The First Horseman

by John Case

  ‘You know where I can send a fax?’

  ‘Not to the Rex Mundi.’ The kid shook his head. ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because . . . It’s a ship.’ He shrugged. ‘So, you must send telex.’

  ‘Telex?’ Daly wasn’t even sure what a telex was. Some kind of telegram or something. But he said: ‘Okay, so I’ll send a telex. Where do I do that?’

  The main post office was just around the corner on ulitsa Voskresinia. And a good thing, too. As Daly stepped out of the shipping office, the cold surged at him like a dog on a chain. For a moment it was as if he was – literally – frozen in his tracks. This wasn’t the kind of cold you had in the States, he thought. It wasn’t the kind of cold you had anywhere. It was straight out of hell, and even as he stood there, paralyzed, it sucked at his heart.

  A stiff wind was blowing out of the north, straight from Murmansk, needling his face with a pebbly snow that felt like a mixture of ice and sand. With a shudder, he hunched his shoulders, pulled his parka closer to his throat, and staggered forward. Taking one tentative step after another, he navigated the ice floe that passed for a sidewalk, and headed downhill toward the frozen river.

  It was twilight and he couldn’t see much. The street was to his left, but it was more notional than real. With his chin on his chest, he found himself in a monochrome world, following the street lamps toward the Dvina. Beneath the lamps the metal posts were flocked with snow and nearly invisible; their lights hung in the air as if by magic, pale and blurry, rocking in a gray wind.

  Nearby, a snowplow bulldozed its way back and forth in the square, the ploshchad Lenina, banking the snow into berms on every corner. I could be here for a while, Daly thought, gritting his teeth against the cold.

  Arriving at the post office, he climbed the icy steps to the door, yanked it open, and stepped into a warm cocoon that smelled of wet wool, sweat, and cheap tobacco. Red-faced men and women milled around in bulky clothing, queuing in front of numbered windows. Daly went from one person to the next, asking, ‘Telex? Telex?’ But no one seemed to understand. Finally, a man in a fur hat took him by the sleeve and explained, in perfect and accentless English, how to send a telex.

  Daly went to a counter in the rear and composed a message on the back of an envelope from the New World Aster Hotel in Shanghai.

  DR. BENTON F. KICKLIGHTER

  KOPERVIK EXPEDITION

  M/V REX MUNDI

  FREQ 333–80

  IT’S A DARK AND STORMY DAY.

  STRANDED ARCHANGEL.

  MEET YOU HAMMERFEST

  ON 28TH.

  FRANK DALY

  He read the message over, and wanted badly to add something more, something nasty and vituperative about being left in the lurch. But even though he was capable of carrying a grudge into the afterlife, within his professional life he’d disciplined himself not to whine. At least when it would do no good.

  He read the message again, frowned, and crumpled it up. First of all, the charge was by the word, and the rate was high enough to discourage anything but nouns and verbs. More to the point, Kicklighter didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was easily amused. He wouldn’t appreciate: ‘It’s a dark and stormy day.’ On the contrary, in the few conversations they’d had, the professor had impressed him as a condescending sonofabitch who was suffering from a terminal case of GMS – the Great Man Syndrome. What was it that he’d said?

  To tell you the truth, Mr. Daly, I’m not much impressed by journalists. You tend to have short attention spans.

  And then he’d made that little clicking noise, dismissing Daly and the world of journalism with a single click of the tongue. It had taken an act of considerable will for Daly to keep his mouth shut. There was a time, not so long ago, when he’d have replied that he himself was not much impressed by virologists – who were said to have short dicks. Instead, he’d shrugged and, looking abashed, expressed the hope that the doctor would give him a chance to prove himself.

  Looking for another piece of paper, and finding none, Daly flattened out the envelope from the Chinese hotel and edited the message on its back:

  STRANDED ARCHANGEL.

  MEET HAMMERFEST. DALY

  That’s better, he thought. Four words, and just the last name. Daly. Like Charlemagne, except Irish.

