Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  One thing seemed certain: the advancing winter did nothing significant to quiet the advancing plague storm. No one had really expected it to when it became blindingly clear that the mutant strain of Yersinia involved was spreading far more predominantly by respiratory contact than through the classic vector of the infected flea. Perhaps, during those winter months, the fire burned more swiftly in the great southern cities—New Orleans or Houston or Phoenix—than in those in the north. But who really could say? One terrible problem was that no one could really say much of anything about any affected area because solid statistical and epidemiological data was virtually nonexistent. Who had time to count the dead? Who had time to tabulate figures? Who could rely with any confidence on such figures as might happen to be available? There were more important and urgent things to do. Whatever figures did appear, here and there, had to be the sheerest blind guesses; who could calmly sit back and separate the plague-dead from those dead from conflagration or civil disturbance or riot or martial confrontations? Indeed, who could care? What use was such information? The dead were very dead. The sick of one day from whatever cause, or the wounded, or the hypothermically exposed, or the starving, were likely to be the dead of the next day, and did tables of figures matter? Most authorities ultimately thought not and soon stopped trying to compile them.

  For those few people in government, or in the CDC or in the public-health offices, or in the military, who had access to some sort of an overview of what was happening, piecemeal as it might be—people like Ted Bettendorf, for instance—certain patterns of events could be perceived occurring in the great population centers. In place after place, again and again, effective public-health defenses were mustered and maintained control for a brief while; but in every instance, again and again, despite what anybody did, that control ultimately faltered; slipped away and finally crumbled.

  It was not the fault of the health workers that this happened— Ted knew that better than anyone. Indeed, if there was major heroism to chronicle during those winter months of the fire storm, it was in the stubborn, determined efforts of individual nurses, doctors, public-health officials, epidemiologists, aides, orderlies and other health workers. Time after time, these people fought down to the line and beyond, did their work with or without protection, the best they could, long after it became obvious that they were losing beyond hope, their front lines broken, their flanks eaten away. Of course some quit and ran; some vanished into the woodwork; not a few sickened and died; but most held on, trying to do something, far beyond reasonable limits. It was not here that breakdowns came, but in all loo many places elsewhere.

  The first and most pernicious breakdown, in almost every instance, was in communications at all levels. In city after city, at the approach of the Horseman, local telephone communications fell into chaos. Contingency plans crumbled within twen-(y-four hours; switchboards were tied into knots, backed up for days. Everyone was on the telephone at once, jamming and overloading every circuit. Within hours it was impossible to prioritize local and distant calls, simply because every single caller regarded his call as first priority, whether it was to call out the fire squad or to check on Aunt Mabel, and there was no one with wisdom and authority to slash through the urgency and panic and say, "These caiis must go through, these must wait, iliese you forget about." By and large, major trunk lines or satellite connections were kept open, at least part of the time, sometimes too open. In cities like New York it became easier to direct-dial Hong Kong than to get through to a party six blocks iicross town. Calls placed to a local hospital in Scranton mysteriously reached Sioux City, Iowa. Thus in most communities, large and small, and more so in the larger than in the smaller, i he telephone as an instrument of communication or defense became virtually useless within hours or days. Only the person with endless time, endless patience or endless determination could get through to anybody.

  Public communications media fared as badly or worse. Endless power failures slowed newspaper printing to sporadic outbursts, and distribution was impossible. Such news as there was was garbled, unedited, unverified, and usually self-contra-dictoiy. Television and radio—the anchor in the chain of public notices and the transmission of directives, orders, advice and vital information, upon which virtually every preplanned contingency program depended to get the right word to the people fast—became an outright laughing stock. Directives and advice that were three days old were broadcast and rebroadcast mindlessly in the absence of anything new to say. Unverified reports fed sensationalism and panic, and became the order of the day. And for all their lifelong dependence on television and radio for input, people were not totally stupid: they very quickly learned that even when some TV news announcer told them something in utmost urgency and earnestness, it was probably either two days out of date or totally false; radio announcers talked nonsense to fill time and competed for listeners with "on-the-spot reports" of things that never happened anywhere, or were grossly misinterpreted. In the end, almost always, the sets got turned off, or simply babbled endlessly in the night. Local mimeographed or photocopied newssheets were far more likely to have valid news, and these appeared by the millions in city blocks or residential areas, handed out free by small running boys or tacked up on telephone poles to gather graffiti.

  With communications unreliable or nonexistent, there was no way to get health information distributed. Clinics and hospitals became mob scenes; officials with bullhorns would broadcast information and directions from emergency-room roofs to mobs piling in below, usually blaring out directions people didn't want to hear, such as Go Home, Listen to Your Radio for Word of Medications, Boil All Your Dishes and Clothes, Stay Away from Crowds, Stay Home—unpopular, those bullhorns. Ambulances in full siren inched through crowds of people who imagined, almost always incorrectly, that they contained precious medical supplies. . . .

