Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  Then the tax man nailed her father on a foolish Caribbean Island tax dodge he'd been playing for half a dozen years, unknown to anyone but a half-wit Missoula lawyer, and stripped him of every penny he had. George Hyatt crawled into the bottle then and never came out again until he died of cirrhosis two years later, leaving Amy to tend her mother and run the hardware store as well.

  It was a staggering burden. The girl bent her back and took it, and toughened to the load, but she hardened, too. It was that summer at age seventeen that she'd met Harry Slencik, come over from Bozeman as ramrod for the construction company that won the bid to underground all the light wires in Missoula's historic downtown section. Harry was big, bland-faced, good-natured—and adoring when it came to Amy. She was a real beauty in those days, a lithe, blond-haired girl, laughing and sly of humor when she could find a few hours free, and sharp enough to recognize a good solid workingman when he came walking down the pike. She loved to square dance and square dance they did, she and Harry, all summer long . . . but then those long, feverish evenings parked in Harry's pickup after the dances finally caught up with her. Harry married her the week after the doctor confirmed the baby—people still did that sort of thing in those days—and moved into the big white house for the rest of his stay in Missoula. With patient thoroughness he helped her inventory the store and sell it for enough to place Mamma in the best nursing home in Missoula for all the years that were necessary, and by the time snow flew that fall he packed the pickup with all it would carry and took his pregnant bride back home with him to Bozeman.

  It hadn't been the richest life they'd had together, at first. A second baby boy followed fast on the first, healthy kids that ate a lot and grew like jungle cats. The work was neither steady nor plentiful, for many years, and when the work was there Harry wasn't one to crowd the boss for money or privilege. Harry had a lot of rough edges on him that wouldn't wear off, and Amy henpecked him, and slowly, slowly, the sly humor began to sour slightly and take on an edge of malice. Later, when Harry started his own construction outfit, and made it go, and started bringing some money in, Amy was happier, perhaps, but didn't change back; the cutting edge was there to stay.

  Dr. Ben Chamberlain had sold them a chunk of some family land he had on Grizzly Creek in the mountain foothills seventy miles from Bozeman, nothing worth a whole lot, just cotton-wood bottoms and half-desert hills with some small stands of fir and pine. He watched Harry build the cabin with his own hands, and take to firewood-sawing all day when he needed to get away from Amy. Ben had watched the kids grow up, those two hulking, muscle-bound boys; he was spending more and more time at his own place down the creek since his Emmie had died from the breast cancer, and he kept an eye on Amy and Harry's place when they weren't there. They had been good neighbors to Ben, over the years; there was nothing Harry couldn't fix or wire or screw together for him; Amy baked him cakes and fed him lasagna; they gathered sometimes for evening drinks and talked incessantly about hunting; and the friendship of proximity grew over the years—and bit by bit, the older man had watched Amy change.

  Now, in the little living room, listening to her sharp voice and watching her sharp eyes and seeing her beat her little fist into her little palm, it struck him just how very much she really had changed. She could bring a whole whale of a lot to this Freehold she was talking about if she wanted to. She was tough, physically strong, hard-minded. As an organizer, an administrator, she could keep things on the track, Ben thought. There'd be no coyotes in the chickens when she was around. But she'd have to come down a long notch or two if anybody was going to be able to live with her for any length of time. If the Freehold was to have any chance at all, he thought, somebody would have to teach her how to shut up and give in once in a while. . . .

  Well, it wouldn't be Harry that brought her down, that was sure, and it certainly wasn't going to be Mel Tapper or Rod Kelley, either. So that left him.

  Inevitably, as the gray fall rolled into bitter winter, chaos deepened in Ted Bettendorf s Atlanta office. As the fire storm raged across the land, the urgent demands on the tall, gray-haired man climbed exponentially as the effective options for action plummeted. From one of the few vantage points from which the whole picture could be viewed at once, Ted himself saw the ever-expanding disaster through a wide-angle lens, and with each passing day he saw progressively less that could be done to stop it.

