Jason Frost - Warlord 04 - Prisonland

by Jason Frost - Warlord 04

  Eric gave D.B.’s chain a jerk. “Hell, she keeps pretty good watch too. And she’s no dog.”

  “Yeah, but if you get hungry you can cook the dog and eat it.”

  Eric shrugged. “I can do the same with her.”

  The fat man made a face at Eric. The shark on his head wrinkled in the furrows of his brow. “Jesus, man.”

  “You know a guy named Dodd?” Eric asked, describing him.

  “Sounds like a lot of guys around here. What about my dog?”

  “You two make a nice couple.” Eric walked on, leading D.B. beside him. He’d had several offers for D.B. since strolling through Asgard, some of them fairly generous. But still no word on Dodd’s whereabouts.

  They saw only a few women among the hundreds of men, and even those were sickly or maimed. Occasionally, they’d see a child, but only boys, and even then they were at least fifteen. There were no old people at all, no one over sixty.

  “Where are all the women?” D.B. whispered as they strolled through Ghiradelli Square.

  “I don’t know. Same place as the kids and old folks, I guess.”

  “Spooky, huh?”

  Eric didn’t answer. He scanned the crowds for Dodd.

  Men milled about the lower level of the square, drifting from one location to another, but not with much purpose. There were booths set up, people selling objects or services. Tattoo artists. Used jeans. One booth with nothing but cans of Campbell’s soups. Eric overheard someone say the tough-looking guy in the booth had found a truckload of the soup but that two families had built shacks around the trailer and had been living off the soups for months. He had killed both families and brought the soup here to sell.

  The whole place resembled those giant swap meets Eric had been to at fairgrounds and drive-ins. He’d seen several camps like this in his travels. New California’s version of a shopping mall.

  “Just what was that stuff you gave those goons to get us in here?” D.B. asked.

  “You watched me gather it.”

  “Not exactly. You made me scrub off in the river while you did the gathering. Remember? You figured I’d be worth more if I were presentable.”

  “I was right. Almost got me a Doberman.”

  “C’mon, what was that stuff?”

  “Jimsonweed.”

  “Sounds familiar. What is it?”

  “It’s from the potato family.”

  She laughed. “You got those guys high smoking potatoes?”

  Eric gave her chain a light jerk. “No laughing. People are watching. We’re on our way to get inoculated.”

  “Tell me about it,” she shivered. “After seeing all those sick people and dead bodies, I can’t wait. I feel kinda crummy though, knowing we can get the shots but all those people outside can’t. Makes me feel guilty.”

  “Good. As long as you still can feel guilt, you won’t become like these people.” Not like me, he thought, realizing for this first time that he hadn’t really given any thought to those poor wretches they’d passed on their way here. He’d thought only of finding Dodd. He wanted the tetracycline for himself because that would keep him alive long enough to find Tim. He hoped Tim had been inoculated, but knowing Fallows, all his followers would be taken care of, no matter who they had to slaughter to get it.

  The infirmary and inoculation center was set up in one of the large warehouses near the bay, the kind that used to sell art. On the sidewalk outside, a big beefy man stood guard with a shotgun while a skinny teenager played three-card Monte with passersby. He shuffled the three cards—two aces and one queen—scattering them on the ground and letting people bet on choosing the queen. He had just won a bicycle tire and three aluminum arrows.

  D.B. was chuckling beside Eric. “Potatoes, man. I can’t get over it. The way they were grinning and stuff, I thought they really were high.”

  “They were.”

  “Come off it. On potatoes?”

  “Potato family. Jimsonweed is a tropical plant whose juices are poisonous, particularly when the plant is wilted.”

  “What about those pretty violet flowers?”

  “They come in violet or white and they produce a large, spiny fruit called a thornapple.”

  “Oh yeah. We used to throw them at each other when I was a kid.” D.B. thought for a moment. “But if they’re poisonous, how do people smoke them to get high?”

  “It’s dangerous. Takes skill. A lot of small California Indian tribes smoked jimsonweed as a religious ceremony. The Chungichnich cults contacted their highest god by puffing the stuff.”

