The Burning Road

by Ann Benson

  De Chauliac hid his chagrin and offered Flamel a seat. “No,” he said, “it is we who are honored. Am I not right, colleague?”

  He will put his fat little greasy hands upon that fine manuscript, Alejandro thought unhappily. He nodded and forced a smile, saying nothing. Flamel would not have an expression of admiration from him until he was certain that the man was no threat to the precious words of Abraham.

  “Well,” Flamel said, rubbing those fat hands together, “shall we commence with the work?”

  “Calm yourself, Flamel,” de Chauliac said, “you have only just arrived.”

  “Colleague, you must allow the man his eagerness,” Alejandro said. “Such work is very exciting.”

  “Indeed!” said Flamel.

  “Well, then if you gentlemen will allow me,” the Jew said, “I shall go upstairs and retrieve the manuscript.” He stood and smoothed his clothing. “I suppose I ought to refresh myself a bit. So I may be a few minutes in returning. Will you mind?”

  “See that you do not take too long,” de Chauliac said, and when Flamel’s face showed surprise at his harsh tone, he added, more sweetly, “since we should not keep Monsieur Flamel away from his poor deprived wife any longer than necessary tonight.”

  “I shall hurry.”

  He left the room, and the guards fell in behind him. Flamel watched as they all disappeared, then turned to de Chauliac and said, “Why does he always require an escort?”

  The simple question caught de Chauliac unprepared. He cleared his throat nervously while he formulated a proper response. “He has the falling sickness,” he whispered. “I dare not let him alone, or he will fall and injure himself.”

  Karle and Marcel labored over the letter to Charles of Navarre well past sunset, listing point by point the reasons why they believed it would be best to try to stage the battle at Arlennes. And then they enumerated the reasons why Compiègne would be a poor choice for the rebel troops to amass: no water, poor supply routes, no escape, the ease with which the forces of the Dauphin might surround them. When it was finally finished, Marcel rolled it and sealed it carefully. He set it on the table and said, “In the morning I shall call for a messenger.” He gathered his robes around him and flopped down onto the pillowed bench, sending up a small cloud of dust as he settled himself in. “We accomplished much today, I think, far more than I’d hoped. With the unexpected help of your young lady. Has she a warrior father?”

  One might easily describe her true sire as that, Karle thought with no small irony. But his answer was “A physician.”

  “Well, then her competence is all the more remarkable. I shall salute her with my best wine. In celebration of a plan well laid.”

  He reached out and was about to pull the bell cord, when Karle said, “Not for me, Marcel. I have promised to take the young lady out for a bit of air.”

  “The air is no better outside than in,” he protested. “Come. Sit. Drink wine.”

  And as Kate appeared from the kitchen, he smiled and put an arm around her shoulder. “Perhaps later. This woman deserves to have what she wants, eh?”

  They rushed through the dimly lit streets, dodging the piles of ordure and garbage that would not be banished until morning, and finally came to de Chauliac’s manse. Karle took Kate by the hand and led her around the stately edifice until they reached the west side. They positioned themselves below a small window, assuming from its bars that it was the one in which Alejandro was being kept.

  Karle cupped his hands and let out a soft coo that sounded like the hoot of an owl. A silhouette appeared in the window and looked down.

  “Karle?” came faintly from the window.

  “Yes!” Karle replied, his voice an urgent whisper. He put an arm around Kate and led her out of the shadows. “And look, I have brought Kate.”

  “Pere!” she cried joyfully, “Oh, Père, are you well?”

  They heard no answer. Instead they heard a whizz of air and the thunk of something landing at their feet. Karle bent down and picked it up. It was a piece of parchment crumpled around a small piece of wood. And then, from the window, “Come again tomorrow!”

  And the silhouette disappeared.

  20

  Your Freedom of Information Act application has been processed and approved. Please follow the instructions listed below to retrieve the requested documents. Check to make sure your ID chip is ready.

  Janie stared down at her hand. And then she almost laughed at herself.

  You can’t see the chip, you idiot.

  Then why had she looked when they told her to have it ready? It occurred to her, with no small unhappiness, that she was becoming the robot they wanted her to become.

  But right now, to get what she wanted, such behavior was required and there was no getting around it, no matter how distressing or distasteful it might seem. She was directed to go to a site in the GovNet, and there, upon presenting her ready identity, she found waiting for her the personnel records for the town of Burning Road and the county in which it was situated, for a period from two years before the Outbreaks to two years after. But then came the unexpected miracle—by searching in current voting records, she discovered that the part-time public health officer for the period in question was still very much alive.

  They had died in droves, just like the physicians, mothers, and priests in Alejandro’s fourteenth-century plague journal. To have survived DR SAM in an official medical capacity was akin to being part of a platoon on a mission and somehow the only one to return alive. Doubts always arose, followed closely by unspoken accusations. The woman in question no longer lived near the camp—No surprise, Janie thought, she was probably hounded out of there—but she’d moved to a place that was still less than an hour away from where Janie herself lived.

