Systemic Shock tq-1

by Dean Ing

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  At first, Quantrill thought the pickup would ghost past him to disappear down the mountain as two others had done, on Tuesday morning. It was a green '95 Chevy hybrid with the inflatable popup camper deck that melded, when stowed, into an efficient kammback. Then he saw it ease onto the shoulder and ran to open the right-hand door. “Got room for my pack?" He was already shucking it.

  "What if I said 'no'?" She saw him hesitate, then chuckled. "I'm kidding. Room between us, or push it through the hole," the woman said, aiming a gloved thumb at the orifice behind her.

  Quantrill tried to smile as the Chevy coasted downhill, glanced again at the driver. His first impression had been of a tanned little old lady, sun-crinkles at the corners of her eyes, wrinkles running down her throat into the open-necked work shut. But the lines on the throat were sinew, and the chuckle hummed with vitality. He revised her age at under forty, saw that her own gaze mixed shrewdness and curiosity.

  "Where'd you spend the night? You look hungry," she said.

  "A cave in the bluffs back there. I have some sausage and granola. Afraid to drink the water."

  "Smart boy. Got a canteen? Fill it from mine there," she pointed at an insulated jug. "Actually a Halazone tab is all you'd need. With this fiendish high-pressure area, not much fallout is moving our way. My name's Abby Drummond. Headed for Gatlinburg?"

  "I guess," he shrugged, topping off his canteen. "Anywhere there's shelter, ma'am."

  She drove in silence, the tire-whine loud because the diesel was not running and she was recharging her batteries on steep downslopes. At length she said, "I'll let you off at the Gatlinburg turnoff. I 'm going to detour south of Knoxville."

  Quantrill nodded, wondering if the woman regretted giving him the lift. Well, she wasn't very big. A woman alone…

  Abby Drummond slowed at the tumoff, then drove a hundred meters past an abandoned sedan and stopped. Quantrill shouldered his pack, waved, walked fifty paces before he heard the voices. He turned, then removed his pack again with hurried stealth.

  Two men, heavily dressed as city folk will for an outing, had materialized from the roadside. One stood on the Chevy's front bumper, a prospector's pick waving before the woman's eyes. The other was opening the passenger door. Quantrill could hear them talking, did not need to know what was said. His decision seemed the most natural thing in the world, and changed him forever.

  He took the canteen, scanning the brush for a handy weapon, slipped as near as he dared. If he rushed the men, the last fifteen meters would be in the open. Since they stood at right angles, he felt sure that one of them would spot him. He found a stone the size of his fist, let himself breathe deeply, then tossed the stone high in the air.

  Quantrill was moving before the stone hit the ground on the driver's side. The pick-wielder jerked around, but the man with one foot in the cab did not move. Quantrill ran as quietly as he could but saw Mr. Pick, hearing quick footfalls, whirl back on uncertain footing. The sodden thunkk of the full canteen against the man's temple carried all of Quantrill's speed plus the length of his arm and canteen strap, and Quantrill's inertia carried him behind the man on an oblique course before he could stop.

  The little pick glanced off the Chevy's plastic hood, the man spinning half around before collapsing. He groveled to hands and knees, vented a long moan, then fell face-first in the dirt.

  Quantrill backed away, swinging the canteen like a bolo to threaten the second man until he saw that the man's attention was riveted on Abby Drummond, and his hands were now in the air. "Okay, okay," he was chattering, "people make mistakes. What about my buddy, sounds like the boy bashed his head in." But he was stepping backward now, staring at the short ugly revolver in Abby's hand.

  Quantrill snatched up the pick, saw that the felled man was breathing heavily, and resisted a vicious impulse as he moved to the open door. Then, as though he had always known such things, he stopped. He was nearing the talker, whose flickering gaze seemed to suggest some quick judgment. It was very simple: Quantrill had been about to obstruct the woman's field of fire. The man was preparing to act.

  Quantrill backed off, said "Wait," in a more peremptory way than he intended, retrieved his pack, trotted far down the road ahead of the Chevy. Then he waved it toward him.

