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

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Seems like you’re in trouble,’ said the security guard. ‘I’m sorry, friend, but I can’t let you stay here. It’s more than my job’s worth.’

  Dr. Petrie lifted his rifle.

  Adelaide said, ‘Oh, God, Leonard – no more shooting.’

  He didn’t listen. Still panting for breath, he told the security guard to lay his revolver on the floor. ‘Now call the doctor in charge of the plague,’ he said coldly, ‘and make it goddamned quick.’

  The security guard lifted the phone and pushed buttons. Dr. Petrie kept an anxious eye on the doors while the guard asked the switchboard to connect him with Dr. Murray. The pickets were systematically thumping their shoulders against the frame, and one of the top bolts was already hanging loose from its screws.

  Eventually, with a sour face, the guard passed the phone to Dr. Petrie.

  ‘Dr. Murray?’ said Dr. Petrie. ‘I have to be quick because we have a kind of disturbance down here. My name’s Dr. Leonard Petrie, and I’m a physician from Miami, Florida. I know a great deal about the plague from experience, and I also have a theory about treating it. Can I come up and see you?’

  Dr. Murray sounded elderly and cautious.

  ‘You say you come from Miami? I though they were all wiped out down there.’

  ‘I managed to escape, with my daughter and a friend. I just arrived in New York, and I really have to see you.’

  ‘I’m a busy man, Dr. Petrie.’

  ‘I know that. Dr. Murray. But this could save hundreds of lives. Maybe millions.’

  The casualty department doors were almost off their hinges. The pickets were shouting and kicking at the wood and glass. Adelaide was clutching Prickles close, and retreating as far back down the corridor as she could.

  ‘Dr. Murray?’ asked Dr. Petrie.

  There was a pause. Finally, Dr. Murray said, ‘Oh, very well. But I can only spare you five minutes. Come up and see me on the fifth floor, room 532.’

  Dr. Petrie put back the phone. Almost at the same moment, the angry pickets burst open the casualty department doors, and scrambled inside with their makeshift weapons.

  Dr. Petrie lifted his rifle. The pickets held back, but they watched him intently and closely, and as he stepped away from them down the corridor, following Adelaide, they stalked after him with hard and humorless faces.

  ‘Leonard,’ said Adelaide nervously. ‘Leonard, they’ll kill us.’

  Dr. Petrie stopped retreating. He raised the rifle to his shoulder and took a bead on the nearest picket. The men stayed where they were, silent and threatening, but he could sense that they were uncertain.

  He said, slowly and loudly, ‘You have ten seconds to turn around and get out of here. Then I start shooting, and I don’t care what I hit.’

  The pickets stayed where they were. For one terrible moment, he thought they were going to call his bluff, and make him open fire. He could feel the sweat running down inside his collar, and his hands were shaking.

  ‘Do you hear me!’ he shouted. ‘Ten seconds!’

  A man with a fire-ax took a pace nearer. Dr. Petrie swung the rifle around and aimed at his head, and the man stopped.

  ‘Eight seconds!’

  The pickets looked at each other. One of them said, ‘Aw fuck it, we’ll get him later,’ and threw down his chair-leg. One by one, the others did the same.

  Quickly, Dr. Petrie took Adelaide by the arm, and led her down the corridor to the stairs. He didn’t trust elevators, with the power the way it was.

  ‘Can you climb four flights?’ he asked Prickles. Prickles, white-faced and frightened, gave a nod.

  They found Dr. Murray in a cluttered office on the fifth floor, talking on the internal telephone, and drinking black coffee out of a plastic cup. He was a gray-haired, intense-looking man, with big fleshy ears and heavy horn-rimmed spectacles.

  ‘Dr. Murray?’ said Petrie, putting out his hand. Dr. Murray shook it limply.

  ‘You’d better take a seat,’ said Dr. Murray mournfully. ‘Just move those papers – there’s a chair under there someplace.’

  They sat down. Dr. Petrie self-consciously propped his rifle against the side of Dr. Murray’s desk, but Dr. Murray didn’t register surprise or concern.

  ‘Now,’ said Dr. Murray, ‘what is it you wanted to see me about?’

  ‘It’s the plague,’ explained Dr. Petrie. ‘It started in Miami, and I saw some of the earliest cases myself, and treated them.’

