Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  Some of the people objected to "all this nonsense," of course, didn't feel like sewing up all these yard goods in a hurry, didn't see the point, but Amy Slencik, with Ben's full approval and blessing, laid down the law when necessary. "Ain't nobody around here going to freeload, everybody works, and if Doc Chamberlain says sew up them gowns, you'd better start sewing up a storm. I'm not too sure what he thinks he's doing, but you can bet your ass he does, and what he wants he gets, and if any of you don't feel like sitting down and working, you can pack up and leave any old time you want." Amy sewed with the rest, and Ben watched things piling up, and got them stored where he wanted them, and if there was a little bit of overkill mixed in with what he was doing, that was all right too. It'd keep their hands busy and their minds on something, by God, but that was just a side benefit—because when the Horseman finally came riding up Grizzly Creek—and Ben knew in his bones that the time would come—he intended to be as ready as he could get.

  But if Amy-helped prepare, and the others as well, the real heroes of the preparation were the two Slencik boys. They worked their hearts out helping Ben get ready. While Harry monitored the radio for news and Mel Tapper brought venison down from the hills, the boys manned the shovels and the hoes, the tractors, the plows, the posthole diggers, the trenching tools, the rock buckets, the hammers and saws, the paintbrushes, the pinch bars. From the beginning, with nothing even said, they became Ben Chamberlain's good right arms; when Ben proposed, the boys disposed—quietly, efficiently and well. Huge, fearsome-looking brutes, the two of them, with their solid legs and broad shoulders and shaggy, sandy beards, they looked like bouncers, but were actually the major getters-of-things-done. As their wives grew progressively larger and rounder, the boys worked harder and in the long run, made possible two-thirds of the things around the place that got managed, whether it was rebuilding the barn into a sick bay or amiably keeping the peace just by their huge presences at times when the peace might easily not have been kept at all. If the Freehold were ultimately to be of benefit to anyone, Ben realized, it would be the boys more than anyone else who had made it possible. . . .

  When the blow finally came, it came hard and fast. Jennie Ozmovitch had pneumonic plague, no question about it. When Ben got the call early that stormy morning, he threw gown, cap, mask and gloves on over his winter clothes and drove over to Circle 5. The girl, about ten, was wheezing and coughing blood, fever and chills. It must have come with the last camper that had pulled in from somewhere down in Nebraska just three days before, part of the same circle, and sure enough, two others of them weren't feeling too well either, father and son in a family of five, running fevers, some vomiting in the night. Ben drove Jennie down to the Sick Barn after carefully examining her mother and father and brother, telling them what to watch out for, having them put clothing and bedding into the kettle to boil and dress in boilable gowns and gloves before scrubbing down the camper with Pine-Sol, every inch of floor and walls and ceiling, every dish. Later he hauled the father and son from the new rig down to the Sick Barn too, using only his old Bronco to do the hauling and having one of the Slencik boys stand by to swab down the inside of the vehicle when he came back.

  By then it was dawn, and during the long day that followed, he swung his long-planned operation from the preparation to the active phase, personally and from a distance warning each family in each camper that plague was there, reinforcing orders previously only discussed in theory, setting up cooking and food-distribution arrangements and getting set to enforce strict isolation of each family in its own living quarters. About five that afternoon Elmer Slencik, who had drawn the short straw for the first twelve-hour watch at the Sick Barn, sent word for Ben to come on the double, and at six-fifteen Jennie Ozmovitch was dead; she already had had a bad cold when the infection had struck, anemia and chronic malnourishment piled on top of that—nothing much to fight with—and Mel Tapper and Harry Slencik pitched in to the grimmest task of all, put off even by Ben until absolutely necessary: digging the wide, deep pit in the frozen, rocky earth at the far corner of Mel's pasture and lowering the girl's almost weightless body, covering it with quicklime from the barrel Ben had stored there and then with a thin layer of earth. They made it extra wide and extra deep at Ben's personal direction; there were going to be more where Jennie came from.

  That evening Ben met at his place with Harry and Amy and Martha Tapper and Dan Potter after an evening inventory had shown two people in Circle 1 with slight fevers, but no other symptoms. "There can't be any possible mistake?" Amy said. "She couldn't have just had pneumonia?"

