The Blue Death

by Joan Brady

  ‘So how come guys aren’t still puking and shitting?’ Little Andy asked him. ‘How come you knew it was going to stop when it did?’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘How come we didn’t all do it?’

  ‘I can’t answer these questions, any of them. I wish I could.’

  ‘Come on, Quack. You got to. You have theories if not facts. You got to tell me what you think. I watched those guys die. That really scared me.’

  Quack wiped his arm across the sweat on his face. ‘Maybe the computer data at Medical Direct said that it would stop when it did,’ he said. ‘Maybe whatever it is occurred somewhere else, a small, contained outbreak. These guys were all working on the same section of the canal. Other sections seem okay. Maybe one of them got sick, and maybe there’s a shithouse out there that leaks into the plumbing beneath a standpipe they drink from.’

  ‘And some sick guy shat in it?’

  ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘How come—’

  ‘Let’s give the bones of the wrist another try, huh?’ Quack interrupted. ‘You really are quick, aren’t you? It took me ages to memorize this stuff.’

  Little Andy mouthed the phrase about Tracy’s panties, then began, ‘Scaphoid, er, lunate . triquetrum—’ He broke off. ‘You’re telling me this leaking thing happens twice? How’d this original sick guy get sick anyhow? Nice safari vacation in some weird country overseas? Shooting kangaroos?’

  ‘Doesn’t sound too likely, does it?’

  ‘What then?’

  Quack shook his head once more. ‘The worst-case scenario—’ He broke off, looked up at Little Andy, frowned, looked away. ‘I know somebody wanted me on hand when the first few cases showed. Why else would the Warden send me out? I haven’t done work like that in years. Medical Direct doesn’t usually show even a computer-generated interest in the records I keep and no interest at all in reviewing them. But that time? They wanted full reports. This second time canal workers got sick is the only other time they’d ever paid that kind of attention. The nurse hadn’t forgotten either. She said they wanted my notes “as before”.’

  Andy scrunched up his face, shook his head. ‘I can tell that you see the connection. That’s how come you figured Monk was the last new case.’

  ‘I don’t know that it’s the connection. It’s just that . New diseases crop up from time to time. New ones get created in labs. They need to be tested. Is this bug going to be any use in biological warfare? If so, what are the symptoms? What do they look like? How long do they take to subside? What’s the risk to an invading army? Nothing all that serious the first time around. What happens if there’s a more virulent strain of whatever it is? Might that one actually kill people? Just how might it do—’

  ‘Lab rats?’ Andy gasped. ‘Us? You’re kidding me.’

  ‘I hope I am, Andrew. I truly hope so.’

  17

  SANGAMON COUNTY, NORTH OF SPRINGFIELD: The last night in July and the first few hours of August

  Weather this hot for this long makes fire. Somebody’s cigarette? Or barbecue? Wood rubbing against wood in dry vegetation? Doesn’t matter in the end.

  Several fires had broken out during the afternoon in the wooded areas around Petersburg, just northwest of Springfield; smoke from them still made a haze across the road at midnight. A pressurized cylinder isn’t safe in a fire, and both tankers were 22-wheelers carrying pressurized cylinders. At least there’d been nothing but smoke so far, and there wasn’t anything but smoke at this chain-wire fence. The driver of the first tanker pulled to a stop, climbed down from his cab and ran through the smoke to open the gates. The smoke was acrid. He shut his eyes against it and felt his way to the door of a small structure beyond. He could hear the throb of machinery from inside.

  Lamar Bryant was afraid of fire. He had nightmares about it. Besides, all he wanted to do was get back to his Brittany. She’d spent the last few days with her family in Peoria – arrived home only after he’d left for this job. She was blonde, a real blonde, right down to her bush. He was proud of that. Thoughts of her meant a struggle to keep his mind on the road to this place. He fumbled in his pocket for the key to the structure’s door, and just the idea of putting a key in a lock made his breath come faster. His hands trembled in anticipation, and the damned smoke actually burned his eyes; the key slipped out of his hands. He shone his torch at the baked earth and squinted in search.