  “Highest god indeed,” she chuckled.

  The line moved slowly. Eric was impatient, anxious to take the antibiotics and get on with his search for Dodd. Asgard was a strange mixture of people, an open feeling of hostility swirling in the air as men clutched their weapons and belongings with animal lust. Unlike Los Angeles, this section of San Francisco had not been buried under tons of ocean water. The shoreline had remained constant, the damage to the buildings done solely from the shaking of the earthquake. Eric looked across the bay and saw Alcatraz Island, the dim outline of the prison. Last time Eric had been here was three years ago with Annie. They’d left the kids back home with his mother and come up here for a weekend of, as Annie put it, “indulgence.” They’d eaten dim sum at Yank Sing’s, gone to the aquarium at the park, had sex until they both walked gingerly. And laughed. Most of all he remembered the laughter.

  “Uh oh,” D.B. said. “Here they come.” She hooked her thumb over her shoulder.

  Eric glanced back and saw Grub leading two other armed men up the line, searching every face.

  “What’ll we do?” D.B. asked, putting her sunglasses on.

  “Nothing.” Eric grabbed her leash tight.

  “There,” Grub said, pointing at Eric and D.B. He and the other two men marched up to Eric. The two men flanked Eric and D.B., each gripping a pistol but not actually pointing it. Grub faced Eric. “Thor wants to see you.”

  “I appreciate the invitation,” Eric said.

  “It’s not an invitation,” one of the other men snarled. He had an earring made of a bone. A human thumb bone, Eric noticed. “He wants to see you so move your ass.”

  Eric smiled. “It’s okay with me. But the girl and I have just come in from traveling through the outside. If he doesn’t mind having us wandering about in here before we’ve had our shots from your doctor, fine. It’s his city.”

  Grub looked at the other two. “He’s right. I’ll stick with him and bring him over afterwards. You go ahead and tell Thor.”

  They nodded and pushed their way through the line and disappeared.

  “Thor’s personal guard,” Grub explained. “They was on death row with Thor back in Q.”

  “What’s Thor want with me?”

  Grub grinned. “As if you didn’t know, sport.”

  “The dope.”

  “Good shit, man. Me and Hanks took some over to Thor and he sampled it too. Gonna give you a quiz, pal, and you better pass.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Grub laughed at the notion. “Then you gonna find out why they call him Thor.” Grub eyed D.B., then stroked her shoulder with his dirty fingers. “Nice piece, man. How much?”

  “Haven’t decided yet.”

  “Keep me in mind, huh?” He reached out and squeezed one of D.B.’s breasts. She didn’t budge.

  Eric slapped his hand away.

  Grub’s eyes blazed as he spun toward Eric, thumbing back the hammer of his gun.

  “No free samples,” Eric grinned good-naturedly.

  Grub relaxed a bit, but his face was still grim as he stared at Eric. Finally, he shrugged it off and waved for Eric and D.B. to follow him. “C’mon, we don’t have to stand in any fucking line.”

  He led them past the line of people, around some curtained partitions, through a couple doors. One room was a kind of examination room. Five women sat around naked while a man went from one to another, spreading their legs, shi
ning a flashlight, examining them. The women were all either fat, bony, ugly, or maimed. They didn’t even look up when the three of them paraded through.

  “Gynecologist?” Eric asked Grub.

  Grub snorted. “Him? Used to be a pimp. Doc Fishbine trained him to check twats because Thor didn’t want them spreading gonorrhea or syphilis. Shit, almost everybody’s got herpes around here anyway. Last thing we need is to wipe out our army with some cunt rot.”

  “I haven’t seen too many women around.”

  “There ain’t any women around. Just a few pigs like them you seen back there. Might as well fuck a dog.” He laughed. “And there’s plenty that do around here. Most these guys been in prison for a lot of years. They know how to get along without women. Only we ain’t gonna have to much longer. Thor’s seeing to that.”

  “How?”

  Grub sneered. “You ain’t gonna be around long enough to worry about it.”

  “That a threat?”