  It occurred to him that he ought to add Anne Adair’s name to the heading on the telex . . . but no. Though the expedition had been her idea (according to the NIH Record), she was still only Kicklighter’s assistant. Great Men tended to be sticklers for protocol – even, or especially, where a protégé was concerned. Better, then, to leave her off.

  Envelope in hand, Daly joined the end of a long line that led to the telex window. Steam rose off the back of the pear-shaped woman in front of him, and the air was acrid with the stench of Turkish cigarettes. Boots shuffled and squeaked on the wet wooden floor. Occasionally, he heard American and English voices in the din, but he could never place them. The line moved in lurches of one or two feet at a time, punctuated by long periods of restless waiting. Not that it mattered. There wasn’t anywhere to go, and there wouldn’t be for days.

  After he finally got the telex off, he stopped in to see the Sputnik clerk and make a reservation for a flight to Hammerfest, Norway. Giving the storm a chance to blow itself out, and the Archangel airport plenty of time to scrape off its runways, de-ice its Ilyushins, and reopen for business, he picked a flight in three days time – which would still put him in Hammerfest before the Rex was scheduled to return.

  That done, there wasn’t much else to do but make his way back to the Chernomorskaya – and work.

  Returning to his room, he pulled the laptop out of his backpack, and hesitated. He had the transformer that he needed, and the converter for the plug, but he didn’t want to use them. Not with the power the way it was: every so often the overhead light pulsed like a star that was getting ready to go nova. If he worked off the hotel’s power supply, he might wind up with a scrambled disk. Better to use the batteries. With his coat on, he could work until his fingers froze or the juice gave out. Whichever came first.

  Pulling up a chair, he sat down at the desk and switched on the computer. When the command line finally appeared, he went into the /FLU directory and called up the interview notes that he’d written in Shanghai the week before.

  Lu Shin-Li – M.D., Univ. Beijing. Ph.D., Johns Hopkins. Head, Infi. Brnch., Shanghai Inst. of Allerg. & Infect. Diseases. Author, ‘The Spanish Lady in China: an Historical Overview’ (East-West Journal of Epidemiology). 1918: 10 million killed (India alone!). WWI. Russian rev. ‘Drift’ v. ‘Shift.’ Epidemic, pandemic. H-1 shift ‘way overdue.’ Next year? S-L: ‘I don’t want to spec. Intrstg. bug.’

  Daly had gone to Shanghai to interview Shin-Li because he was the number one epidemiologist in China – and China was the epicenter of every influenza pandemic in history.

  His interview went on for about five pages, and there were another ten pages of miscellany: a brief account of a visit that Daly had made to a Chinese farm, abstracts from various technical articles that he’d scanned into the laptop, quotes from Shin-Li’s piece about the 1918 pandemic, and, finally, the article that had tipped him to the Kopervik expedition in the first place.

  This last was a two-paragraph notice in the Record, the biweekly newsletter published for employees of the NIH:

  Flu Section Chief to Visit Arctic

  Daly tapped the page down key with his finger as he tilted back in his chair, flipping through the notes a screen at a time. He saw it as a three-part series. He’d begin with a couple of thousand words, basic stuff about influenza viruses and, in particular, the ‘Spanish Lady’ – then go to part two, the expedition to Edgeoya. He’d call it ‘Funeral in Reverse.’ Then he’d finish with an account of Kicklighter’s work at the NIH and his theory about protein coats.

  If everything went brilliantly, he might be able to place the piece with Harper’s or the Smithsonian, the
n use the published article to get a book contract. Which was the basic idea: to graduate from being a reporter on leave from the Post to being a writer. To work for himself, in other words, instead of someone else.

  The only problem being that he’d missed the boat in Murmansk, and now he was going to miss the ‘funeral in reverse.’ Which meant that he’d lose a lot of the color he was counting on, unless he could find a way to tell the story through someone else’s eyes.

  Anne Adair was one possibility. Or maybe one of the crew, or the NOAA scientists. They could talk about the cold, the machines and the permafrost, the terrible loneliness of an island in the northernmost reaches of the Norwegian Sea.