  ‘With any success?’ asked Dr. Murray, dourly.

  ‘None at all. The only thing we discovered was that it was related to Pasteurella pestis, but that it didn’t respond to the usual antibiotics or serums.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Dr. Murray. ‘So what are you trying to tell me?’

  Dr. Petrie coughed. ‘I’m trying to tell you, Dr. Murray, that even though it’s a fast-breeding bacillus with no known antidote – a bacillus that has wiped out almost the entire population of the Eastern seaboard in one week – I haven’t caught it.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ insisted Dr. Petrie. ‘I haven’t caught it for a reason. My daughter hasn’t caught it for a reason. My girlfriend hasn’t caught it because she has stayed almost exclusively with us, and we’re never going to get it.’

  Dr. Murray opened a drawer in his desk, took out a pack of stale Larks, and unsteadily lit one up. He kept the cigarette in his mouth, puffing smoke out sideways like a poker player.

  ‘What you’re trying to tell me, Dr. Petrie, is that you know why you haven’t caught it? Is that it?’

  ‘Exactly. We haven’t caught it because we’ve been exposed to radiation. In my case, it’s X-Rays. In my daughter’s case, color television. I believe now that my daughter did get a mild dose of plague, but because she was kept away from other carriers, she recovered.’

  Dr. Murray took off his spectacles. ‘I don’t understand you, Dr. Petrie. How can radiation possibly have any effect on a plague bacillus?’

  ‘It can have an enormous effect. It’s my supposition that, somehow, radiation reached the raw sewage that was dumped off the Long Island coast, and that within the radioactive sewage, the common plague bacillus mutated into a fast-growing and very virulent super-plague. Perhaps further doses of radiation can mutate it further into a harmless form, or slow down its incubation. I don’t yet know. I was hoping that you and some of your doctors here could help me find out.’

  Dr. Murray thought this over. Then he said, ‘Dr. Petrie, I think you have a very interesting notion, there. But what I am not is a research bacteriologist. I am trying to run a metropolitan casualty department here, and at the moment, what with the strike and the plague, I’m not making much of a go of it. What you need is a man who can turn your theory into scientific facts – if it’s a theory that’s any good.’

  ‘Can you suggest anyone?’

  Dr. Murray reached for his desk diary, and leafed through the pages.

  ‘There are two very good men,’ he said. ‘At the moment, they’re both fighting each other in court, as I understand it, over some new technique of theirs. But they both have good reputations, and they’re both interested in radioactive mutation of bacilli. Here we are – Professor Ivor Glantz – and Professor Sergei Forward.’

  ‘I’ve heard of Glantz,’ said Dr. Petrie. ‘A bit of a lone wolf, if I remember.’

  ‘Brilliant, though,’ said Dr. Murray. ‘If there’s any foundation to your theory at all, he can find it.’

  ‘Where do I find him?’

  ‘You’re very fortunate. He lives on First Avenue, in Concorde Tower. He’s a rich man.’

  ‘I didn’t know research bacteriologists got rich.’

  ‘They do if their fathers are bankers, and they take out a patent on self-aborting bacilli for the brewing industry. Ivor Glantz devised the bacillus that made Milwaukee not only famous but extremely profitable.’

  ‘I see. Perhaps you and I are in the wrong branch of science, Dr. Murray.�
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  Dr. Murray ignored him. ‘I can let you have a note to take to Glantz, on hospital paper. They won’t let you into the tower otherwise. Right now, they won’t let you into any place at all unless you’re known.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dr. Petrie, as the older man unscrewed his pen and scribbled a letter. ‘I just hope that we can do something to make your job easier.’

  Dr. Murray grimaced. ‘There is one thing. When you’re up at Concorde Tower, you can take that rifle of yours and make a large hole in Kenneth Garunisch.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ said Dr. Petrie. ‘Is there another way out of this place? I kind of unsettled the medical workers’ pickets on the way in.’

  Dr. Murray nodded. ‘We’ll get you out. Would you care for some coffee before you go? My secretary will make you some next door. Right now, I have to get back to the wards.’

