Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  The doctor broke off and turned to the uniformed youth at his elbow. "Tim, here's the first list of names and addresses. Dr. Fox will take you to the place where the medicine is and fill up bottles and put names on them and give you mimeographed instruction sheets. You get the first ten guys over to that place to start running the bottles to people. Make sure they understand about wearing the face masks, and just hand the bottles and the instructions in the door and take off—no more contact with the people than is absolutely necessary. Meanwhile get the rest of the Eagles over here so they're ready to help direct traffic." He caught Whitey Fox's eye and motioned him over. "Whitey, we've got to start moving on this. Take Tim here over to the Grange Hall. He's got the first distribution list." Maclvers took a deep breath. "Meanwhile, I think it's about time we confronted this Bettendorf chap and got him out of our hair. Do you know him?"

  Frank shook his head. "Not directly, but Monique does— and it doesn't look like she's making any headway. . . ."He had noticed the two of them in heated conflict across the room, Bettendorf shaking his head and gesticulating angrily, Monique talking to him quietly but doggedly. "Well," Maclvers said, "he's been badgering me to talk to him since ten o'clock last night when he flew in from Lincoln with the agents, but I've been too damned busy. So let's give him a chance."

  The skinny little doctor pushed through the waiting-room crowd, with Frank at his heels. He had to tilt his head back to look up into the gray-haired man's face. "So you're Dr. Bettendorf," Maclvers said before the older man could open his mouth. "From Atlanta, Georgia, out here to pay us a visit. Centers for Disease Control. Great. I'm Sam Maclvers, general family practice, nothing fancy, from Willow Grove, Nebraska, where some of our people have gotten sick and started to die of plague, and 1 live here, and these people are my responsibility, so you'll excuse me if I make this as brief as possible—"

  "Look here, Dr. Maclvers—"

  "Hold it. We've got some cops in here so nervous already that they're going to start shooting the lights out if we give them anything more to worry about. Since we're going to argue for a while, I suggest we go back where we can have a little privacy. Flag down your aides and let's all go back to room number three."

  While Bettendorf corralled his FBI men, Frank grabbed Mo-nique's arm. "What was he saying to you?" he asked.

  She was white-faced, almost in tears. "He's not buying it, Frank. He's going to stop us. He's going to shut us down if he has to bring the army in here to do it."

  "What army?"

  "He's talking about troops stationed in Lincoln. To say nothing about the National Guard units in Omaha—"

  "And they're going to volunteer to come into a plague town? He's dreaming. And what would they do if they came here? Bomb the place out in order to save it? At the very worst it's going to take him hours to mobilize any kind of force, and that's going to give us the jump on him. And anyway, I don't believe it."

  "He means it, Frank."

  "Well, I don't think he can do it."

  They crowded back into the little examining room, Maclvers and Frank and Monique, Bettendorf and two very beefy, hard-eyed gentlemen in dark business suits, with Perry Haglund wiggling in just before the door was closed. "Okay, Dr. Maclvers, now I'm going to talk a minute," Bettendorf began before the little doctor could start. "I represent the U.S. Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control on the national level, and that means I represent the enforcement arm of the CDC, if necessary, and I'm telling you that you don't have the authority to use an unknown, untested drug in this city, and I'm going to stop you if I have to. There are procedures to be followed in situations like this—"

  "Yeah, I know all about your procedures," Maclvers said. "And we're all very impressed with the way your CDC has been dealing with this murderous thing. That's why we plan to do things a little bit different here."

  "My God, man, we've been doing the best we can do! We're in the middle of the most vicious worldwide pandemic of plague in all history—"

  "That's not news to me, Dr. Bettendorf. I've been on the telephone all night, and we have plague here in this town right now, and you're the man our good friend Haglund over here was going to contact three weeks ago to bring in vaccine. Now where's our vaccine?"

  "There isn't any vaccine anywhere in the country. There hasn't been for six weeks. Every supply in the country has been exhausted, and there won't be any more for ten days, maybe more. I assure you that we'll get you sor .e off the top when we have it."

