The Plague, Pestilence & Apocalypse MEGAPACK™
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nothing about the world beyond my horizon . All I can deal with
today is the people who are here, now .
In a rush, I unload the last of the bear and elk and fire up the
truck and make the long turn around the block, driving back up the
highway . I stop beside the half-built factory, considering its walls
and windows before deciding to move farther . The bridge is as good
as any place . I cross the bridge slowly and pull off into the ditch,
parking in a spot low enough that nobody can see my rig from the
PALLBEARER, by Robert Reed | 72
opposite bank, but still leaving me with a good chance of driving out
of there . Fast, if necessary .
This is hunting . My prey isn’t people, I tell myself . What I’m
hunting is a large lumbering machine cast off from another time, and
I won’t hurt anybody. That’s how I convince myself to pull my rifle
out of its hiding place, and both pistols, and enough ammunition to
fight off a brigade. With binoculars around my neck, I move close to
the north end of the bridge, and after hard thought and a few doubts,
I decide where to make my blind and how to work this ambush .
But I am hunting people . Punching holes in those military-grade
tires might be impossible, and I doubt that I could cripple any engine
that’s durable enough to drive halfway across the continent . But a
bullet in the driver’s head wouldn’t be difficult, and I don’t like
Winston . I picture him at the wheel and Grandma back on the bed,
and once the RV rolls off the road, I can finish the old lady without
ever seeing her . Her son is a bigger problem . And there’s May too .
I don’t know what I want to do, but when I think about them, my
thoughts start to swerve . They won’t be coming in this direction,
I promise myself . I’m just sitting here to prove a point to myself,
because they’re right now heading back east again, taking a known
route before heading north to that promised land .
My blind is a stand of tall dead grass, and I do my best job of
vanishing . The day is past its brightest, and the cold is coming out
of the ground and out of the dimming sky . It doesn’t take long to
feel chilled . But I curl up tight and adjust my stocking cap, standing
every so often to stomp my feet, checking the surrounding ground
for anything sneaking up on me . But nothing is . I might be the only
animal on this landscape, kneeling down again, checking my weap-
ons again, feeling nervous and feeling a little warmer because of it .
They won’t come .
I say that aloud .
“They went the other way, and they’re gone,” I tell the evening
breeze .
Maybe an hour of daylight remains . I stand again and stomp
my stiff cold hurting feet, thinking hard about leaving . But when I
PALLBEARER, by Robert Reed | 73
glance downstream, I catch a sudden flash of sunlight reflected off
moving glass, and my heart kicks, and for a moment I think of turn-
ing and running . But that isn’t what I do . From somewhere comes
the courage to put the binoculars against my eyes, and just the sight
of that aluminum house is enough to make the anger rise up all over
again, as big as ever and refusing to back down .
I am going to shoot the driver and then work my way back . Any
movement in a window will be a target . Any likely hiding place will
be punctured . I’ll tear apart the RV on my way back to Grandma,
and then I will stop . Maybe I won’t waste precious ammunition on
her . One cold night with nobody to care for her, and the end won’t
be long coming for her either .
The RV is still a long, long ways off .
I kneel . I check my guns again . I stand and stomp and use the gun
sight, seeing nothing but the machine with its flat face and no hint
of a soul .
I kneel .
A moment later, I’m shaking . Hard .
Then comes the rattling roar of an engine, and my first thought is
that I know that sound and why is it so familiar? Somewhere behind
me, the little engine cuts out . I keep hiding . A block of granite would
show more motion that I do right now . I wait and listen, holding my
breath for long spells, and then I hear the sound of boots on the road
above and then the boots stop and a voice that I know better than my
own asks, “What are you doing down there?”
I turn, looking up at Lola .
She smiles, and then decides not to smile. What replaces that first
expression is scared and puzzled and then even more scared . In my
face, she sees something she has never witnessed before, and when I
rise to my feet, she looks at the various guns and my face again and
then across the bridge, asking the cold dusk air, “What are waiting
for, Noah?”
“A tiger .”
“What tiger?”
PALLBEARER, by Robert Reed | 74
“I saw him when I came by before,” I say . One weak step doesn’t
carry me far up the very brief slope . “He’s a beauty . He’s got a spec-
tacular pelt .” I manage another step, saying, “It’s been a bad day,
and I wanted to give you a gift . Something you wouldn’t expect .”
The RV is close now . Its driver doesn’t seem to notice either per-
son on the far side of the river, the vehicle neither speeding up or
slowing down, it and its loyal trailer rolling close to us and then past
us, the clatter of gravel on concrete lingering for several seconds .
But the rest of the apparition has vanished behind a wall of oak and
cottonwoods .