  When Dr. Murray had left, they sat for half an hour by the window of his secretary’s office, sipping hot coffee and staring out over the darkened city. The windows were soundproofed, but they couldn’t keep out the endless howling of sirens, and the crackle of shots. The city was black and shadowy, lit here and there by sparkling orange fires. It looked like a medieval vision of the devil’s kingdom; a place where demons and beasts roamed in echoing darkness. Not even the stars looked down on the twentieth-century city that had become, at last, the realization of a fifteenth-century nightmare.

  *

  Ivor Glantz had just come out of the shower. He was wrapped up in a white toweling bathrobe, and he dabbed his perspiring forehead with a succession of tissues pulled from a Kleenex box.

  ‘Dr. Petrie,’ he said, assiduously gathering up sweat, ‘I have to say that I admire your courage. You and your lady, and your little girl.’

  Dr. Petrie, shaved and smelling of Braggi, was sitting on the wide cream-colored 1930s settee, with a large Scotch in his hand. For the first time this week, he felt clean and civilized. Prickles had been dressed up in one of Ivor Glantz’s pajama jackets and put to bed in the small bedroom, while Adelaide and Esmeralda were talking in the kitchen, and making supper.

  ‘It wasn’t courage,’ said Dr. Petrie, smiling tiredly. ‘Far from it. It was survival. They burned down Miami, and we had to get out.’

  ‘You think they did that deliberately?’ asked Glantz.

  ‘Set fire to the city? I don’t know. I don’t understand the way the federal government have handled this thing from the very beginning. Down in Miami, we were all beginning to feel like sacrificial lambs.’

  Glantz smiled. ‘You did well to get out of it, anyway. If you want to stay here for a few days, you’re welcome. We have our own power in this building, and we’re very secure. This block was designed as a maximum-security project. You saw how tight they’ve got it defended downstairs.’

  Dr. Petrie sipped his Scotch. He was suddenly beginning to realize how utterly exhausted he was. He didn’t even know if he was going to be able to stay awake for supper.

  ‘Have you thought about my theory?’ he asked.

  Ivor Glantz nodded. ‘Sure. I was thinking about it in the shower.’

  ‘And how does it grab you?’

  Glantz tapped ash off his cigarette. ‘It grabs me pretty well, if you want to know the truth. It’s one of those theories that’s wacky enough to work. You see, most epidemic diseases are sparked off by a particular combination of historical and environmental circumstances. Sometimes the circumstances are so absurd and unusual that you could never predict they were going to happen. But we’ve had all the ingredients for this epidemic in American society for years, and it only took a couple of odd happenstances to get the whole thing going.’

  Glantz got up, walked across to the drinks cabinet, and poured himself a large whiskey.

  ‘Ingredient one is plague itself,’ he said. ‘We have had plague in the United States throughout the twentieth century, and every single year – particularly in the Western states – we suffer plague fatalities. It’s endemic in squirrels and rats in the West, and there have been cases reported in Florida, as you probably know.

  ‘Ingredient two is the raw sewage – the medium in which plague bacilli were incubating beneath the ocean. The sewage, if you like, was the laboratory in which the bacilli was mutated.

  ‘Ingredient three is the radioactivity. Well – we don’t have any proof where the radioactivity comes from, but I can guess that radioactive waste might well be dumped into the ocean from industrial processes, or maybe atomic-powered ships and submarines have offloaded uranium fuel in the area where the raw sewage was lying.

  ‘Given those three ingredients, all it took was an unusual climatic situation, with reverse currents and changeable winds, and the epidemic was served up to us on a plate.’

  Glantz sat down again, and puffed his cigarette. ‘It’s a classic epidemic situation, Dr. Petrie, and that’s why I believe your theory is right.’

  Dr. Petrie nodded wearily.

  ‘The problem is,’ said Ivor Glantz, ‘that even if it’s right, we have to prove it’s right, and even when we’ve done that, we still have to find a way to communicate our information to the federal government, and make sure they act on it.’

  ‘Is Manhattan completely cut off?’

  ‘As long as the power is out, yes. They were flying helicopters out of here for most of the day, but I should think they’ve all been commandeered by now. The same goes for boats. And as long as we’ve got plague in the city, there isn’t anyone who’s going to fly in here to bring us out.’

  ‘What are we going to do, then?’ asked Dr. Petrie. ‘It looks like I wasted my time.’

