Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  Because of the shots, we thought maybe that the cops would come knocking, but either our neighbors were unfazed by a little explosive night music, or the cops had their hands full with hundreds of people falling down sick on the city’s sidewalks.

  In spite of all of the noise and commotion, Mazey still hadn’t woken up. Before I switched off the bedside lamp I leaned over to make sure that she was OK. She was perspiring so much that her hair was damp, and she was breathing quite quickly, as if she had been jogging. It was a hot night, though, and who could tell how many mojitos she was sleeping off?

  I climbed back into bed and switched off the lamp. I could faintly hear Rick and Dazey talking for a while, and then there was silence. I took me a minute or two to realize that there was silence. No cicadas flexing their abdomens, no ambulance sirens, no traffic. Nothing.

  At first I thought I must still be deaf from Rick’s gun going off about two inches from my ear, but then I realized that I could clearly hear Mazey breathing and the rustling of her sheets as she kept turning over.

  ‘Mishkway,’ she murmured. At least that’s what it sounded like.

  I lay there listening. Her breathing had a slight catch in it, but I didn’t think it was anything to worry about.

  ‘Mishkway,’ she repeated. Then, ‘Soggy mass.’

  Oh well, I thought, I’ve probably said stupider things in my sleep. In fact I knew I had. Sandy had once told me that I recited some Walt Whitman poem about the stars but got it all wrong. ‘Look’d up … in puffing silence … at the stars.’

  I closed my eyes, and I was right on the brink of falling down the rabbit hole when I heard Mazey wrestling with her sheets, and then her heels bumping on the floor. I opened my eyes again. There was a very long silence while I lay there listening, and she sat upright on the side of her bed, breathing very loudly through her nostrils.

  After a while I said, ‘Mazey? Are you OK?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Mazey?’

  Still no answer, but now she stood up, lurched across to my bed and started to climb in beside me, all knees and elbows. She smelled strongly of alcohol and some musky Oriental-type perfume she always wore, and although she was so sweaty she felt freezing cold. Her T-shirt was soaked, and it had ridden right up under her breasts.

  ‘Mazey,’ I said, but she collapsed on top of me, and her forehead hit me right on the bridge of my nose. I saw stars for a moment, just like Walt Whitman, but then I managed to heave her over me and lay her down beside me.

  I was reaching out for the bedside lamp when she convulsed, her back arching and her thigh-muscles shuddering and her fingers clenching and unclenching.

  ‘Get – get it—’ she began, through teeth that were tightly clamped together, but then she retched and a warm torrent poured out of her mouth, all over me.

  I switched on the lamp and saw that I was covered in blood and the sheets were drenched in blood, too. Mazey was staring at me, white-faced, her mouth smothered in red like a zombie who has just looked up from eating somebody alive.

  ‘Get it out of me, Wizard!’ she gasped, and bubbles of blood popped between her lips. ‘Please – get it out of me!’

  I said, ‘Mazey, I need to get you to a hospital, and fast!’ even though I knew that all of the emergency rooms were overwhelmed with patients and there was probably nothing that any of them could do for Mazey, even if one of them would take her in. But what else could I do? Just watch her convulsing and vomiting up blood until she died, the same way that Father Zapata had died?

  The bedroom door was flung open, and it was Rick, looking even more disheveled than he had before. ‘Holy shit, Wizard!’

  I don’t know if his first impression was that he had surprised me right in the middle of murdering Mazey, but any doubts he might have had were quickly dispelled when she convulsed again and brought up another flood of blood.

  ‘Holy shit, what’s wrong with her?’

  ‘I think it’s the same sickness that killed Bobik,’ I said. ‘In fact, the same sickness that everybody’s catching.’

  ‘Harry, get it out of me! Get it out!’ shrieked Mazey.

  ‘What does she mean?’ asked Rick. ‘Get what out?’

  It was then that Dazey came into the bedroom. ‘Mazey! Oh my God! Harry, what’s wrong with her?’

  ‘It’s this epidemic,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know where she caught it from, but we need to get her some help, and quick. Where’s the nearest ER?’