  ‘Hurry it up,’ called out the driver of the other tanker. He had the word ‘Boss’ tattooed across his knuckles, one letter per knuckle.

  ‘I’ve kind of . well . ’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Bryant.’

  ‘Got it, got it, got it.’

  He unlocked the door to the structure, ran back to Boss’s tanker to help him and the second man unload a stainless steel box as big as an old-fashioned jukebox. ‘What is this thing?’ he said to Boss. ‘Some kind of Coke machine? Jesus, it weighs a ton. What are all these gadgets on it?’

  Nobody answered him. The three of them manoeuvred the box onto a trolley and pushed it into the building. Lamar tended to his own tanker, easing it through the gates, unwinding a hose from it, pulling the hose inside. The others were already attaching the hose from their tanker to the box. Lamar craned his neck to watch, dabbing at his eyes with a Kleenex.

  ‘Get your nose out of this,’ Boss said to him.

  ‘Jesus, you guys. Hooking up a bunch of hoses ain’t exactly a state secret, is it? I mean, what could be in them tankers anyhow? Liquid gold? Pink champagne? Oil of—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  A third hose attached the gadget-laden box to a heavy container on a concrete plinth. This procedure took three hands, which made the third guy seem a masterpiece of efficient design; he had only one arm. ‘What are these machines supposed to do?’ Lamar went on; he stood back to survey them. ‘They look . I don’t know, maybe like some juiced-up espresso maker or some fucking thing. We going to supply the birds and bees with fresh, hot coffee? Bad idea. It’ll keep them awake all night. On the other hand, I’m not so sure about that. It might be kind of pretty. All that singing in the—’

  ‘Bryant! Shut your fucking mouth.’

  While Boss went to turn on the tankers’ pressure pumps, Lamar said, ‘You got any idea how come we got to go out at this hour of night? Why tonight? What’s so urgent about it? I mean, why couldn’t we do it in the morning? Be a hell of a lot easier. We could see what we’re doing.’ Lamar glanced around at the cement walls. ‘Not that this is a chamber fit for a lady or nothing. Probably just as ugly, day or night.’

  The one-armed guy gave him an irritable glance as pressure in the pumps outside roared into action.

  ‘I don’t even know your name,’ Lamar shouted over the noise. ‘How the fuck can a guy work with people he doesn’t even know the names of? Here’s this guy with “Boss” tattooed across his right hand. Is that really his name? Nobody says so. I asked him. He says it’ll do. Well, nobody’s just “Boss”, is he? He’s got to have a name.’

  The one-armed guy said nothing.

  ‘Hey, Boss,’ Lamar said as Boss reappeared, ‘doesn’t One Arm have a name either? He won’t talk to me.’

  Boss only turned to check over the couplings.

  ‘Fuck it all,’ Lamar went on, ‘you have no idea how these night jobs screw up my love life. What’s wrong with daytime? I could show you a much easier route. My wife was telling me about it. She knows this country, grew up near here. There are foxes and stuff in the underbrush. She keeps asking, “Lammie-love, what do you do on these night shifts?”’

  Boss was turning slowly back to face him. ‘She asks that?’

  ‘My Brittany is full of questions.’ Lamar smiled. ‘It’s really cute, know what I mean?’

  ‘And what do you tell her?’

  “Bout what?’

  ‘Night shifts.’

  ‘What am I supposed to tell her, wise guy? I tell her we help jukeboxes fuck ice-cream makers.’ Lamar gav
e a short laugh. ‘Does look kind of like that, don’t it? That’s what she says. Even all them gauges.’

  ‘You told your wife what this machinery looks like?’

  ‘What do you care what I tell her?’

  Lamar Bryant got home at three in the morning. He and Brittany lived in White-tailed Deer Town, a 1960s housing estate north of Springfield and right in the flight path of planes going to Chicago. Deer Town – that’s what its residents called it – was row upon row of homes, so many of them and so identical in layout that they’d once looked like wallpaper to passengers in planes flying out of Abraham Lincoln Capital Airport. Since then, trees had grown. So had hedges. Many of the houses had been torn down and replaced. Other owners had added extra storeys and extra garage space.