  Glantz shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. Dr. Petrie. I don’t have any test facilities here at home, but I can work out the probability graphs and all the mathematics. I guess we can check your theory to the point where we’re sixty-five percent sure about it, and I think that should be enough to convince the government. What we need to discover is the critical level of radioactivity which renders the plague harmless, and then we’re all set. Anyone who hasn’t caught it already could be given a dose of X-Rays, and they’d be protected.’

  ‘What about pregnant women?’ asked Petrie. ‘We couldn’t give X-Rays to them. The last thing we want to do is cure the plague and wind up with a whole generation of deformed children.’

  Ivor Glantz shook his head. ‘I don’t think the dosage is sufficiently high to make it a problem. But we’ll check. Once we’re reasonably sure, we can get a message to Washington, or wherever the President is hiding himself, and they can do the basic practical research outside of the plague zone.’

  ‘You seem very confident,’ said Dr. Petrie.

  ‘I’m not in the least confident,’ Glantz replied. ‘But it’s the only theory we’ve got, and we might as well make the best of it.’

  ‘Do you think there’s a chance?’

  ‘Oh, sure. Of course there’s a chance. There is no bacillus in my long and varied experience that can’t be destroyed or mutated into complete harmlessness by the correct application of radioactivity. The same goes for humans, if you must know.’

  Dr. Petrie finished his Scotch. ‘How long will it take?’ he asked. ‘The mathematics, I mean.’

  Ivor Glantz shook his head. ‘Hard to say. Two or three days. Maybe less, maybe more.’

  ‘And meanwhile, the whole of New York just dies?’

  ‘I can’t help it, Dr. Petrie. As soon as I’ve eaten, I’m going to sit right down there and start work, and that’s a promise. But I can’t work miracles.’

  Dr. Petrie stood up and walked over to the window. Sixteen floors below, the streets were dark, blind and chaotic. He saw red flashing police lights and ambulances, and the smoke from a smoldering store rising almost invisibly into the rainy night sky.

  ‘I sometimes wish it were true,’ he said quietly.

  ‘You sometimes wish what were true?’ asked Glantz.

  Dr. Petrie let the drapes fall, and turned back into the room. ‘In Mia
mi,’ he said, ‘they used to joke about me and call me Saint Leonard. I just sometimes wish it were true.’

  Glantz looked at him oddly.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dr. Petrie. ‘I’m not a religious maniac, and I’m not going out of my mind. But I’ve spent most of my medical life nursing rich old widows, and now I’ve suddenly seen that there’s so much more to medicine than dishing out placebos to dried-up geriatrics with more money than sense.’

  Glantz sniffed. ‘Don’t knock money,’ he said. ‘Money makes it easier to have scruples.’

  Dr. Petrie rubbed his face exhaustedly. ‘I don’t know whether I want scruples right now.’

  ‘Have another drink instead.’

  Ivor Glantz was pouring Dr. Petrie another large dose of Scotch when Adelaide and Esmeralda came in with a hot egg-and-bacon quiche and a fresh salad. The girls laid knives and forks on the glass coffee table, and they all sat down to eat informally.

  ‘Usually,’ said Glantz, ‘Esmeralda insists that we eat in the dining-room, with starched napkins tucked under our chins. But tonight we’ll make an exception.’

  Adelaide said, ‘I don’t know how we’re ever going to thank you for this. It’s so bad out on the streets, I thought we’d never get out of it alive.’

  ‘It doesn’t take people long to revert to the jungle, does it?’ Ivor Glantz remarked. ‘You only have to pour a few drinks down most people, and they start behaving like apes. That’s how alcohol works. Layer by layer, it anesthetizes your civilized mind, until you’re nothing but a caveman. Or cave-woman.’

  Esmeralda was slicing quiche. She didn’t look up, but handed Dr. Petrie a plateful of food. He smiled at her, because he found her attractive. Her long black curly hair was tied with ribbons, and she was wearing a dark brown satin negligee trimmed with lace and bows. She looked a little pale, but it suited her fine profile. He found himself glancing at the soft mobile way her breasts moved underneath the satin, and her long bare legs.

  Adelaide was too tired and hungry to notice. She was looking scrubbed and plain, with no make-up at all, and her brunette hair was tied back in a headscarf. She’d borrowed a pink dressing-gown from Esmeralda, and the color didn’t suit her at all. Sexual attraction, thought Dr. Petrie, as he ate his flan, is the unfairest urge ever.