  Abby Drummond accelerated quickly away and did not entirely stop as Quantrill tumbled into the passenger seat again. A hundred meters back, one man stood helplessly watching them while the second was reeling up to a sitting position.

  "Could've been worse," she said. “You'd best drop your canteen out the window. Could be contaminated now. In fact, you and I are taking chances with each other as it is. I've come from Spartanburg."

  Quantrill did not understand and said so, discarding his canteen with reluctance. "I've been camping up here since Friday," he said. "If it has fallout on it, so do I."

  "Not fallout; microbes. Those men were out of fuel, and were running from the same thing we are — whether you know it or not, ah, what's your name?"

  "Ted Quantrill, ma'am."

  "I called you a boy, and so did that poor devil back there. We were wrong, Ted. You maybe only sixteen or so, but—"

  "Fifteen, almost."

  "Man enough for me back there, Ted. Call me 'Abby'; looks like we'll be together awhile, if you're up to it. Frankly, I'm glad to have a man along. I gather you weren't headed home."

  Quantrill spent the next twenty minutes telling his tale as Abby guided them toward foothills and the outskirts of Maryville, Tennessee. He did not tell her about Tom Schell: least said, soonest forgotten. She seemed to know which side roads to take and, if she was faking her knowledge of their predicament, he decided it was a damned convincing fake. "Anyway," he finished his account, "if I catch anything, you'll have to give it to me."

  Abby chuckled again, saw that he had intended no double-entendre, and slapped the steering wheel as she laughed outright. "I'll see what I can do," she said in arch innocence. "But seriously, I think we got out in time. If we didn't, we'll know by tomorrow, I guess. We probably shouldn't mix with other people for a day or two. The only ethical thing to do, wouldn't you say?"

  "You're 'way ahead of me," he said. "Jeez, I don't even know where we're going."

  She told him.

  "Oak Ridge? Shit-fire, I mean, uh—"

  "Whatever turns you on," she said easily.

  "I mean wouldn't that be a prime target?"

  "It's just a museum now, Ted; the Union Carbide people ran out of funds years ago. I work there in the summers. My best friend there is Jane Osborne; believe you me, Janie knows the tunnels as well as anybody. Most people don't even know about 'em. Not at the museum, but — well, you'll see. Uh-oh."

  Quantrill saw why she was slowing. Just ahead lay a bridge, barricaded so that only one car could pass. Four men in khaki, all with riot guns, stood guard. "We can't fight those guys," he muttered.

  "Deputies, I'll bet. Act sleepy, I'll do the talking," she said, and rolled down the window as she stopped.

  The spokesman was middle-aged, kindly, firm. No traffic from the east, he said. "Official cars only."

  "But I'm from Oak Ridge," Abby said. "I am an official." She selected a card from her bulging wallet as she invoked the phrase with resounding dignity. ' "The American Museum of Atomic Energy. I only came down to pick up my son here, and bring him back."

  "Back from where," the man said, no longer so kindly, but jerking his eyes toward Quantrill as he returned the card.

  "What's the name of that silly mountain we just left, hon," she asked, looking brightly at Ted. "Poor dear, he's been up there only one night alone and so tired he can hardly move. Teddy, answer mother."

  "Uh — Clingman's," he said, and rubbed his eyes. "We aren't home yet." It was a complaint; almost a whine.

  "Soon. Go back to sleep."

  A second man, silent until now, had been listening. His age and wedding ring suggested that he might have a family of his own. "Lady, yo
u had to be crazy to let the boy go camping alone at a time like this. How many anthrax victims has he rubbed up against since yesterday, and why didn't your husband come along?"

  "The Lord took my husband, sir," she said softly. "And left me only the boy. I promised he could have his little adventure; and Teddy was complaining that he didn't meet anybody up there. I didn't think God would take him away from me when he's all I have — except for my official duties. I do have those; and I'm late." Not quite a protest.

  The older man, ruminatively: "Those are Georgia plates on your car."

  Without hesitation: "Georgia plates are cheap, and a widow has to make ends meet. Chief Lawrence in Oak Ridge knows that."

  "I reckon he does," the younger man laughed, and turned to his companion. "Look, Sam, they aren't really from across the Smokies — and she is an official. And they haven't had a chance to catch anything. Whaddaya say?"

