Plague: A gripping suspense thriller about an incurable outbreak in Miami

by Graham Masterton

  Every half-hour, there was a plague bulletin, and a repeated message telling people what to do if they thought they had plague. The message was sober, but it was also absurdly optimistic, and if you didn’t know how terrifyingly quickly the plague had spread across the Eastern seaboard, you could have been forgiven for thinking that your pallor, your pains and your chronic diarrhoea were nothing worse than a severe tummy bug.

  The Pastons and Shark McManus drove through the pallid night into the early dawn. They were flagged down once by a motorcycle cop just outside Jersey City, but he seemed more interested in checking Edgar’s driver’s license than questioning their destination. He looked around the station wagon a couple of times, and then waved them on. He was obviously tired out after a night’s duty.

  The radio said, ‘Now, it’s important not to let your anxiety about this epidemic prompt you into ill-considered action. The federal authorities in charge of this situation say that the best thing you can do – safer for your family and safer for your neighbors – is to stay home. If you do not have sufficient foodstuffs to last you – well, simply wave a makeshift flag or banner from your windows, and your local police department will bring you supplies. Stay at home, folks – it’s the sensible way, and it’s the safest way.’

  Tammy said, ‘They’re bound to stop us and send us back home. Edgar, why don’t we just turn back? Please!’

  Shark McManus turned in his seat. ‘Of course they’ll stop us. But if we use our noodles, they won’t turn us back. Now relax, will ya? I have some brainwork to do.’

  Tammy said, ‘Edgar – tell him we’re turning back!’

  But Edgar said nothing, and kept on driving through the outskirts of dreary Jersey City – through the silent, deserted suburbs – with the emasculated obedience of a man who knows he will never have the courage to argue against a gun.

  Shark McManus, chewing gum noisily and repetitively, directed Edgar through the streets of Jersey with laconic expertise. It was a dead city of parked cars and wind-blown garbage, and the gradually-brightening sky only made its shabbiness look worse.

  Tammy sat there, pale-faced, with dark rings under her eyes, and the two children silently dozed, with heads lolling against the seat. Tammy was coming along because Edgar was her husband and she was Edgar’s wife, but – with a strange kind of internal tension that she had never felt before – she was beginning to suspect that Edgar was not the man she had once thought him to be.

  She even wondered if he had shot that Boy Scout out of something more than the righteous defense of property and the American way – out of violence, even, and calculated hatred. A bond of some sort – an understanding – seemed to have grown up between Edgar and this hoodlum Shark McManus. She looked at the back of her husband’s neck as he drove and it looked like the back of a stranger, someone she didn’t love very much at all.

  At five-thirty in the morning they stopped. She opened her eyes and realized she’d been sleeping. They were third or fourth in a line of cars that was being checked by police and National Guardsmen by the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel.

  ‘Edgar,’ she said. ‘What’s happening?’

  Edgar didn’t turn around. ‘Lincoln Tunnel,’ he said flatly. ‘We got as far as here, and we didn’t get stopped by the cops once. We can thank Shark for that.’

  ‘That’s right, ma’am,’ grinned Shark McManus. ‘Right through them back-streets like rabbits through a warren. Any time you want to get yourself out of a jam, just call on Shark McManus, and you’re saved. Service with a smile.’

  Tammy said, ‘They won’t let us through here, whatever happens.’

  Shark pointed across the gray ruffled waters of the Hudson, to the gray spectral spires of Manhattan. This morning, the city looked like a ghostly mirage of itself – an oasis of purity in a desert of disease.

  ‘You see that?’ he said, smiling lopsidedly. ‘That’s where we’re headed, ma’am, and aint nobody going to stand in our way.’

  Two cops in amber sunglasses strode up to their car and signaled for Edgar to roll down his window. They looked tired, but tough, and they had four or five armed National Guardsmen backing them up.

  ‘Hi, folks,’ said the cop, checking the inside of the car. ‘Can I ask where you come from, and where you believe you’re headed?’

  ‘We came from Elizabeth, New Jersey,’ said Edgar, in a dry voice.

  ‘And we’re headed for there,’ put in Shark, nodding towards Manhattan.

