Dr. Petrie laid the phone down. Adelaide was looking at him anxiously. On the floor, Prickles was tucking her doll in for the night underneath the armchair, and singing her a lullaby in a small, high voice.
'Did I hear you say plague?' asked Adelaide.
'That's right. That boy I picked up this morning, the one who died. He was infected with some kind of mutated plague bacillus. They're trying to pinpoint it now.'
'Is it dangerous?'
Dr. Petrie went across and picked up his drink. He took a long, icy swallow of chilled white rum, and briefly closed his eyes.
'All diseases are dangerous, if they're not treated promptly and properly. I've taken a couple of shots of antibiotics myself, but I think you and Prickles ought to have the same. Plague will kill you if it's left untreated, but these days it's pretty much under control.'
'Are you sure? I mean — '
Dr. Petrie shrugged. 'I can't be sure until the experts are sure. But I wasn't close to that boy for very long, and the chances are that I probably haven't caught it.'
Adelaide sat down. She watched Prickles playing for a while, and then said, 'I just find it so hard to believe. I thought plague was one of those things they had in Europe, in the Middle Ages. It just seems so weird.'
Dr. Petrie sat on the arm of the settee opposite. Unconsciously, he felt he ought to keep his distance. There was something about the word Plague that made him think of infection and putrescence and teeming bacteria, and until he knew for certain he was clean and clear, he didn't feel like breathing too closely in Adelaide's direction.
He sipped his drink. 'I was reading about it the other day, in a medical journal. We've had plague in America since the turn of the century. We've still got it — particularly in the west. They had to lift the ban on DDT not long ago, so that they could disinfect rats' nests and ground squirrels' burrows. Don't look so worried. It's just one of these things that sounds more frightening than it really is.'
Adelaide looked up, and gave him a twitchy smile. 'Plague. The Black Death. Who's frightened?' she said softly.
Prickles was shaking her doll. 'Dolly,' she said crossly, 'are you feeling giddy again?'
Dr. Petrie smiled. 'Is dolly feeling sick, too?' he asked. 'Maybe she needs a good night's sleep, like you.'
Prickles shook her head seriously. 'Oh, no. Dolly's not tired. Dolly doesn't feel like going to bed yet. Dolly's just feeling giddy.'
Dr. Petrie looked at his little daughter closely! Her hair was drawn back in a pony-tail, and her profile was just like his. When she grew up, and lost some of that six-year-old chubbiness, she would probably be pretty. Margaret, when he had first married her, had been one of the prettiest girls on the north beach.
'Well,' he said, 'if dolly's feeling giddy, perhaps dolly would like some nice streptomycin.'
Prickles frowned. 'No, dolly doesn't want any of that. Dolly doesn't like it. She's just feeling giddy, like Mommy.'
Dr. Petrie stared at Prickles intently. 'What did you say?' he asked her. He said it so sharply that she looked up at him with her mouth open, as if she'd done something wrong.
He knelt on the floor beside her. 'I'm not angry, darling,' he said. 'But did you say that Mommy was giddy?'
Prickles nodded. 'Mommy went swimming, and when she came back she said she felt sick, and the next day she was giddy.'
Dr. Petrie leaned back against the settee. The creeping sensation of anxiety was spreading all over him.
Adelaide, her face pale, said, 'Leonard… you don't think that Margaret…?'
Dr. Petrie stood up. 'I don't know,' he said hoarsely. 'What worries me is how many other people have caught it. I think I'd better get down to the hospital and find out what's going on.'
'Is Mommy all right?' said Prickles, frowning. Dr. Petrie forced a smile, and laid a gentle hand on his daughter's pony-tail.
'Yes, honey. Mommy's all right. Now — don't you think it's time that dolly went to bed?'
Prickles sighed. 'I suppose so. She has been very giddy today. Do all dollies get giddy? All the dollies in Miami?'
Dr. Petrie picked Prickles up in his arms, and held her close against him. The doll was made of lurid pink plastic, with a shock of brassy blonde nylon hair. He examined it closely, and then pronounced his diagnosis.
'I think that dolly's going to get better. And I don't think that all the dollies in Miami will get giddy. At least — '
He couldn't help noticing Adelaide's anxious, attractive face.
'At least I hope not,' he finished quietly, and laid his daughter down.
