Denver Is Missing

by D. F. Jones

  “You’re an incurable optimist!” She fell silent. The moon rose, the wind-singing rigging throwing shadows across the main sail. The world of Suffren, cars, TV, and city sidewalks was incredibly remote….

  “Give me a cigarette, will you, Mitch?”

  We lit up and I moved closer. I’m not totally insensitive.

  “I’ll tell you about Denver.”

  “Don’t, if you don’t want to.”

  “No! Now is okay. Back there it was all too close, all too likely to happen again.”

  She fell silent once more, and I had concluded she had changed her mind when she began:

  “Denver, Colorado. Never been there before. I don’t know much more about it now. It may have been a swell place to live, bring up kids, watch TV, and die in; I wouldn’t know….” Her voice trailed off, her mind elsewhere. She turned her head to me, her face hidden in shadow. “Fantastic; that’s the only word for it. Come on, Mitch—what d’you think it was like? Tell me!”

  “Hell, that’s the damdest question to answer!”

  “Sure, but I’d like to hear. After all, you have had some experience with the gas. If you can’t visualize it, what chance is there of the average person getting the idea— until it’s too late?”

  “Well, I guess you landed at the airport, got drafted to a hospital which was full of cardiacs. I expect you found the air thin, or more accurately, low on oxygen, and, well it must have been pretty tough for a girl—”

  She gave her view of that in one short, sharp bark of a laugh. “Listen, I’ll tell you. When we took off we thought we were heading north. Before we’ve settled down, we land at the International Airport and unload. The senior medic tells us that this is a deadly secret; there is trouble in Denver. So, okay, we get all the gear out and after the usual fooling around we get airborne, not feeling so good about all this; but if we’re needed in Denver, okay, we’re needed in Denver. We get there. What d’you think happened then, Mitch?”

  I did not answer.

  “We taxi in, stop. Then the captain came on the p/a; ‘Please remain seated for fifteen minutes after the doors are opened. Just relax—and no smoking.’ We do just that. For a couple of minutes it seemed normal, then the buildup began. In five minutes I was breathing as if I had walked a half mile pretty fast. It was a hot day, and sitting in that plane we were like foil-wrapped chickens in an oven. An Army officer came aboard, strolled—there’s no other word for it—to the center of the plane.

  “That was the keynote of Denver, slow, seemingly casual movement, every action in slow motion—and fear in everyone’s eyes. The officer was sweating like a pig, his face bright red. He looked to me like our first customer. After a minute’s rest he spoke, weird clipped strings of words which just made sense. We Americans get through a hell of a lot of words—ask Bill—but Denverese is practically a new language. He said, ‘Relax.’ He tapped his chest. ‘Five minutes getting aboard. Rest often.’ He looked toward the exit. ‘Out. Bus.’ And all the time he was panting, the sweat pouring down his face.

  “We moved out real slow, but by the time we’d got in the bus I felt as if I’d just busted the two hundred meters sprint, and there was a beastly, metallic taste in my mouth like hot copper which stayed—remember it?”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “I thought we’d move off, but no. The officer had moved up beside the driver. There’s a small oxygen bottle and mask there, he takes a quick suck at this, we sit there watching hungrily—and we’re the relief force, not ten yards from our plane yet! He gives us a bleak grin, then talks fast, while he can. ‘Special allowance. All oxygen is now under Army control. So’s Denver. Martial laws rules here, and we ain’t kidding. To protect you, or more truthfully, your oxygen supplies, you’ll have an armed escort wherever you go—and don’t try to duck it. Plenty of people will kill in this town for a single whiff of this stuff! You’re OEP—Oxygen Entitled Personnel. This means you may have some if you need it to keep going, but no more. There’s not enough oxygen in the whole United States to satisfy Denver right now, so in all circumstances treat it like gold dust, only more so. Right. Here we go.” He was fading fast. “Remember, relax. Obey orders.” And so we drive off.