  The cop looked thoughtful. Behind him, one of the Guardsmen was yawning.

  ‘I’m sorry, folks,’ said the cop, ‘but we have emergency regulations in force right now. Nobody is permitted to leave the state of New Jersey, and nobody is permitted to enter Manhattan.’

  Edgar Paston lowered his head tiredly. ‘What you’re saying is, we have to turn around and go home?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s the message, folks,’ said the cop.

  Edgar turned to Shark. ‘Looks like we don’t have any option,’ he said.

  Shark shook his head. ‘Life is full of options, man.’

  He produced the police .38 from under the seat, cocked it, and pointed it straight at Edgar’s head, a half-inch from his right ear. The two cops quickly stepped back, and drew their pistols.

  One of them called, ‘Hey, George! Trouble!’ to the National Guardsmen. The men lifted their rifles, and two of them ran across to the other side of the road to keep the Pastons covered.

  ‘Okay, kid!’ yelled one of the cops, in a rough voice. ‘Don’t be a dead wise guy! Throw the gun out, and come out of there with your hands up!’

  ‘Start the engine, Edgar,’ hissed McManus.

  ‘What?’ said Edgar faintly.

  ‘Start the fucking engine. Get this heap moving.’

  ‘They’ll kill us.’

  ‘No, they won’t. They’re good guys. Now get moving.’

  Edgar hesitantly reached for the ignition keys, and started the engine. Shark screamed, ‘If any of you guys fires a single shot, this dummy gets it in the brain! Just one shot, you hear!’

  Tammy said, ‘Please – you don’t know what you’re doing!’

  ‘Of course I know what I’m doing,’ said Shark. ‘I’m getting us into Manhattan. Now move your ass, Edgar, or I’ll blow your head off!’

  Slowly, the Mercury wagon rolled down the gradient towards the tunnel. Two or three police and National Guardsmen jogged along beside it, while the rest of them ran back to their patrol cars, started them up, and tailed the Pastons at a circumspect distance.

  As they entered the tunnel, a police bullhorn gave them a raucous message, weirdly distorted by echoes and half-drowned by the draft that blew through the tunnel from the Manhattan shore.

  ‘Listen, kid! Throw out the gun! You don’t have a chance! We have both ends of the tunnel sealed! You’ll never get away with it! Throw out your gun and you won’t get hurt!’

  Tammy was sobbing. Chrissie and Marvin sat white and frightened. Only Shark was relaxed. He held the .38 steadily against Edgar’s head, and chewed gum as casually as if he were propping up a street corner.

  ‘Come on, Edgar,’ he coaxed. ‘Drive a little faster, man.’

  Edgar speeded up. He could see the black and white police car, fifteen or twenty yards behind him, with all its lights on. They were going too fast now for the jogging cops and guardsmen to keep alongside, and McManus even found time to wave to them.

  ‘So long, suckers! See you in the city!’

  The drive through the Lincoln Tunnel seemed endless. As they went deeper under the Hudson, it seemed to Tammy that it was more like the end of the world than ever. There were tears running down her face, and her hands were tightly clenched in her lap.

  Gradually, they perceived the gray light of morning ahead of them, washing wanly down the tunnel gradient. They also saw the police cars pulled across the roadway, and the armed officers waiting for them.

  ‘Okay,’ said Shark, ‘this is the difficult part. Stay
cool and everyone is going to be fine.’

  ‘What do you want us to do?’ asked Edgar, in a numb voice.

  Shark peered along the tunnel towards the roadblock.

  ‘There aint no way we’re going to smash our way through there, so we’re going to have to walk. Just before you get to the roadblock, pull up sharp. Then we all get out of the car at once, and we stroll in a bunch towards the cops, and through. I want you in front, Edgar, and I’m going to have this piece right up against your skull. Then I want the missis and the kids all around me, so none of those police marksmen starts taking pot-shots. You understand?’

  Edgar nodded. They were only seventy yards away from the roadblock now. He could see the police squatting down behind their cars, gripping their guns in readiness. The patrol car that had been tailing them all the way through the tunnel edged closer, and its headlights dazzled Edgar in his rearview mirror.

