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

by Graham Masterton

‘It might do. It might stop you from bottling all your feelings up, and turning yourself into a nervous wreck. You’ve had so much to contend with.’

  ‘I’m a doctor. Doctors don’t get sick.’

  Adelaide smiled. ‘Don’t you believe it.’

  Prickles, who had been sleeping on the back seat, stirred and yawned. ‘Is it time for Star Trek yet?’ she said, sitting up.

  Adelaide pulled a face at her. ‘How can you watch Star Trek in a car?’

  ‘I forgot,’ said Prickles, rubbing her eyes. ‘I was having a dream I wasn’t in a car.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Adelaide, ‘having no television is probably the best thing that ever happened to you. All that garbage they put on for kids. And think of your health. Think of all that radiation you get from sitting in front of color TVs. Not to mention the eyestrain.’

  Dr. Petrie was just about to start up the car again, but he paused. He turned to Adelaide and said, ‘What?’

  She was confused. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What was that you just said?’

  ‘I don’t know. Eyestrain, something like that.’

  ‘Before that.’

  ‘Oh, you mean radiation?’

  ‘That’s right. Radiation! Radiation from color TVs!’

  Adelaide said brusquely, ‘I wish you’d kindly explain what radiation has got to do with anything.’

  ‘I don’t know precisely,’ said Dr. Petrie. ‘But do you remember what they said on the radio about certain people being less prone to plague than others? Children was one category, and so were ConEd powerworkers, and doctors.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘No, it’s very simple. That was what I was trying to work out before. I was trying to think why Anton Selmer and I should both escape the plague, even though we were heavily exposed to it. There were one or two other doctors at the hospital, too, who seemed to be immune. Now you mention children, sitting in front of color TVs. How many hours of television does the average American kid watch per day?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. Six or seven?’

  Dr. Petrie nodded. ‘Right – that’s a lot of television, and a lot of radiation. And that’s what Dr. Selmer and I had in common, and what we’ve all got in common with certain types of power workers, and others. We were supervising X-Rays, and we must have picked up a mild dose of radio-activity.’

  Adelaide thought about it. ‘It’s a theory, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s better than no theory at all.’

  Dr. Petrie started up the car, and they pulled away from the curbside.

  ‘It could be nonsense, but it’s the only thing that seems to fit. I mean, if the plague has been mutated into a super-plague, maybe it was mutated by radio-activity. In which case, radio-activity seems to be the only thing that can ward it off.’

  They drove through the rain towards the Holland Tunnel entrance.

  ‘Are you going into Manhattan?’ Adelaide asked.

  Dr. Petrie nodded. ‘I guess we have to. They can’t have had the plague for very long, and if I’ve got some kind of theory about curing it, I think I really have to tell someone.’

  ‘But Leonard—’

  ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you want to go?’

  ‘Leonard, it’s not a question of wanting to go. Look at it – it’s dark and it’s getting darker. That city’s bad enough when it has lights. It’s going to be a jungle in there. You can’t take Prickles into that.’

  Dr. Petrie slowed the car and took a long left-hand curve. The rain fell through the light of their headlamps in a careless pattern.

  ‘Adelaide,’ he said quietly, ‘I don’t see that we have any choice. All we have to do is find someplace secure to stay for the night, and then tomorrow we can get in touch with the hospitals. As long as I can tell someone about this radiation theory, we’re okay. Then we can leave.’

  ‘Leonard,’ said Adelaide, ‘I’m frightened. Can’t you understand that?’

  He glanced at her. ‘Don’t you think I’m frightened, too?’

  ‘Then why go? We could skirt around New York altogether, and drive up to the Catskills. We could be safe there. You said before that we were going to find ourselves a place to stay until the plague was all over.’

  Dr. Petrie nodded. ‘I know.’

  ‘Then please, Leonard.’

  They had almost reached the tunnel entrance. For a moment he was tempted to turn around, and escape from the plague for good. They could drive upstate, and into Canada, and leave America to the ravages of fast-breeding bacilli and whatever fate was in store for her. But then he shook his head.

