing home.

    So he and Marsha resigned to walk.

    He still recalled the look on her face. It had been an oddly attractive mix of the cold breeze, an effort to smile after Harold’s bad day hours earlier, and apprehension over seeing a horror film. She’d never liked them.

    Marsha’s parents had been strict Evangelical Christians and deprived her of such delights as a child, so she never quite grew the stomach for them. They’d wanted nothing more than to see her attend a conservative Christian college and marry a nice blond-hair Christian man. Her father was an overbearing man all her life. He was the kind of man who knew everything there was to know and you were wrong or too young and naïve if you tried to tell him he was wrong. Her mother worked stalwartly with the church, designing and writing the pamphlets they’d pass out at each mass and operating full-time to indoctrinate the children; breeding the next generation of Christian Warriors, as she would often say. It was them against the world.

    Harold always found that notion a bit arrogant. Her and those like her thought of themselves as soldiers of god and he found any self-important idolizing dangerous.

    He would often joke with Marsha after a dinner with them or a bump-in at the store that he’d gotten a call from MPPD. Her mother had been arrested trying to bomb a Planned Parenthood or stoning a prostitute.

    Marsha never laughed at his antics. They had just made her sad.

    She knew her parents hated Harold with a fervor almost exclusive to religious zealotry and that he hated them equally in return for the backwards notions they tried to instill in their daughter, his love.

    It had been difficult at first for Marsha, hiding their admittedly radical set of beliefs from her liberal atheist boyfriend. So many excuses to avoid meetups until she could work up the courage to just sit Harold down and tell him.

    He smiled to himself, gazing beyond the dirty stained glass at the college side of town where they’d met, recalling the conversation the two of them had in his dorm that November night.

    The conversation had been over dinner on his craped full mattress and began like any other, with jokes and sweet nothings that would quickly delve into more serious matters. They needed to be quite, sneaking Marsha in the small room by means of the fire-escape and through the dorm room window. She’d brought Chinese from Wo-Tung downtown, one of his old favorites.

    Harold recalls the baffling fear they had felt at being discovered. The adrenaline-fueled violation of college guidelines had his blood pumping, despite its meager minor infraction status. He had felt something he’d seldom felt before, like he was getting away with something, and that was a feeling he relished in the moment.

    Harold had been a perfect student all his life. He stuck steadfast to the codes and guidelines established within the education institutions he’d attended like laws.

    The truth is that they’d have perhaps been slapped on the wrist, if any formal punishment of note would have been distributed at all. They might have gotten a note in their records. But to Harold, someone who hasn’t so much as chewed gum in a classroom since the second grade, that was risking life in prison.

    Marsha had broached the subject of her parent’s beliefs and her conservative evangelical roots with little tact, playing off his discussion of his Biology professor’s lecture on biogenesis in the natural world and the idea that abiogenesis birthed life on Earth.

    “My mother would hate that one,” she’d said.

    Marsha had tried to subtly brush off the comment, tried to make it as though part of the natural flow of their discussion. She’d stuffed an unnaturally large wad of lo mein in her mouth too quickly with her chopsticks and nearly choked to death afterwards.

    Harold smiled, remembering her nervousness. The way her eyes darted to anything or anyone but him when she was anxious in his presence. The manner in which she would bite her lower lip, transferring some of the cherry lipstick to her top front teeth in the process.

    He hadn’t cared. People would always believe what they want to believe, stupid or not. Humans have always set aside fact and reason to justify their own insipid moral and existential beliefs; beliefs that made them feel safe and secure in an unsafe and unsecure world. There was no chance of changing human nature. As long as Marsha was reasonable and kind, and she was, he was fine.

    They grew closer that night. Most in part due to her.

    In college, he had so often been lost in his own world; the one within his mind. The world of Biology. She had always been the rock, the anchor that held them together through tough times.

    She listened when he spoke. He heard but never quite registered when she spoke.

    So when she’d presented him with the watch, his heart broke. It had been a comment he’d made in passing, glancing across the boulevard at the clock-tower in town square.

    “I really need a watch.”

    He’d spoken so quietly to himself that he hadn’t thought she heard. Why would he? What should she care about a hollow rouge thought mentioned casually on their way to the cinemas? The comment had been almost instinctive like a spontaneous reflex, spoken without any conscious thought other than how nice it would be to have one, but she had been there. His Marsha. Listening and attentive as always.   

