Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  Frank, red-eyed and bleary, just blinked at him and looked at the readout, looked at the curves, and grunted. "Our control of things is also beginning to fall apart," he said. "You can only hold people rigid for so long, and it all begins to unravel. Tomorrow is going to be a bad day. . , ."

  It was. An upsurge in new cases, the highest number for one twenty-four-hour period yet, and an alarming rise in the contact curve. People who hadn't been hit were getting bold. They were getting bored, going next door to talk to the neighbors, thinking things weren't really that bad, gravitating back toward normalcy. Several shopkeepers opened their stores, defied the police to send them home, claiming the whole thing was blown up out of proportion. They found out, soon enough, but by then others were breaking discipline. Another day, another big rise in new cases and a doubling of contacts. Running Dog was dispatched south for another vanload of medicine—with all highways rigidly blocked around the plague town, there wasn't enough gasoline left to take a chopper down for it.

  Monique took the Community Hospital pathology department for her lab, handled all the samples for culture and identification, directed the hospital lab people in keeping running checks on blood pictures and liver-function and renal-function tests on people taking the drug. The drug was working, there were no side effects except a little diarrhea here or there—but the toll kept mounting.

  Had the Horseman faltered momentarily after the first on-

  slaught? Had he paused before unexpected resistance, a barrier he hadn 't met before ? Had he slowed to reconnoiter, regroup his hellish forces, seek another route, a weaker place to break through to ride and ride ? Was there something new in the wind, something different that some vast, malignant, animate sensing mechanism detected? Surely there was a sense of silence and suspended animation, a deathlike winter stillness like a pall of malice hanging over the empty streets of Willow Grove, Nebraska. . . .

  Council of war on the eighth day in the basement of the First Methodist Church. Sam Maclvers and Whitey Fox were there, looking gray and weary and vastly dispirited. Avis Rupert was there, the large, quiet, motherly, incredibly competent head nurse from the Community Hospital who almost single-handedly had been Fielding the telephone advice on home care of the sick and exposed, encouraging, supportive, compassionate, sympathetic as the situation demanded, Sam Maclvers's good right arm and merely one of the many townspeople who had risen far above themselves to meet the crisis. Frank and Monique were there, and Ted Bettendorf and the statisticians and a very quiet, thoroughly chastened Perry Haglund.

  Ted Bettendorf was not silent now; he had abandoned his cold silent observer status completely by the fifth day and joined in wholeheartedly, which was just as well because it was really he, with his figures and computer readouts and analyses, who held the key to what was actually happening in Willow Grove. Now, meeting the grim, silent faces around him, he started out without preamble. "Something is going on here," he said, "beyond any doubt in the world, something different than anything we've seen anywhere—but I'm not at all sure what it is. Monique, have you found any change in the organism turning up here?"

  "None. At least none that I can detect."

  "Could you detect it if it were there, with the facilities you've got available?"

  Cautiously: "I—I think I could. There are good enough culture facilities, I've got a really quite good Hot Lab, for field conditions; I've been able to do a lot of things that should have showed up changes if the bug were different, and I haven't seen them." She hesitated. "On top of that, I don't feel anything different with these bugs. That's not very scientific, but I've quit fighting it. I've been living cheek by jowl with these organisms for six solid months now without a break, and 1 swear to God I feel them. I sense them, and I don't sense anything different here than anywhere else before, and I think I would. The organisms are the same."

  "Then we have to rule that out," Bettendorf said. "But we're seeing funny patterns just the same. I'll tell you this: we're using one whale of a good drug—Christ, I wish we'd had it six months ago. It's so much faster and more effective than the 3147 that I can't believe it—but it's here on the curves. We're getting far higher rates of recoveries among proven, massively symptomatic plague victims than we've ever gotten anywhere since this started. It's also highly effective at blocking the organism among contacts, once you've tracked them down and stuffed the pills in their mouths. About twenty percent of the people on full therapeutic doses get the trots from it, but we can live with that. We may have some pseudomembranous enterocolitis turning up, too, but we can also live with that. What we can't foresee is long-term or late side effects, and I'm now forced to agree with you that we've just got to live with that—"

  "The dead ones don't have to worry about long-term side effects," Frank said.