  ‘Adelaide,’ he said, ‘I’ve only got a theory, but maybe nobody else has put two and two together in quite the same way. Maybe this could help to cure the plague, or slow it down, and if it does that, how can I leave Manhattan with a clear conscience? There are seven million people in this city, Adelaide, and if I only saved a seventh of them, that would be a million people. Can you imagine saving the lives of one million people?’

  Adelaide lowered her head. ‘Do you think, Leonard, that even one of those million people would stick their neck out to save you?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s irrelevant.’

  ‘It’s not irrelevant! You’re risking your life to save people you don’t even know, and who would probably leave you to die in the gutter if it meant putting themselves out. Leonard, you’re not a miracle worker, you’re not a saint! I know you want to be famous – but not this way! What’s the use of being famous when you’re dead?’

  Dr. Petrie was straining his eyes, trying to see the tunnel entrance. He stopped the car and shifted it into Park.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with fame, Adelaide. If anything, it’s to do with shame. I ran out on Anton Selmer, and left him to cope with the plague alone. If you really want to know the truth, I’m ashamed of myself. I feel I’ve betrayed something.’

  She looked at him carefully. ‘Is that why you tried to shoot that security guard in the car park? Because you were ashamed of yourself?’

  ‘Probably, I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, Leonard.’

  They sat in silence for a while, and then Dr. Petrie said, ‘If you want to stay behind, darling, you’d better stay. But I’ve got to go into the city, and that’s all there is to it. I love you, you know.’

  ‘Do you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I don’t know whether to believe you or not,’ she said. She paused, and her eyes were glistening in the darkness. ‘But I’ll come. It that’s what you want, I’ll come.’

  Prickles interrupted. ‘Have we got to that place yet?’

  ‘What place, honey?’

  ‘Unork.’

  Adelaide laughed. ‘It’s New York, not Unork. Yes, honey, we’re almost there. Daddy’s just going to take a look-see, and make sure this tunnel’s okay. Aren’t you, Daddy?’

  Dr. Petrie grinned. ‘Sure. I won’t be long. Just hang on in there.’

  He took his rifle and climbed cautiously out of the car. It was so wet and gloomy as he walked up to the entrance to Holland Tunnel that he couldn’t see what had happened at first. A large armored police van was parked diagonally across the road, and two black and white police cars were parked on the curb. A torch was shining dimly somewhere behind the cars, but Dr. Petrie couldn’t see anyone around. Rain spattered into his face and seeped into his shoes.

  ‘Hallo!’ he called. ‘Is there anyone there?’

  There was a long rainswept silence. Across the river, in the murky graveyard of Manhattan, he thought he heard the brief echoing wail of a siren, but he couldn’t be sure.

  He walked up to the van, and peered into its rain-beaded window. Inside, huddled on the seats, were five or six policemen, and they were all dead. Dr. Petrie circled around the cars, holding his rifle at the ready and found a seventh cop, hunched-up and pale, with his face in a puddle. In his hand was an electric torch which was still shining. Dr. Petrie stood there in the rain staring at him for a
while, and then he turned around and went back to Adelaide and Prickles.

  ‘The plague is here too. They’re all dead.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Adelaide sighed.

  Prickles said, ‘Is this Unork, Daddy? Can we go there?’ He looked back at her and smiled. ‘We’re on our way, honey.’

  Dr. Petrie started up the car, and drove around the police van, down the rain-streaked entranceway to the tunnel. All the lights were out, and it was pitch-black, hot, and stifling.

  The journey through the tunnel was like a miserable and terrifying ride on a ghost train. The sound of their car made an uncanny roar, and their headlights cast weird shapes and shadows. Dr. Petrie had to drive slowly, because of derelict cars lying wrecked and abandoned, and bodies sprawled on the ground. He had a horror of driving over a corpse by mistake.

  It took almost half-an-hour of slow driving to get through the tunnel. He was worried that the car wouldn’t make it. It was now caked with dust and grime and dented from countless collisions and rough detours. During the long haul north, Dr. Petrie had begun to wonder if life wasn’t anything but narrow back-roads and rutted tracks, and the Delta 88’s creaking rear suspension agreed with him.