It was nearly midnight when the black and white police patrol car turned the corner from Washington Avenue into Dade Boulevard, cruising up the warm, deserted streets at a watchful speed. At the wheel, in his neat-pressed shirtsleeves, sat 24-year-old Officer Herb Stone — a thin-faced cop with a dark six o'clock shadow and a pointed nose. Beside him, eating a hot dog out of a pressed cardboard tray, sat his buddy, 26-year-old Officer Francis Poletto, a chunky, tough-looking young police athlete with a face like a pug.
'I almost broke my ass laughing,' Poletto was saying, with his mouth full. 'The guy gets on the water-skis, the boat starts up, and the next thing I know, they're pulling him right across the bay underwater. He climbs out, coughing and spluttering, and he says, "Well, that's great for a start — now teach me how to do it on the surface!" Laugh? I broke my ass.'
Herb Stone grinned politely, and left it at that. He liked Poletto, and there were a couple of times when he'd been glad of Poletto's rough-house style arrest. But Stone was quiet and academic, and hoped to make it through to detective school, and promotion.
Poletto, on the other hand, liked to keep in touch with the streets, and the tough cookies who hung around the beaches. He was hard and dedicated and had once shot a hippie in the left arm.
They stopped at a red light, and waited at the empty junction. Crickets chirruped in the grass, and palms rustled drily in the soft night air. Herb Stone whistled tunelessly under his breath. Poletto munched. The radio said something indistinct about a traffic violation on Tamiami Trail.
Just as they were about to move off, a second-hand silver Pontiac came swerving across the junction in front of them, bouncing unsteadily on its springs, and roared off down Alton Road. Stone looked at Poletto and Poletto looked at Stone.
'Let's go,' said Poletto, screwing up his cardboard hot-dog tray. 'This might be the only action we get all night.' Herb Stone switched on the siren, and the police car squealed and skittered around the corner and bellowed off after the speeding Pontiac. They saw its crimson tail-lights vanishing down Alton Road in the direction of MacArthur Causeway, swaying erratically from one side of the road to the other.
'Drunk,' snarled Poletto. 'Drunk as a fucking skunk.'
Herb Stone, tense and sweating, closed the gap between the speeding Pontiac and the warbling, flashing police car. In a few seconds, they were close enough to see the dark shape of the driver, hunched over his wheel. Herb tried to nudge the police car up alongside the Pontiac and force him over, but the Pontiac slewed from kerb to kerb, tires squealing and suspension banging at every turn.
Suddenly, the Pontiac driver slammed on his brakes. Herb, dazzled by the red glare of the fugitive's tail-lights, went for his brake-pedal and missed it. The black and white police car smashed noisily into the back of the silver Pontiac, knocking it sideways into the kerb. Herb stamped on the brakes and stopped savagely.
'You're, supposed to chase him,' said Poletto bluntly. 'Not smash the ass off him.'
The two officers climbed out of their car and walked across to the Pontiac. Poletto unbuttoned his top pocket and took out his notebook.
'Okay, Charlie,' he snapped. 'What's all this, Death Races?' The driver didn't answer. He was middle-aged, with rimless glasses, and he was sitting upright in his seat like a wax dummy. His face was a ghastly and noticeable white.
Herb stepped up closer and saw that his eyes were closed. He had gray, close-cropped hair
and a check working man's shirt. He looked respectable, even staid. He was shivering.
'Do you think he's okay?' asked Herb uncertainly. 'He doesn't look too well to me.'
Poletto shrugged. 'Herb — if you'd drunk as much as this guy, you wouldn't look too well, neither. Okay, Charlie, out of the car.'
The man didn't open his eyes, or stir, or say anything.
He just sat there shaking, pale and beaded with perspiration.
'Come on, wise guy,' ordered Poletto, and wrenched open the dented car door. He was about to reach in, but he stopped himself. He pulled a contorted face and said, 'Jesus H. Christ.'
'What's wrong?' said Herb. Then, before Poletto could answer, he smelled it for himself. It was so rank that he almost felt sick.
'I think he's ill, Frank,' said Herb. 'Get an ambulance, will you, and the wreck squad, and I'll pull him out of there.'
Poletto screwed up his nose. 'Rather you than me, buddy boy. That guy smells like a goddamned drain.'