  Not only could the health services not function well—and public power services only sporadically—but food supplies also began to falter. Ancient cities such as Rome and Constantinople were limited in their ultimate size and population by the length of time it took to bring fresh food from the countryside into the heart of the city. No such problem had existed in modern cities, with trucks and freight cars following fast, established delivery routes. But as supplies in the countryside dried up and as trainmen and truckers parked their trains and cabs outside "dangerous" areas and refused to move into the cities, food began to vanish. People with well-stocked shelves and freezers and refrigerators managed to eat—until the power went off long enough for the frozen food to melt and spoil . . . (attempts were made to distribute such food while it was still good, some successfully, some not). . . . When cooking power failed, people ate their food raw, and when fresh foods dwindled they ate dried macaroni and chewed uncooked rice, soaked overnight into a soggy sort of softness.

  And throughout it all, worse some places than others, there was the panic, the looting, the rioting, the burning (though not so much burning, so often—Savannah had been a dreadful lesson that hit home to most people), the slow strangulation and crumbling of the great and small population centers, and—ever-present—the gathering heaps of dead and the clustering of the dying for warmth and comfort and sharing of misery.

  In multitudes of places, for multitudes of people, it was a winter of nightmare and horror—yet somehow, in some places, good spirits hung on for dear life. Sometimes good things happened that might never have happened otherwise, and heroism in small, increasingly meaningful things, appeared in strange places. If too many people surpassed themselves in compounding the growing misery around them, in venality and cruelty and sheer blind raw selfishness, other people far surpassed themselves, rose far above themselves, in selfless acts and kindness to others and compassion.

  55

  Siddie Harper's turf was unpromising land for heroism. Through the endless, broken slum streets of Chicago's South Side the Horseman had taken his hideous toll with the sureness of a surgeon's blade in the face of lit
tle or no opposition at all. Unlike so many other major-city slums, there had been no rioting there to speak of, little violence, little looting, little response that could be characterized precisely as panic. It seemed, in many ways, that the scourge had sliced its way through tens of thousands there like a knife through softened butter. Partly, of course, it was the long, long tradition of submission to utter grinding poverty so characteristic there, basically unrelieved in the slightest by the welfare checks or the child-support money or the food stamps nobody could buy or the huge, ineffective-health-care institutions nobody would trust or the vast, towering, barren, strife-torn urban renewal projects erected there to rot or the endless preachings of the endless Jesse Jacksons. The yawning gulf of poverty there, entirely comparable to the barrios of Rio or the drought-starved Sahel, sucked them all in and gulped them down without the faintest residual trace that they had ever come and gone, despite all the publicity and the political posturings, leaving tens and tens of thousands no better off and probably worse, with little will or human spirit left to fight anything with anything.

  Even more, there was the very swiftness with which the fire storm had struck south-side Chicago, a devastating blow that had moved through the tenements and sewers and alleyways like a demon, numbing all facilities at once, offering no chance

  for recovery, too vast and relentless for anyone even to imagine where or how to start fighting. And the early, bitter winter that struck the northern-tier states merely contributed a little bit more than usual to the agony, with icy Canadian winds slicing down off Lake Michigan and snow at two-foot depth by early October. Rat-borne plagues of the past had always been slowed in winter, but not this man-borne plague. Inevitably the power outages and fuel-delivery failures and street blockings and commercial stoppages that plagued all of Chicago came first and worst on the South Side and were repaired last, which meant not repaired for weeks at a time as the death count mounted and the people there, for the most part, bowed their heads with almost inaudible wailing and waited with folded hands for any delivery at all.

  Sidonia Harper was never one to have much use for folded hands, but then, one might have thought that Siddie had little choice in the matter. Sidonia had sat helplessly and watched her mother die in their little second-floor cold-water tenement flat during the first tidal wave of plague that hit Chicago. There was nothing she could do but sit and watch as her mother, already sick and dispirited, crippled with arthritis, abandoned by her only serious consort four years before in the wake of Sidonia's accident, losing her four boys to drugs or prison or the rolling mills in Gary, barely able to keep Siddie and her younger sister alive, became suddenly and violently ill one night, and abruptly ceased breathing three days later. Her mother had been unwilling, or unable, even to try to travel to the nearest hospital facility twenty blocks away (not that it would have done her any good) and Sidonia was certainly not in a position to drag her. Siddie had nursed her as best she could, understanding all too well exactly what was going on in that tenement block where everyone, everyone, suddenly seemed to be getting sick at the same time. Siddie understood, all right; she had a very good mind and a TV set for a teacher. She had done all the right things for her mother the best that she could do them from her wheelchair, and—maybe fortunately for Siddie—it made her postpone thinking or paying attention to anything else, for a while. It was not until her mother was finally breathing no more and the truck had finally, finally come to take her away, that Sidonia had realized in a wave of absolute horror that the tene-

  ments on her block had become for the most part empty, and that death and her eight-year-old sister were the only companions she had left.