    He realized that he left a lot to be desired in a husband. He was often self-absorbed in his own work.

    After college, Harold had published numerous dissertations and papers of evolutionary biology. He was good, and Genamyks quickly sought him out for contract employment.

    Prior to them contacting him, Harold had only heard the name ‘Genamyks’ one or two times and usually not in a good way. The organization had been a major NGO operating internationally from modified off-shore oil platforms it purchased from BP after their 2022 spill into the Atlantic which nearly put them out of business forced them to scale down their operations, with government fines levied from six different nations and an extreme overreaction of regulatory inspection and restrictions. 

    Genamyks swooped in, paid millions for the platforms, completely redesigned them and outfitted the floating fortresses with bio-labs and other genetic research facilities. Rumors were abound that they’d been researching eugenics on the rigs stationed in international waters, and things like forced evolution and genetic modification so aggressive most governments would have shut them down had they been positioned within anyone’s defined boarders.

    But they weren’t and were thus allowed to operate mostly unhindered by governmental interference and regulations, as they weren’t at all a medical manufacturer or pharmaceutical distributor of any kind.

    Harold had few other options. The money was good, even if he couldn’t possibly pinpoint its origin. Genamyks had no consumer products they offered, no non-profit status in any nations. Nothing. It truly was a shadow organization.

    But even through all the indecision and all the inner conflict, Marsha stuck beside her husband. 

    She’d just might have been the only person to ever genuinely have any affection for him, or at least the only one to express such affections in any impactful or meaningful manner.

    But his time with her, as he’d come to realize on his ascent up the dilapidated wooden stairs of the First Lutheran Church of the Sacrament Saints’ bell tower, had been but a fleeting transient foretaste of the happiness ahead of him that never was.

    Martha. His Martha. Had been cruelly and maliciously ripped away from him.

    He’d laid awake in bed the night before, hours after she’d uttered one final inhuman croak and died, wondering if perhaps he’d been wrong all along about God and that this might be his punishment for meddling into his affairs.

    Her father had thought so when Harold had called him in the morning. A plague had been sent upon him so that he might see the light, Jack Whitlock had told him, seemingly more interested in capitalizing on the death of his daughter that he might convert her husband than morning her passing.

    “What kind of God would take an innocent women to spite her husband?” Harold had asked, grief-stricken and just wanting to hurt someone.

    Her father would do.

    “One that demands respect and adoration he’s owed,” Jack had answered, his voice breaking over the phone’s lousy connection.

    Since the EM virus had been leased into the populace, infrastructure wasn’t really on the forefront of anyone’s mind. Those who maintained phone towers, phone lines, had given in to the hysteria sweeping the country and likely remained home with their families.

    “That’s not a God worth worshiping,” Harold had replied. “That’s a vicious, spiteful cunt. If that’s the god you worship, I’ll gladly side with Lucifer.”

    He’d hung up the phone before Jack could utter another abhorrent response.

    The man never loved his daughter. He had eyes only for his God and his ancient book, written by cave-dwelling savages.

    The only god Harold had deemed worth worshiping had been taken from him. She had been a sacrament and he had been blessed enough to have her as a symbol of ‘God,’ whatever that is, and his love for him. And she had been taken from him; his sacrament defiled.

    For hours, he had sat. Sat on the chocolate leather sofa they’d a mere month ago purchased together, running the Timex watch through his fingers.

    She had known, he realized. She’d been concerned about the cough. About the headache. She’d told him that she felt a pressure behind her left eye.

    And Harold had brushed it off as a flu. Told her to get off the internet.

    And she’d died two days later.

    Of the monster he’d created.

    Atop the bell tower, Harold can see the entirety of the small town of Morgan Point and the shore of the Atlantic beyond. A heavy mass of fog moves slowly over the calm bay waters, consuming the east end of town.

    From there, the world seemed almost calm. But he knew that miles away men and women die and writhe in pain. The sickness was spreading like wildfire in a drought, never quenched. Never satisfied.

    The quiet sea breeze carries with it an unfamiliar hymn from the church below. It sang of God’s love.

    Harold exhaled. He leaned down, removed his shoes and his watch and placed them neatly on the ground before stepping over the waist high cement brick wall, and finally leaping from the tower.

    The ground came up quick.

    It relieved him of his guilt, of his pain, and of this part in his love’s death.