  As might have been expected, the blossoming plague struck the major cities earliest and hardest, and one by one Ted saw them stagger and fall. The factors of inevitability were all in place, waiting: the huge numbers of people packed into small areas, impossible to isolate; the staggering insistent demands for vaccine and medication, undersupplied; social and health institutions, never too efficient at best in their gangling, rambling bureaucracies, ultimately impossible to keep functioning; the government, at all levels, already so acutely overdrawn in the huge cities, becoming impossible to maintain; law enforcement and police protection already staggering under their normal loads, becoming impossible to provide—the slow death of the cities was as inevitable and predictable during that terrible fall and winter as the ultimate burning of Savannah had been during the late summer. Ted Bettendorf knew that, as he fielded the increasingly urgent and impossible telephone calls from his headquarters in Atlanta or traveled out for on-site inspections and consultations in the failing cities, but by sheer force of will he refused to think about it or acknowledge it. If he had acknowledged it even for a moment, he might have been forced, in the cold light of inevitability and helplessness, to say, "Sorry, but we've written off all of the major cities and the hundred and fifty million people living there, so don't call back," and turned his attention to the ones that were left— but of course he could not have said such a monstrous thing, nor even thought about saying it, so instead he ignored the inevitable. Others in authority in the dying cities ignored it or confronted it as their individual natures inclined them, and one by one the major cities met the plague in their own distinctive ways.

  As Ted observed it, it came to New York like the slow, crushing grip of angina, a deep-seated painful pressure, first irritating, then acute, then unbearable, relentlessly spreading and spreading and spreading. When it first appeared in the teeming ghetto rooms of Harlem and the decaying tenement towers of the Lower East Side and the grubby flats of the Village and the sprawling slum ruins of Brooklyn, it was only dimly recognized. That fall was cold and rainy in New York and everybody stayed indoors, fearful of a hungry, frigid winter to come. Health Department bulletins of warning, of precautions to be taken, of signs to watch for, of things to do, as always in New York, fell on hundreds of thousands of deaf ears. Interests were too narrow. Misery was already too deep. TV bulletins were ignored, snapped off in midstream in favor of the soap operas and the game shows and the oblivion of primetime entertainments. These were people who didn't know what Savannah was, or where, people who didn't listen, couldn't or wouldn't comprehend. Many couldn't even understand the language—and how could they respond?

  Soon plague was spreading through the crowded, steaming subways, packed with coughing, spitting people feverish to reach home. People left work and never were seen again. In a sudden wave, within a single week, everybody seemed to be sick with something, and plague was there for certain, finally and reluctantly identified by the labs, as the health establishment struggled helplessly to fight it. Official cries went out for the vaccine, and for city-wide supplies of

  Sealey 3147—but not until demand had far outstripped supply. The city needed a river of vaccine and received a trickle as the CDC tried to juggle consignments and batch after batch was sucked away to a thousand other places. When a planeload finally did arrive at JFK in the dark of a cold, rainy night, already too late to stem the raging epidemic, it was hijacked into a semi trailer waiting at the loading dock and vanished into the Northeast somewhere—it certainly never reached the warehouse in downtown Manhattan prepared to receive and distribute it.

 
; The crushing pain turned to agony with the first winter storm to strike the city, first a mass of cold, wet air sweeping up from the Gulf and dropping fourteen inches of snow on Manhattan in twelve hours, then an icy blast from the Arctic, rolling down from Montreal, dropping temperatures to -15° F, in New York, ten degrees colder in Westchester and Jersey. Supplies into the city, already hamstrung by truck drivers too sick to drive and others afraid to come anywhere near the plague spot, now slowed to critical. Fuel supplies began sagging, rationing pleas were ignored. Snow removal faltered—no one could get anywhere, and even those who did couldn't find what they wanted when they got there. A sad little emergency team tried valiantly for forty-eight hours to enforce a city ordinance to hold home and office thermostats down to fifty degrees, but panic and a very real fear of freezing to death met them at every hand, and the enforcement team gave up.

