by Gary Glass
Roger’s eyes were lit like lasers. He looked all around — not at the room — beyond it. His sight passed through the walls of silly décor around them.
“She’s looking out into the void,” he said. “Out into space.”
“But what is IDD, Roger?” Marley said, desperately. “What is it?”
“We are how she’s waking up. We are becoming her. We are how she is becoming herself.”
Marley looked at Delacourt. She was glassy-eyed, seeing nothing he could see. She was gone. She was sitting beside him, breaking with IDD. She looked like Fred Peters had looked that horrible night in the tomb.
He tried to stand up, suddenly, but banged his thigh against the table, and fell awkwardly off the bench onto the floor. He was yelling. Yelling at Roger, at everyone. “But I don’t want to!” he cried. “I don’t want to become anything else! You’ve got to make it stop! For Christ’s sake, you’ve got to stop it!”
He sounded like a child.
“Carl!” Benford said, “what the hell is going on?”
He scrambled to his feet again. “Xan has it!” he said. “Xan has IDD!”
“Carl, it’s breaking out in the crowd!”
He whirled and looked at the screens.
The crowd was surging through the police barriers.
They were coming for him!
He looked at Roger and Delacourt, still sitting in the booth seats. Roger had his hand on Delacourt’s arm — comforting her? — but he was looking at Marley, eyes full of light and sorrow, excitement and sympathy. His eyes overwhelmed him. Marley had to look away.
“Carl, are you all right? Answer me!”
Through the violet-tinted windows at the front of the diner, he saw the crowd swarming through the cordoned area. Vaguely human figures flickered rapidly back and forth like shadow puppets.
My God, are they fighting?
He felt nauseous, drunk. He staggered forward. He looked back again.
Roger was getting up. He was helping Delacourt to her feet.
“Carl, we’ve got to pull out! I can’t get through the crowd! If you’re still there, answer me!”
Marley couldn’t find his voice. He grunted something. He didn’t know what. He couldn’t think in words anymore. Was this it? Was this what it was like?
He stumbled forward, fleeing from Roger. He had to escape from Roger. Before it was too late. But where could he go? Into the madness in the street?
Roger took Delacourt by the hand, drew her to her feet. They started toward him, hand in hand.
Marley backed away down the bar, closer to the windows, struggling not to give in to panic.
Not now, he thought. Not yet. Not here.
He stopped at the end of the bar. Roger smiled at him and turned toward the door. They were going to leave him in the bar. They were going outside.
Marley reached to grab Delacourt’s arm, to stop her, but hesitated. He was afraid to touch her now.
“Xan!” he said, his voice a weak rasp. “Xan, don’t.”
She looked through him, her dark eyes sparkling. Her lips moved slightly, but she said nothing.
Roger still had her hand. He opened the inner door, and she followed him into the vestibule.
The sounds from the riot in the street came through — a weird, vaguely musical ooling like a whale song.
Suddenly Marley remembered the sniper with the tranquilizer gun.
“Wait!” he shouted.
But it was too late, they were outside. The outer door swung closed behind them.
He ran into the vestibule, but he was afraid to go outside. He tried to see them through the tinted glass, but they had already disappeared into the crowd.
No one shouted or reacted. The sniper must have pulled out with Benford and the rest of them. Or joined the crowd.
Chapter 35
And now he was alone. He backed out of the vestibule, back into the faux saloon. What if they start coming inside? What could he do? He didn’t see any way to lock the door without a key.
“Colonel Benford, are you there?”
The comm was dead. Nothing but crackling static.
On the screens over the bar the street scene outside was being displayed in a box while the talking heads silently narrated.
“… as the riot continues,” ran the caption. “We’re currently unable to reach our correspondent in Juneau. However, it appears that the police and National Guard forces are pulling back.”
He sat down at the end of the bar.
He couldn’t think what to do, how to get out of here.
He felt in his pockets for his phone, turned it on. No signal. How could that be? He tried it anyway. As he put the pen-shaped machine to his ear, the mike-end curled inward toward his mouth. Nothing.
He remembered the military phone they’d given him for Roger to use. It was still on the table. He walked down the room to get it. It still had a signal. He sat down in the booth again to dial while he watched the scene outside on the news.
He dialed Ally’s number.
He let it ring until it rolled over to voice mail.
He hung up and tried the coffee shop.
It rolled over to her cell.
He hung up and tried their home number.
It rolled over to her cell.
He hung up and tried his office at Joplin. It rolled over to voice mail.
Was his office closed? What day was this? He couldn’t remember the day of the week. In the corner of the Newsline screen it said “3:35 pm, AKST, Thu 15 Apr”. The office should have been open on Thursday. — No, it was after hours in Chicago now. — But, it didn’t matter. The place was quarantined, wasn’t it? He couldn’t remember. Had he heard anything about it? How could he not know something like that?
He hung up and called Joplin’s main number. It rolled to a recording.
“By order of the Centers for Disease Control, the Joplin Psychiatric Care Center has been closed for an indefinite period.”