  A drive out there would probably get her better information than a phone call or a letter. She considered her remaining gallonage; in all likelihood, it was not going to be enough to last the rest of the year.

  So I’ll walk when I need to go someplace, or take the bus. She sent the woman a message asking if she could come for a visit the next day.

  I need to quit my job, she e-mailed Kristina. It’s starting to look a little fishy, all this time I’m taking off.

  “You can’t,” Kristina told her later. “You’ll lose the authority you have from being on staff at the foundation.”

  Janie almost laughed. “What authority? I’m just a research associate.”

  “It worked with the AMA, didn’t it?”

  She was right, Janie realized, it had.

  “What if you run into another situation where you need that position? And besides, your record for the time you’ve worked there has been exemplary, so no one’s going to give you a hard time. You have just about the highest attendance percentage of anyone in your research department. And what do you care, anyway? You hate that job.”

  Of course, Kristina would know all these things.

  “I do. But I still want to do it well. And it’s getting harder, with these distractions.”

  The distractions were piling up, fast and deep, and becoming noticeable.

  “You’re going on vacation, I see on the schedule,” Chet had remarked the day before when she flitted in and out of the office. It was the second comment he’d made in recent days about her increasingly frequent absences. “I know you do a lot of work outside the facility, but we do like to see you every now and then.”

  She was going to have to be careful because things were getting crazy again. She remembered how it felt from London, and dreaded its return. Maybe this trip to Iceland would actually end up doing her some good—it would force her to slow down, assess her situation, regather herself. “I’m completely up-to-date on my projects,” she told Chet. “I’ll make sure I leave everything in good shape. And anyway, I’ll only be gone a few days.”

  “You have a week blocked out on the schedule.”

  “That was the original plan, but I don’t think I’ll be taking t
he whole thing.”

  Oh? his look said.

  She shrugged. “It just doesn’t feel like a good idea right now.”

  The Berkshire town was high in the hills and Janie watched her gas gauge with alarm as the Volvo whined upward slowly in second gear, consoled only by the fact that the trip home would largely be made on gravity.

  It’s half an hour to the nearest quart of milk, she thought. What do people do out here, when they need to go out for—whatever?

  What they did was ride horses. She passed dozens of them on the narrow, twisting roads, almost hitting one or two. Most carried packs behind their riders, a few even pulled small carts. Janie dreamily envisioned carved signs for wainwrights and blacksmiths over open straw-floored storefronts on some old-fashioned Main Street. City laws would not permit it, but out in the hill towns, where bicycles were understandably out of the question, horses were figuring in daily life again. Fertilizer would no longer be a scarce commodity.

  She saw only one or two other cars on the road, an old pickup truck grinding down the hill in what remained of its second gear, the other slowly making its way up behind her. It was one of those all-black Darth Vader four-wheel-drive monsters that Janie always imagined to be carrying mafiosi, of whatever sort might be in power at the time. She wondered, as she always did when there were tinted windows, who in the vehicle was so important that absolute privacy was required, and that the gas to run it was not a problem.

  Maybe they’re following me, she teased herself. A smile came to her lips.

  Okay, catch me if you can.

  She slowed down and the car behind her slowed. When she increased her speed, Darth Vader did too and she began to feel a little nervous. She stopped varying her speed and just drove steadily. The black vehicle behind her did exactly as she did.

  For a moment, she considered coming to a complete stop on the side of the road, but two things prevented her: It was a narrow road, a dangerous place to stop if one didn’t need to, and she was, according to the landmarks, about to reach her destination. So she kept driving, and when she reached the right driveway the black vehicle sped on past her while she was still in midturn.

  Once she was off the road, Janie sat in the car for a moment and thought about what had just transpired. She discovered, unhappily, that she was shaking; what had started out as a little joke with herself had turned into something way too real. She got out of the car and looked around for a few moments to calm herself. The setting was beautiful and secluded, and from the rustic appearance of the house, Janie had the feeling that her electronic sidekick would not be welcomed by the human who inhabited it. So she locked V.M. securely in the trunk of the Volvo.

  But when she stepped inside, ushered in by a gracious and smiling Linda Horn, she found herself within an aerie of light and sound and perfect climate, with moist air and the smell of peat, and butterflies, hundreds of them all over the place, their colorful wings silently aflutter. They were perched on the lamps and books and knickknacks, but in greatest numbers on the amazing assortment of plants. It was as if a tropical wonderland had inexplicably relocated in the low mountains of western Massachusetts. Off in one corner of the great room, she saw a sleek new computer, its screen aglow.

  “Oh, my,” Janie said softly as she gazed around in awe. “This is just—wonderful. But how …?”

  “My husband is an energy engineer,” Mrs. Horn answered. “He set the whole thing up for me.”

  “Does he hire out?”

  Linda Horn smiled. “He’s retired now. Sorry.”

  “Well, if he ever decides to come out of retirement, I’ll be his first customer.”

  The woman laughed quietly and shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “There’s a line, believe me.”

  A small bright blue butterfly landed on Janie’s shoulder. “I can understand why. What a haven you’ve created here.”

