Homefront Hero

by Allie Pleiter

  “John, he told me one hundred and thirty men have died at Jackson. How many will die here?”

  John cast his eyes down to the yellow half sheet Leanne held out. It was a wire statement from Army Surgeon General Victor Vaughan. While John might conclude it was Vaughan’s job to size up threats in the worst possible light, this exceeded the staunchest pessimism. “If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration,” the smudged type declared, “civilization could easily disappear from the face of the earth within a few weeks.”

  It wasn’t that hard to believe. Death felt as if it lurked around every corner, hid in every sunken set of eyes. According to the velvet box back somewhere in the bottom of his rucksack, John had faced death down, had “saved lives at the risk of his own.” Still, John could not escape the truth that he’d felt terror at that episode and mostly peace here. Is that what faith did? Gave one peace in what might be the end of the world?

  “I’ll admit to very little knowledge of God, but I cannot think He would grant me you and then not give me the world to enjoy with you. Does it look like the end of the world? I’ve seen battlefields that show nothing but devastation, so yes, I suppose it does. But it does not feel like the end of the world, at least not to me. It feels like war.” He gazed into Leanne’s eyes, willing her his battle nerves. “I know war, Leanne. I know what to do in war. In the one out there and the one right here. Victory isn’t out of reach. You hold on to that thought. I’ve far too many things I want to show you to consider anything else. I plan to take you up in a plane and show you the sky from God’s point of view. Would you like that?”

  She smiled for the first time this evening, and popped another bite of sausage into her mouth. “It sounds wonderful.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “I ought to have you shot!”

  John pulled his head away from the phone receiver and Barnes’s tinny bellow. It was funny; he’d endowed the general with so much power over his life before, and now his anger didn’t faze John at all. “It was very foolish, I agree. Still, I’d do it again given the chance.”

  The general’s sigh was closer to a growl. “Your father will have my head for not getting you out of here.”

  Ah, so it was true. John had long suspected it was the Gallows name, rather than his silver tongue, that earned him a spot on that train. Father’s leverage was still as powerful, his connections still strong if his father knew of the epidemic as fast as Barnes. “Father knows me well enough to know I’m not much for orders. One doesn’t get the medals for being a good boy, but rather a brave soldier. Amazing how often that involves ignoring wise advice, isn’t it?”

  John could almost hear Barnes pinch the bridge of his nose. “Son, what good are you to anyone if you die over there?”

  “Begging your pardon, General, but I could have died just as easily in Chicago and I’m tremendously useful over here.” John had raised the recruitment rates in three states, had driven auditoriums of young men to their feet in cheers but had never felt more useful than he had in the past twenty-four hours. “I’m a soldier, and I don’t have to tell you, this is war.” Whatever it was he was seeking in his return to the front, he had already found it. The stand he’d taken here, holding the line against this deadly enemy, had settled his soul in more ways than one.

  “Captain Gallows,” Travers called from the hallway, “we got four less boxes than we thought. What do we do now?” Late last night someone had recognized him, and his anonymity was gone, but it hadn’t mattered. Influenza had little respect for rank or status.

  “What’s going on?” Barnes asked through the line.

  “Five minutes,” John called to Travers, then returned to the receiver. “Enough of the staff has fallen ill that I’ve been drafted into figuring out how to make five loaves and two fishes feed the five thousand.” Leanne had drawn the Biblical comparison, saying they’d need one of Jesus’s miracles to make the meager supplies meet the herculean need. She’d also kissed him and told him she thought no one short of Christ more suitable to attempt the feat. He’d grinned; evidently his spiritual awakening had yet to squelch the legendary Gallows ego.

  “What?” Barnes sounded duly baffled.

  “Instead of getting me out, sir, can you wield that leverage to get supplies in?” They’d created a self-contained “no contact zone” around the dormitory and two adjacent halls—a quarantine within a quarantine—and John had worked out a non-contact drop system in the dormitory’s west door. He found it no coincidence that the idea sprang from a cloister of French nuns whom he’d frequented for excellent chocolates. “We’re in dire straits for bandages, medical alcohol and chloroform.”