  “He was right about the martial law. We got our first sight of what that meant at the airport entrance. Two or three Army trucks parked across the road, allowing passage for only one vehicle at a time, the gap covered by two machine guns, one on either side, the crews flat on the road. It was easier that way. It doesn’t take much energy to pull a trigger, and they’d proved it! There were ten, maybe more bodies—I didn’t count—crumpled up in the sun. Left there, dead and dying, because it took too much energy to move them.”

  “Jesus! I didn’t know—”

  “Wait till you hear the rest,” said Bette sardonically. “One time I saw a shooting match—the Army weren’t the only people with guns—three men in a car tried to bust through a roadblock, firing to keep the soldiers’ heads down, but the Army fired right back, and the car hit a fireplug or something. One man got out. I remember him, fat and fortyish, shooting a hand gun, the soldiers firing back. He wanted like hell to get to cover—God knows how they missed him—and this is the point: the best he could do in the face of death, was a drunken amble!”

  “Maybe he was hit—”

  “No. He hadn’t a mark on him,” said Bette with unusual calm. “I know. He took shelter in the same doorway as me. Died there too—heart.”

  Her cool, matter-of-fact recital detracted nothing from the fearful tale. “But surely,” I protested, “why not let them go?”

  “You still don’t get it! When Denver was hit, people were totally unprepared. Hell, they didn’t even know what, was happening to them! In those first few chaotic hours there was a mad rush to get out of town. Panic stricken, they just went, and achieved the biggest automobile smashes in history! That was my first assignment from the hospital. Three of us sent out in a chopper—the road was completely blocked with abandoned cars, trucks, everything. From the air it looked like a gigantic Fourth of July jam, only not so neat. Cars on sidewalks, in ditches, and up front the real smash. On the out-of-town highway, eighty, ninety, oh I don’t know.” She shook her head hopelessly. “One hideous tangled pile-up. Then, a hundred yards further on, on the in-bound lanes, another, worse one, head-on stuff caused by people driving over the center strip and tearing off on the wrong side. Not that we did anything there. The whole thing was blazing. We worked on the other—heap—I can’t think of a better word. I’m not too bad as a doctor, Mitch, but I’m no surgeon. I did three amputations in that mess, just to get people out. One of those was a waste of time. The kid was dead before I finished.”

  “Bette! I had no idea! You—”

  “No! Neither have most people! After three hours I felt as if I had spent my life in a junkyard. Fortunately, I was back on the grass with a casualty when that whole thing went up!”

  “You mean….”

  “What d’you think? By then it was dark, gas all over the road. Maybe it was a spark from the other fire, I don’t know. Anyway, there was one almighty whump! and it went. Maybe the oxygen scarcity delayed it. Certainly there was a lot of smoke, and I guess most of them died of asphyxia. The screaming didn’t last long. , . .” She lit a cigarette. Her hand was shaking.

  “You may think me hard-boiled. Darling, any other attitude would have had me raving mad in the first ten hours. Well, we did what we could. I sat with my flock of casualties on the roadside with not much more light than the fires. The Army sent a big chopper out. Even with the aid of a shot of oxygen now and then, it took two hours to load up. Then the foul-ups really began for us.” She drew heavily on her cigarette.

  “I’m not blaming anyone; few, perhaps none of us, appreciate just how complex a city is. It grows, bit by bit over fifty, a hundred years, more. As long as it works, fine. We beef about the traffic and when there is a strike of some utility, like garbage collection, we get a hint, and pretty
soon forget that, too! But you toss a real spanner in the works like this one, and bingo!” She stopped, and did not continue until she had finished her cigarette.

  “No. You can’t blame anyone. That chopper, a big Piasecki, had been flown in by a pilot who was a stranger to Denver. He had an easy time reaching us, our Army escort talked him in, and the fires helped. To get back he had to rely on some creep of a nurse from the hospital who was supposed to know the way. Yes, the hospital’s pad would be flood-lit—only we couldn’t find the hospital! In the end we put down in some clear space in the city where there was enough light to see where we were going. We send the nurse off for help and reckon to stay put until dawn—and then a gang of men try to hijack the plane!”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “I wish I was! Four or five men stagger—and I mean stagger—up clutching guns and order the pilot to take off. He was pretty shot anyway, and tells them that he’ll never get off in that light with the load he’s got. These guys would have tossed all of us out if they’d had the strength or spotted our oxygen. Instead, they order us to get the casualties out. Well, we are groping around, four of the men on the ground covering us, with one in the plane with the pilot, when a police car turns up—for sure they were OEP! One of the gunmen panicked and took a shot at the police, then they all started shooting. In the confusion the pilot got his gun out and covered the guy with him, the police shot two on the ground, and the other two stuck their hands up. The pilot turned over his capture, and the police finished them off.”