  “Hell no. Just means most people don’t stay here more than a couple days. The rest is Thor’s men. It ain’t the safest place in the world, especially if you got something of value.” He looked at D.B. “My advice is you sell her soon as possible then haul ass outta here. You go walkin’ around Asgard with her much more and by tonight they’ll be lining up outside your room to slit your throat. She’s a choice cut, sport.”

  D.B.’s skin was red with anger. She opened her mouth to say something to Grub and Eric yanked her choke collar, strangling her words.

  “Thanks for the tip,” Eric told Grub.

  “No sweat, man. That’s why I told ya I’d take her off your hands.”

  “I’ll think it over.”

  Grub led them deeper into the warehouse, down corridors of patients. Some were on cots, others just on blankets spread out on the floor. Eric noticed a lot of wounds; gunshot, knife, razor. Bruises and broken bones were also popular. Fighting was a way of life here, like an old wild west town. Arguments were settled by combat, the winner taking everything from the loser; the loser coming here to be repaired until he could find someone to defeat and take away their belongings. It had an odd sort of purity to it, Eric admitted.

  “Hey, Doc,” Grub hollered across one room lined with patients.

  A young man in a stained lab coat was bending over a man without an arm, checking the bandage on the stump. He lifted his head at Grub’s yelling and shook his head. “Quiet, asshole.”

  Grub chuckled. “Sorry.”

  Eric was surprised. Grub was not the kind of man to let anyone talk to him like that without turning it into a brawl. Certainly he wasn’t afraid of the doctor, a man about Eric’s age, though shorter and slighter of build. He had a shock of unruly red hair swirling from his head. He stared at Grub with a contemptuous frown but Grub, rather than crushing the doctor into sand, smiled as if pleased by the attention. This doctor obviously carried a lot of respect in Asgard.

  “Thor wants you to take care of these two right away.”

  “I don’t give a shit what Thor wants,” Dr. Fishbine said. He nodded at Eric. “I won’t even spit on this moron until he takes that choke collar off her.”

  D.B. gave a little smirk to Eric as he slipped the collar up over her head. Eric draped the leash over his shoulder.

  “Don’t mind the doc,” Grub explained to Eric. “He’s kinda gruff, but he’s a helluva doc.”

  “And he’s full of shit,” Dr. Fishbine said, leading them on a brisk march through the wards past rows of patients. “This girl needs iron in her diet, for Chrissake. Isn’t there anybody left in California with a scrap of brain?”

  Eric heard him talking but suddenly he wasn’t listening. The skin in his face tightened and his heart felt like a flaming log in a block of frozen ice. The man in the third cot. Sleeping.

  Dodd.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Eric asked.

  “What’s it to you?” Dr. Fishbine snapped.

  “Curious,” was all Eric said, but there was an edge in his voice, a tone of menace that stopped all three of them.

  The doctor stared at Eric a moment before resuming his march. “Observation. He came in a few days ago. Fever, chills. Preliminary symptoms of plague. Gave him some tetracycline and he seems fine. I want to take one more blood culture and sputum sample.”

  “What about aspirates of enlarged nodes?”

  The young doctor looked pleased. “You a doctor?”

  “Had some medical training.”

  Dr. Fishbine studied Eric closely. “Soldier?”

  “For a while.”

  ” ’Nam?”

  “For a while.”

  “Me too. Orderly.”

  “Like on TV,” Grub said. “M.A.S.H.”

  “Only without the laughs,” the doctor said, brushing back a hunk of red hair. “What’s your name?”

  Eric hesitated, saw no point in lying. “Ravensmith.”

  The doctor thought about it a moment, shrugged, and started to walk on. Then stopped abruptly, snapped his fingers. “Ravensmith from Night Shift? The one who put Colonel Dirk Fallows away for that massacre?”

  Eric didn’t answer.

  “Yeah,” the doctor nodded. “We’re about the same age. I remember you from TV.”

  Grub looked confused. It had been a national scandal for months, all through Fallows’s trial, but Grub didn’t know what they were talking about. “This guy a stoolie?” he asked angrily.

