Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  Well, so much for the miracles of modern medical science, Carmen thought sourly, that little blonde may have known her mahcro-awg'nisms but she sure didn't have the rest of the scenario straight. Carmen had heard the broadcast, or part of it, those long months back and tuned it out for the latest' 'Sour Apples" show, but she listened intently to the rerun—the two-thirds of it that played before the power went out for the day—and then caught it again two or three more times at odd hours. She doubted from what she'd heard that there were going to be any antibiotics or vaccines around when the ax dropped, but that business of sterile techniques and isolation and simple measures in the home began to sound plausible and not even all that difficult, once you understood what you were doing.

  When Jack was on his feet enough to be left alone, Carmen went out to stockpile things. While other people stockpiled Froot Loops, she stockpiled Clorox, gallons upon gallons of Clorox. She stockpiled cheap kitchen rubber gloves and ripped up old bathrobes to make face masks and set up a changing room in the back entry so that clothes worn outside wouldn't come inside and kept a kettle of water ready on the fireplace hearth so that they could burn the furniture, if need be, to boil water.

  She discovered to her horror that there really were rats in the basement, they got into one flour sack and a bag of oatmeal, so she dressed up in clothes soaked in Clorox until she looked like a one-woman decontamination crew and moved all the untouched stockpiled food into the kitchen, and then put the contaminated flour in bowls mixed half-and-half with plaster of Paris and left them for the rats; she'd read about that once in some country journal she'd subscribed to. Then she nailed the cellar door shut and enlisted Jack in the enormous task of decontaminating the house—with Clorox. That operation nearly killed them both; they scrubbed walls and ceilings down with Clorox, soaked down chairs and sofas and mattresses with Clorox, tore carpets up and hurled them into a heap in the backyard ("Millie says fleas just live and breed in carpets") and mopped the bare floors down with Clorox, running outdoors gasping for air, their eyes streaming because the whole place reeked with Clorox until finally Carmen declared the place adequately decontaminated. And when the day finally came that one sick patient unexpectedly contaminated the whole Community Hospital and plague began in earnest, Jack and Carmen Dillman were as well prepared as anybody in Brookdale, Connecticut.

  The Horseman rode the streets of Brookdale with typical swiftness. One day there were people still to be seen occasionally on the streets, the next day, no one. From Jack's upstairs study window they could see many of the homes around, see candle lights at night when the power was off, saw the candle lights going out one by one, as night followed night. A man down the cul-de-sac, Jerry Berman, Millie Berman's husband, was out back one night digging a hole by flashlight, and no one answered the Bermans' phone anymore even when the phone was functioning, and two nights later there were no candles burning in the Bermans' house. Only the silent echo of hoof-beats past the Bermans' house, around the cul-de-sac, down the next street—

  Carmen heard rats gnawing on the fourth and fifth evening, found a hole in the floor almost big enough for one to squeeze through, fought down a wave of hysteria as she stared in the flashlight beam at the corner of the kitchen floor and saw a hairy nose and yellow teeth sticking through, working furiously. She cut up a tin can, spread it out flat and nailed it down over the hole, then spent the night searching for other weak spots. Each one that appeared, she plugged, poured a gallon of Clorox down the hole—they didn't seem to like Clorox—and then she and Jack made a twice-daily inspection of every inch of floorspace and Carmen's fright and revulsion gave way to anger—"The bastards," she went around muttering, "the dirty, slimy, nauseating bastards. . . ."

  They marked days on the calendar, and waited. The phone was out more and more, Carmen could get through to her "spy" network only rarely and then presently not at all. They ate oatmeal and biscuits or bread baked in the fireplace in a reflector oven Jack ingeniously devised from a couple of ply wood scraps and some aluminum foil; it caught fire one night, but only one corner burned before they rescued it. Carmen set out other rations like Captain Bligh in the lifeboat—half a can of tuna one night, a can of so-called beef stew (lots of stew and little beef) another. They filled the bathtub with drinking water when water would run from the faucets, at least a couple of hours a day, and they took sponge baths out of a common saucepan of water heated on the fire.

  On the eighth day the unseasonable thaw came to an abrupt end with a screaming blizzard down from Canada, dumping eleven inches of snow on the ground in seven hours, heaping in drifts around the houses, and that night the temperature dropped through the floor, icy, brittle, pipe-bursting cold. For most of the day they made do huddling in blankets and sleeping bags, running the furnace for an hour at a time just to take the edge off—no response from the oil man for four days—but by evening Jack said he'd had enough and went to the changing room, dropped his inside clothes inside the entry, got on his outside clothes and waded through drifts to the dwindling supply of cordwood stacked in the locked tool shed against the house, brought some in for the fireplace after changing out of outside clothes and sloshing down with Clorox. He didn't notice Carmen shivering violently, wrapped in a blanket in the middle of the living-room floor, until he had a fire built. "Jesus, you are cold," he said, looking at her blue lips. "Well, the fire will help, and I'll give the furnace a goose too."