Finally, he hung up and tried Karen’s cell, hopelessly.
He let it ring a dozen times.
He wondered how he would go about calling Benford. He dialed 911. The military phone just bleeped. He was dialing into a defense communications satellite in geostationary orbit. It didn’t know anything about the local emergency network.
The shadow people continued to flicker against the violet windows. Eventually it would break up. He could wait it out. They didn’t seem inclined to come inside. What if they did? Nothing he could do about it. Hide?
Behind the bar, a long bank of liquor bottles flickered in the light of the video screens. A drink to calm the nerves!
He served himself. Double vodka, straight up. On the house.
He drank it standing, behind the bar, watching the television. The picture of the surging street outside was getting darker, grainier. The air was heavy. The camera hadn’t moved. It must be in a fixed position. The talking heads were talking:
NEWSREADER: [Captioned.] … with our local correspondents. We have been unable to reach anyone by phone or radio. They may have evacuated, or they could be hiding. It’s possible, I’m not saying it’s happened, but it’s also possible they’ve developed the disease, IDD. We just don’t know at this point.
He put the bottle on the bar, took a stool, and poured himself another double.
This is what it’s come to, has it? Hiding in a bar, getting drunk. Hiding from patients! Now there’s a switch.
The news rolled on and on. Like a recorded loop. The time in the corner of the screen seemed an abstraction, a meaningless number.
And then the screen went black. And the lights. The little red light on the coffee warmer winked out. Marley found himself sitting in semi-darkness, the shadowy purple gloom from the front windows his only light.
For a moment the panic was on him again. He felt it tightening around him. But the vodka had warmed him up. His skin was now a lambent shell—
He jumped up.
“Jesus Christ
!” he yelled in the darkness.
Am I losing my mind? I can’t sit here all goddamned night!
He dug the useless bug out of his ear and dropped it into his empty glass. Leaving the clunky military phone on the bar, he got up and headed for the door.
The street outside The Purple Pony was swimming with people. What had seemed like a riot from the camera above, at street level looked more like an after-prom dance. But it was a strange sort of dancing they were doing. There were no partners, just amorphous groups, flowing in and out of each other. And no music. Just a kind of tuneless keening, paced by a semi-rhythmic humming and thumping.
There was little light. Night was falling and the power was out all down the street. A cold, sad drizzle fell softly from a dreary sky. But no one seemed to mind.
Marley pressed against the windows outside the saloon, unnoticed. No one touched him or looked at him. The whole surging crowd was obviously gone, dancing in a different world.
He looked around for Roger or Delacourt but did not see them.
He tried to see over the heads of the crowd if the communications van was still parked across the street. He couldn’t see well enough to tell, and he didn’t dare attempt to cross through the crowd.
He noticed there were uniformed police and Guardsmen in fatigues among the crowd — weaponless and vacant.
He made his way down the sidewalk, staying against the storefronts, afraid of being swept up into the mob.
Not everyone was dancing. He saw people standing very still holding each other for long minutes, others were sitting on benches, some rocking slowly back and forth, others with their heads in their hands, as if they were sobbing. He saw a young girl holding her mother’s hand as the mother gently danced along the street, the girl smiling widely at everyone they passed. He saw an old man standing with his arms crossed over his chest, his face turned up into the cold drizzle.
He saw no one talking. No one vocalized any words at all — nothing but the humming and keening that perhaps half of them kept up.
He had no particular plan in mind. He made his way along the street, back along the way they’d come in. Had it only been this morning? What had gone wrong with time? It seemed at once a week ago, and also just a moment. Had they really been talking all day in the saloon? What had been said in all that time? Nothing had happened. Yet everything had changed.
He kept looking for Roger and Delacourt as he made his way along, but he never saw them.
He came to an intersection, where a cross-street sloped uphill away from downtown. He realized then that people were still streaming toward Main Street, toward the epicenter of the outbreak. Cars and pickup trucks stood abandoned, doors open, like rocks in the current. The whole city was turning out, despite the gloom and the cold rain, they were leaving their homes and their cars and their jobs, and walking downtown, like they were answering a call to worship. They looked like zombies — happy zombies.
He crossed the street at a fast walk, compelling himself not to break into a run, and being careful not to touch anyone, and so continued making his way up the street. Whenever anyone drifted toward him, he’d stop, even reverse himself, or duck into a doorway or behind a garbage bin — anything to avoid being touched. His progress was slow. It was getting darker and colder. Many of the people in the streets were without coats. If they don’t get out of this weather, he thought, they’re risking hypothermia. Do they have enough sense to get the children out of this?
And he thought about the hospitals. Were they also emptying out? Were the staff walking out to join the parade leaving their patients alone? He tried to remember if he knew how many hospitals there were, and where, but he didn’t know.
He wondered what had happened to the power. Had they shut it down themselves? Had it failed because power station personnel were walking away from their monitors?
He stumbled over a curb in the darkness, and realized he didn’t know where he was. Main Street had run out. The crowd was behind him now, but he could still hear their weird song clearly. He wanted to get back to the bridge and back over the channel. He’d walk all the way to Abrams if he had to.
