Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  One morning a crowd of eighty thousand people converged on City Hall on the Missouri side, many of them armed and all of them howling for blood and heads on stakes; denied and turned away by an embattled police force, they dispersed through the downtown area, smashing department-store windows, looting shelves, raging into office suites and rending and tearing everything in sight. It took police two days to clear mobs out of the downtown shambles, with eight hundred dead, fully half of them police—but the looting spread and continued in widespread outlying areas of the city. Cars were dumped on their sides to blockade streets, windows were shattered, bombs exploded, small fires raged.

  Ted Bettendorf believed every word of the accounts that came to him from CDC field workers: Kansas City was a city gone mad, enraged at betrayal in a place long familiar with the finer points of political betrayal. Governmental controls collapsed altogether as the angry mobs grew and officials were searched out and besieged in their houses, defending their doorsteps from pillagers and watching their families dragged away before their eyes. Utilities fell apart, electricity and communications were virtually obliterated. For days the city convulsed with a rage of street fighting. Functioning automobiles for escape came suddenly into demand, and street thieves came into their own, stealing first hubcaps, then tires, then wheels, and then whole engines out of cars that anyone was foolish enough to leave parked and unguarded for more than half an hour at a time. And then, as the real depth of the plague began to rack the city, now totally helpless and defenseless, protective fiefdoms sprang up from block to block to guard what was left to be guarded. Cellars were converted into hospices for the dying, barricades blocked two-thirds of the city streets, nine-tenths of the stores and most of the richer homes were looted and ransacked, the dead were burned on street corners in ever-increasing numbers and finally the ice-cold winter came as a frigid blessing because it kept down the stench. In a different way and much faster than New York, Kansas City also died.

  In Chicago the plague itself struck more swiftly and widely than perhaps anywhere else in the country. In early October, multiple mini-epidemics sprang up simultaneously in various areas of the city, most of them ultimately traced to air travelers from the West and South, until all possible track of them was inevitably lost. Multiple nameless prediagnosis contacts, including a dozen-odd black families that had evacuated, already ill, from Savannah to Chicago, vanished into the fastnesses of the city slums, never to be heard from again except through outbreaks of the infection they carried. On-hand supplies of vaccine and Sealey 3147 were quickly exhausted protecting essential hospital and public-health personnel, while urgent appeals for more took their place at the bottom of the growing stack on Ted Bettendorf's desk in Atlanta. With incredible swiftness the infection spread, with first hundreds and then thousands of new cases appearing daily. In the deep urban tenements the Horseman could almost have been seen galloping from block to block, had any alert epidemiologist had the time or facilities to tabulate the wildfire spread; in the middle-class tracts and wealthy suburbs the firestorm burned less flagrantly, perhaps, but no less fast. In the endless flatlands of Chicago, of all places, the ground had been prepared for uncontrolled spread of pneumonic plague by an immediately prior epidemic of A/Montreal influenza which had struck the city unseasonably and hard in late September and left 400,000 people near prostration from a three-week illness before the plague appeared.

  In Chicago, the spreading illness produced a confrontation between citizens and authority of a different order of magnitude than was witnessed elsewhere that early in the fire storm—a confrontation between huge masses of people determined to go elsewhere and a military authority empaneled and determined to keep them where they were. As the total inability of health authorities either to treat the infection or control its spread became increasingly evident, vast squadrons of people, both the quick and the dying, began a mass exodus to the south and west of the city in a hapless, hopeless search for open country, help, food, warmth and succor of some sort. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands began flooding the major expressways, open, pulsating arteries hemorrhaging people into the countryside, people with small possessions on their backs, dull eyes, coughs and high fevers, all afoot or on bicycles, since auto traffic was quickly and totally choked off by the sheer mass of moving bodies. In a matter of days those tens of thousands became hundreds of thousands, leaving their dead where they dropped, moving as relentlessly and mindlessly as a staggering army of human ants down the freeways and across the countryside. . . .

  Local authorities quickly made the bold decision that these masses must not be allowed to leave the city—they faced certain chaos and slaughter to the south and west in a countryside that did not want them. But stopping them and turning them back was something else altogether. A National Guard militia composed of a few hundred exceedingly green, inept and combat-innocent farm boys flown in from southern parts of the state to barricade the expressways found themselves immediately stripped of clothing, shoes, arms, supplies and even underwear almost the instant that they took up their positions. As swiftly as possible, which was not quite swiftly enough, federal authorities then declared martial law for all of metropolitan Chicago and surrounding areas, and army and marine units moved in, complete with tanks, field artillery and quite a considerable air force of transports and helicopters with orders to stop the outflow. Yet not even the leaders of these units, much less the troops themselves, had any stomach for mass slaughter of helpless people. Rubber bullets and riot-squad attacks merely pushed masses of people from Point A temporarily over to Point B and then back to Point A again; tear gas produced instant chaos wherever it was used, effectively halting all motion whatever and reducing an advancing mass of people to a blinded, weeping milling mass of people—but a mass of people who were not going back where they had come from and couldn't even if they had wanted to because of the further masses of people piling in behind them. Tank commanders refused to send their tanks rolling north through masses of people moving south, and those foolish enough to try soon found the masses of people separating around them like buffalo and then engulfing them in a sea of bodies—and what tank commander wanted his troops in that close contact with that infected sea of bodies? The intent was sound enough, but the task was impossible; a solid line of D8 bulldozers forming an unbroken arc 150 miles long might have stopped those people from moving forward, perhaps even moved them back a few hundred yards, but presently the people would simply have climbed over the bulldozers. In the end, the total net effect of this military adventure in confronting people and stopping them from going where they wanted to go (or thought they did) was hopelessly perverse: a containing arc of militia and machinery and vehicles and helicopters all slowly retreating to the south and west in'the face of the oncoming horde, with no alternative to retreat other than chopping the horde down like wheat on the prairie, with lots more wheat where that came from.