  At last, they were climbing the tunnel gradient towards Manhattan. They emerged on Canal Street in steady rain and darkness. Slowing down to five or six miles an hour, they crept cautiously east towards the Bowery, headlights probing the streets, looking for any sign of life, or death. The dark city enclosed them like a nightmarish maze, hideous, threatening and unfamiliar.

  They saw the first bodies on the Bowery. There weren’t many, but they lay on the sidewalks and in the road with their clothes sodden and their eyes staring sightlessly at the ground.

  ‘Isn’t there anyone around anywhere?’ asked Adelaide, looking out into the night. ‘The whole place seems deserted.’

  As they turned uptown, they began to see a few lights – dim candles burning high up in apartment-block windows and hotels. They also saw living people for the first time. Every building’s entrance seemed to be locked and patroled by security guards and vigilantes with torches and guns. On Second Avenue, Dr. Petrie pulled the Delta 88 into the curb and shouted to a man standing outside an office block with a rifle and a guard dog.

  ‘Hey! Can you tell me what’s happening?’

  The man raised his rifle. ‘Scram!’ he snapped back.

  ‘I just came in from Jersey!’ shouted Dr. Petrie. ‘I want to find out what’s happening!’

  The man waved his rifle again. ‘If you don’t get the fuck out of here, I’m going to blow your head off!’

  Dr. Petrie said, ‘Listen—’

  The man fired one rifle shot into the air. It made a booming sound that echoed all the way down the avenue. Dr. Petrie closed his window, and swung the car away from the curb as quickly as he could.

  As they drove further uptown, they drove slowly into hell. In the distance, up beyond 110th Street, there was the rising glow of burning buildings, as white youths ransacked Harlem and the Spanish ghetto. Even through the rain, there was an acrid smell of smoke and burning rubber. All around them, white and colored looters were running wildly through the darkened streets, breaking windows and raiding stores.

  Bodies lay everywhere – infected by the plague or killed by muggers. Dr. Petrie saw a black girl lying dead on the sidewalk, her green dress up under her arms. He saw a young boy of fifteen or sixteen who had fallen face-first on to a broken store window.

  It was the noise that was the worst. All through the dark canyons of Manhattan there was the screeching and wailing of sirens, the endless smashing of windows, the report of gunfire, and a kind of grating roar, like a demonic beast crunching glass between its teeth, as the panicking population screamed and howled in a frenzy of destruction and despair.

  ‘Do you know where it is? The nearest hospital?’ asked Adelaide tensely, her eyes wide with fear, as they drove across 23rd Street.

  Dr. Petrie nodded. ‘I want to get to Bellevue, on First Avenue. I visited there once before, and I know one or two of the staff. I just hope to God they’re still alive.’

  Across the street, they saw a gang of black youths pushing over a Lincoln and setting fire to it. The fuel tank exploded in a hideous glare, and one of the youths was drenched in fiery gasoline. The other stood around and laughed as the boy shrieked and stumbled and tried to beat the fire away from his blazing face.

  Adelaide raised her hand to her mouth and retched. ‘Oh my God, Leonard, it’s unbearable.’

  Dr. Petrie reached over and briefly squeezed her shoulder. ‘Please, darling. We’re nearly there now.’

  Suddenly, he heard a siren whooping behind him. He looked in his mirror, and a blue and white police car came flashing and howling down 26th Street, flagging him down in a tire-slithering curve. Dr. Petrie stopped the car and waited.

  Two cops, guns drawn, climbed out of the police car and walked towards them. Both men wore respirators and gloves. They stood a few feet away from the Delta 88, and one of them called out in a muffled voice, ‘Get out of the car!’

  Dr. Petrie opened the door and did as he was told.

  ‘Hands against the roof!’ called the cop. Dr. Petrie laid his hands on the wet vinyl. The rain was easing off now, but it was still enough to make him feel uncomfortable.

  ‘Don’t you know there’s a curfew?’ asked the cop. ‘What are you doing on the streets?’

  ‘I just came in from Jersey. I didn’t know about the curfew.’

  ‘From Jersey?’

  ‘That’s right. But we’re not infected. None of us has plague.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘We came from Miami originally. We’ve been exposed to plague for five or six days, and none of us have caught it. I’m a doctor. Would you like to see my ID?’

  ‘Just hold it up.’