  They rolled nearer and nearer the roadblock. The patrol car behind them was almost touching their rear bumper.

  ‘Stop,’ said Shark McManus, and opened his door.

  There was an echoing silence. Shark beckoned Edgar to shift himself across the front seat, and pulled him out through the passenger door. Then he gripped the back of Edgar’s shirt-collar with one hand, and pressed the .38 against his skull with the other.

  ‘Don’t anyone move!’ he yelled. ‘One move and this guy gets it!’

  Then he snapped at Tammy, ‘Come on, ma’am. Get your butt out of that car and stand here.’

  Tammy opened her door. It was never recorded what the New York police thought she was going to do, or whether they had any reason to believe she might be armed. But there was a sudden echoing crackle of shots, and the rear windows of the Mercury were smashed into milk and blood. Edgar yelped, and tried to reach the car, but McManus fiercely tugged him away, and kept the gun pressed to his head.

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ screamed McManus. ‘One more shot and I kill him!’

  The police held their fire. Awkward, crab-like, holding Edgar tight against him. Shark McManus shuffled towards them. One of the cops raised his gun, but the lieutenant in charge waved him back.

  There was silence as Shark McManus and Edgar Paston made their way slowly up the Lincoln Tunnel towards daylight. They were covered every foot of the way, but the police had not yet been given instructions to fire on potential plague carriers, and they let them pass.

  ‘Have them followed,’ said the lieutenant impatiently. ‘They can’t walk around like Siamese twins for the rest of their lives. The minute that kid drops his guard, I want him hit.’

  He turned back to the Mercury wagon. A young paramedic was opening the doors, and easing Tammy and the children out. There was blood everywhere. Tammy had been hit in the left breast and left shoulder. Chrissie had been hit in the ear, and Marvin had been hit twice in the chest. They were all still alive, but the doctor was shaking his head and looking pessimistic.

  ‘Do I have to take them back to Jersey?’ he asked the lieutenant. ‘Those few extra minutes are going to make all the difference.’

  The lieutenant shrugged. ‘It’s the rules, Jack. Nobody gets into Manhattan, alive or dead. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Christ,’ said the doctor. ‘You shot ’em.’

  The lieutenant grunted. ‘Sure. But I didn’t infect ’em.’ The doctor nodded towards the slowly-disappearing figures of Shark McManus and Edgar. ‘What about those two?’

  ‘We’ll get ’em. Just stick to what you’re good at. Band-Aids and lint.’

  Long after Shark McManus and his hostage had disappeared from sight, the police could hear Edgar weeping, his sobs echoing and distorted down the empty tunnel, like the cries of a lonesome seal.

  One of the four people who had died of plague on the main street of Elizabeth, New Jersey, on Friday night, was a 52-year-old insurance salesman from Hoboken named Henry Casarotto. The pain of his dying had been so intense that he had bitten his own left hand, and his infected sputum had dribbled on to his fingers and his red signet ring. His signet ring. New Jersey police discovered, had been removed by a looter sometime after his death.

  They had no way of knowing that it was now on the right hand of Shark McManus, and so they had no way of warning the detectives and patrolmen who followed McManus along West 39th Street on Saturday morning that their only possible hope of survival was to shoot first, and worry about police procedure later.

  It was six minutes after six o’clock, and the plague had arrived in Manhattan.

  Three

  On Sunday afternoon, it began to rain. The temperature dropped six or seven degrees, and there was a heavy, cloudy wind from the sea. Dr. Petrie drove northwards up the Atlantic Coast of New Jersey with Adelaide fast asleep beside him, and Prickles singing softly to herself in the back.

  The plague had stricken New Jersey swiftly and relentlessly, as if the living breath had been stolen from the whole seven thousand square miles of it in one night. Bodies lay prone on the rain-slicked roads, just where they had fallen. Cars and trucks were abandoned in the middle of the highway, with their drivers sitting like pallid waxworks behind the wheel. They passed a few other cars, driving aimlessly through the wet afternoon, but almost every town they came to was deserted, silent and strewn with bodies.