  Lamar and Brittany’s was one of the original houses, completely intact, still a single-storey, shoddy construction of plastic and wood. The whole place shook when Lamar slammed the front door behind him in his dash through the living room to the bedroom, where their one air conditioner rumbled away. He had his trousers unzipped and down as far as his knees by the time he hit the bed.

  An hour later, Lamar and Brittany were deep in sleep. So were all their neighbours. There was nobody to see the man who knelt beside the window of their bedroom. Not that anybody would have been likely to see him. Lamar wasn’t much of a gardener. He always said he liked weeds shoulder high; he said they looked ‘natural’. A privet hedge planted by a previous owner had grown into a small forest so dense that the Bryants hardly needed curtains in the bedroom.

  The kneeling man had had to cut a path to the window. He ran his hands over the elderly air conditioner that protruded from it, took a screwdriver out of the tool belt he wore around his waist and set to work.

  Old-fashioned air conditioners leak water. Sometimes they leak refrigerant too. Given just the right conditions, refrigerant can be dangerous, and the first signs of trouble can easily go unnoticed in the dark: vapour streaming out from the metal box that holds the machine’s compressor. The man didn’t wait around to watch. He was already on his feet and running when the first thin tongue of flame peeped out. But he certainly heard the whump of the explosion. Even the seventh graders of Lincoln City Junior High – on a chartered flight to Chicago for a special morning performance of Carmen at the Opera House – could see the orange-red fireball that lit up the sky.

  The story didn’t appear in the Journal-Register until the day after, but it was still front-page news:

  Two dead in freak fire

  Home-repaired air conditioner explodes

  Lamar and Brittany Bryant of White-tailed Deer Town died instantly when .

  18

  SPRINGFIELD: The first morning in August

  Jimmy’s campaign promise – a terrorist-proof control room for Springfield’s water utility – blossomed into a reality on the night Lamar died. The first of a series of running-in periods began then. What a showcase installation this was! So fully automated that a single person could monitor it.

  The single person that night was Pete Tanaka. He sat at an angled console lined with a bank of flat interactive touchscreens, all of them linked to a movable keyboard. Camera feeds to a bank of bigger screens included maps showing every distribution pipe, valve, pump station, pressure-monitoring station, water meter, even every service vehicle. GPS transmissions ensured that a touch of the finger could send out response teams to any defect, disruption, damage, threatening incident.

  Pete wasn’t good with humans; they veered off in such unexpected directions. But computers? He loved their glow, coloured lights, background hum, quiet crackle when the processor started up a new function. He’d studied this system, run through it many times but never been alone with it before. Now it was his until dawn. He’d spent a couple of hours feeling it out – very gently – resizing images and zooming in on them, panning for greater detail and focus while the city of Springfield held firm around him, everything under control.

  But Pete wasn’t holding so firm himself. He had a bladder infection that caused what doctors call ‘urgency’; when he had to take a leak, he had to do it right now. He was taking a sulphonamide for it, and sulphonamides have to be washed through the body. Lots of water in. Lots out. The problem was that the toilets for the control room weren’t yet installed. The only place to pee was along a criss-cross of hallways, down a flight of stairs to the basement. He’d figured he could handle it with the mayonnaise jars his mother kept for preserving; he’d stuffed his knapsack with them, and so far tonight he’d filled only two.

  At three in the morning, he discovered that the chair he sat in was as friendly as the electronics. It moved beneath him as though it were floating on air. A gentle shove: it hovered into the middle of the room. A harder shove, aim for the door at the far wall, go flying, feet off the floor, arms stuck out to provide a bumpered landing.

  The jolt and crunch came as a complete shock. And yet he knew at once what had happened.

  He’d set his knapsack near a corner when he arrived; he’d fetched two mayonnaise jars from it, replaced them in it. Not even so friendly a chair could fly over an obstacle like that. The stench of urine proved him right before a tentative glance inside showed the broken mayonnaise jars. And that’s when the urgency hit him. It didn’t even give him time to think. He hung on to his prick, made a dash for the basement, peed as fast as he could, then rushed back up the stairs.