  ‘Just call nine-one-one!’ said Dazey breathlessly. ‘Get her an ambulance!’ She knelt down on the floor beside her sister and held her hands, in spite of all the blood. ‘Hold on, Mazey! Hold on, darling! We’re going to get you to a hospital, right now!’

  I picked up my blood-smeared cellphone and punched out 911, although I didn’t expect an answer and I didn’t get one. After thirty seconds of listening to the ring tone, I looked across at Rick and shook my head.

  Rick said, ‘There won’t be any ambulances free, Daze. You saw the news. Thousands of people are getting sick. I don’t even know if we’ll be able to get her into a hospital.’

  ‘We can’t let her die!’ said Dazey. ‘She’s my kid sister! I always promised to take care of her. I promised mom!’

  Mazey quaked yet again and brought up even more blood. ‘Please,’ she said, although she was so weak now that she could barely move her lips. ‘Please get it out.’

  Meanwhile, I had been tapping away at my cellphone, looking for the nearest ER. The Valley Presbyterian Hospital where Rick and I had spent the previous afternoon was probably the closest, but even then it had already been massively overcrowded. I guessed that Mazey might have more of a chance of being treated at Cedars-Sinai, on Beverly Boulevard, because it was so much larger.

  ‘Get some clothes on, Sharky,’ I told Rick. ‘We’ll take her to the hospital ourselves.’

  I went into the bathroom, filled the basin with warm water and plunged a hand-towel into it, so that I could wipe off most of Mazey’s blood. Then I roughly dried myself and went back into the bedroom to pull on a pair of jeans and a blue checkered shirt. Dazey was hugging Mazey, and it didn’t look as if she had brought up any more blood. Rick appeared a few seconds later, all dressed in black, as usual.

  ‘I’m coming too,’ said Dazey. ‘If you take her out to the van, I won’t be two seconds.’

  I pulled one of the blankets off Mazey’s bed, and we wrapped her up in it.

  She lifted one arm feebly and said, ‘Wizard … please …’

  ‘It’s OK, Mazey,’ I said, speaking close to her ear. ‘Everything’s going to be fine. Just hang on in there, OK? Just hang on in there.’

  Her eyes rolled up so that only the whites were showing, and she let out a terrible creaking groan. ‘Please, Wizard … get it out of me. Please. It’s killing me.’

  There was nothing else that I could say to her. Together, Rick and I carried her out to his van, with me holding her under her arms and Rick holding her legs. We laid her down in the back, amongst all of Rick’s bug-spraying equipment, and we tucked door-sealant strips either side of her so that she wouldn’t get flung around too much when we were driving to the hospital.

  A few seconds later, Dazey came hurrying out of the house, wearing a white T-shirt and denim shorts and carrying a bath towel. She climbed into the van and sat down next to her sister. ‘Mazey?’ she said. ‘I’m here now, baby. We’re going to take you to the ER and get you fixed up.’ Then she turned to Rick and said, ‘Let’s get going, Rick. I’m not going to lose her, I mean that.’

  We backed out of the driveway with smoke coming out from our tires, speeding south-west and then due south.

  No wonder I had heard nothing but silence when I was lying in my bed. The streets were almost completely deserted, with only six or seven stray vehicles driving around, and they all appeared to be driving pretty aimlessly, as if they had no idea where they were going. As we turned into Santa Monica Boulevard and headed west, I saw three
people lying on the sidewalk outside Michelle’s Donut House, a man and two women. Blood was glistening on the concrete all around them, and the man was convulsing and bending his spine like a caterpillar.

  Rick slowed down, but I heard Mazey retching again in the back of the van.

  ‘We can’t, Rick,’ I told him. ‘I don’t even think that we can save Mazey, let alone anybody else.’

  One of the women lying on the sidewalk must have seen us, because she raised one hand and attempted to wave. Rick looked at me, and I looked back at him, and then he put his foot down on the gas and we sped off along Santa Monica at more than sixty miles an hour. There was no other traffic around, so we drove through one red light after another.