  Leonard Petrie drove through Perth Amboy at five-forty-five, and calculated on reaching Manhattan before it grew too dark. The rain lashed against the windshield, and the tires made a sizzling noise on the concrete highway. He sucked peppermint, and watched the wipers flopping backwards and forwards – trying to think of diseases and diagnoses he should have remembered from medical school, just to keep himself from closing his eyes and dropping off to sleep. Prickles sang, ‘There was an old woman tossed up in a blanket… Seventeen times as high as the moon.’

  The radio, strangely, was silent – except for whoops and squeaks and whistles and the occasional burst of Morse. He had picked up regular broadcasts from New York stations until about lunchtime, when they had suddenly faded. He had had no news of the plague now for almost six hours, and no idea if Manhattan Island had been sealed off, or if it was still possible for refugees to cross the Hudson and seek sanctuary.

  He felt as if the whole world had died around them – as if they were consigned to drive for the rest of their lives down dull, rainy streets of empty cities, searching for an America that had gone for ever, and could never be found again.

  Every now and then, he saw helicopters beating across the windy sky, and he tried flashing his headlights at them. One of them had seen him, and had circled noisily overhead for a few minutes, but then it had heeled away and headed westwards like all of the others. The plague had made people even more suspicious and violent and remote than ever before.

  Whenever he had visited New York before. Dr. Petrie had always flown into La Guardia. He remembered the glittering spires of the Empire State and the Chrysler Building, and the sparkle of traffic along Roosevelt Drive and the Triboro Bridge approaches. But now, as the World Trade Towers loomed out of the murky dusk, and the skyline of Wall Street and downtown Manhattan emerged from the rain behind them, he realized with a sensation of eerie apprehension that the city was in darkness. As far as he could see across the choppy black waters of the Hudson, Manhattan Island was a sinister castle in the sea, with buildings that stood like pale and ancient ramparts, gleaming dimly through the low clouds and the teeming rain. Not a light winked anywhere.

  He pulled the car to the side of the street and switched off the engine. The sound of rain pattering on the vinyl roof was the only sound there was in the whole world. Dr. Petrie rubbed grit from his eyes and leaned his head forward in exhausted resignation. For the first time in days, he didn’t know what to do, or which way to turn.

  Adelaide stirred, and opened her eyes. ‘Leonard?’ she said. ‘What is it? Why have you stopped?’

  Dr. Petrie looked up. Then he nodded towards the distant skyline. Adelaide blinked her eyes and peered into the gloom.


  ‘Leonard…’ she said. ‘That’s New York! Leonard, we’ve made it!’

  She reached over happily and kissed him. But he gently pushed her away, and pointed out into the dusk.

  ‘Look again.’

  She frowned. ‘What’s happened?’ she said. ‘Where are the lights?’

  He shook his head. ‘They could have had a power failure. It’s happened before.’

  Adelaide stared at him. There was an uncomfortable silence between them that was prolonged by their mutual refusal to acknowledge what had happened. Finally Adelaide said, ‘It’s the plague, isn’t it? They’ve caught it here.’

  Dr. Petrie nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said huskily. ‘I expect they have.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ she asked. ‘Oh God, Leonard, we can’t go on running away for ever. The plague seems to spread faster than we can move.’

  Dr. Petrie coughed. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know what to do. I suppose in the end we’ll catch it like everybody else.’

  ‘We haven’t caught it yet.’

  Dr. Petrie stared at the dribbles of rain coursing down the windshield. ‘I don’t know whether that’s a blessing or not. What’s the use of staying alive when there’s nobody else around to make it worthwhile? What does a doctor do when all his patients are six feet underground?’

  Adelaide leaned over and kissed him. ‘Leonard, you’re tired. You’ve been driving for days. Don’t get depressed.’

  Quite unexpectedly, Dr. Petrie found himself weeping. It was years since he’d last cried. Adelaide watched him tenderly and said nothing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, blowing his nose. ‘That was ridiculous.’

  Adelaide shook her head. ‘No, it wasn’t. You have a lot of things to cry for.’

  ‘It doesn’t help solve our problem.’