  Then the garbage collectors struck, a wildcat affair; their contract was not up for another eight months but the opportunity was too good to miss. They couldn't move their trucks until snow removal had cleared the streets, they said. There were too many dead bodies turning up in the garbage, they said, and they were sanitation engineers, not morticians. A third of them were too sick or terrified to come to work anyway, which put more of a load on the dwindling number that were still able and willing, and you couldn't expect them to work like that without more money, lots more money, now, not eight months later. Day followed week of futile talks, threats, name-calling and sympathy strikes, as the garbage piled up on the sidewalks, steaming from its own fermentation in the frigid air, and the rats, knowing a good thing when they saw it, came up out of the sewers in regular battalions. There came a day when the chief Sanitation Workers' Union negotiator met with the Mayor and other city officials around a long table in a downtown building, the union man's eyes bright with fever, coughing blood into his handkerchief and chilling violently in his seat, explaining desperately that the men weren't going back to work without more money (more coughing, more blood), there was no way anyone could make them go back to work, a whole lot of them weren't going back to work at all, money or no money, anywhere, period, because they were sick and dying, and so was their negotiator, and there you were, boys, that was the whole picture. . . .

  Little by little, New York City suffocated, strangling from its own size and complexity and the gradual day-by-day breakdown of supply and service and maintenance in an ever-expanding chain reaction more grisly and deadly and stultifying than any uranium fission bomb. Contrary to early predictions, New York City did not explode, as Savannah had. Instead, it slowly, slowly imploded, gradually collapsing under the weight of its own offal until one day it was no longer a functioning city on any level at all, merely a vast, hopeless quagmire of dying people.

  The Kansas Cities of Missouri and Kansas faced the crisis with more style, if with even less wisdom. Those unequal cities standing like Great Claus and Little Claus at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers were blessed by a long, warm Indian summer that extended into late November. The million-odd people in their combined metropolitan areas were far more homogeneous than those in New York—at least they all spoke roughly the same language. More important, the plague came more insidiously there than in the eastern cities, nibbling at the edges of each social group like hors d'oeuvres before the devouring feast began. It took a while for the people there to fully realize how terribly dreadful the crisis was going to be.

  In fact, given reasonable leadership from the respective city fathers and guidance from the local Public Health Services and the Centers for Disease Control, the Kansas City metropolis on both sides of the state line might actually have had a fighting chance to withstand the onslaught when it came, had it not been for a sequence of the most astound-ingly obtuse political decisions ever taken in the long, spotty political history of the region. As it happened, Kansas City, Missouri, actually had a fairly adequate supply of the new vaccine, as well as a reasonable stockpile of Sealey 3147, on hand in the city at the time the first bite of the plague was really felt there. The shipments had come in late September as part of a nationwide pro rata distribution of then-existing supplies of vaccine and antibiotic to the major cities, undertaken as part of a presidential executive order at the persistent urging of Ted Bettendorf, and had been completed before other mutually exclusive executive orders began curtailing the air traffic that made such rapid shipments possible. What was more, the Kansas City public-health authorities, in cooperation with CDC field workers, had actually developed workable blueprints for a rudimentary emergency action plan to swing into effect whenever it became clear that plague was indeed hitting that metropolis: traffic and police control plans, hospital utilization plans, medication distribution plans, block-by-block isolation plans, sane quarantine regulations—in total, one of the best-conceived and earliest-developed citywide defense programs to be worked out in any major city in the country since the burning of Savannah. Indeed, the whole Kansas City complex might conceivably have weathered the storm for a while—except that the whole action plan fell apart before it ever got instituted.