  The general made a gruff sound. “You and half the Eastern Seaboard.”

  Travers shifted in the doorway. “Captain Gallows, sir?”

  “You do what you can from out there, I’ll do what I must from in here,” he said to the general.

  “Bandages, medical alcohol and chloroform?”

  “That’s what they tell me. At least today. Tomorrow is anyone’s guess.” If anyone could throw his weight around in Columbia, it was General Barnes. As fearful as the general’s wrath might be once this was over, it was better to have the man as an ally for the present battle.

  “Anything else?”

  John couldn’t resist. “A good steak might help. And some yarn.”

  * * *

  Leanne mopped another puddle of drying blood from the floor. Every square inch of the room was occupied by moaning bodies. Doctors darted between catastrophes, barking orders at nurses, all so tired themselves that civility had been abandoned.

  A young woman to Leanne’s left gave out a raspy cry, clawing at her chest. She’d torn open her blouse, for the supply of hospital gowns had disappeared along with the civility and clean linens. “There now—” Leanne grabbed the woman’s hand and laid it back down on the cot “—they’ll bring more medicine soon.” It seemed the kindest of lies, for in truth Leanne had no idea how long supplies would hold out. “Try to rest.” She redid the young woman’s buttons, and wiped her brow. There were no sheets to tuck her under. Leanne smoothed her tangled hair, for there were no pillows to place beneath her head. Kindness was the only treatment she had to offer.

  The woman quieted some, and Leanne rose to arch her back against the growing ache. She needed to leave the din of moans and cries, just for a minute or two to catch her breath. She found Ida in the ladies’ washroom, catching her weary glance as they ducked over the line of sinks. “I’m worn to the bone and then some,” Ida said, splashing water on her face and then leaning back against the wall. Towels had disappeared from the washroom, if they were ever there at all.

  “I hurt everywhere,” Leanne replied, using a wet hand to wipe the grime from her neck. The suffocating smells spun her senses and tumbled her stomach if she moved too fast. Her tongue dragged inside a parched, pasty mouth for the sheer mass of bodies had baked the room to a suffocating heat.

  “Did you hear that doctor when he came in yesterday?” Ida asked, flexing one wrist in slow circles. “Took two steps in the door and pronounced it ‘the very cradle of death.’ As if we’d all somehow benefit from the description.”

  Leanne didn’t find it much of an overstatement. “That’s the worst part, isn’t it? How hard they’re trying to hide that they don’t know what to do?”

  Ida’s sour laugh echoed against the tile, bloodstained even in here. “Do we do any less? Telling patients medicine is on the way, that relief is coming?”

  Leanne looked at the blood caking her fingernails, unable to recall the last time those fingers had touched yarn and needles. “It’s a horrid false kindness, isn’t it?” She scraped her hands against the slivers of soap left by the sink and washed again, the cracks in her knuckles stinging from the harsh lye. “Still,” she said as she rinsed, “it calms most of them, and that’s help enough.” She cupped her hands and drank, the bitter trace of soap sending her into a fit of coughing
. Even a decent drink of water had become a luxury in the ward. She coughed again, shut her eyes against the ache that doubled in her chest and wiped her hands on her skirts for lack of any hand towels.

  Ida stared.

  “Nasty soap.” Leanne had tried not to give in to complaints, but she felt too battered to keep this one in. “I’m fine.” She cleared her throat again, feeling as if she’d swallowed gauze bandages instead of poor water.

  Ida made no reply, but stood there with dull shock written all over her face as Leanne grabbed the counter with one hand while the other went to her throat. Coughing again, Leanne followed Ida’s gaze to her own skirts, damp from her hands.

  Two bright red smudges.

  Leanne looked at her hands and saw not the dried brownish-red smears of the ward’s endless blood, but lines of fresh red in the creases of her palms. She fought the urge to cough again as she forced herself to look in the dingy mirror above the sink.

  Red spots, bright as alarms, spattered one cheek. The edges of the room began to spin out of her vision, and she clutched the edge of the sink as another cough tore up out of her chest to shower tiny red drops across her clenched fist.