  "That is very true—and by now the dead in this community would be overwhelming without that medicine. The trouble is that there are still too many dead, and I don't know why. It isn't your approach or your epidemiology—so far the organization of everything has been beautiful; control is unraveling now, but we have to expect that, because people are going to behave like people. The trouble is that a certain small amount of unraveling of social controls at this point shouldn't matter that much; with this drug and this degree of organization we should have the cutting edge turned by now—and we don't. We're doing far better here than you were doing at this point in Canon City, Frank—believe me, I'm not being critical—but for some reason it's not cutting it. Put it this way, very simply: we're containing it better than any other place I know of, but we are not controlling it, and we are most certainly not stopping it. As far as I can see at this point, Willow Grove is losing this fight. It's ing it slower than other places by a factor of ten, but it's still losing."

  "So what can we do?" Sam Maclvers blurted. "What should we be doing that we're not?"

  "I don't know," Bettendorf said. "All I can tell you is what the picture is. Renew the efforts you're already making. Keep doing it, don't let down. Let's make another major tight to restore social control, keep it from unraveling. Maybe I'm getting a distorted picture. Maybe it's still just too early. Let's go on and review it again tomorrow and the next day, and the next. Maybe we'll see it turn. Or maybe we'll think of something. . . ."

  That night Frank and Monique made love, the first time since they had left Wichita, slowly, sweetly, intensely passionately, even though both of them were close to exhaustion. Almost nostalgically, their lovemaking a bittersweet salute to things and times and events past, almost with a sense that there might never be another time. As their passion faded, sated, they lay in darkness holding each other closely, both awake, neither speaking, not expecting passion to arise again, not really wanting it to. In the darkness Monique lit one of her rare cigarettes; Frank saw the coal glow, saw the glow reflected in her eyes, gently kissed her naked breast, faintly pink in the glow. "You know what I wish?" she said finally. "More than anything else in the world? I so terribly wish we had Carlos here." She turned her head. "Not for loving, no, I don't mean that. Just to be here."

  "I know," Frank said. "I've thought the same thing for a week."

  "Carlos would see what's wrong. He'd know what to do. He'd find a key."

  "Carlos was a great key-finder."

  "He was a great man, in his funny way." Monique raised up on her elbow, looked at Frank's shadowy face, softened from its craggy norm by the darkness. " You know what I think Carlos would say? I think he'd take one hard look at what's happening here, and he'd say we're still just chasing it, not catching it. And you know, he'd be right. That's all we're doing—chasing it. Reacting to what's already gone by. Clean ing up the mess after it's happened. Carlos always wanted to move in ahead, cut something off at the pass—"

  Quite suddenly Frank Barrington was sitting up in bed, staring down at Monique. "Keep talking," he said. "Say that again, a different way."

  "We're just running after this murderer, Frank. It acts, we react. We can n
ever re act fast enough to stop it. We've somehow got to get ahead of it, ambush it, blast the pass full of rocks so it can't get through. . . ."

  "Yes," Frank said. "Ambush it. Kid, maybe you've got the key. Maybe, if we move fast enough, you've got the key. . . ."

  Five minutes later in the south side of Wichita Sally Grinstone was awakened by the jangling of a telephone.

  65

  The plague came to the Freehold on Grizzly Creek early in February, sweeping in on the wings of a late winter storm. Amy Slencik saw the boy late one afternoon, making his way down through the trees on Grizzly Ridge toward the creek, clothes ragged, long hair matted, filthy and stinking, barefoot on the crusted snow, pole over his shoulder with the faded bandana bag dangling from it. "I must have been dozing there in the chair by the window," she told Doc Chamberlain later, "and I looked up and there he was, stooping down to drink. I went to the door and shouted and he just ignored me, but the air smelled like a dead deer, and then he looked up at me, and God! that face—And then he waded the creek, barefoot in all that ice, and when he got to this side, right in front of me, he turned to the creek and ..." She made a crude gesture and grimaced. "Well, he started down the path toward your place, and I grabbed the shotgun and ran after him, hollering, but when I got to the turn in the path, he was gone. I don't know, maybe I'm getting spooky or something. Maybe I just dreamed it all. . . ."