He looked all around, trying to get his bearings, and spotted a dim amber glow of light through the rain. Some place with power. And it was downhill. Toward the waterfront.
Leaving the street, he started toward it, cutting through open property.
He heard fast water flowing, and tried to find its source. It was very loud. He slipped on wet ground, and nearly fell into an open concrete channel choked with water. It sounded too big and too fast to cross on foot. He stumbled along the edge for a while, but, after falling twice more, he gave it up and picked his way back to the street.
He made his way through a dark neighborhood, at each corner turning in the direction of the dim blob of light, but all the streets dead-ended against the concrete canal.
Finally, he found a street with a narrow bridge over the rushing water. After that he made good progress. A couple of blocks beyond the canal he found a street that dropped down to the foot of Douglas Bridge, just a quarter of a mile further on. That’s where the light was. He could see military vehicles and barricades out on the bridge, standing in the glow of floodlights mounted on fixed poles.
Powerless traffic lights hung heavily over the intersection at the foot of the bridge. The wide streets lay nearly vacant, a few vehicles scattered at senseless angles. Out in the middle of the bridge, dark figures stood silhouetted by the floods, watching his approach. They looked unnaturally thick in their puffy fatigues and fat-headed helmets. Rifles, like sticks, sprouted from their hips.
Marley raised his hand and waved.
There was no response for a few seconds. Then an amplified voice burst out: “Dr. Marley?”
It was Benford.
“Are you all right?” she said.
She wanted to know if he had it.
“Yes!” he called back, “I’m fine!” and started walking onto the bridge.
“Is Delacourt with you?”
“No!”
“Come ahead!”
He came on quickly, breaking into a jog.
Benford emerged from the other figures and came toward him — moving like a shadow-puppet against the glare of floodlights. Someone else followed her, a few paces back — Tyminsky. They met him midway up the slope of the bridge.
She shook his hand warmly, gripping his upper arm with her other hand.
“I’m so glad to see you!” she said. “I thought we’d lost you too.”
She was wearing a headset.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” Marley said. “The comm was dead.”
“We had to pull out. IDD started breaking out in the crowd, and in the police, even our own people — people who’ve been working safely with IDD for weeks now. And you weren’t responsive.” She was apologizing. Sort of. “We had no choice.”
Marley nodded. “Delacourt has it,” he said. “There was nothing I could do.” He was apologizing too.
“OK,” she said. “Let’s get out of the rain and discuss the whole thing. There’s coffee. You look cold.”
They started up toward the island of light.
From the bridge Marley could see Coast Guard ships out in the channel, watching the city with silver searchlights.
“What happened to the power?” he said.
Benford ignored the question. “I’ve been in constant contact with General Harden,” she said, “and Secretary Pritzker. They’re going to want a report from you right away. The President may want to be there too.”
“The President of the United States?”
“Yes, that’s the one I mean,” she said without smiling.
Chapter 36
An hour later they were back in the auditorium at Abrams. An enormously enlarged image of Secretary Pritzker glowered down from the middle of the big screen. General Harden was beside him, and several members of his staff were present off screen. Also various officials from Defense and th
e CDC were dialed in from multiple locations around the country. They appeared in smaller viewports orbiting round Pritzker’s.
“The President is unable to attend,” Pritzker said. “However, I can assure you he is staying abreast of the situation closely.” Pritzker frowned at his mallocution, and turned his giant gaze down on Marley. “Dr. Marley, I’ve been keeping one eye and one ear on your negotiations with your escaped patient all day long.”
He made it sound like Marley was personally responsible for Roger’s breakout.
Marley tried to return Pritzker’s look, but the secretary’s face was so large and so high up the wall he had to crane his neck back to meet his eyes.
“I’ve been updating the President hourly,” Pritzker continued. “I’ll be updating him again immediately after this meeting. He plans to address the nation on television at midnight tonight. Eastern time.”
Pritzker had been the President’s campaign manager when he won his first term in office.
Benford turned toward Marley. Time for him to start talking.
He spoke for ten minutes, presenting his report of the situation on the street.
When he was finished, Pritzker sat back in his chair and let out a long breath. “Jesus Christ Almighty! Now what?”
General Harden leaned in: “The situation on the ground remains unchanged. We have surveillance in place. The weather is keeping helicopters grounded, but we’ll have them back in the air as soon as it breaks. We have long-range infrared cameras set up at strategic positions all around the city perimeter. The mountains will give us excellent angles too — once the clouds clear. In any event, from what we can see at this time, the situation remains, as I said, essentially unchanged. The downtown area is full of people. There are no vehicles moving. However, it’s past nightfall and the temperature is dropping. We expect the weather will drive people indoors before long.”
“Half the people I saw,” Marley said, “weren’t even wearing jackets. And they were getting very wet. Hypothermia is a real danger.”
Pritzker looked from him back to Harden: “What’s the situation with the hospitals?”