  It took us no more than ten minutes to reach Cedars-Sinai. On a normal day, I guess it would have taken us more than twice as long. But as we drew up at the hospital, we could see that the parking lot was jammed up with scores of vehicles, most of them parked every which way, as if their owners had arrived in a hurry. Outside the entrance to the emergency room, there must have been twenty or thirty ambulances, all with their lights flashing.

  ‘Look at all those busses,’ said Rick as he pulled into the side of the road. He managed to find a tight space behind a Winnebago with blood smears across it and park with two wheels on the sidewalk. ‘Why aren’t they out there, picking up more people?’

  ‘Maybe the ER has run out of room,’ I suggested.

  ‘Yeah, well, let’s see.’

  He opened the back of the van and together we lifted Mazey out. The bath towel that Dazey had brought with her was half-soaked in blood, and there were spatters of blood all over Dazey’s T-shirt.

  ‘Oh God, I think she’s dying,’ said Dazey as she awkwardly climbed down. ‘She keeps saying, “Get it out, get it out,” but I don’t understand what she means.’

  ‘Let’s just get her inside,’ said Rick. ‘What she needs is a blood transfusion, and fast.’

  Even as we carried her across the parking lot, Mazey started to convulse again, twisting and jerking and kicking her legs, and it was all that we could do not to drop her. As we approached the entrance to the emergency room, we found that the sidewalk outside was scarlet and sticky and criss-crossed with hundreds of footprints.

  Two weary-looking security guards were standing outside, and one of them raised his hand to stop us. ‘ER’s full to capacity, sir, I’m real sorry.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ I retorted. ‘So what are we supposed to do? She’s dying.’

  ‘Hundreds of people are dying, sir. Our medical staff are doing everything they can, but they just can’t cope with any more patients.’

  ‘So what do you suggest we do? Take her straight to the nearest mortician?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. I honestly wish I could help you. You could try the Olympia Medical Center on West Olympic, or maybe St Vincent’s on West Third Street.’

  ‘I saw both of those hospitals on the news,’ put in Dazey. ‘They were turning people away as early as yesterday evening.’

  ‘I’m afraid that we’re having to do the same,’ said the security guard. He was young and Hispanic with a fuzzy black moustache, and apart from sounding tired he also sounded genuinely upset that he wasn’t allowed to let us in. He reminded me of Marcos Hernandez’ son Felipe, and I felt really sorry for him.

  Rick, however, was not in a sympathetic mood. He drew back the left-hand side of his black denim jacket and said, ‘You see this, pal? This is a special pass that lets us in anyplace we want to go. Right now we want to bring my girlfriend’s sister into the emergency room and see if we can’t manage to get her some life-saving treatment. This special pass says we can. Capiche?’

  The young security guard looked down at the black patterned grip of Rick’s Smith & Wesson Governor, which was protruding from his studded black biker’s belt. Then he turned to his fellow security guard, who was middle-aged and gray-haired. The older man shrugged, as if to say, What the hell? There were no police around, and there was little chance of finding any in the middle of this crisis. In any case, the chances of Mazey surviving were practically zero, so what difference was it going to make where she died? Under these circumstances, why argue with a sour-looking man with a powerful handgun?

  The young security guard opened one of the side doors for us, and we carried Mazey inside. As we crossed the reception area our shoes made Scotch-tape noises on the bloodstained floor. There was nobody behind the reception desk, and so we followed the sign saying ‘Emergency Room’ and continued to carry Mazey along the corridor.

  Even before we reached the Emergency Room I felt that we were wading our way through the aftermath of a Civil War battle, with people lying on both sides of the corridor on bloodstained blankets. Some of them were clearly dead already, because their eyes were staring blindly at the ceiling and the blood was drying on their chins. What was really scary was the expression on their faces, these dead people. Their mouths were stretched open, as if they had died in mid-scream. You would have thought that they had died of sheer terror instead of disease.

  We carried Mazey into the center of the room, and now we had to be careful not to step on anyone. The screaming and retching was deafening, and there was a constant irregular drumbeat as people in convulsions thumped against the floor. There must have been over three hundred patients crowded in that room, and the smell of blood and vomit was almost unbreathable.