  "Well, ten days is too long. You may be managing things on the national level, but I'm managing things here in Willow Grove, Nebraska, where we've got plague right now, and we're going to do something about it right now."

  "You don't have authority to do what you're planning."

  "I have a license to practice medicine in the state of Nebraska, and that includes the authority to prescribe medicine as I see tit."

  "You don't know this medicine."

  "Well, I do," Monique snapped. "You're the one who doesn't know the medicine, Ted—"

  "You have a series of preliminary tests on rats," Bettendorf said wearily. "You don't really know what this may do to people. Look, Doctor, you don't need to take this risk. With proper public-health measures taken now under Mr. Haglund's guidance, rigid isolation, sane protective measures, with vaccine arriving within ten days or sooner if I can possibly expedite it, your town can survive this attack."

  "What survival rates do you have for isolated rural communities the size of Willow Grove without any defenses?"

  "I would hope forty percent of the population would make it."

  "Good Christ. You call that survival? And what towns do you know that are doing that well? I mean which specific communities where?"

  "Look, I don't have precise data right here in my hands."

  "Well, the question was rhetorical anyway," Maclvers said. "You're simply wasting my time here, Dr. Bettendorf. I'm supposed to stand around and watch eighteen thousand people in this county die? You'll have to shoot me first. Now stand aside, I've got some productive work to do."

  "I will bring force in here if I have to," Bettendorf said angrily. "I give you my word I'll give you all the help I possibly can, all the manpower I can muster, all the guidance, but if you start dispensing a potentially dangerous drug, I will be obliged to stop you—"

  Frank Barrington cleared his throat. "Dr. Bettendorf, I don't think you quite took the doctor's meaning. He's through talking, now, and I, for one, am through listening. In terms of practicality, you and your people are outnumbered in this town right now about five thousand to one. You aren't going to call in any force from anywhere unless you get to a telephone or a radio, and if Dr. Maclvers doesn't want you to get to a telephone or a radio, there is a crowd of local police out there who are probably going to see to it that you don't get to a telephone or a radio. So much for force. Now, if you actually want to help in this situation, there are three things you could do. First off, you could get on your plane and go back home to Atlanta. Now, that would really help, and then when we find out what happens here using Tom Shipman's drug, we'll give you a jingle. Or if you insist on hanging around, you can go sit and sulk in a motel room and stay out of people's way and see what happens in the next few days with your own eyes. Or if you really want to help, you can rustle up a fewvcompetent people, just a few, to run statistics for us so that we won't have to work all day and then stay up all night every night trying to figure out where we're getting. Now, those are your three choices. Which is it going to be?"

  Bettendorf looked at them, and finally looked at Monique. "You are really going along with this?" he said.

  "Every inch of the way," she said. "I helped get us to this point, and 1 am most assuredly not quitting."

  "What you don't seem to realize is that you could be slaughtering more people than you helped. We're the only ones who are equipped—"

  "And what you don't seem to realize," Frank said, "is that the roof has fallen in on
this country, and when the roof really falls in, the ones who survive are the ones who-help themselves. We've decided that we're going to help ourselves here—and maybe test a way to help a whole lot of other people who are left too. Now you'd better make up your mind what you're going to do."

  Bettendorf stood for a moment with his jaw clenched. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again. Finally he looked at one of the FBI men. "Jackson," he said quietly, "if Dr. Maclvers will give you permission, get to a telephone and get Cooper from Omaha out here with some statisticians, and then see about getting some computer facilities here in town connected with our network—Dr. Maclvers will find you space. Then we'll handle the statistical end. As for you people"—he looked up at Frank and Monique—"let me tell you, by Christ, that whatever goes on in this town in the next few days, I am going to be here to see that it's documented from here to Guinea and back. And may Carlos Quintana rest in peace."