  "I don't think it's that," Carmen said.

  "Come on, you just got overchilled—"

  "I'm not cold. I'm burning up," she said through chattering teeth. "You'd better get a mask on and some gloves and get some water on to boil your clothes. This started about an hour ago, and I'm already aching all over."

  Silently Jack went to the bathroom, got the thermometer. "A hundred and four," he said.

  "That's what I thought." Her voice was very small. "Jack, you mustn't come near me."

  "Sorry, kid. I'm not running from you, plague or no plague. For once we're in this together."

  "Then get me some aspirin. I've got to stop this shaking."

  After the aspirin he pulled her over to the fire, wrapped her in more blankets, sat and held her as she shook. There seemed nothing else to do; no doctor was going to help; they had done everything reasonable that they could do. Yet something now was tugging at Jack's mind. No help but what we have in the house. Not much in the house but a little stored food—and Clorox. And yet—and yet—something like a fishhook in his mind. "Carmen, honey? You remember back when you were such a pillhoarder?"

  "Hmmm?"

  "Back ten years ago when you were going to the doctor all the time? Before you got disgusted with doctors altogether?"

  "Yes. I remember. Why?"

  "And you'd never finish a prescription but you'd never throw the pills away? While you were having all those damned bladder infections? What did you do with all those pills? It seemed to me you had boxes of them.''

  She looked at him, herteeth still chattering, "/don't know. I suppose they're still up in the linen closet, I had some boxes there once. But they'd all be out of date—"

  He was running up the stairs to the master bathroom, grabbing a flashlight on the way, tearing open the linen-closet door, tossing towels and washcloths and sheets and pillowcases in a flurry around him. Back on one of the shelves, way back, long forgotten, two large pasteboard boxes—full of pill bottles. He took them out, shook them out on the bed. All dated ten, eleven, twelve years ago. Some with the names on them, some without. White pills, gray-and-white capsules, blue-and-yel-low capsules, red-and-green-coated pills. A bottle of pills marked V-Cillin K, probably no help if the books were right. A large bottle of white capsules with a gray stripe with CHLOROMYCETIN 250 mg typed on the label—he remembered something about that, she had had this fierce bladder infection and nothing else had worked and Doc Jensen had finally ordered up something like this, but he'd so thoroughly scared the shit out of her about how dangerous they were, how they might
depress her bone marrow and all sorts of horrible things that she hadn't taken a one of them. . . .

  He gathered up pill bottles in both hands and went on downstairs. She had stopped chilling now and was drowsy. "Armpits sore as hell, and down between my legs—God, they hurt," she said.

  "But you're not coughing."

  "No—I'm breathing all right. What's—what's all this you've got?"

  "Pills," Jack said.

  "Don't be silly, we can't take those. We don't know what they are."

  "Does it matter?" Jack said. "Maybe something in here will help some, I don't know. Don't care, either. They can't any more than kill us, and you can only die once. What you've got is going to get worse if we sit here, and we know it can kill us. If we're going to die of plague, we might as well die eating pills." He got some water and returned to her side. "Here, this one for your bladder—two four times a day, it says, and there's enough here for both of us for two days. Might as well pile another one on while we're at it, and vitamins—hell, vitamins can't hurt us. . . ." He counted out pills, dumped about nine of them in her hand. "Here you go. Down the hatch."

  She gulped them down. He took largely the same things himself and swallowed them. Watched her closely, then after a while checked his own pulse thoughtfully. "Nothing happened yet."

  He wrapped up in a blanket and sat down Indian fashion beside her. She stared up at him, wonderingly. "We really going to keep on taking those things?"

  "Bet your ass we are. Every four hours. When the chips are down, kid, you gotta use whatever you've got. If those don't help, you got a lot more Of them upstairs to try—"

  Suddenly she was laughing, roaring with laughter in spite of herself, tears rolling down her face. "Oh, Jack, you crazy idiot," she said. "Did I ever tell you what a silly nut you are?"

  "I'm crazy as a fox," he said, pulling herto him and holding her close. "You sleep now, while you can. Just close youreyes and let me be crazy. It's just like you've been saying right along—we're going to beat this thing, or we're going to die trying. ..."

  In Willow Grove, Nebraska, Ted Bettendorf did what he said he would: he really did back off and leave them alone. He flew in two medical statisticians and a small Hewlett Packard computer from what was left of the public-health operation in Omaha, which was not much, and set up shop in the basement of the First Methodist Church just across the street from the Willow Grove Family Health Clinic. Sunday services didn't interfere; on the first afternoon Sam Maclvers had buttonholed the Reverend Dr. Paul McFarland and said, "Sorry, Paul, but there won't be any Sunday services for the duration; have your people do their praying at home—but for God's sake see that they do some praying at home." (Unfortunately, the good Dr. McFarland took Maclvers's admonition perhaps more literally than intended and, ignoring all embargoes to the contrary, made daily rounds of his parishioners to make certain they did their praying at home, neglecting either to call his own burgeoning symptoms to anyone's attention or take the capsules Maclvers had forced on him, and falling dead of plague on the fourth day, bringing his short-lived emergency ministry to an untimely halt; at which news Dr. Sam Maclvers almost muttered, "So much for praying" within somebody's earshot, but bit his tongue in time and didn't.) The basement of the church was an excellent place for Bettendorf and Co. to work, since figures could flow across from the clinic on an hourly basis as they came in, and twice a day Frank Barrington or Sam Maclvers or Monique could run across to pick up printouts to study. From the beginning, Bettendorf directed the statistical work, but offered the emergency workers not a single word of advice. "If you people are running the show," he said stonily to Frank the second day, "then you're running the show. All 1 am is an innocent bystander. A very interested bystander, I assure you, but a bystander just the same. You want rope to hang with, you've got it. . . ."