  But it would have been better – who was he kidding? it would have been a lot better – if he’d been there himself when the graves were opened. With a low growl, Daly leaned forward and typed Part I. Then he hit the carriage return and began to work on the lead. Half an hour later he finally had something he liked:

  (Shanghai) They called her the ‘Spanish Lady,’ though she was anything but that. Her roots were in China, not in Spain, and, far from being a lady, she was a killer. Indeed, within a few months of coming to the States, she’d killed more Americans than all of those who’d died in World War I.

  And the bitch was just getting started.

  Daly crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. With a smile, he read what he’d written, and thought, Not bad. Good hook. Except they wouldn’t let him use it. He’d never get away with a line like that. It was too interesting. With a grimace, he replaced ‘the bitch’ with ‘she’ and continued typing.

  Dr. Liu Shin-Li, chief of the Influenza Branch of the Shanghai Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, says that ‘the Spanish flu was one of the most deadly pandemics in world history, killing as many as thirty million people around the world.’

  Daly frowned, and thought, As if. Shin-Li’s English wasn’t nearly as good as he was making it sound. Still . . . that’s what he’d said.

  The speed with which the illness killed was as startling as the virus was deadly. In Westport, Connecticut, a woman playing bridge bid three hearts – and fell over dead. In Chicago, a man hailed a taxi – and died before he could open the door. in London, a soccer goalie leaped to make a save – and was dead when he hit the ground.

  By all accounts, each of these people appeared to be in good health – until they died. But millions of others were less fortunate, suffering an array of symptoms so various that it seemed as if a dozen diseases were at work.

  A physician in New York City reported that his patients were ‘blue as huckleberries, and spitting blood.’ Fevers of 106 were commonplace, as were projectile nosebleeds and endless bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. Genital gangrene was widely reported, as were instances of leucopenia (a sort of leukemia in reverse), sudden blindness, and complete loss of hearing.

  Patients wept at the slightest touch, and physicians were mystified by a disease whose symptoms mimicked those of so many terrible illnesses. On one military base, hundreds of soldiers were treated for what doctors thought was a chlorine gas attack. Elsewhere, victims were given appendectomies, or treated for pneumonia, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, or sandfly fever.

  In the end, most of the dead were found to have coughed their lives away, drowning in a slurry of blood and mucus, even as their lungs dissolved to the texture of ‘red currant jelly.’

  The battery light blinked on the computer, and Daly checked his watch. It was just past seven, and he was getting hungry. But the story was going well, and besides, it was freezing outside. He kept on typing.

  According to Dr. Shin-Li, ‘Wild ducks are the main reservoir of the virus, and we have more of them than any other country in the world. Not only that – because we raise chickens, ducks, and pigs together, the virus is able to move back and forth among them, from one species to another, changing as it goes.’

  Because influenza is a shapeshifter, and animals are constantly swapping viruses, mutations are frequent. While microbes like smallpox and polio are extremely stable, influenza is an RNA virus with a segmented chemical structure that is held together by only the weakest bonds. Lacking the DNA function that guards against mutation, the virus is constantly ‘reassorting’ itself in its animal hosts. This means that segments break off only to recombine with other segments, generating new strains of the flu.

  It is this characteristic that forces scientists to develop a new vaccine each year.

  The battery light was glowing steadily now, a soft yellow blip on the matte surface of the laptop. Daly figured he had about ten minutes left before it died.

  Why the Spanish flu should have been the most deadly of all influenzas is the subject of a study by Dr. Benton Kicklighter.

  The battery light flared, the computer beeped, and Daly jumped. He had about a minute left before the laptop crashed, but he didn’t want to quit. He was getting to a part of the story that bothered him, the part that didn’t make sense. It was the part about the expedition, and the reason it was mounted. If he stayed at the computer and wrote about it, or tried to, he might be able to figure it out. At a minimum, he should be able to articulate his own confusion – which was the first step to getting the story right.