  The older man exhaled slowly, then stood aside. "What was the name of your police chief again?"

  Already rolling, the diesel now warming up to take its share of the load: "Calvin Lawrence," Abby said, "even if I didn't vote for him."

  The man smiled, waved her on, waved again as the Chevy eased onto the bridge. She waved back, then rolled up the window and heaved a sigh of record proportions. "We're a good team," she said.

  Quantrill: "You're a great team all by yourself. I almost believed you myself, mom."

  "Mom your ass," she squealed, and backhanded his shoulder lightly. "I'm thirty-four years old, fella. In the right clothes I could pass as your hotsy."

  "I think you could pass for any damn' thing you wanted

  "And why not? I didn't tell you what my profession is, nine months a year."

  Slyly: "Does it involve lying to deputies a lot?"

  "By God, but you're getting cocky! What I do, is cause the willing suspension of disbelief."

  "I believe it," he said quickly.

  "You have some good lines, inside and out," she winked. "Anyway, — I teach drama at a junior college."

  "You really a widow?"

  "Of the grass variety. Twice. I like macho men, but I don't like to be directed, I like to direct." She glanced at him again, laughed again. “Mom your ass," she repeated, laughing.

  When she laughed, Abby Drummond seemed more like thirty than forty. Quantrill decided the tan and the strong muscular lines had led him astray, then reflected that she could be almost any age. All that play-acting might let her be anything she liked. To anybody. Suddenly he was aware of the first stirrings of an erection. "You and that deputy both mentioned anthrax," he said quickly. "Tell me about it; I thought it was a cattle disease."

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Abby Drummond had felt secure in Spartanburg until (she told Quantrill) Monday night after she snapped off her holo set and spent an hour reading De Kruif, the Britannica, and other snippets from her small library. Anthrax was one of the few diseases with an epizootic potential that included not only cattle but swine, sheep, horses, domestic pets — and the domesticator as well. Isolated by Koch in 1876 and fought with Pasteur's vaccine in 1881, anthrax in its original form was well-known.

  If breathed, anthrax spores caused pulmonary infection that advanced within days to lethal hemoptysis — hemorrhagic pneumonia. Human victims might tremble and fight for breath before the convulsions and the bloody froth at the mouth, or they might just succumb quickly and quietly.

  Introduced into a skin abrasion, B. anthracis produced a large carbuncle with an ugly necrotic center which soon fed ravenous microbes into the bloodstream where, without prompt treatment, septicemia led to meningitis and usually death. Ingested, the bug was just as deadly. Consumption of anthrax-killed beef was not a very popular form of suicide, but a little dab would do you.

  Toxoids, proteins produced from the bacterial toxins, could provide immunity. Antibiotics might halt the progress of the disease. If there was one optimistic note to be struck in this dirge, it was that recovery from anthrax usually meant permanent immunity.

  On the other hand were four murderous fingers. Anthrax was so contagious that a corpse could infect the living. Onset of the disease led to death so quickly that treatment often came too late. The bacillus reverted to spores that could lie in lethal wait for a host, sometimes for years in open fields. Finally there came the fact that, within hours after Indian craft dispersed the disease, the Surgeon General's office announced that a new, more virulent and invasive strain of the bacillus was involved.

  The defunct USSR, in 1980, had succeeded too well in developing a modified B. anthracis in one of its bacteriological warfare centers near Sverdlovsk. And had failed miserably to contain it, resulting in the now-famed Sverdlovsk scare that killed scores of citizens and further curtailed the supply of local beef while Tass News Agency denied the obvious. Sverdlovsk had been lucky; the distribution of its anthrax had been meagre, accidental, and vigorously fought. Unlike the farmlands of the southeastern US in 1996.

  The SinoInd delivery system took a multiplex approach to the problem of vectoring the disease. To start with, paran-thrax spores were much smaller than those of the original bacilli; a cubic centimeter of them could be dispersed fifty times more widely for the same effect, because they multiplied faster. The dispersal method was by sub-launched Indian cruise missiles, fat capacious cargo drones that flew a leisurely mach 0.7 from the Mexican Gulf toward Virginia, voiding trails of deadly paranthrax spores as they passed over agrarian centers. Macon, High Point, and Roanoke typified the targets.