Lola watches me . She has probably never seen a machine like
that, but I am the only object of any importance on this landscape .
She stares and says nothing, watching me slowly climb up to the
old roadbed, and then I start to talk again, to tell her something else
that isn’t true, and her gloved hand pushes at my face while her face
cries, and she says, “I don’t want a tiger .”
She tells me, “Come home with me . Now .”
PALLBEARER, by Robert Reed | 75
PANDEMIC, by J. F. Bone
Originally published in Analog Science Fact
and Science Fiction, February 1962.
“We call it Thurston’s Disease for two perfectly good reasons,”
Dr. Walter Kramer said. “He discovered it—and he was the first to
die of it .” The doctor fumbled fruitlessly through the pockets of his
lab coat . “Now where the devil did I put those matches?”
“Are these what you’re looking for?” the trim blonde in the gray
seersucker uniform asked . She picked a small box of wooden safety
matches from the littered lab table beside her and handed them to
him .“Ah,” Kramer said . “Thanks . Things have a habit of getting lost
around here .”
“I can believe that,” she said as she eyed the frenzied disorder
around her . Her boss wasn’t much better than his laboratory, she
decided as she watched him strike a match against the side of the
box and apply the flame to the charred bowl of his pipe. His long
dark face became half obscured behind a cloud of bluish smoke as<
br />
he puffed furiously . He looked like a lean untidy devil recently es-
caped from hell with his thick brows, green eyes and lank black
hair highlighted intermittently by the leaping flame of the match.
He certainly didn’t look like a pathologist . She wondered if she was
going to like working with him, and shook her head imperceptibly .
Possibly, but not probably. It might be difficult being cooped up here
with him day after day . Well, she could always quit if things got too
tough . At least there was that consolation .
He draped his lean body across a lab stool and leaned his el-
bows on its back . There was a faint smile on his face as he eyed her
PANDEMIC, by J. F. Bone | 76
quizzically . “You’re new,” he said . “Not just to this lab but to the
Institute .”
She nodded . “I am, but how did you know?”
“Thurston’s Disease . Everyone in the Institute knows that name
for the plague, but few outsiders do .” He smiled sardonically . “Vi-
rus pneumonic plague—that’s a better term for public use . After all,
what good does it do to advertise a doctor’s stupidity?”
She eyed him curiously . “De mortuis?” she asked .
He nodded . “That’s about it . We may condemn our own, but we
don’t like laymen doing it . And besides, Thurston had good inten-
tions . He never dreamed this would happen .”
“The road to hell, so I hear, is paved with good intentions .”
“Undoubtedly,” Kramer said dryly . “Incidentally, did you apply
for this job or were you assigned?”
“I applied .”
“Someone should have warned you I dislike clichés,” he said . He
paused a moment and eyed her curiously . “Just why did you apply?”
he asked . “Why are you imprisoning yourself in a sealed labora-
tory which you won’t leave as long as you work here . You know, of
course, what the conditions are . Unless you resign or are carried out
feet first you will remain here…have you considered what such an
imprisonment means?”
“I considered it,” she said, “and it doesn’t make any difference . I
have no ties outside and I thought I could help . I’ve had training . I
was a nurse before I was married .”
“Divorced?”
“Widowed .”
Kramer nodded . There were plenty of widows and widowers
outside . Too many . But it wasn’t much worse than in the Institute
where, despite precautions, Thurston’s disease took its toll of life .
“Did they tell you this place is called the suicide section?” he
asked .
She nodded .
“Weren’t you frightened?”
“Of dying? Hardly . Too many people are doing it nowadays .”
PANDEMIC, by J. F. Bone | 77
He grimaced, looking more satanic than ever . “You have a point,”
he admitted, “but it isn’t a good one . Young people should be afraid
of dying .”
“You’re not .”
“I’m not young. I’m thirty-five, and besides, this is my business.
I’ve been looking at death for eleven years . I’m immune .”
“I haven’t your experience,” she admitted, “but I have your at-
titude .”
“What’s your name?” Kramer said .
“Barton, Mary Barton .”
“Hm-m-m . Well, Mary—I can’t turn you down . I need you . But I
could wish you had taken some other job .”
“I’ll survive .”
He looked at her with faint admiration in his greenish eyes . “Per-
haps you will,” he said . “All right . As to your duties—you will be
my assistant, which means you’ll be a dishwasher, laboratory tech-
nician, secretary, junior pathologist, and coffee maker . I’ll help you
with all the jobs except the last one . I make lousy coffee .” Kramer
grinned, his teeth a white flash across the darkness of his face. “You’ll
be on call twenty-four hours a day, underpaid, overworked, and in
constant danger until we lick Thurston’s virus . You’ll be expected
to handle the jobs of three people unless I can get more help—and I
doubt that I can . People stay away from here in droves . There’s no
future in it .”