  But not this time. The laptop beeped again and, with a sigh, Daly saved the file to disk and shut the computer off. Then he pushed it into his backpack and shoved the backpack under the bed. His fingers were stiff and his stomach was rumbling, although after looking at the size of the pile of snow near his window and noting the ongoing blizzard in the airshaft, his appetite faded. It looked like he was going to have to take his meals in the basement of the Chernomorskaya.

  Why did his heart not sing?

  8

  78º20′N, 220º14′E

  ANNIE WOKE FROM her nap all at once, bursting into consciousness from a sleep so deep that, when her eyes opened, she gasped to find herself in the world. Jumping to her feet, she made her way down the corridor to the main deck, goggles in hand. Eager to see where they were, she leaned into the metal door that led to the deck, then pushed it open and stepped outside – where the cold air went off in her face like a paparazzo’s flashbulb. Suddenly, she was more awake than she had ever been in her life, and utterly transfixed – as mind-blown as a dandelion in a gust of wind, her thoughts gone in an explosive scatter.

  Icebergs! But what a bland word for what amounted to floating palaces of ice. The Rex was sailing through a flotilla of drifting blue mountains. And they were nothing like she expected, not big ice cubes bobbing on the dark water, but architectural wonders, carved by wind and water into complex and convoluted shapes. There were parabolic curves, Gothic spires, columns turned on a lathe, shimmering ridges and rippled slopes, cantilevered mountains of ice. And all of it was fashioned of a translucent material that had nothing in common with the ice she knew, but pulsed with a pure blue, heavenly light, as if lit from within.

  This was the blue of Montego Bay, and of the robes the Virgin Mary wore in statues found in little gardens in the Boston suburbs. It was the pure, inviting aqua chosen for the walls of swimming pools. And it was the radiant, unearthly blue that converged on the scene of the crime, whirling on the roofs of police cars.

  Near dusk, they reached their anchorage, and Annie could see the coast of Edgeoya – a rumpled island hunkering in the sea, its bleak shores defined by a ragged line of black rocks. An hour after the anchor dropped, she and Dr. K, the Snowmen and the captain, took dinner together in the captain’s mess.

  The captain himself was a big Latvian with a florid face and thinning blond hair that he combed in strands across the top of his head. Annie liked him, but sitting at the table, she was in a subdued mood. Her delight and amazement at the Arctic had given way to a sense that we shouldn’t be here, we don’t belong, it’s too beautiful. The empty perfection of the landscape, with its limited palette, the clarity of the air, the piercing silence – all of this was shattered by the primary colors of their parka
s, the cloud of diesel fumes that hung above the ship, the trivial din of their presence.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ the captain asked, his beefy face flushed with wine.

  Annie shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Nothing. It’s just – I feel like we’re trespassing.’

  Doctor K chuckled. ‘And the miners? I suppose they were trespassing, as well.’

  ‘Them, too,’ she said, then shook her head as a burly waiter came to her side with a serving dish of liver and onions. ‘I’m not hungry. Thanks.’

  ‘You gotta feel sorry for the miners,’ one of the physicists remarked. ‘I mean, it’s not like those guys were explorers. There wasn’t any glory in it. They were miners. Which meant that they spent all day in a hole, and when they came up – they were here.’

  The captain nodded. He’d brought a few bottles of Spanish champagne to toast their arrival on Edgeoya. Uncorking one, he leaned across the table and began to fill people’s glasses. ‘This place is hell,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  The physicist, a weight lifter named Brian who doubled as the ship’s helicopter pilot, laughed and tasted the champagne. ‘Well,’ he interjected, ‘I don’t know about that. It may be a little chilly for hell.’

  The captain shook his head. ‘No, I disagree,’ he said. ‘The temperature is perfect.’

  ‘And how do you figure that?’

  ‘Dante,’ Annie said.

  Everyone at the table looked at her. The captain smiled and gave her a deferential nod as he set the bottle down on the table.

  Brian frowned. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘The young lady is correct,’ the captain said. ‘Dante – he is the expert on hell.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the poet,’ Brian said.

  Mark, who’d warned Annie about frostbite earlier that day, joined in the conversation: ‘I thought that was Milton.’