  A Korean nurse in a bloodstained uniform approached us, shaking her head.

  ‘I can’t do anything for her, I’m sorry. You can see the situation.’

  ‘Aren’t there any doctors around?’ Rick demanded.

  ‘Every doctor is tied up with other patients. It was first come, first served. The kindest thing you can do is take her home.’

  ‘She’s dying,’ said Dazey. ‘Can’t you do anything?’

  The nurse continued to shake her head. ‘I will be truthful with you, ma’am. We don’t even know what this sickness is yet, let alone how we can treat it.’

  I said to Rick, ‘I’m going to have to put her down for a while, Sharks. My back is killing me.’

  We lowered Mazey on to the floor. She had stopped convulsing for a while, and her eyes were closed. But when I looked around the emergency room I could see plenty of people like that, so it obviously didn’t mean that she was getting any better.

  I did, however, catch a glimpse of something else. Over on the far side of the room, half-hidden by the curtain that had been drawn across a cubicle, I saw a nun.

  ‘What’s wrong, Wizard?’ asked Rick. ‘You look like you just seen a ghost.’

  ‘There’s a nun over there,’ I told him.

  ‘A nun? So what? People are dying in here. She’s probably giving them the last rites or hearing their confessions or somesuch.’

  I took a few steps to the left, making sure that I didn’t tread on any of the people lying all around me. Only six feet away, a woman vomited a fountain of blood that splashed all over herself and everybody lying around her, but they were all too weak to wipe it away. Now, however, I could see the nun more clearly. In fact, there were two nuns, and both of them wore black, with black scarves draped over their heads so that their faces were concealed.

  I went back to Rick and said, ‘There’s two of them.’

  ‘So there’s two of them.’

  ‘But it’s them. They’re the ones who are spreading it, this disease. Who were the last guests at the Elite Suites, before they got infested with bedbugs? Nuns. Who were the last guests at the Royaltie Inn, before they got infested? Nuns. What happened to the housekeeper and her son? What happened to Bobik? Now Mazey’s caught it. It all ties up, Rick.’

  Again, I was tempted to tell him all about the nuns who had appeared in my cottage in Coral Gables, and all about Matchitehew and Megedagik, but Rick was a natural skeptic, and I reckoned that I had told him enough to prove my point.

  ‘I think we should take Mazey home,’ said Dazey. Her cheeks were streaked w
ith tears. ‘If she’s going to die anyhow, I don’t want her dying in a hellhole like this.’

  ‘OK,’ said Rick. ‘It looks like we don’t have much of a choice, do we?’

  We were about to pick Mazey up when I saw a tall ash-blonde woman in a white lab coat appear through the double doors at the end of the room. She was wearing spectacles and carrying a clipboard, and she had a businesslike air about her, as if she might be in charge. I said to Rick, ‘Wait up just a moment. That babe looks like she’s a doctor.’

  I hip-hopped my way over the patients lying on the floor until I reached her. She was talking to two of the nurses about taking blood samples, and I waited patiently beside her until she had finished.

  She was already turning to walk away when I said, ‘Doctor?’

  She took off her glasses and frowned at me. ‘I’m not a doctor, I’m afraid. I’m only here to carry out research.’

  ‘Oh. Pardon me. It’s just that my friend’s girlfriend’s sister, she’s caught this disease, whatever it is.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that. We’re working on it intensively, I can assure you, but so far we haven’t come up with a cure. We don’t really know how it’s spreading, either, although we have some ideas.’

  ‘Bedbugs,’ I said.

  She looked at me narrowly. ‘Bedbugs? What makes you think that?’

  ‘I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you.’

  ‘No, go on. Why do you think it’s bedbugs?’

  ‘Because my friend runs this exterminating business, and twice now we’ve been called out to bedbug infestations – I mean really major infestations, thousands of them. And after we went out to treat the second infestation, one of my friend’s sniffer dogs got sick and died the same way these people are dying, bringing up blood and having fits and everything. The hotel’s housekeeper and her son, they both got sick, and they died, too. Now my friend’s girlfriend’s sister has it, and we don’t know what the hell to do to save her.’