  “We’ve been working on it for a long time. We’re members of a movement, of sorts. Of people who want to live like this.”

  Movement. It was a word from a previous generation, and it carried a certain weighty implication. “The participants must be awfully quiet.”

  “Oh, we are—but there are lots of families setting up situations like this and we all stay in touch.” She nodded in the direction of the computer and smiled. “There are a number of people in this area who are rather heavily involved,” Mrs. Horn said.

  Janie gazed around, entranced by what she saw. “It must have been quite a challenge to get this all going. It’s so—perfect.”

  “The biggest problem was acquiring the land. You need at least a hundred acres to get a permit for the type of setup we have here. We bought this land a few acres at a time over the course of our entire marriage, otherwise we couldn’t have done it. The solar collectors don’t take all that much room, but the windmills require a lot of space and a certain kind of placement.”

  Still exploring with her eyes, Janie said, “I congratulate you. This is truly amazing. This is a type of living that’s always appealed to me. But I never got even close to it. My life was just too—busy.”

  “It’s never too late,” Linda Horn said.

  “Oh, I don’t think anything like this is going to happen to me, at least not in the immediate future, anyway. But the reason I wanted to see you …”

  She explained, slowly and carefully.

  Linda’s brow tightened and little lines appeared on it. “I was wondering when someone would start looking into that whole thing.”

  Janie nibbled quietly on a lemon crisp as Linda Horn related all the details of the incident at Camp Meir.

  “They had lab tests showing Giardia lamblia in the bloodstream of some of the campers. And their water samples from the pond showed an infestation. But we never did find anything. We didn’t do the blood tests.”

  Janie wondered why—it could be considered an oversight. “Any particular reason?”

  “I worked for the town, but in a situation like that the county called the shots. They told me to accept the camp’s tests as valid. Didn’t want me to spend the money to replicate them. A few of the boys had the right symptoms.…”

  “You wouldn’t by any chance have kept the records from back then?”

  “No. When the whole thing started, I had no inkling that it would all develop into something that smelled so fishy. But I remember it all pretty well. Largely because the camp’s on-staff nurse refused to accept any assistance from our office when we offered—usually she welcomed our help. I mean—a camp full of teenage boys? Come on. It would have been mayhem if they all got sick at once. So it stuck out in my mind as an unusual reaction on her part. And we never were able to reproduce the results they had in their water tests. You probably remember that all the antibiotics were on their way out at the time—and we weren’t allowed to authorize casual or prophylactic use—so we wanted to have solid evidence.”

  “But you never found anything in the local water.”

  “No. Well, wait a minute—that’s not entirely true. We found one spot with a slightly elevated level of Giardia. But nothing that would cause a major health hazard, and certainly none of the water from that source was making it anywhere near the camp’s water supply. They weren’t using that pond for swimming or canoeing, either. We tested and tested, at a lot of different sites all around the area, but we never found anything more than that little trace.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Very. But even so, someone from the camp’s insurer showed up one day at my office with a fistful of official-looking papers and explained how they were going to drag us into court immediately for keeping them from carrying out their in loco parentis duties toward the campers. They had most of the parents convinced that the threat was real.”

  “But you think it wasn’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think. I can only go by what the water tests showed, and all but one of them were grossly negative.”

  “But you gave them the permit fo
r the antibiotic anyway, so you must have—”

  “I didn’t really have any choice, Dr. Crowe. These people were quite assertive. The county and town were already suffering from fiscal difficulties—we were terribly understaffed, and sometimes my paychecks were delayed. It didn’t seem like much of a sacrifice to give these campers a nearly useless medication if it would keep the town from being sued.”

  Janie was pensive while she sipped her tea.

  “So,” Linda finally said, “why are you looking into this? Does your foundation have an interest here?”

  Janie set her teacup down before answering. “A lot of boys whose only connection to each other is the camp are getting sick, at the same time, with a similar rare condition.”

  “Which is?”

  “At this point, I should probably tell you only that it’s orthopedic, with neurological implications. I haven’t sorted out the details completely just yet.”

  “Well,” Linda said as she refreshed her own tea, “I for one am not at all surprised.” She took in a long breath and gazed straight ahead as if she were trying to remember something. “I went out there on some other silly pretext on the day the treatments were being administered. I admit I was curious, and being the health officer I couldn’t just be turned away and told to come back at a more convenient time. I saw a couple of the vials. The medication they were supposed to be giving those kids was metronidazole. In injectable solution it’s almost perfectly clear with a slight golden tinge to it, and it comes in transparent rubber-topped vials. There was only one company still manufacturing it at the time, and that’s what its product looked like. Now there are none, by the way, if that’s of any interest to you.”

  “It’s not an effective medicine anymore.”

  “And it was on the way out then, which is another reason why I found the whole thing very odd. In any case, what they were injecting into these kids was being drawn from opaque white plastic containers, but I couldn’t really get close enough to see what color the liquid in the syringes was. And instead of dropping the empties in a biosafe bag for disposal as would ordinarily have been done, they put them all into a plastic case with some sort of snap lid.”