  "No," Ben said. "It's here, beyond the slightest doubt."

  "It must have been that last bunch that brought it," Amy said darkly.

  "It doesn't matter," Ben said wearily. "Maybe it was them, maybe not. It could have been me on that last run I took to Bozeman—they've got it there now, too. It just doesn't matter, Amy. If it wasn't those people, it would be somebody else. So now the long winter begins. We've got to remember the rules if nobody else does: isolate; disinfect; support the sick ones. Get them down to the Sick Barn as soon as we're sure there's active infection. Thank God I got some oxygen last trip in, and some visqueen for tents. We'll have to use triage, save the oxygen for the strongest ones, the ones with the best chance of slugging it out. The other end of the triage is to keep the sickest and weakest down in the critical corner and just try to make them comfortable. It's going to be brutal, but we've got to do it. Martha, you've got to handle food for down there."

  "Yes, and I'll see that the kettles keep boiling and help with the disinfecting," Amy said. "And I'll set up a schedule for the runners—we've got to have people to carry food, supplies, messages, from one place to another—"

  Ben shook his head. "I don't want any more people moving anywhere than we absolutely have to. I'm going to be exposed anyway, I'll do as much of the moving and contacting as I can, as long as I can."

  "Like hell you will, Ben," Amy said. "Of all the people around this whole place, you are the one single one that isn't expendable. We've got to have you directing things, not screwing around with details. You of all of us have got to stay clean, Ben. With you around, we've got a chance. If you go, we might as well just go howl at the moon. I'll take care of the runners."

  The storm had ended, and that night the temperature sank like a stone, 10 degrees below zero next morning, and there it stayed. The Freehold valley was like a frozen, silent death camp. Eight o'clock inventory that morning found four more sick enough to be taken to the Sick Barn and two others to be rechecked later; all these were from Circle 3, untouched the day before. Heat tapes connected to Harry's gasoline generator and transformers kept the water lines open, but fire-watchers had to be appointed to keep the fire pits going; late winter cold snaps like this, Harry warned, could go on for days or weeks. On that second day Ben Chamberlain, having been up and moving forty-eight hours without a break, reached the end of his rope and turned direction over to Amy and Elmer, and went to bed. It was a long sleep, and just as well; it was his last unbroken sleep for a long time. When he woke up on whatever day it was—the third or fourth or fifth, he couldn't be sure—there was too much work piled up for any long sleep again. Day melted into day; it was an endless, exhausting, defeating Red Queen's race just trying to keep from falling farther and farther behind, and nobody had time or energy or interest to keep much of a diary. When things happened, as of course they did happen, they didn't happen on such-and-such a day at such-and-such an hour, they just happened one day, or one night, indistinguishable from any other, each as dread-filled and endless as the last.

  One day—maybe the fifth or sixth—there were twelve people in the Sick Barn, three certainly and imminently going out, two almost certainly going very soon; four more had joined Jennie Ozmovitch in the cold comfort of the rocky pit—but Russ Jenkins, the father of the family from Nebraska, was still limping along, perhaps even getting a little better with the support of oxygen and intravenous flui
ds, and his son, beside him in the same partitioned cubicle, was doing much the same without oxygen. Two others were still breathing unsupported and not actually doing worse. Ben steadily made his twice-a-day inventory of all the campers and trailers, one job he would not let Amy delegate to herself. One day he found one more to send down to the Sick Barn, a teen-age boy who was sick enough not to object; twelve hours later he found four more, and next day, another day, there were three.

  One night, just as he was finishing his camper rounds with Circle 7 (every circle, of course, had been hit by now) a man

  "'HW

  came out, took him aside. "Doc, you'd better know. Some of the people are lying. Fran Solomon, over in that blue-and-white rig, won't report sick, but the women say she was coughing all night and has a terrible fever. She's got her baby with her, you know. She don't want to go to the Sick Barn. Scared to. Says nobody's ever coming back from there. . . ."

  Ben sighed and said, "Just don't say anything for a half an hour and I'll try to take care of it, okay?" He'd had suspicions in two or three other places too. He drove down and saw Russ Jenkins in his Sick Barn cubicle. "You doing better, Russ?"