Poletto went across to the police car, reached inside and picked up the mike. Herb heard him calling for an ambulance. Taking a deep breath he pushed open the Pontiac's door as wide as he could, and tried to get his hands under the driver's armpits. The man murmured and mumbled, and feebly pushed Herb away. But then he sagged and collapsed, and Herb dragged his heavy body out of the diahorrea-filled driving seat, and laid him on the road.
The man whispered something. Poletto, coming back from the police car, said, 'What's he chirping about? Is he sick, or what?'
'I don't know,' said Herb. He knelt on the road beside the feverish driver, and put his face as close as he could to the sick man's mouth. He never did understand what the man was trying to say, but he remembered the spittle that touched his cheek as the man's lips whispered those last, incomprehensible words.
In the distance, they heard the ambulance siren. Herb lifted the man's head from the concrete road and said gently, 'Don't worry, mac. You're going to be all right. They'll take you away, and you're going to be fine.'
Dr. Petrie reached the hospital a little after twelve. He was surprised to see that the casualty reception area was crowded with ambulances and police cars, and even a couple of Press cars. All the lights were on inside the building, and people were running backwards and forwards with medical trolleys and blankets.
He parked the Lincoln on the road and walked across to the hospital doors. A shirt-sleeved policeman said, 'Sorry, friend. This is off limits.'
Dr. Petrie reached into his white linen jacket and produced his identity card. 'I'm a doctor. I came down here to see Anton Selmer. He's in charge of emergency. Say — what goes on here?'
The policeman examined the identity card suspiciously. 'Are you sure you're a doctor? You don't look like a doctor.'
Dr. Petrie raised his eyebrows. 'What's a doctor supposed to look like? Marcus Welby, MD?'
The policeman shrugged, a little embarrassed, and handed the card back. 'I guess it's okay,' he said, ungraciously. 'Seems like they've got some kind of epidemic around here. They just told me to keep people out. Through there.'
'I know the way,' Petrie said, and pushed through the swing doors into the brightly-lit hospital corridors.
There was obviously some kind of panic in progress. The corridors were lined with trolleys, all waiting to collect patients from the ambulance bay; and there were nurses and doctors everywhere, bustling around with medical report sheets, diagnostic kits and bundles of sheets and robes and plastic gloves.
He reached Dr. Selmer's office and rapped on the door. A nurse answered it, wearing a cap and mask, her forehead glistening with perspiration.
'Yes? What is it?'
'I'm Dr. Leonard Petrie. I came to see Dr. Selmer. I thought I could help.'
'Just hold on there. Don't come inside. He won't be a moment.'
Dr. Petrie was about to say something else, but the door was shut firmly in his face. He shrugged, and leaned up against the corridor wall to wait for Dr. Selmer. As he stood there, a medical trolley was rushed past, with a young woman lying on it. Her face was deathly white, and she was shivering and trembling. A young doctor came hurrying in the other direction, calling out for a nurse to bring him some blankets and antibiotics.
It was ten minutes before Anton Selmer appeared. He came out into the corridor, freckled and ginger and worn out. He managed a weak smile as he pulled off his cap and mask, and let out a long, exhausted sigh.
'Hi, Leonard. Glad you could make it.'
Dr. Petrie inclined his head towards the door of the emergency ward. 'How long have you been in there?'
'All day.' said Anton Selmer, rubbing his eyes. 'It looks like it'll be all night, too.'
'Is it the plague?'
Dr. Selmer scratched his head tiredly. 'We've had twenty-eight more cases since eight o'clock. They're picking them up all over the place. We've had a bar-tender, a supermarket manager, two cops and four ambulance crew. We've even had a hooker. They come from all over town. Most from the south — Coral, Gables and South Miami. But two or three from Hialeah, and some from the Beach.'
Dr. Petrie stepped back to let a trolley rattle past. 'What about treatment? Are they responding?'
Dr. Selmer didn't look up. 'Five of them are dead already. Two were dead on arrival. We've tried streptomycin, tetracyclines and chloramphenicol. We even tried aureomycin, in case the bacilli were resistant to streptomycin. I've brought in plague antigens from Tampa, and I'm having serums made up from a virulent strains flown in right now from Los Angeles.'