  "Maybe," Doc Chamberlain said.

  The storm hit that night, straight down from the north, loading the trees with snow and piling ten inches of it onto the roads and dumping so much into the creek that great blue clots of it floated downstream and hung up on snags. And then about four in the morning a woman started screaming in one of the big campers in the fifth circle and Elmer Slencik, Harry's older boy, plowed his way through the snow and storm to knock Doc out of bed and said, "It's Jennie Ozmovitch, Doc, her mom woke up and found her coughing and choking and she's spitting up blood all over the place," and Doc knew right then that it finally had come.

  Every reasonable preparation he could think of had already been made, everything he could dredge up from his long experience dealing with infection and pneumonia and death. There were forty-odd families at the Freehold by then, mostly arrived in campers or trailers. Most had brought some food with them; most had had some money to help buy additional food and supplies, and despite Amy's misgivings they had managed to live much of the winter in reasonable peace and harmony without anybody bothering anybody too much. Mel Tapper's five acres and a big chunk of Kelley's west pasture had been devoted to camping space for them, and they had ultimately settled on small groupings of five or six rigs each, set out in rough circles to break the sometimes biting canyon wind, with buried water pipe going to each grouping and a big fire pit in the middle of each one, vaguely reminiscent of the rings of covered wagons set up to weather winter storms and Indian attacks on the prairies a century before. The men kept busy cutting and hauling firewood from up in the hills above Grizzly Ridge as long as the weather and gas for the chain saws and pickups held out, sparing the cottonwoods on the creek bottom near the Freehold as much as possible. The food wasn't much, but there was plenty of it, and fires to keep warm by, and people to talk to and an odd sense of shared hardship and shared waiting-out of crisis.

  Doc had been the busiest one in the Freehold since his confrontation with Amy three months before. Quietly certain that plague would come sooner or later, one way or another, he had set about a series of preparations designed to deal with the problem as well as it could be dealt with when it arrived. He could see no reason to believe that any help would be available from anyone or anywhere when the chips were finally down. Harry Slencik, with the best and most powerful AM/FM receiver on Grizzly Creek, had spent many hours monitoring the increasingly fragmentary news of what was happening outside—the falling of the cities, the inexorable sweep of plague into and through the rural areas in all parts of the country, the slow disintegration of power grids and interstate shipping channels and fuel supplies and telephone service; the failure of delivery of a much-touted "new vaccine," at first because it was deemed too toxic and dangerous to use, and then when released anyway, was available largely in the wrong places at the wrong times; the demoralizing announcement, made post facto and without any preamble, that the top echelons of the federal administration and selected top political leaders had been transported by the Secret Service to whatever sterilized grottoes had been prepared to receive them in case of life-threatening national emergency or disaster, that they might survive to continue "leading the country," meanwhile leaving an unfortunate skeleton crew of underlings in the White House to "carry out executive orders" and sending the remainder of both houses of Congress scurrying for cover in their home districts—followed by the later news, largely unlamented by very many, that three-quarters of those who had descended to the sterilized grottoes, including the President, Vice-President and Speaker of the House, had perished soon upon arrival because, like medieval barons and kinglets who had pulled up the drawbridges and settled into the safety of their castles, they found they had taken plague into their grottoes with them. . . . From these tidbits scooped up by Harry Slencik from the airways in bits and pieces, Doc Chamberlain had come to realize quite clearly that whatever was to be done when plague came to the Freehold was going to be done by him and those he could teach. . . .

