The Plague Tales

by Ann Benson

  He turned a corner, and she followed, hoping that this was not his own neighborhood, with hiding places known only to himself and a few other locals. She was losing him, she knew it. Yersinia pestis would indeed be set loose in London as Bruce had feared it would. No doubt the thief would toss the case the instant he opened the sealed plastic bag and saw its gruesome contents, without concern for where it might land. Soon flies and fleas and rats would come, and then it would simply be a matter of time before the rats transported their infected fleas throughout the city, and history would repeat itself.

  Those who do not learn from history, she thought to herself as she surged forward, are destined to repeat it. It will be the Middle Ages all over again.

  Fighting off the searing pain in her thighs, Janie tried to concentrate on running faster, but all that came to mind was the vague remembrance of an urge to pack up that small circle of fabric sample and leave it alone when they were preparing to examine it in the lab with Frank. That fateful day, less than a week before, seemed like a lifetime ago.

  She was completely out of breath. Her throat screamed for water, and the beating of her heart almost drowned out the shriek of her quarry as he hit the cobblestones somewhere up ahead of her with a sickening thud. The clamor of voices came through the noise of her heartbeats and she looked ahead to see several people standing over the crumpled thief, one holding the pointed end of a cane, the hooked end of which was looped around the thief’s ankle. Janie came upon them in a few more steps, and stood for a moment bent over with her hands on her knees, gulping in air as if each breath would be her last.

  Between gulps she managed to pant out a wheezy “Thank you.” She retrieved her case and stumbled back down the alley again, leaving behind a very bewildered group of gawking heroes who felt justifiably unappreciated.

  She had just turned the corner back onto the main thoroughfare when Bruce nearly slammed into her. He embraced her joyfully when he saw the case in her hand, knowing what might have happened had she failed to reclaim it. They stood together in the rain, Janie shaking and panting, Bruce enfolding her, and let the cold water wash over them.

  A few minutes later they managed to flag down a taxi. Once inside, they both slumped down in the rear seat, motionless and exhausted from the pursuit. When she was more composed, Janie loosened her fierce grip on the case and set it down on the floor of the cab. She reached over and took gentle hold of Bruce’s injured hand. He offered no resistance. They rode on in silence until the Institute’s ornate facade appeared through the cab’s windshield. Bruce paid, tipping the driver far too generously, then they stood together in silence looking up at the forbidding entrance for a few minutes before either one spoke.

  Finally Bruce said, “You or me?”

  Janie answered, “It has to be you. If anyone sees me trying to open the lab with a handprint, they’ll know something’s up.”

  Bruce’s stomach tightened into a knot as he envisioned himself holding Ted Cummings’ severed hand up to the palm-print reader outside the lab’s door. They stepped to one side of the entry walk between two trees and turned their backs to the street, willing themselves some privacy. Janie pulled out another pair of disposable gloves and helped Bruce put them on. He opened the briefcase and removed the white plastic bag, and as he held it still, Janie slit it open with her knife. Ted’s hand was bled out and completely white, utterly unlike the ruddy tone of Bruce’s own skin.

  “Better put your other hand in your pocket so no one will notice that it’s gloved,” Janie said. “It looks a little suspicious. I’ll get the door for you when we go in.” She looked directly into his eyes. “Ready?”

  He nodded, but Janie could see the fear and reluctance in his sober expression. Bruce grasped the dead thing with his own gloved, injured hand. He hunkered down and slid the sleeve of his jacket lower, hoping that anyone observing from a distance would think that the hand protruding from his sleeve belonged to him.

  Janie closed the briefcase and picked it up. They walked up the stairs, trying to look as nonchalant as possible. She held the door and together they entered the building.

  They walked quickly through the corridors, dreading a chance encounter, and fortunately met no one; Janie began to think that the day’s luck was really changing. After three turns and three long hallways, they were within sight of the lab.

  A security guard rounded a corner perhaps thirty feet ahead of them as they approached the lab. He stopped and peered closer to see who was there. Janie saw him squint and start heading in their direction, but after a few steps he stopped and waved. “Oh, good evening, Dr. Ransom. I didn’t recognize you all wet like that. Rotten bit of weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

  “Rotten,” Bruce agreed nervously.

  “Nice to have you back. How was your trip?”

  Janie whispered to Bruce, “You’d better answer him.”

  Feeling sicker with each passing second, Bruce tightened his grip on Ted Cummings’ hand. He smiled thinly and said, “It was very interesting. I wish I could get out of here for a few more days.” The guard, satisfied that all was well, laughed and agreed. Then he turned and walked away, continuing his rounds down the corridor in the other direction.

  They watched until the guard was completely out of sight. Shaking and nauseated, Bruce raised up the dead hand and pressed it against the palm-print reader. He waited a few seconds for the green light to appear, but the indicator remained unlit. He tried again, but the hand had stiffened and would not flatten against the glass surface enough to make a successful print. With a grimace of distaste he reached up with his other gloved hand and pressed the rotten hand flat. The green light came on. They hurried through the door and locked it behind them.