  "Yeah, breathing better. Been off the oxygen for over a day now, too. Mighty weak, though."

  Ben believed him; he looked like a walking corpse, but one side of his lungs, bubbling last night, was almost clear now. "You think maybe you could walk for about fifteen minutes, if I helped you?"

  "Mebbe. I-could try."

  Ben bundled him up against the frigid night air and supported him out to the Bronco and then drove back to Circle 7. "That blue-and-white rig, woman named Fran. She's sick and won't go to the Sick Barn. Thinks everybody goes there is going to die. You go in and tell her, Russ. Tell her that you were dying, and you got better in the Sick Barn. Lie to her a little, tell her I said you could be out of there tomorrow and go back to your family. You can't, quite, not tomorrow, but tell her I said you could."

  He helped Russ up to the door, and he went in. Low talking, a woman sobbing, denying, refusing. A minute or two later the man came back out. "No use, Doc. She's got her baby. She won't take her baby down there."

  In desperation Ben turned to Amy. "Maybe you can woman-talk her," he said. "She's going to infect the baby and everybody else in the circle." Amy struggled into a boiled, frozen stiff gown and cap and mask and icy rubber scrub gloves and went into the rig; she was there almost fifteen minutes, but came out shaking her head.

  "But damn it, what are we going to do with her?" Ben exploded, a week's frustration pouring out.

  "I don't think we're going to do anything with her," Amy said with uncharacteristic gentleness. "Poor woman is sick, but it's scared to death she is, and not just for herself, for the baby. If she's not going to go, we can't make her. Mark the door or something and warn everybody that nobody goes near the rig except me. I'll dress up in this monkey suit and take care of her. We've got that extra kerosene heater over at our place—I'll bring that over, get some heat in there, and maybe I can get her to let me take care of the baby over at our place. But you can't make a woman like that do anything; she'd drive herself off down the road first, and we can't let her do that. ..."

  There wasn't any extra kerosene heater, Ben knew that, just the one in Amy and Harry's bedroom, but he acquiesced, and a day or so later Amy had the baby boy over at her kitchen table, a husky kid, no sign of sickness, and Fran Solomon was at least still breathing. . . .

  Things like that happened. Unexpected things turned up. Ben learned you could set up the plans, but you couldn't make people follow them, He did his best, and day followed day, and new sick ones turned up every day, but there wasn't the wildfire through the Freehold that he had heard about in other communities; something they were doing was helping. Presently there were twenty-three dead by the grisly tally Amy kept on the kitchen calendar, the only record anybody was keeping—but five or six who had been deathly sick were recovering—make that seven, Teddy Bairn's fever just broke and he sweat so much he soaked through a six-inch-thick straw-and-ticking mattress and left a puddle on the floor under the shiplap pallet he was lying on, and that tight chest of his sure as hell was breaking up.

  Another day, late in the afternoon, a woman from Circle 2 flagged Ben down as he headed into his cabin for a catnap. "Another rig came in this morning," she said, "a big thing down from Utah. Full of people. Turned around and got out of here like the devil was after them when they found out we'd been hit. You should have seen 'em run!"

  "Yeah, I guess it figures," Ben said, looking down at the woman from the window of his Bronco. "Nobody wants to snuggle up too much to what we've got."

  "Well, reason I stopped you—they talked a minute before they left. Said somebody somewhere down in Nebraska was experimenting with some new drug that really did wonders against plague. Lots of sick people getting well. Some kind of new wonder drug."

  "Somewhere down in Nebraska, huh?" Ben said sourly. "Well, that figures too. It wouldn't be right around the corner here."

  "Still, maybe you should look into it," the woman said. "Maybe we could get some of it."

  "You know somebody here that wants to drive down to Nebraska?" Ben asked.

  "Well, not me! At least I know what's going on here. .

  "Yeah. Well, you go home and take your vitamins, Becky, and let's not worry about some wonder drug down in Nebraska. Before this is over we're going to be hearing about more new wonder drugs turning up somewhere else than God made little apples. I don't think there's going to be any wonder drugs for us."