  The basic idea they pursued seemed sound enough. In a community like Willow Grove and its surrounding villages, with their aggregate of thirty-thousand-odd people, communications could be maintained one way or another—by local radio run by gasoline generators, by local TV, by mimeographed handbills, by runners where necessary, leaving the telephone lines open for vital messages that had to get through. Nobody had to check on Aunt Mabel because after that first day Aunt Mabel was home where she belonged and didn't go out again until she was told to. There were neighbors to keep an eye on Aunt Mabel and see that she was doing okay without exposing either her or the watchful neighbors to more than minimal risk. Nobody had to use the telephone except for certain specific things, and the switchboard had to be kept open for those specific calls—and miraculously enough, in Willow Grove, Nebraska, in direct confrontation with the long-ingrained American instinct to get on the phone the moment anything interesting or out of the way happened, most people did not get on the phone, and the telephone switchboard remained mostly open and functional for vital emergency use most of the time.

  If that, in itself, was the First Miracle of Willow Grove, it was only the first of many. The message that went out to thirty thousand people by way of every communication channel that anyone could dream up was a marvel of bald simplicity, calm enough but deadly serious, as bluntly devoid of euphemism and false cajolery and political puffery and ambiguity as Frank Bar-rington and Dr. Sam Maclvers and half a dozen others (including Sally Grinstone, who had actually written the draft text weeks before) could make it: Every soul in thi. town is in mortal peril; this plague will give you no warning; it moves like the wind and it kills quickly. Unless you are specifically called upon for help, freeze in your tracks. Stay home. Keep your family home. Don't visit anybody. Don't go anywhere. If you see anybody wandering around without Scout neckerchiefs or red armbands, call the police and report them—they may inadvertently kill you if you don't. If you develop fever, nausea, pain, coughing, bruises or anything else that doesn't seem right, call any of seven medical numbers and report it without a minute's delay. Medicine will be brought to you with instructions for use. Use it as directed because it may be the only thing that can save your life. In addition, if you develop symptoms, report the names of anyone you contacted face-to-face within thirty-six hours previously, and then try to phone them and tell them you are sick and they should contact a medical number themselves. If you need food, water, help, call the same medical numbers; otherwise stay off the phone. Above all else, stay home, stay home, stay home—help will come to you.

  Nobody can give orders like that to thirty thousand people and expect all of them to obey and get things straight and do what they are told for long—but the message hung together well for seventy-two hours, and that was the Second Miracle of Willow Grove, Nebraska. That was long enough to get the organization working. Seventy-two precious hours to get telephones manned, to get vital functions organized, to find out what they were starting with, how deep the knife had already plunged. Within twenty-four hours there were 103 known or suspected cases, 4 known deaths, over 1,000 identified contacts. By seventy-two hours known or suspected cases had risen to 430, with almost 100 dead but another 100 not yet dead that should have been, and the contacts fell sharply by proportion, only another 900 contacts. Initial plans to try to isolate known cases in the high-school gymnasium were debated and redebated and discarded—treat them in their homes, treat everybody in each afflicted home, treat every reachable contact as soon as the fact of contact became known, and treat each contact of the contact if the contact became ill, with full therapeutic doses of the Ship-man drug. The Scouts were tireless, moving packets of capsules through town on foot or bicycle, sticking them in doors and turning and bolting like the devil was nipping at their heels. Within forty-eight hours, with people largely off the street, all the local police and the fire-department volunteers had joined the distribution team getting medicine, messages and supplies where they were needed and when. One phenomenon, miraculous in itself, went totally unremarked until much, much later because everyone had simply taken it for granted: there were no gangs roaming the streets of Willow Grove,
no looting, no violence, hardly even a parking violation. Nobody thought this was particularly remarkable.

  By the fourth day the numbers of afflicted were still rising inexorably—the sick, the dead, the contacts—but not on the deadly curve that had become the nightmare of every health official in the nation. On the fifth morning Ted Bettendorf met Frank with hands shaking so hard he could barely hang onto the printout sheets, and looked at Frank with an odd light in his eyes. "Something's happening," he said hoarsely. "I've been working at it all night long and something statistically significant is going on. That drug is doing something the Sealey drug has never done. ..."