  They put the hand back into its plastic bag and Janie set it on the floor inside the door with the intention of disposing of it in a biosafe container before they left. As Bruce was removing his latex gloves inside the lab, the palm-print reader on the wall outside began its electronic cleansing routine. It sent a thin current of electricity across the surface of the glass, and then ran through a diagnostic scan to determine if any live bacteria were still present on the reader. It would repeat this procedure, after a warning beep, until there were no living cells detected on the surface, each repetition taking about one minute.

  Twenty minutes after Bruce and Janie entered the lab, the reader was still self-cleaning, and still beeping. The security guard was too far away to hear the disturbing repetition, and Janie and Bruce heard nothing inside their well-insulated high-tech womb.

  Bruce swore as he tapped on the blank computer screen. “There’s nothing in here. Nobody’s home. Someone must have wiped out the memories completely.”

  “This is just getting too weird,” Janie said. “Are there any other systems we can use?”

  “Not with the same programming. These are the only two in here set up for the type of identification operation we need to do.”

  “Can we go to one of the other labs and do the same thing?”

  Bruce sighed. “We can,” he said, “but it will take too long to get to what we need from them. There’s another setup at the far end of the lab—not as sophisticated, but it’ll do the trick for the sort of comparison we’re making.” He got up from the chair and started in that direction. “Come on with me,” he said.

  She followed him to a bank of microscopes. He selected a stereoscopic unit capable of showing two images at once. He mounted the original fabric on one side and a cut square from the nightdress on the other, then turned on the illuminators and started raising the magnification. As details emerged on the fabric sample, he adjusted the focus to sharpen the images.

  There were literally thousands of microbes on the surface of the fabric circle. Some were obviously alive, heaving and quaking and dividing as he watched, but many others were dead, having burned themselves out after repeated reproductions. The hand now resting in a plastic bag on the lab floor was probably teeming with millions of the
same microbe and oozing biological toxins as the tiny creatures went through their strictly ordained life cycles, dividing exponentially, then dying in poisonous masses when there was nothing more of the host to devour.

  Janie brought the nightdress section to the same magnification and sharpened the focus. At first nothing showed up, and she began to hope that the call to Biopol would not have to be made. But that might mean that Caroline had done something terrible to Ted.…

  She had to know. She kept stubbornly scrolling the section around under the scope, the uncertainty torturing her with every new inch of the fabric that she examined. She wasn’t sure what to hope for. What she really wanted was time, enough time to think the situation through more carefully, time to start looking for Caroline on her own. For a few minutes nothing was visible but an unblemished field of cotton fibers, and the notion of having that time seemed distinctly possible. Finally a few cells scrolled into the field, then a few more, and soon the field was replete with scattered cells. She compared the microbes in both eyepieces. After glancing back and forth a few times, she said to Bruce, “Take a look at this. I’m pretty sure these are the same.”

  “Let me see,” Bruce said. He looked back and forth between the two fields of vision. “I think you’re right,” he said finally.

  Janie sighed. Now comes the time when I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t, she thought sadly. “Caroline was probably sick, but Ted probably drugged her. Looks like nobody wins,” she said.

  Their eyes met and locked. Each one waited for the other to come up with a better solution to their dilemma. A few silent seconds passed.

  “I’ll make the call,” Bruce said wearily, and headed for the nearest phone.

  Nineteen

  Alejandro wiped the drool from the corner of Kate’s mouth and then passed the cloth over her sweaty forehead. He picked up a bowl of porridge from the bedside table and dipped a spoon into it. It looked terribly unappealing to him, but he knew it was mild and well tolerated, a food that his tiny patient was unlikely to throw back at him, as she had done with almost everything else he had tried to feed her.

  “Kate,” he said softly, “open your mouth, child. You must take some nourishment if we are to succeed. You need the strength to fight.…”

  But the thin lips remained resolutely closed, so he set the bowl and spoon back down on the table, then got up and left the room.

  Adele waited in the hall outside the room, her face distraught and her hands clutched together. “Well?” she said.

  Alejandro removed his herbal mask as he left the room. “She has eaten almost nothing for three days,” he said. “Three days. It is a marvel she is alive.”

  Her voice hopeful, Adele said, “Then perhaps the medicine is working?”

  “Perhaps,” he said, “but I think it is too soon to tell. How many times have you turned the hourglass since we last administered it to her?”

  “It is coming up on the fourth turn.”

  “Then you had better call the others.”

  She nodded, dreading what she knew would soon come, and turned away.

  Alejandro pulled his mask back in place and reentered the sickroom. “Four knuckles and half a cupped hand,” he said aloud as he mixed the powder and the yellow fluid for Kate’s next dose. He stirred the thick slurry, then held up the spoon over the bowl and watched a thick glob of the slurry plop back into the bowl again.

  Adele came into the room with a mask on her face, followed by both the housekeeper and the overseer, similarly masked.

  “Ready?” Alejandro said.

  All three nodded.

  “Very well, then, hold her down.”

  The housekeeper and the overseer each held down one arm and shoulder while Adele forced Kate’s lips apart by squeezing the sides of her face. Alejandro spooned the gloppy mix into her mouth, then quickly set down the bowl and pinched closed both her lips and her nostrils.