'And?'
Dr. Selmer's voice was unsteady with emotion. 'It's not going to work, Leonard, It's not going to work at all.'
Dr. Petrie frowned. 'What do you mean — not going to work?'
'Just that, Leonard. The plague is not responding to the normal methods of treatment. Not sulfonamide, not anything. I guess it's because it's some kind of mutation. It's totally resistant to antibiotics, and it's even resistant to heat.'
'What about the antigens?'
Dr. Selmer took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. Then he blew his nose loudly. 'They slow it up, that's all. Usually, they cut the mortality rate. You can save two out of three. But with this plague, they hardly help at all. Whatever we do, Leonard, they're dying just the same.'
Dr. Petrie leaned back against the wall. He tried not to think of Prickles and Adelaide. The corridor was bright and clinical and smelled of disinfectant. Outside, through the constantly swinging doors, he could see the red flash of ambulance lights, and the clatter and shuffle of trolleys. He heard someone shouting and moaning, and someone else trying to argue in a high, persistent voice.
'Have you told the health people?' he asked quietly.
Dr. Selmer nodded. 'I told them around half-past nine. They didn't really believe me at first. Wanted proof. So I brought Jackson and Firenza down here, and let them see for themselves.'
'What are they going to do?'
'Wait and see. Firenza said he thought it was probably an isolated outbreak.'
'Wait and see? Are you kidding? What makes him think it isn't going to spread around the whole damn city?'
Dr. Selmer shrugged. 'Precedent. The worst outbreak in American history was New Orleans, in 1920, when eleven people died. Firenza doesn't believe that we're going to lose more than twelve.'
'Didn't you tell him you'd lost five already? Jesus, Anton, this thing is far worse than bubonic plague. Doesn't he understand that?'
Dr. Selmer pulled his surgical cap on again. He looked at Leonard Petrie with his pale, worn-out eyes, and when he spoke his voice seemed hollow with tiredness.
'I think he understands that, yes. But he's like everyone else. They watch Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey, and they don't believe that American medicine can ever be licked. They don't understand that we can make mistakes. Officially, we're not allowed to. Officially we're not even permitted to be baffled.'
Dr. Petrie looked serious. 'Anton,' he said, 'how bad is it really?'
'There's a mask and a gown spare, Leonard,' Dr. Selmer said. 'Come inside and you can see for yourself how bad it really is.'
They pushed their way into the emergency ward. Dr. Petrie tugged on a tight surgical cap and laced a mask over his nose and mouth. The nurse helped him put on green rubbers and a long gown. She gave him transparent latex gloves, and he pulled them on to his hands as he followed Selmer into the glare of the surgical lamps.
It was the middle-aged man that Herb Stone and Francis Poletto had picked up in Alton Road. His face was drawn and lividly pale, and his eyes were rolled back into his head so that only the whites were showing. Beside the couch, on the luminous dials of the diagnostic equipment, his respiration, heartbeat and blood pressure were slowly subsiding.
The nurse said, 'His breathing is failing, Dr. Selmer. We can't keep him much longer.'
Dr. Selmer, helpless, stood at the end of the couch and watched the man gradually die.
'This is how bad it really is,' he said to Dr. Petrie, in a hushed voice. 'This man's wife told us that he felt sick just after lunch. By the evening, it had gotten so bad that he decided to go and look up his doctor. He was on his way there when he was picked up by the cops for drunk driving. He wasn't drunk, of course. He was dying of plague. Twelve hours from first symptoms to death.'
Dr. Petrie saw the pulse-rate drop and drop and drop.
The luminous ribbon of the cardiac counter was barely nudged by the man's weakening heart. 'Is his wife here?' Dr. Petrie asked.
Selmer nodded. 'We're keeping every relative and friend in the waiting-room, under observation. The way this plague seems to develop, you show your first symptoms three or four hours after you've been exposed to it. We had a young girl brought in about three-and-a-half hours ago, and her father's showing the first signs. Dizziness, sickness, diahorrea, shivering. It's the fastest infectious disease I've ever seen.'
Dr. Petrie said nothing as the man on the couch died. Whoever he was, whatever he did, his forty-five years of life and memory and experience dwindled to nothing at all, and vanished on that hard, uncompromising bed.
Plague Page 4