  63

  When the plague finally came to Brookdale, Connecticut, late in January in the midst of an unseasonable midwinter thaw, three doctors from the town and fourteen nurses and aides from the Brookdale Community Hospital were among the first to go, which effectively cut the heart out of any organized community medical resistance to the onslaught. The fact that one of the doctors was also the Chief Public Health Officer in the town really didn't make much difference; there was no wherewithal with which to mount a public-health battle anyway. No vaccine had been available anywhere on the northeast seaboard for weeks, and the tiny supply once kept on hand in the Brookdale Hospital dispensary for the inevitable emergency had long since been commandeered for use in the hard-hit metropolitan areas around New Haven and Westchester County. Supplies of the Sealey antibiotic were available in various distant warehouses, but reliable shipment of anything anywhere in the East had disintegrated to the point of the ridiculous. Even public-health education efforts, planned with considerable care in Brookdale, couldn't be carried out. The public power grid was operating only sporadically, a few indeterminate hours a day; when telephone switchboards were open at all, they were clogged; newspaper distribution had ceased about the time the last remnants of postal service had creaked to a halt, and even mimeographed handbills prepared as a last resort had no one to deliver them and sat in stacks at the few places in town where anyone congregated at all: the Betterway supermarket, the local newsstands, the county courthouse and the coal yard.

  Thus when it came, hard and sure and swift and seemingly in the course of a single night, many people of Brookdale reacted rather like trapdoor spiders, crawling inside their domiciles and pulling the lid shut after them. Some packed up and left in the night, but there was a sense of futility to it: where was there to leave to? Boston was a sinkhole; Albany and other upstate New York cities and their environs were as dead as New York City to the south; the smaller New England semirural towns and cities were being hit too, despite sometimes violent or heroic attempts to isolate themselves, and Montreal was reeling from the impact of plague which seemed to have moved eastward from Toronto and Ottawa.

  Of course, some people in Brookdale had made some tentative preparations, despite a certain pervading sense of unreality about the whole thing. After the aborted raid on the Betterway store, some people, at least, began laying in some kind of stockpiles of staples, whenever they could be found from whatever source—rice, flour, sugar, coffee. Tastes and judgments varied; one family with four children tilled their basement with cartons of Froot Loops and nondairy creamer (partly, perhaps, because there was a considerable oversupply available); one man somehow obtained an entire side of beef at God only knew what cost in money and integrity, cut the entire thing into two-inch cubes and had his wife home-can the whole thing. Certainly the raid on the Betterway had shocked people into a realization that something real and frightful and very deadly was going on even before the plague itself hit. There was not going to be business as usual tomorrow or perhaps ever; the nightly armed patrols lost the patina of fun-and-games-and-camaraderie with which many had participated in the beginning and became a deadly serious matter of halting any unidentified person or vehicle in the community, simply shooting the tires out from under unrecognized cars that did not stop and possibly shooting the occupants as well, and now and then somebody didn't come home from patrol.

  Of all the people in Brookdale, Carmen Dillman was perhaps the most curiously transformed by the Betterway supermarket raid and the slow community disintegration that followed. First and foremost she had had Jack on her hands, and Jack had turned out to be no mean medical challenge. His wound did not heal well. A piece of shirt carried into the wound by the bullet and undetected by the emergency-room doctors sat festering and the wound in his chest and armpit abscessed. For weeks it had healed and drained, healed and drained; for weeks he had been toxic, devoid of appetite, unable to hold down much that he ate, running fevers daily to 103 degrees and losing weight and strength until he was gaunt and frail as a scarecrow. Carmen nursed him diligently, applying hot epsom-salt soaks until Jack wanted to scream, inserting sterile drains at the doctor's telephoned directions, tearing up Jack's old flannel shirts for dressing materials and boiling them sterile whenever they were changed, so that during whatever hours the power happened to be on the whole house smelled like a cross between an abbatoir and a Chinese laundry. During this period Jack seemed to sleep interminably; he was hardly awake and stirring for more than three hours in the morning before he dozed off in whatever chair he was sitting in, napped in the afternoon, napped in the evening, slept like an exhausted dog all night.