  Though American epidemiologists did not yet know it, pulmonary paranthrax spread fast because still-ambulatory victims spread the microbes in their exhalations. As active bacilli or after sporulation on contact with air, the disease was literally designed to spread into the countryside.

  The region west of the Appalachians had been spared immediate effects of paranthrax because the Pensacola bomb did not arrive until two flights of old Marine Sea Harriers scrambled from there, following sonar contacts to the surfaced Indian subs in the Gulf. In the brief engagement, one sub dived after launching five of its fat birds. Our Harriers shot down three of them; the other two spread death.

  The second sub was caught with its panels down as it readied the first of its missiles intended for Mississippi, Tennessee,and Kentucky. Despite direct hits on its deck pods with One-eye missiles, the sub might have escaped but for the act for which Marine Captain Darryl Tunbridge won his Medal of Honor. Tunbridge, a flight instructor whose Harrier was equipped with depth charges, used the hover mode of his sturdy old Harrier as he watched tracers climb past his wing. He marveled at the valiant Indian gunner's mate who manned the quad one-cm, antiaircraft guns while his own decks were awash; did not pause to wonder at his own risk as he overtook the diving sub at fifty knots, hanging almost dead overhead, feeling the shudder of one-cm, slugs in his fuel tanks, dropping his depth charges while virtually scraping the sub's squat conning tower. The Harrier faltered as the sub's bow, impelled by two mighty blasts, rose from the water.

  Captain Tunbridge's honor was posthumous, but that sub would never launch a missile from her permanent rest at 330 fathoms.

  We soon realized our debt to the Pensacola Harriers. We needed more time to discover just how virulently effective were the two cruise missiles that got through. Had the disease spread from farmlands toward agrarian centers, we could have organized teams to distribute penicillin, chlortetracy-cline, erythromycin. Once those centers were fighting for their lives while evacuees fled to spread the epidemic, there was little hope for the nearby farmlands. There was not enough disinfectant on earth to cleanse ten thousand square klicks of grass.

  "I think I got out of Spartanburg in time," Abby sighed. "First symptom is usually skin itch, followed by open sores that don't hurt much, with swelling. The fever and pains in the joints don't begin 'til later."

  "Lordy; makes me itch just to think about it."

  She lent him a vexed glance. "Do tell," she said, and scratch
ed herself. "Hand me the Clorox."

  He watched her dampen a face tissue, dab it to cuticles; imitated her; stowed the jug of bleach.' "This all we can do?"

  "Until we can get antibiotics. This may not do much good but from what I've read, it's a start. The things I couldn't find at my apartment were antibiotics and thirty-eight cartridges."

  "Oh well; six shots are more'n you need," he said.

  "You don't get it, Ted. I don't have even one."

  Long pause. "You faced those bastards down with an empty gun?"

  "Now you got it," she smiled; winked.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Jane Osborne's two-bedroom bungalow lay on the outskirts of Oak Ridge near the museum. She did not answer Abby's calls. They saw a neighbor peering from a shuttered window. He refused to answer their hails. They decided against going into the house until after their self-imposed quarantine. But in the detached garage was Abby's storage and, "I've got medicine and an old TV in there," she explained. They wrestled with musty cartons in the garage. The garage lights worked, and Abby immediately plugged the Chevy's recharger into a garage socket. Abby's penicillin was long outdated, but they shared the half-dozen tabs.

  Without cable connections, they had only two available TV channels, curiously flat without holovision. They learned that Memphis and Tullahoma fallout did not yet seriously threaten the Oak Ridge area, though local background count had risen as particles drifted down from the stratospheric Jetstream. There were no pictures of gutted cities; the news was vague and optimistic. An old public service announcement illustrated how a basement room could be protected against modest fallout by taping cracks, blocking windows with books, and shoveling dirt shin-deep onto the floor above.

  "Jane's house doesn't lend itself very well to that," Abby judged, lighting a candle amid spectacular sunset reflections. “We 'll be better off in the tunnels. I 'm sure Jane can get you in with us."