  “Never mind, Grub,” Dr. Fishbine said. “You wouldn’t understand.” He pointed at the leash and collar dangling from Eric’s shoulder. “Hard to believe the same man that did such a heroic thing is capable of using that.”

  “Times have changed, doctor, or haven’t you noticed?”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed.”

  “One might be just as curious about you. What you’re doing here.”

  Dr. Fishbine grinned. “Got out of the army, had an attack of social consciousness. A lot of that going around then, remember? Anyway, after med school and residency I started a GP practice and volunteered a few spare hours work at San Quentin. Just my luck the damned quake hits when I’m lancing some con’s hemorrhoid. Poor guy.”

  D.B. laughed and the doctor laughed too.

  “When the walls came tumbling down at San Quentin, Frank Stovell, or Thor as he now calls himself, grabbed me and took me along.” He held up his hands. “So here I am, fighting the plague and bandaging the wounds they inflict on each other. Had a bunch of AIDS victims last month, Thor sent a bunch of his men over to kill them all. Right, Grub?”

  “Yeah, we got rid of ’em nice and clean. Burned the whole lot of them too, just like Thor said.”

  “Now you know what I’m up against. One doctor for five hundred people, and another few hundred drop-in patients from the outside.”

  “Don’t you have any help, nurses or anything?” Eric asked.

  Dr. Fishbine laughed. “Yeah, sure. When Thor wants to punish somebody, but not enough to kill him, he sends him over here to work for me. Kind of like not having enough money to pay for your meal at a restaurant and having to wash dishes.”

  “I say a bullet through their fucking heads,” Grub said. “That just leaves more for the rest of us.”

  “More what?” the doctor asked, baiting him.

  “More ...” Grub searched for a word, finally just throwing up his hands. “... stuff. More stuff for the survivors.”

  They entered the makeshift lab area. Modern equipment lined tables. Overhead, electric lights beamed.

  “Electricity,” D.B. gasped.

  “Generators,” the doctor explained. “If there’s one thing these men are good at, it’s scavenging. They got the drugs I asked for, plus a bunch I didn’t. Also, they brought me all this equipment. Some of it I still don’t know how to use. But it’s sufficient for the tests I need to run for this plague business.” His voice became very methodical as he rambled on, more to himself than to the others. It seemed to help his concentration as he moved aroun
d the room, adjusting equipment. “Yersinia pestis is nonmotile at 37 and 22 degrees Celsius. The organism is usually negative for urea hydrolysis, but may be positive in freshly isolated strains. The oxidase, indole, and Volges-Proskauer reactions are negative ...”

  Eric stopped listening. He was thinking of Dodd now. Just down the hall, asleep. This was a perfect opportunity. The only obstacle: Grub. And maybe the doctor.

  “It’s pretty simple really,” the doctor continued. “The fleas bite you, suck the blood, then they vomit the blood back into your system. Only by now it’s picked up the plague. The incubation period is usually three or four days, but it could be as short as a few hours, as long as ten days. Starts with chills, fever, headaches. A palpable bubo may appear, preceded by pain and tenderness. Then it’s up for grabs. Nodal swelling in the armpits and groin. Insomnia, delirium, stupor, vertigo. That’s when the toxins hit the brain. Antibodies might form and clear the mess up by itself, or with some help from antibiotics. But if it gets into pneumonic stage within twenty to twenty-four hours after onset of illness, then you’ve got tachypnea, dyspnea, and coughing productive of bloody mucopurulent sputum supervene. If you aren’t treated effectively,” he sighed. “Meat wagon.”

  His talk had frightened D.B. “Why give us anything, you don’t even know if we’ve got it?”

  “I’ll run a test to make sure, but this is a kind of preventive medicine. Back in the 1940s they used sulfoamides and streptomycin but resistant strains started popping up. Now we use streptomycin and second, broad-spectrum antibiotic like tetracycline or chloramphenicol. Maybe kanamycin and co-trimoxazole.”

  “Let’s just get it over with, huh?” D.B. said.