  People stopped Ben to talk to him like that, everyplace he went. Talked about all kinds of crazy things sometimes, never any telling what was on their minds, and they had a lot of time for thinking about things. They'd stop Ben and talk to him, or come to his place and talk to him, when they wouldn't dare go near anybody else. He always took time to pause and listen and talk to them, too, and they didn't mind if he always took a mask out of his pocket and slipped it over his nose and mouth when anybody came near—in fact, it was a kind of reminder to them, when they tended to forget or get sloppy, and they'd go home and tell the others, "Don't forget those masks when you're near somebody. I was talking to Doc today, and he never forgets."

  And then one day, another day, Harry Slencik came down the trail to Ben's place just at dark in the evening, just as Ben had pulled in and was getting himself something with rum and butter and brown sugar in it to warm him up after making his evening inventory out in the cold. It surprised Ben a little, seemed like he hadn't seen Harry except for a glimpse or two across a field for a week or more. Big, bland-faced Harry Slencik with his sweat-stained old cowboy hat cocked to one side as usual on his big head, and the usual big grin on his face; but that night when Ben greeted him and asked him in, it seemed as though Harry's big grin had some look of a skull about it. "Cold out there," Harry said, and looked over at Ben's rum-and-butter. "You got any more of that stuff around, why don't you buy me one?"

  The big man walked over and sat down, warmed his hands by Ben's fireplace while Ben made the drink. Took a long pull, big smile gone, set the cup down on the hearth and just sat staring at the flickering light.

  Ben sat down across from him. "Amy, Harry?"

  Harry nodded. "She'd kill me if she knew I was down here; she says it's nothin', just a little chest cold, but it's not just a little chest cold. Coughing and feverish, threw up once this morning that I know of. She's been goin' too hard, hasn't been taking precautions, goin' into all those trailers, takin' care of that baby; I told her she shouldn't be doing all that, but hell, Ben, I can't tight with Amy when she's got her mind made up, you know that."

  "No, you don't get far fighting with Amy. But we'd better go up and see her."

  Harry nodded again, stood up slowly. "Ben, listen. She don't want to go down to that barn down there, and I don't want her to. I'll put her to bed and take care of her, make sure nobody comes in and gets contaminated or nothin'."

  "Harry, for C
hrist sake—"

  "I know it ain't very smart, but that's what I want. We been in that cabin up there too long to go somewhere else now."

  Well, Amy wasn't the only hardheaded one in the family, Ben thought, trudging up the path with Harry. He checked her over carefully, and after a sad little pro forma protest that everything was fine, she let him get her to bed, get some aspirin into her, get something cold on her forehead. He didn't put on mask or gown or gloves; there'd been too many things in the past, they'd all been together too long for that at this point, he wasn't going to look at this woman out of a big protective gown or over a cold muslin face mask, to hell with that. "Well, you're right," he said finally. "You've got a little bronchitis; what you need right now is some sleep and a little rest for a couple of days, and Harry'll see that you get it. But you've got to stay in bed—no going out. no seeing anybody. There are others can pick up the load. ..." And Amy nodded weary agreement, no argument there, and turned her head, got comfortable with her wheezing and occasional burst of coughing and was sleeping, finally, before Ben clapped Harry on the shoulder and left. Back at his cabin he threw ail his clothes into the big vat of Clorox and sloshed his hands and face and hair with Bard-Parker's, but his heart wasn't in it. It seemed, all of a sudden, that his heart wasn't in anything anymore. At this point, who the hell cares? And what does it matter?

  Amy died about.two the next afternoon, Lord only knew how long she'd been sick before even Harry noticed. Tears were freezing on Harry's cheeks as he and Ben and Mel Tapper put her down in the burial place just at dusk, and nobody said any words, it was just too bitter cold to stand out there talking. But—maybe it was an omen—that night the frigid, icy sky clouded over and the temperature outside rose thirty-five degrees overnight and next day a warm southerly breeze brought the mercury above freezing and somebody said something about it seeming almost springlike and after a while Ben Chamberlain found himself thinking that Amy or no Amy, maybe some of the Freehold would endure. . .