  They waited for days for something to happen, with Siddie's sister in abject terror, unwilling to go out on the street to try to get food until Siddie had soothed and assured and calmed her for hours, and then returning more terrified than before she had gone out; and Siddie, of course, could not go out at all. She had not been out of that second-story flat except rarely at any time during the four years since the terrible hot summer night when a wild-eyed boy she had known and teased at school had broken in the door of the place and brushed her mother aside and backed the fourteen-year-old girl out onto the fire escape to rape her and was stripping her clothes off her when the fire-escape railing gave and Siddie plunged two stories down to the concrete alleyway below and broke her back in three places. After the short hospital visit to make sure she was going to live at all, she had returned home to endless months in traction in the tenement flat as an ill-nourished body slowly, slowly allowed broken bones to heal—but the torn spinal cord would not heal.

  Time had ceased to exist for Siddie Harper for part of that four years as her broken body matured and her mind changed. For a while girl friends came by, but they were aliens to Siddie, talking about their "men" and their pushers and their johns, and presently they stopped coming by. Broken bodies made them feel uneasy and so did Siddie's head—she seemed far too old and thought about far too many weird things that didn't really fit anything the others knew. They were lonely years, but something happened in Siddie's mind to make the loneliness not too bad; of all people on the block she was the only one who waited for the bookmobile week after week, who wondered about things outside the block, who read and who taught herself to do many little things no one else knew that she could do when there was so much she couldn't. She had lived on a timeless island, served and maintained and changing until the sudden, terrible fire storm struck and her mother was gone and Tessie, her sister, was terrified.

  She helped Tessie, then, showed her how to do things, instructed her where to go to get what was needed in spite of her

  fear and the terrible things happening outside as the fire storm raged. Siddie was by no means helpless; she could get around well enough in the old beat-up wheelchair the state had provided (the state had actually paid for a brand-new chair with all the special features, but the one that had finally arrived at the second-story flat was an old, used, decrepit model with sharp angles and rusty swivels and the stuffing hanging out of the seat). Things would have been much easier for Siddie if her mother could have found—and paid for—a first-floor flat, as the visiting nurse had urged on one of her three visits, but the hard work of searching for a ground-floor place, and the ever-climbing rentals quoted for such flats whenever anybody heard about the wheelchair and smelled welfare money defeated that; so Siddie seldom got downstairs. But she managed just the same. Though her legs had withered, her arms and shoulders and pectorals and wrists and hands had become powerful from constantly manipulating her chair, as was the case with so many paraplegics, and she became very capable in many ways. So it was, after Mamma died, that she had been able to show her little sister what to do, and used her strong arms to comfort her, and wheeled herself around the flat to manage the cleaning and the simple cooking that sustained them. As long as they were well, they managed—but then the inevitable day had come when Siddie realized that Tessie was suddenly ill, gray and coughing and shivering violently in the cold flat, and that she herself had suddenly become feverish too, with angry, painful swellings appearing under her arms, and a vicious cough that would not stop.

  Like Mamma before her, Tessie also had died, though not quite so quickly. Some person from some clinic, spurred perhaps by some quixotic urge to help the handicapped, had come by with a small bottle of capsules for the girls to use if they got too sick, and Tessie ate the capsules and they seemed to help somewhat, she seemed to improve for a little, but Siddie just got sicker, doing her best to help the child until one evening her sister's breathing stopped and she knew she was comforting the dead and she herself was so sick she could barely ease the body to the floor and move it into the bedroom alcove; then she just sat there, watching over her dead sister, totally alone, waiting for her own time to come, if it was going to.

  By some miracle of justice Sidonia Harper did not die. She was terribly ill, with draining sores and pain that was unbearable, a
nd no one coming, delirium that wiped out days and made the nights endless; but she did not die, and then one morning—who could say how much later?—she had opened her eyes and her head was clear, and she was aware that her clothing stank until she got it stripped off, wheeling her chair around to hide from the icy blast from a window that had somehow gotten broken, and bathed herself from the washbowl, aware suddenly that she was desperately, unspeakably hungry. Cupboards were bare, milk rotting in the refrigerator, a handful of oatmeal and nothing else. Somewhere nearby a child was crying endlessly, somewhere else in the building, but when she tried a hoarse cry out the window herself, there was no response, and when she looked down at the alleyway and the street beyond she saw no people, no traffic.

  No food. Nobody to help her. It was then that she knew with utter clarity that somehow she had to get downstairs.