  Dr. Petrie did as he was told. One of the cops shone a torch on the papers, and leaned forward to read them. ‘Seems okay,’ he told his buddy.

  ‘Have you had the plague here long?’ asked Dr. Petrie. ‘I thought you were going to try to seal the whole city off.’

  The cop shook his head. ‘That’s what we thought, too, but it seems like some nut managed to get through. Real neighborly, huh? We had the first calls yesterday evening, and it’s been total panic ever since.’

  ‘Does everybody have to stay off the streets?’

  ‘It’s for your own protection, doctor. Ever since the power went out, we’ve had every psycho and madman out on the streets like bugs crawling out of a drain.’

  ‘What about the federal government? Are they helping?’

  The cop shrugged. ‘Who knows? The last I heard, the city of New York was told by the President to act brave, and go down with all flags flying. Jesus – you can’t cure it, so what’s the use?’

  Dr. Petrie said, ‘Maybe it can be cured. I’m on my way to Bellevue right now, to talk about it.’

  The cop holstered his gun. ‘Well, if you can cure it, you deserve to be called a saint.’

  Dr. Petrie climbed back into his car, and the cop called out, ‘Watch your step around Bellevue. The medical workers are still out on strike, and it aint exactly a ladies’ coffee morning. You got a gun?’

  Dr. Petrie nodded.

  ‘Well, take my advice, and use it. The wild animals are out tonight, and I don’t like to see innocent people getting themselves torn apart.’

  The cop was right about Bellevue. In the dim and unsteady light of emergency generators, a sullen group of medical workers was picketing the casualty department, and there was an angry crowd of relatives and parents trying to force their way through with plague-sick people on makeshift stretchers. Twenty or thirty ambulances were jammed in the street, and more arrived every moment, in a deafening moan of sirens.

  Dr. Petrie parked the Delta 88, and helped Adelaide and Prickles out. He collected his automatic rifle and a couple of clips of ammunition, too, and then locked the car. No doubt some marau
ding gang would break into it and steal what few possessions they had left, but they might be lucky.

  With Adelaide carrying Prickles behind him, he pushed his way through the shouting crowds towards the hospital entrance. One woman with disheveled hair and tom tights was shrieking at a picket, ‘Bastards! Murderers! You’re all going to hell!’

  The picket was yelling back, ‘That aint true! That aint the truth! You want your sick looked after so much, you do it yourself!’

  Another man bellowed, ‘What would Jesus have done! Tell me that! What would Jesus have done!’

  Dr. Petrie found himself wedged between a burly picket and a tall black man in a bloodstained alpaca suit. He pushed, but they wouldn’t give way. Finally, he lifted his rifle and prodded the picket in the back with it.

  The man turned around, sweaty and aggressive, and said, ‘Who the fuck are you pushing, Charlie?’

  ‘Out of my way!’ Dr. Petrie shouted. ‘Just get out of my way!’

  ‘What are you going to do? Shoot?’ roared the man. ‘You wouldn’t have the fucking nerve!’

  Dr. Petrie, afraid and angry, fired the rifle at the man’s legs. The picket yelled in pain, and dropped to the ground on one knee.

  ‘My foot! Christ! You’ve hit my fucking foot!’

  There was blood spattered all over the ground. The crowds heaved back – swaying away from Dr. Petrie and the sound of the shot. He roughly pushed Adelaide and Prickles around the fallen picket, and shoved them in through the cracked glass doors of the casualty department. A security guard, trying too late to keep them out, slammed the doors behind them, and bolted them.

  ‘I’m a doctor,’ said Dr. Petrie breathlessly, holding up his papers.

  The security guard glared at him. ‘A doctor?’ he said. ‘With a gun?’

  ‘Have you been out there?’ snapped Dr. Petrie. ‘Have you seen what it’s like?’

  What do you want?’ said the guard. Was that shooting out there?’

  Prickles was crying. Dr. Petrie said firmly, ‘I want to speak to the doctor in charge of the plague. I have some very important information. Can you call him for me, please?’

  The security guard looked uncertain. Outside, the pickets were hammering on the door. One of them smashed the glass with a pick-ax handle, and reached in to try and open the locks.