  I’m to die, then, Leanne thought as she slumped against the wall, the tile cool and soothing against her flushed cheek. She heard Ida’s cry for help and the squeaky bang of the washroom door as if it were a thousand miles away. She closed her eyes, feeling something in her core begin to unwind, like a snagged thread unraveling a sweater’s knitting. I’ve come undone.

  * * *

  John was standing over a telegraph machine someone had brought in from the university’s administrative offices, working with a clerk to wire calls for favors to every family member or family friend he could list. If the Gallows name held any weight, now was surely the time to wield it. Still, even a pedigree like his couldn’t produce linens out of thin air, nor medicine when no one knew what drugs worked. Travers had begun to wear a bag of camphor pellets around his neck and brought one for John to use, but he declined. He suspected the smelly folk-remedy held about as much credence as the Gallows moniker against their invisible foe. Still, he sent out the next telegraph to a textile mill down the river from his family estate, asking for any help they could give.

  Thanks to his new curative, John smelled Travers before he saw him. “Hank,” John called, not looking up from the buzzing metal box, “I’d always thought the term ‘I can smell you from a mile away’ to be an exaggeration, but in your case…”

  The look in Travers’s eyes stopped him midsentence. The man clearly bore bad news. John wasn’t sure he could stomach another shortage of anything, given how dire circumstances already were. He straightened up slowly, feeling sparks shoot down his leg as he reached for his cane. “What isn’t coming now?”

  Hank looked down, twisting his cap in one hand. John hated how the masks made everyone’s face so difficult to read. Hank shifted his weight. “It’s Miss Sample, sir. They told me to come fetch you.”

  John grabbed the back of a nearby chair. The words came slowly, thickly out of his mouth. “What about Miss Sample, Hank?”

  Hank said nothing. Which said everything.

  “Where is she?” He whacked the chair away with his cane, betrayal rising in his throat like bile. “Where is she?”

  “Down in the second building with some of the other nurses that done got sick this afternoon.”

  John pushed past him into the hallway, his cane banging over and over on the wooden floor as he tumbled into something close to a run. Leanne could not fall ill. It was as simple as that. God would not give him her heart for two meager days and then tear it away. Everything else could fall to pieces, he could lose everything else but he could not, would not lose her. Not this way.

  “Leanne!” he called as he rounded the corner to the ward Travers had indicated. He’d pulled his mask down, not caring what lay in the air he swallowed with each stinging breath. The burning in his leg had already lodged in his lungs and his heart, what was a mask to him now? John wanted to hit something, to punch through a wall or bellow curses into the wind, but he skidded to a stop in the doorway where Ida stood with apologetic eyes.

  Panting from his dash, his leg absolutely screaming, John locked his gaze onto Leanne’s face. She lay in the third of four cots, curled on her side and clutching her stomach, eyes narrowed in pain above a mask smattered in the bloody droplets that announced her fate. “Leanne.” It was almost a cry, a howl rather than her name. “No.”

  He lurched toward her, but Ida caught his shoulder, pointing silently to the mask hanging around his neck. He couldn’t care less about that useless square of cloth now, but Leanne managed a “John, please,” that only served to send her into a wave of gurgling coughs. Her skin was the pale gray he’d come to hate, her brow beaded from fever so that damp curls of hair framed her face. It was agony to sink down beside her, the burning in his leg still no match for the shot-through sensation in his chest. He’d fallen from heights and not felt the wind so knocked out of him as when he clutched her hand. It was cold, dry and clenched tight with suffering.

  “I’m not so bad,” she lied with hopeless eyes.

  “Leanne,” he said, any other words beyond him. “My dear.”

  No shy smile greeted his endearment. “John.”

  “You’re in pain.” He grabbed the towel from its basin on the floor beside her and mopped her brow. Even though he was no stranger to pain, the thought of her suffering made him crazy. She was too sweet, too fragile to be wracked in the fever’s agony.

  Her eyes fluttered shut as he cooled her forehead. “Not much yet.”