  As it was in New York and Kansas City and Chicago, so it was in the other cities, minor variations from one to another but the same major theme. As the fire storm raged on, government institutions and public-health facilities grew steadily less able to cope with, much less contain, the holocaust. In fairness, of course, the day-by-day disintegration of the government and authority could not be blamed solely on the ineptitude or venality or incapacity of national or local leaders. The President proved no better nor worse a crisis leader than any other President in recent history would have been; he was not stupid, nor blind, nor even overly concerned with the political implications of what he did. If anything, he rose far above his capacity in facing the fire storm and did as much as any other human being in his position might have done. Behind and about him, tens of thousands of others in high places in government worked valiantly and did the very best they knew how to do to preserve the reins of control. In the final tally there were far more heroes than cowards in those ranks.

  The problem was, very simply, that the best those leaders knew how to do fell fa
r short of what needed to be done, and the tools that were needed were not there. No government in modern history had ever faced a disaster of the magnitude and suddenness of this one. whether economic, medical or military. The great, crushing depression of the 1930s had taken years to mature to its most dismal depths. Later, in the midst of the most terrible war in all history, it had taken six full months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor before the country was fully mobilized to fight back, despite three full years of advance warning; by then the enemy had achieved their empire, and it took four long, bloody years to wrench it back—but the first six months did not see the total disintegration of the nation. It merely made the fight longer and harder and more costly.

  But even that disastrous war was of a different nature entirely from the present fire storm. In this case there wasn't any six months in which to mobilize. Within a couple of months or so after Savannah the major cities were buried in corpses, and the wherewithal to fight simply didn't exist. A year before the storm began, a total of twenty-three cases of plague had been reported in the entire year, confined to eight western states, all but six cases bubonic and flea-borne in nature. In all common sense, there had been nothing to be prepared and mobilized for until Pamela Tate was carried down the mountain, and within days all rational efforts at mobilization were already running frantically merely to catch up with a disaster far out of control. What was worse, for mobilization to be possible at all, the gears of national commerce, health controls and communications would all have had to mesh perfectly—but as the storm spread, the gears failed to mesh in too many areas at once, and quickly ground themselves to powder. Nothing of any significance could be accomplished because nothing really continued working enough of the time in enough places at once. Highway shipping could not accomplish anything when crosscountry truckers fell sick at the wheel halfway to their destinations, or refused to drive their trucks into plague-stricken cities or simply walked away, leaving their vehicles planted on the highways. Without effective medications the medical establishment was reduced to the prayers, promises and post-mortems of a bygone age. Locally operated public utilities worked valiantly to keep such basics as heat, light and electricity going part of the time in most places, shoring up areas that broke down as best they could, but all too soon generating capacities began to Crumble from lack of coal and oil immediately at hand to power the generators.

  Telephone communications worked better than most things, at first, with at least the main trunk lines functioning to most areas part of the time and with overloaded satellite facilities pressed to the utmost—yet in counterpoint to this, the postal system ceased to work at all except on the most local, hand-delivery levels—and who wanted to do the hand-delivering? Checks that were mailed never arrived; heaps and mountains of mail piled up in central dispatching offices and overflowed into the streets; orders for goods and cash were never confirmed if they were ever received; nobody got paid. Normal commercial air traffic ground to a halt, amid a massive confusion of counterdirections, impaled on the horns of dilemma—the acute, agonizing need for fast transport of people and knowhow and materiel on the one hand, and the acute, agonizing knowledge that airplanes were spreading the disease worldwide on the other hand, so that the Horseman had leaped cities and countrysides and borders and oceans long before he was even recognized. . . .

  And so it was, Ted Bettendorf reflected, that hell followed after Him Who Rode. Paralysis spread hand in hand with plague; first the cities and then the towns and villages and hamlets were stricken in the ever-growing fire storm, and the nation headed into a dreadful winter without food or fuel or medicine or leadership enough to go on for six more weeks, and no idea on God's green earth where any of those things were going to come from. . . .