  As he reached the top of the flight, the lights went off so suddenly that he teetered on the step and had to feel his way back along the corridors to the control room. By the time he made it through the door to his bank of computers, the only thing still powered up was the red warning signal on the angled console. As he watched, it too faded and died.

  He had a torch in his backpack. The problem was finding the thing. Why is it that when you can’t see, something you know is there isn’t where you left it after all? Why does it seem that somebody’s watching you? Forcing you to bumble around? Laughing at you as you pat along the skirting? When he finally found the pack, he grabbed for the torch in a panic, forgetting the broken mayonnaise jars, and leapt back with a yelp at the burn of a glass cut across his palm.

  ‘Help!’ he cried. ‘Somebody help!’ He held his breath and waited. Nothing. ‘Help! Control room! Help!’

  Nobody came. He slipped down against the wall to his haunches. His mother had taught him to count his breathing in and out if he got frightened. ‘One and a two and a . ’ He clenched his fist and felt a shock of pain. Blood spurted through the fingers. ‘Help! Help! Help!’

  Still nobody came.

  ‘One and a two . ’

  He took off his technician’s white coat, wrapped it around his hand as both bandage and protector and probed gently amid the broken jars for his torch, found it, got to his feet, switched it on. The control room landline stood on the console. He picked up the receiver. Dead. He pulled out his mobile, dialled the utility helpline. It was engaged. He tried 911. ‘Please wait for a connection,’ came the robot voice.

  The emergency generator should have switched on automatically. He located the room’s toolbox, balanced his torch, unscrewed a panel at the back of the console – blood dripping everywhere – found the manual override, flipped it. Still nothing. He’d just eased back on his haunches when the lights in the room flickered, and he heard the gentle bump of the computer start-up. The screens flashed. But they didn’t display the utility’s logo. They flashed again, trembled and went dark.

  Minutes passed. Nothing happened. A yawning emptiness opened up in him. His heart hurt. They’d find out about the piss bottles. They’d say he’d deserted his post, that if he hadn’t, none of this would have happened. They’d fire him. He’d never get another job, and he could see his mother crying with the shame of it.

  ‘Please. Please.’ He prayed directly to the computer system itself. ‘Please, wake up.’ Still nothing. He slumped against the console, and his mother’s tears rolled down his cheeks before
she had a chance to shed them.

  Not long after dawn, the sprinklers were on full across the Freyl lawns. High arcs of water and a fine spray made rainbows in the morning sun. The gardener was on the far side of the house; there was nobody to see the height of the spray drop abruptly, recover, drop again. Then it paused, gurgled, choked and stopped altogether.

  That gurgle and choke in the garden water supply showed itself inside the house when Lillian filled the kettle for coffee. She turned the tap off, set the kettle down, turned the tap on again. The water spat out at her. She jumped back, then glanced down at her apron. The water splattered over it was brown-grey. She brought the cloth to her nose and grimaced at the smell: dead skunks and ammonia.

  She checked the basin in the downstairs bathroom. Same thing. She checked the laundry room. Again the same. She changed her apron and went into the dining room where Becky – glasses on her nose, head bent over a pile of papers, BlackBerry resting between emails – had the TV on to catch the morning headlines.

  ‘Miz Freyl,’ Lillian said, ‘I’m afraid something—’

  But the news anchor beat her to it.

  ‘Warning!’ he cried from behind a black-edged yellow screen that read:

  WARNING

  HAZARD

  ‘Reports have just come in,’ the anchor went on, ‘that water supplies to some homes on the west side of Springfield are contaminated. Springfield Light and Power has issued an emergency press release warning residents not to drink water from their taps, cook with it or brush their teeth with it. They must not even bathe in it.’

  ‘It sure do stink,’ Lillian said.

  Becky glanced up, shook her head in despair. The timing couldn’t be worse. The open Council meeting was on Tuesday. People would discuss Jimmy’s plans to privatize Springfield’s water with this awful smell lingering in their noses as well as their minds. They’d listen to a call for change.