  The small child sputtered and struggled with surprising strength, trying to spit the disgusting mess out of her mouth; the adults, all talking at once, tried to calm her, but she would not stop her thrashing.

  “Swallow, for the love of God!” the physician said as she stubbornly held the medicine in her mouth. Finally, when he saw that she was beginning to turn blue, Alejandro gave the order for everyone to stop. As soon as she was freed from the grips of her tormentors, Kate spit out the gray-green mess, fouling her bedclothes and nightdress.

  No one spoke; they had been through this frustrating ritual many times, sometimes with success, sometimes with exasperating failure. The housekeeper started to leave the room, but Alejandro stopped her.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “I am going to the cupboard for fresh linens and nightdress,” she said, her voice muffled by the mask.

  “No, wait,” he said. “We will try again. This time I will mix it thinner, and perhaps she will swallow.” He picked up the bowl and started measuring the ingredients. “This time we will try four knuckles and a full cupped hand.”

  “Will those proportions work?” Adele asked.

  “I have no idea,” Alejandro said, “but I am certain that the proportions we are using now are useless if we can’t get the vile stuff into her.”

  He mixed the powder and liquid together, but this time it dripped easily off the spoon. “She will have no choice but to swallow this,” he said.

  They repeated the detestable ritual again, but this time Kate could not fight it off. As soon as Alejandro pinched her airways closed, she gulped hard and took the whole mouthful into her stomach at once. She gagged and coughed, but kept the medication down, as the adults around her cheered and clapped.

  Adele and Alejandro removed her soiled nightdress, and as the housekeeper changed the linens on the bed, they bathed her in a tubful of warm water. All thoughts of modesty were cast aside as Alejandro examined her, looking for signs of changes in her condition.

  He looked at her neck and armpits carefully. “The bruises seem no larger than they were two days ago. Nor have they formed into pustules,” he said. “This is a hopeful sign.”

  But by the seventh day of her treatment, with the better part of the medicine gone, Alejandro was forced to admit to himself that there was the possibility that they would not succeed. “She has not come around as I had hoped she would,” he told Adele. “I had hoped for better results by now.”

  “But it is a quarter turn of the moon,” Adele said, protesting his pessimism. “I have seen many succumb in less than half that time.”

  He remembered the papal guards who had come with him on his journey from Avignon. One had lived only three days from the time he took ill. He knew it was true that Kate had not sickened with the same devastating speed, and her illness was not nearly so grave. But that nearly miraculous success would not satisfy him. I will have her live, and live in health, he thought, or I will die myself in trying to make it come to pass.

  He stood at her bedside that night, long after everyone else had retired, and held in his hand the diminishing vial of grayish powder that Mother Sarah had told him was the dust of the dead.

  The hair of the dog that bit you, he thought to himself.

  No sooner had the thought left his mind than he sat up and stared at the vial again. The hair of the dog that bit you. The dust of the dead. One and the same! Perhaps each contains some invisible substance with powers against the contagion, he thought excitedly. He left the bedside and found his book of wisdom to record his ideas.

  Having done so, he took the time to read back through what he had written after observing Mother Sarah. Such strange measurements! A “knuckle” of the powder, and half of a “cupped hand” of the water, indeed! Should it be Adele’s knuckle, and his own cupped hand, the mixture would be far different than the one he had first used. Should it be the knuckle of Adele’s smallest finger, and the cupped hand of her overseer, it would be different still. The mixture used by Mother Sarah had been only partially successful.

  But
if the powder were less, and the water more, did it not logically mean that the medication was weaker? he wondered. And is there not some way to counteract that weakness? If one now gives four strong doses in a day, might not eight weak doses be as effective? And why not give ten, or twelve, or even more doses? He sat up straighter, his excitement growing, and scribbled furiously in the book. Truly, he thought to himself, this is a night of hold thoughts! Surely it would not harm Kate to ingest that very thing of which she herself was made; and although all civilized societies forbade the practice of eating the flesh of man, did not the Christian Jesus give of his own to his followers?

  He picked up the bowl in which Kate’s medicine was mixed. A small amount remained. He added more of the yellow water, and then a small amount of powder, until he had a thin, watery mix. He would begin giving her that mixture when it was time for her next dose.

  Rarely did the child awaken. Her small body curled into an infantile position, as her mother had lain near the end. As needed, her vigilant companions washed her bodily wastes away and cleaned her bedding. Sometimes she would twitch, and Alejandro wondered if Carlos Alderón had found his way into Kate’s dreams too. It seemed that the blacksmith had tired of visiting the physician, perhaps because he could not get his full attention anymore, now that Adele was by his side.

  But gradually, Alejandro started to notice improvement. The swellings in her neck began to diminish in size and in the depth of their color, and she slept more peacefully. Finally, on the thirteenth day after taking ill, Kate opened her eyes and looked around, and saw Alejandro asleep by her bedside, with his mouth hanging open and his head lolled over the back of the chair. Through her cracked lips she managed to squeak, “Physician …Physician …”

  Alejandro bolted awake and shook his head to clear his senses. He quickly put on his mask. For a moment he was not sure where the small voice had come from; had it been another dream?

  “Physician …” she said again.