  In a ruined industrial-warehouse area on the outskirts of Wichita, Sally Grinstone wrestled the wheel of the old Dodge van to avoid the larger potholes and craters in the street, cursing under her breath as she steered the rig around heaps of rubble, expecting a tire to go at any minute. It was late afternoon and she was heading straight into a baleful yellow-brown sun still trying to burn through the lead-gray overcast of a wintry Kansas sky. She shivered despite the soiled down jacket she was wearing and glanced approvingly at the wrapped-up gin bottle jouncing on the seat beside her. Sally at heart was a creature of the warm countries, the lands of few clothes and many palm trees, the sun-drenched swimming pools of Florida and New Orleans and The Coast; she had nothing but dread for what that lead-gray Kansas sky might hold in store when the white stuff started coming down, with an icy northern wind behind it—Ugh. Going to need that gin bottle, especially with the work we've got lined up. . . .

  She eased the rig around the fallen brick wall of a burned-out warehouse. It was the most inauspicious-looking vehicle imaginable, a big, boxy, mud-brown van, top-heavy and awkward, with one side panel crunched in as though it had been stepped on by an enormous foot. Not the sort of rig that anybody was likely to stop and hassle, she had thought, which was exactly why she and Tom had stolen it, if you could call it stealing. They'd seen it standing abandoned on a street in Des Moines one day, forlorn and wrecky-looking, the crunched side panel forced open, windshield smashed with a rock, tires so lousy nobody'd stolen the wheels. Sally had crawled in under the dashboard upside down and hot-wired the thing to get it going while Tom stood chickie against cops and looters, looking acutely embarrassed, and then gaped as Sally left her little red Fiat sitting with the keys in the ignition in the exact same spot as they drove away in the van. "Fair enough trade," she'd said. "Nobody could use this wreck but us; they'll take that little bomber apart right down to the chassis and make a fortune selling the parts."

  Now Sally watched the rearview mirror, a line of worry creasing her baby face. A blue Ford pickup was about two blocks behind her, pacing her rather too neatly; she was sure she had seen it a couple of times earlier. She hit a pothole and heard a sloshing sound in the back of the van, glanced over her shoulder at the half-dozen acid carboys riding back there in their wood packing frames—the object of this trip in the first place. It had taken her two days to track down a supplier and some highly ingenuous lying to explain just what she wanted with them. Maybe they didn't believe me that women use the stuff in shampoo, she thought, glancing again at the pickup in the rearview. But Tom had said he needed acetic acid, reagent grade, and innocently left it up to her to get some, and that was what she had done—

  She took a sudden left and stamped hard on the gas pedal, running the van down the obstacle course of a little side street as fast as she dared. The pickup passed on its way behind her without even slowing, and she breathed easier. A real nervous pain, she thought, this business of back and fill and dodge, you just couldn't trust anything or anybody, the number of weird people running around was just incredible, almost to the point that anybody seen wandering the streets afoot or on wheel was by definition weird until proven otherwise—

  The street she had turned into was really just an alley with brick-walled buildings tight on either side and trash and rubble strewn everywhere. Twice she had to get out and move overturned garbage cans to get through the single block to the next avenue—and then, just as she reached it, the blue Ford pickup swerved in from the other end and decisively forced her into the right-hand wall. A swarthy man leaped out with a shotgun in his hands, and the shotgun was trained on her.

  For a moment Sally just froze. Then, very deliberately, she uncapped the gin bottle, took a long pull and rolled down the window. "Okay, dummy, what's your trouble?" she demanded.

  The man was short and fat, either Mexican or Indian, with a long, droopy black mustache and a face like a discontented spaniel. He motioned to her with one hand. "Hop out," he said.

  The shotgun drooped as she hopped, gin bottle under her arm. She squinted hard at him as she climbed down. Definitely Indian, she thought. "You'd better push the safety on that thing," she said, "before you shoot your foot off." The man's face darkened, but she heard the clic
k of the safety.

  He pointed a finger toward the back of the van. "What you got in there?" he said.

  "Vinegar," Sally said.

  "Vinegar?" His mouth tightened. "Open it up," he said.

  She threw the side door open and the man peered inside. Then he moved closer, frowning, and sniffed. "My God, it is vinegar,'' he said.

  "Thirty bloody gallons of it," Sally affirmed. "Good and strong. You wanted some vinegar, dummy, you got it."

  The fat man edged away from the van—and from her. "What you doin' with all that vinegar?"

  "I mix it with my gin," she said evenly. She offered him the bottle. "Have some?"

  He shook his head quickly and edged away another step. "Stomach wouldn't take it."

  "Well, then, I suppose you're going to rape me," Sally said impatiently. She glanced at her watch. "Where? Hood of your pickup? Let's get on with it—"

  "Jesus, lady, who said anything about rape?" The man was in full retreat now, his spaniel face a study in distress.

  "Well, hell's fire, man, if you don't want my vinegar and you don't want my gin and you don't want to rape me, why are we hanging around? Get that junker out of there so I can go home." She started climbing back into the van, then paused to peer at the shotgun. "You ever actually shoot that thing?"

  "Once or twice."

  "You want a job as a bodyguard?"

  "Jesus, lady, you don't need no bodyguard."

  "Maybe not—but I sure could use a runner. I've got errands to run all over this broken-down town, and this hijack-the-woman-driver crap gets old, believe me. Yesterday it was a cop in uniform—how about that? So maybe you'd like to run errands."