  A lot depended upon doing things himself, fast, and on teaching as much as he could as quickly as he could to as many people as he could. But then, after all, that was how he had spent all those long years in practice, wasn't it? Doing and teaching? Carefully and patiently he had begun by explaining to people everything that he had been able to glean about this new mutant plague infection, what it did to people and how it did what it did. Carefully and patiently he started hammering home the basic ideas he knew the Freeholders would need to know when the crunch finally came. He was convinced, he told them, that survival would depend not on drugs and medicines and vaccines and fancy medical miracles, but on simple, old-fashioned principles of isolation, disinfection and physiological support. Patiently he reiterated one simple fact that practically nobody in the Freehold had ever seriously thought about: that people had survived devastating, virulent infections and deadly pneumonias for centuries and millennia before the so-called miracle drugs were even dreamed of. True, not so many had survived, and survival had often meant weeks or even months of debilitating illness, but people had survived. Ancient Egyptian pharaohs had contracted crippling paralytic polio—and survived it. As far back as Hippocrates it has been known that people could survive deadly pneumococcal pneumonia. Women survived the dreadful ravages of childbed fever—not too many, perhaps, but at least some—before its causes were even suspected. And people had survived the vast pandemics of plague that had preceded this one, even back in the filth and ignorance of the Middle Ages—not too many, perhaps, but at least some.

  Then he explained the changes that had come about from the great nineteenth-century discoveries of men like Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister and Ignaz Semmelweis—names some of the Freeholders might have heard about once, but certainly hadn't thought about for years. There were ways of loading the dice against infection, of increasing survival by understanding the way infectious organisms passed from victim to victim, by isolating those infected, preventing spread by disinfection and giving support to the sick ones to give them a fighting chance to heal and survive. True enough, these things seemed stupidly simple, as he went over them, hardly what you would call the keen cutting edge of a modem medical campaign, but when there wasn't any cutting edge to use, you used what you could.

  Certain key decisions fell to Ben alone, and he made them and then enforced them. It was Ben, for example, who decided on keeping the campers and trailer rigs in small, isolated groups, with at least 150 yards of clean air between the groups, with totally separate water supplies, latrines and cooking facilities. If one group got hit, he pointed out, maybe another wouldn't. It was
Ben who had taken the two Slencik boys and a few others down to Kelley's place and completely cleaned and scrubbed down the enormous loft of a big hay barn, still fragrant from last year's hay, and built raised pallets and partitions out of two-by-fours and old shiplap siding lying around to create a crude twenty-five-bed infirmary to isolate and care for any who turned up actively infected. Cattle in the lower level would help keep the loft warm; snow on the roof would insulate; and he commandeered Dan Potter, the hydraulic engineer, into building a boiler and a network of steam pipes in the walls for further warmth.

  It had been Ben Chamberlain who had made endless trips to Bozeman for odd and mysterious batches of supplies. On one trip he had brought back bolts of ticking and put the Freeholders, men and women alike, to work sewing them into mattresses and stuffing them with the cleanest wheat straw he could find within a fifty-mile radius, to make mattresses for the Sick Barn. He bought even more bolts of cheap cotton polyester yard goods, Woolworth prints and the like, the colors were wild and the storekeeper in Bozeman thought he was crazy as a loon— "Did you say twenty bolts?"— but that didn't bother Ben any, and again he put people to work cutting and sewing dozens of loose throw-over gownlike affairs with long sleeves and drawstrings at the necks and dozens more floppy surgical-type caps and masks. He scoured the town for surgical gloves, rubber kitchen gloves, rubber scrubbing gloves, anything that might work for isolation techniques, and had elastic banding put into the wrists for close fits. He bought and stored iodine, Clorox, chloride of lime, bichloride of mercury, Bard-Parker solution by the gallon, Pine-Sol by the five-gallon can and rubbing alcohol in whatever quantities he could drum up. He also saw that each group of campers had a big kettle or water boiler of some sort somewhere near the firepit, to be shifted onto the fire and filled at a moment's notice; and that each group had a fifty-gallon drum with a lid for discarding contaminated clothing; and that each had a big burning barrel.