  And during these times when the telephone was also out, so that she could not keep in touch with her various "spies" around the community, Carmen spent long silent hours over coffee at the breakfast table in the kitchen, staring out at the wasteland of the backyard. Something about the raid and Jack's part in it and his wounding and Hal Parker and the whole nauseating mess had come suddenly into focus for Carmen Dillman, and she found herself looking back on the wasteland of their lives together, all those long wasteland years, dragging a veritable Marley's chain of cruelties and infidelities and hatreds and missed opportunities, many of the links—not all, but too many—of her own forging, and it was not entirely with self-pity that she regarded the stultifying barrenness of those years, those desert years.

  And now, with Jack sick almost to death, she began glimpsing for the first time perhaps in her life the meaning of an actual loving relationship with another human being; she saw infection whittling away at a person she had scorned and belittled for decades who suddenly was very dear to her in ways she had never imagined possible. Mysteriously, as she changed dressings and tried to fix food that Jack could or would try to gag down, they found themselves talking; she found a wry, almost whimsical humor in her husband, so subtle sometimes as to be almost indistinguishable, yet present just the same, and, amazingly, an unbelievably powerful sustaining force for him, time and again helping to pull him out of pain, helping him rally from a bad spell as if solely to have a chance to pass on something bizarrely funny that had come into his mind a few moments before. Then, at one point, the abscess became almost the size of an orange under his arm, and there was a crisis of pain and fever; he lost the use of the arm again, indicating pressure on the brachial plexus, according to the doctor on the phone, who promised to come over and try to install a drain when he had a chance—but never had a chance. One evening while Carmen was applying the hot wet dressings, the swollen, inflamed area opened quite spontaneously and drained copiously and, unbelievably, a still-recognizable chunk of embedded torn shirt came out in the drainage, and by morning the fever was down to ninety-nine degrees and Jack, for the first time in weeks, found himself halfway hungry for some breakfast. ...

  All this, fortunately, came before the onslaught of plague began in Brookdale. With Jack suddenly less of a worry, Carmen began turning more and more of her awesome energies to getting ready—and, as his strength increas
ed and his capability grew, nagging Jack to get ready too. "It's going to be us against it, buddy," she told him. "There's nobody going to help—but when it comes, it's going to have its work cut out for it, because we're going to beat it, you and me, or go down trying. None of this wailing and gnashing of teeth like I hear from Nancy Tollman every time she talks to me, the idiot. None of that for me."

  Good as her word, she started out by learning what she could. They had actually accumulated a huge library over the years, with all kinds of books, including medical references, that Jack had used from time to time. She read everything about plague she could find in the house from the Merck Manual to Defoe's Journal of the Plague Years to articles in an assortment of family medical encyclopedias and a dozen other references. Of course they all talked about rats and fleas and didn't say anything much about direct respiratory convection of the organism—but then one night when power was on she caught a rerun of a PBS plague special on TV—she'd seen it once before way last October, with that blonde biologist Monica Jan-somebody from the CDC lab somewhere in Colorado patiently explaining how this plague microorganism (the woman said "mahcro-awg'nism") was a virulent mutant form that liked lung tissue better than anything, a different kind of plague bacterium than had ever been seen before—and there were charts of how the current plague could jump over the man-flea-rat-man cycle and go straight from man to man (or woman) and how it grew faster lhan most—time-lapse microphotographs of the organism actually growing in lab cultures of lung-tissue cells—and the measures one could take in the home to protect oneself and prevent contact and prevent spread if one followed the rules of sterile and isolation techniques to the very letter—and how with these simple home measures, together with the ample supplies of effective antibiotics and new forms of vaccines available through your local state and county Public Health Service offices or your doctor's offices, this epidemic of a dangerous disease could readily be contained and controlled and wiped out. . . .