  “You mean they just shot them?”

  Standing beside Bette on the heaving deck of Mayfly in all that solitude made it even harder to believe.

  “Of course they shot them! What d’you think they’d do, take ’em back to the station and charge them? Well, there were no ambulances, and the pilot wasn’t kidding, so we stayed where we were, and moved on to the hospital at first light. Most of our patients over forty were dead by then. The hospital was a shambles, what with the accident cases from all over—a lot of people died just driving—plus the shooting, plus all the SARAH aggravated cases.” She shook her head. “Mitch, you’ve no idea, Denver has slipped back to the Middle Ages!”

  “I’m sorry, Bette,” I said humbly, and really meant it. “I can’t imagine how you stood it.”

  “If you’re stuck with it, you’re stuck with it! Don’t get the wrong idea, I’m no heroine. But for you, yesterday, I would have folded completely.” She wanted to finish the story, to unload it on someone. She went on, keeping to her matter-of-fact tone.

  “So the hospital was filled to capacity. I’d lost track of my group, and it took me three hours to find out where the control center was, and another hour before I got transportation to it. More by luck than anything, I met up with our senior medic and he took me off to our quarters in a swell hotel, or it had been, for all service had collapsed. No food, no hot water. What with giving morphia and blood plasma in the helo, plus all the other excitements, I hadn’t done so well for sleep. I flopped out on a bed. Even after two or three hours’ sleep, when I was wakened, my pulse was ten percent up. Someone had got some Army emergency rations. We sat around eating those, warned to be ready to operate as a group. We moved as a relief team to a casualty center, but when we arrived, we found the place had been cleared, all patients had been sent to the airport for evacuation! So I—we—sat around angry, frightened, and fantastically tired. A bit later we move back to the hospital to take over for the medics there, who are practically dead. In the general chaos, not knowing the layout or anything, we overlook for a time one private room. Mel— you don’t know him—finds it, comes back, gasping for a guard.” She shuddered. “There’s two oxygen tents set up, with five babies in one bed under one tent, only there’s no oxygen, and they’re dead, the oxygen bottle’s missing. And in the other bed,” she drew a deep breath, “there’s a young man—if you can even call him human—asleep, lying on top of the bed. What with looking at the babies, it is some time before Mel realized that the man was on the bed, not in it. Then he saw; there was a body beneath the youth. That was when he called for the guard, who got the youth awake and out. Seems be sneaked in, easy to do under the circumstances, stole the kids’ air bottle, and decided to have a quick whiff in the other tent. Like most people, he was pretty exhausted, and once his breathing got normal, he slept. The kids’ oxygen bottle was in the bed.”

  “What about the guy underneath?”

  “He was dead. Maybe the youth suffocated him deliberately—who knows?”

  “What then?”

  “Nothing, really. The guard took him out and shot him—after he’d been made to carry the bodies to the morgue.” She tried to laugh it off. “That was the high-spot of my time in Denver. After that, there couldn’t be much more, but there was….” She gestured irritably as if I was forcing her. “But we’ll skip that. Humans! Under the thin veneer, we’re no better than animals, except that insults animals! I keep thinking of that—that vampire! The only comforting thought I can find is that he must have been mad, really mad, yet he didn’t seem…. Oh, skip it! Well, we went on doing what we could, which wasn’t much. Then the final twist! A new bunch of doctors, nurses arrive to take over. This crowd is from Boston. It seems we should not have been called in the first place! Some panic-stricken idiot had either over-ridden the orders that existing disaster areas were not to be called upon for help, or had overlooked the order. So once more the nightmare trip back to the hotel to get our gear, then another wait, first there, then at the control center, finally at the airport. By the time the Army was getting really organized. All gas stations were closed and under armed guard, all private cars and trucks not officially authorized, banned, partly to help clear the roads, partly to reduce air pollution. Anyway, after hours—I phoned you then, and that took time, believe me—I got drafted to an L.A. bound plane as medic in charge of passengers, with me stopping off with a nurse and some equipment in San Francisco.”