  What happened was horrible in its veiy simplicity. When the vaccine and antibiotic shipments arrived, with distribution jointly entrusted to the governing authorities of the two major metropolitan segments of the city—the Missouri city and the city across the state line in Kansas—disagreements between the two governing bodies immediately appeared. Those two governments had seldom—if ever—agreed on anything whatever in the past, and the imminent crisis did not make them any better bedfellows. In fact, the two communities reached real agreement on one single point alone: that distribution of supplies to the other community should take place only after prudent and ample provision had been made for the protection of the entire governmental and health preservation organization of the first community—and since possession was indeed nine-tenths of the law, the "first community" was defined by its governing body as the community which managed to obtain actual physical possession of the whole metropolitan shipment of vaccine and antibiotic. And an early, frantic and very secret cashing in of political credits speedily greased the shipping skids so that the entire consignment arrived by air on the Missouri side of the line.

  The city fathers there lost no time making prudent and entirely ample provision for the protection of themselves, their wives, their children, their nephews, their closest and most profitable business friends, their most reliable supporters in the second echelon of government, their most reliable supporters in the third, fourth and fifth echelons of government, including all their wives, children, nephews and close and profitable business friends, and so on into the night. All this was accomplished with positively breathtaking efficiency, amid a succession of highly secret and totally illegal meetings, and with the quiet collusion of certain highly placed commissioners and subcommissioners of public health on the Missouri side of the river, within hours of the time the consignment of medicinals touched ground, and a full week before CDC personnel and the actual working crew of the Missouri-side Public Health Department even knew the consignment had been shipped. During that time not a single carton of vaccine nor case of antibiotic crossed the state line into Kansas.

  When at last a by-then-much-depleted supply of medicinals was finally released for distribution to public-health and CDC authorities on the Kansas side, virtually none of it actually reached its target. Distressed as they were at Missouri's rape of the shipment, the city fathers in Kansas said nothing; their police simply appropriated every bit of the consignment that crossed the river, quietly and efficiently, the moment it hit high ground and delivered it to City Hall. Of this supply, officials and subofficials on the Kansas side made prudent and extremely ample provision for their own protection in the same pattern as had occurred in Missouri. Thus, like wheat shipments to India since time immemorial, seven-tenths of the entire consignment vanished from the docks before anyone knew it had arrived, and only three-tenths ultimately sifted down to the hands of
the public-health and CDC workers and finally, to the doctors and other health workers designated by the blueprint action plan to distribute it. Many of those people, angered in their turn by the city fathers' actions and panicking at the sudden appearance of the disease itself on all sides of them, used the materials available quite arbitrarily to protect themselves, their families, their office workers, their receptionists, their administrative personnel, their switchboard operators and billing clerks, selected business friends and finally, certain favored patients and their families. What little of the material sifted through that enormous sieve fell, for the most part, into the gentle hands of the most powerful Mafia family between Chicago and Houston and became available, as the city fell into increasingly extreme straits of illness, not for the free distribution intended, but for sale to the highest bidders. . . .

  It was an example of greed and unenlightened self-interest of staggering proportions. It all happened fast and in secret, before Kansas City's most wide-eyed news hawks tumbled onto it—and when they did, suppression of news was ready and waiting on either side of the river. The Kansas City Star broke the first stoiy on the Rape of the Shipment, with screamer headlines and promises of details to follow—but details did not follow, because the Commissioner of Public Utilities, on his own recognizance, cut off the power to the newspaper's press with one flip of an enormous switch and then posted armed guards around the switch to see that it stayed flipped. TV news reporters, never famed for their follow-up capacity under the best of circumstances, emitted a single loud scream in concert and then were drowned out by endless hours of solemn denials by trusted city officials.

  Of course, such a story could not long stay hidden. Very soon the people of both cities became acutely aware of increasing disease and death in their midst, at precisely the same time they became aware that virtually all of their public-health protection had been betrayed by their community leaders in the course of a single week. Public outrage began as a murmur, blossomed into a rumble and then a roar.