Black Death — Stephen Donald Huff

Genoa, 1343. A plague ship quietly slips into the harbor bound from Cathay by way of Calla, a city under interminable siege from Tatars, who use assault tactics that include catapulting putrid, disease-ridden corpses over the city walls. These bloated bodies crawl with infected fleas. The fleas teem with bacteria. Thus, upon the flesh of these hapless refugees, bubonic plague arrives in Europe. Millions will soon die. This is the history we know. The truth is certainly not so obvious, and humankind will never definitively know how an obscure infection spread over the course of a century from Kublai Khan's invasion of Korea, across the entire span of China along the Silk Road through India and the Middle-East to finally appear in Genoa, Italy. Examined from another perspective the plague's apparently deliberate journey tells a different story… one with disturbing implications for the near future.