  That was the worst of it; she knew what was coming. They both did. He returned the cloth to its place and took her hand. It felt wrong; it was too cool and stiff, rigid but without life. The hideous purple spots had already begun to form on her wrist, and a cold coil of helplessness began to wind its way around his spine. “You won’t die.” The words were foolish. Nurses had begun affixing postmortem identification toe tags to patients upon arrival, not having time to wait until they’d passed. No one had yet recovered. No one. “You’ll be spared, you’ll see.”

  “Wouldn’t that be lovely.” Her head rolled listlessly to one side.

  John hated the surrender in her voice. He had no intention of surrendering Leanne to this evil beast. Had it been a visible foe, he would have run straight at it, roaring with his bayonet lunging. But there was nothing to plunge his bayonet into, no target to shoot. He could not blow up the bridge to the next life before she crossed it. He couldn’t do anything, and that was worse than any pain.

  “I’m so very hot,” she whispered, and John brought the cloth to her brow again. He folded it across her forehead, and she sighed. Any tiny bit of comfort felt better than the resignation clawing at his heels. She shifted, wincing as she did, and he rearranged the thin scraggly pillow beneath her head. She was lucky in that; despite the university laundry running nonstop, pillows and clean linen were becoming more scarce every day. And he was thankful she wasn’t in that sea of near-corpses on the first floor, but here with a small number of nurses who had fallen ill. She stood half a chance that way, he told himself. “I’ll sleep,” she said, her eyes finding him again. “It’s better when I sleep.”

  John ran a lock of her hair through his fingers. “You need your rest. You need it because you’re going to live. Those students? Those socks? They need you.”

  Her eyes fell closed, but she smiled.

  “I need you.” His voice broke with the power of that truth. Self-sufficient, self-important, self-absorbed John Gallows needed. Perhaps it really was the end of the world.

  “But you’ve finished your first sock,” she said, speaking with such a thin calm that he wondered if she was still awake. “You’ll be surprised. The second one is so much easier.”

  “I still need you.” He wasn’t talking about socks at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It burned. Parts of her burn
ed, then cooled, then burned again. The air had grown thick and hard to breathe, hot and liquid against her throat. The scents around her were familiar, yet some part of her knew they were cause for alarm. There were times—hours? days?—when her stomach would feel hollow and still. All of her felt hollow and still, like a water glass emptied out. Then there were the insufferable spaces where time twisted over on itself in pain, where every breath felt like it took hours and filled nothing. Voices and faces would ebb in and out of her awareness. Sometimes she conversed with them, knowing they were friends and yet not being able to place them in her life outside the heat and pain. Other times they were only noises she could not understand.

  Days were hard. The bright sunshine hurt her eyes, made the sights and sounds too sharp. For a little while each day, however, the storm would subside and she could be in the world. Feel the cool gauze on her forehead, taste the salty broth someone held to her lips. She was very sick, she knew that, although she wasn’t sure how. Every once in a while, especially when light returned to the room, Leanne would feel something tell her not to fight, not to strive. An inner voice assuring her that whatever this was, it was out of her hands.

  She was sure the voice came in the growing light because the dark was so awful. Sleep and wakefulness wove together without clear lines, so that she never knew if her eyes would open to dark or light. In the light there were shapes and movement, but the dark held only sound and space. Once she thought Charles Holling came to her in the darkness, as pale and hollow as she felt. He didn’t plead to die like she remembered, only asked very politely as if he were a gentleman asking a lady to dance. She would tell him she didn’t want to dance, or to die, that John was here somewhere, and then she would turn and look for John in the darkness. She would push her hands out of the fog draped over her, and find the solid warmth of his hand. It was as if she floated, wandered, but his hand would anchor her back whenever she touched it. She’d call his name into the fog, and often his answer would come back like a lighthouse beacon. He held her to this place, to this time, even to this pain. It made her think of John’s accident, hanging over the sea by the dirigible stay wires that both tore him and saved him at the same time. How did she know that? Had she been there to see it? She couldn’t remember. Nothing made sense.