Mary smiled wryly. “Literally or figuratively?” she asked.
He chuckled . “You have a nice sense of graveyard humor,” he
said. “It’ll help. But don’t get careless. Assistants are hard to find.”
She shook her head . “I won’t . While I’m not afraid of dying I
don’t want to do it . And I have no illusions about the danger . I was
briefed quite thoroughly .”
“They wanted you to work upstairs?”
She nodded .
“I suppose they need help, too . Thurston’s Disease has riddled
the medical profession . Just don’t forget that this place can be a
death trap . One mistake and you’ve had it . Naturally, we take every
PANDEMIC, by J. F. Bone | 78
precaution, but with a virus no protection is absolute . If you’re care-
less and make errors in procedure, sooner or later one of those sub-
microscopic protein molecules will get into your system .”
“You’re still alive .”
“So I am,” Kramer said, “but I don’t take chances . My prede-
cessor, my secretary, my lab technician, my junior pathologist, and
my dishwasher all died of Thurston’s Disease .” He eyed her grimly .
“Still want the job?” he asked .
“I lost a husband and a three-year old son,” Mary said with equal
grimness . “That’s why I’m here . I want to destroy the thing that
killed my family . I want to do something . I want to be useful .”
He nodded . “I think you can be,” he said quietly .
“Mind if I smoke?” she asked . “I need some defense against that
pipe of yours .”
“No—go ahead . Out here it’s all right, but not in the security
section .”
Mary took a package of cigarettes from her pocket, lit one and
blew a cloud of gray smoke to mingle with the blue haze from
Kramer’s pipe .
“Comfortable?” Kramer asked .
She nodded .
He looked at his wrist watch . “We have half an hour before the
roll tube cultures are ready for examination . That should be enough
to tell you about the modern Pasteur and his mutant virus . Since your
duties will primarily involve Thurston’s Disease, you’d better know
something about it .” He settled himself more comfortably across the
lab bench and went on talking in a dry schoolmasterish voice . “Alan
Thurston was an immunologist at Midwestern University Medical
School . Like most men in the teaching trade, he also had a research
project . If it worked out, he’d be one of the great names in medicine;
like Jenner, Pasteur, and Salk . The result was that he pushed it and
wasn’t too careful . He wanted to be famous .”
“He’s well known now,” Mary said, “at least within the profes-
sion .”
PANDEMIC, by J. F. Bone | 79
“Quite,” Kramer said dryly . “He was working with gamma ra-
diations on microorganisms, trying to produce a mutated
strain of
Micrococcus pyogenes that would have enhanced antigenic proper-
ties .”
“Wait a minute, doctor . It’s been four years since I was active in
nursing . Translation, please .”
Kramer chuckled . “He was trying to make a vaccine out of a
common infectious organism . You may know it better as Staphy-
lococcus . As you know, it’s a pus former that’s made hospital life
more dangerous than it should be because it develops resistance to
antibiotics . What Thurston wanted to do was to produce a strain that
would stimulate resistance in the patient without causing disease—
something that would help patients protect themselves rather than
rely upon doubtfully effective antibiotics .”
“That wasn’t a bad idea .”
“There was nothing wrong with it . The only trouble was that he
wound up with something else entirely . He was like the man who
wanted to make a plastic suitable for children’s toys and ended up
with a new explosive . You see, what Thurston didn’t realize was that
his cultures were contaminated . He’d secured them from the Uni-
versity Clinic and had, so he thought, isolated them . But somehow
he’d brought a virus along—probably one of the orphan group or
possibly a phage .”
“Orphan?”
“Yes—one that was not a normal inhabitant of human tissues . At
any rate there was a virus—and he mutated it rather than the bacte-
ria . Actually, it was simple enough, relatively speaking, since a virus
is infinitely simpler in structure than a bacterium, and hence much
easier to modify with ionizing radiation . So he didn’t produce an
antigen—he produced a disease instead . Naturally, he contracted it,
and during the period between his infection and death he managed
to infect the entire hospital . Before anyone realized what they were
dealing with, the disease jumped from the hospital to the college,
and from the college to the city, and from the city to—”
PANDEMIC, by J. F. Bone | 80
“Yes, I know that part of it . It’s all over the world now—killing
people by the millions .”
“Well,” Kramer said, “at least it’s solved the population explo-
sion .” He blew a cloud of blue smoke in Mary’s direction . “And it
did make Thurston famous . His name won’t be quickly forgotten .”
She coughed . “I doubt if it ever will be,” she said, “but it won’t