  “Bette, I can’t tell you how sorry, hell, I can’t think of anything—”

  “Don’t bother, Mitch. There’s a lot more I could tell you. We think we’re mighty civilized. Don’t you believe it! That crowd at the railroad station was only warming up! I don’t aim to chance my luck more often than I have to. Back in Denver I was lucky. We lost a doctor and a nurse, killed by stray shots; three more were wounded. No,” her voice was climbing dangerously, “I won’t get caught a second time. Not if I can help it!”

  “There’s something more—isn’t there?”

  She hesitated. “Yes, there is. At some point—I can’t say when, it’s all so mixed-up—we were given guns.” She paused, then went on with sudden fierceness. “I didn’t want the damned thing—few of us did—we were doctors! Anyway, we were armed.” Her voice sank; she held my arm tightly. “And we used them.

  “Some men tried to raid the casualty center. I was in the main aisle—it was a church—patients all around me. There was a terrible noise, shouting, shots. Two men burst in, with guns. I had mine out, holding it with both hands. The look on one man’s face—it reminded me….” She was trembling. Gently I took the tiller from her. Right then she was not on Mayfly.

  “I shut my eyes, pulled the trigger. The gun fired and fired, and then it was empty…. When I looked, one man had gone, the other was on the floor.” She buried her head in my free arm. “A guard staggered in and shot the man again. I don’t know, I may have killed…”

  “Bette, darling—what else could you do? It was horrible, dreadful for you, but honestly, I only hope I’ve got the guts to do what you did.”

  “It’s much worse than that, Mitch. The thought that haunts me is not that I may have killed, but the knowledge that after seeing that man’s eyes, I wanted to! And I’m a doctor.”

  “A doctor defending her patients.”

  “Yes, that’s a comforting thought, but it’s not really worth much. I’d have fired anyway.”

  I got the coffee out, lacing it heavil
y with rum. I reckoned we both needed it.

  At midnight Bill and Karen took over. As I edged past Karen she said in a carefully neutral voice, “Sorry I couldn’t change the sheets, but they’re paper.” Darkness hid her face, but I could guess at her expression.

  I let Bette go ahead, and hung around in the saloon, thinking over the appalling story of her time in Denver. What a strange mixture she was! Tough as hell, and soft, tender….

  Bette was in the bunk, turned away from me as I hastily undressed. Not that it mattered; the small oil lamp swinging from the deck-head was no floodlight.

  I climbed in beside her, felt her smooth, cool flank touching me, and at once Denver and all the rest dwindled and vanished. She turned to face me. “Darling,” her voice was husky, unsteady, “darling Mitch…”

  For the next thirty-six hours we made good progress; the weather was ideal. We averaged five to six knots, around seven miles per hour, but we did it twenty-four hours a day, no fuel stops, no traffic lights, jams. In fact, it began to look as if the Pacific was our private lake, for we saw no other craft. Now and then we glimpsed the coast, but Bill was careful to keep a good twenty miles offshore.

  A small boat is a fine place to find out the defects in the characters of other people—and to learn a thing or two about oneself. We got on very well together, accepting each other’s idiosyncrasies: Karen’s gay cheerfulness in the early morning, Bill’s passion for cleanliness.

  He told us, with a very assumed air of carelessness, that he took a bath every morning. We Californians were somewhat surprised, knowing the temperature of our ocean, but with unfailing regularity, he would appear, a towel around his waist, clutching a bucket and sponge, and get up on the foredeck. If Bette was around, she would find something pressing to do below. I tried it once, but salt water soap and the Pacific failed to charm me.

  We also discovered he had another phobia. He was alone on deck, the rest of us below, busy with various chores.