The Blue Death

by Joan Brady

  ‘Glasses?’

  ‘Top left.’

  He got out a couple of tumblers, poured the wine, brought her a glass and sat on the edge of the desk. She gave him an irritated glance, but he stayed where he was. Ten minutes later, he got up to tend to the hash, came back, sat on her desk for another ten minutes before he had to tend to the hash again. By this time her glass was empty. So was his. He poured another for both of them.

  ‘Getting me drunk, are you?’ she said irritably.

  ‘It’s worth a try.’

  ‘Not really.’

  It was past sunset by this time and already pitch-black outside. The wooded area beyond the windows was too dense for light from the moon or from the town to penetrate. He leaned over Helen and pointed into the dark. ‘See that bird out there?’

  ‘Bird? What bird?’

  ‘That bird. See it?’

  ‘Christ, David, it’s too damn dark to see anything out there. You can’t see a bird out there. Nobody can.’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘Really.’ She turned resolutely back to her book.

  ‘I used to watch you like that,’ he said. ‘Other guys watched starlings and pigeons. I watched you.’

  She pretended not to hear.

  ‘The first time . ’ He paused, started again. ‘You were wearing ribbons in your hair. It was your birthday party and—’

  ‘Jesus, David, you were in prison.’

  He only nodded. ‘Summer. Lots of flowers in bloom. Lots of kids playing. Punch and hot dogs in a tent. Huge pile of presents. You pulled a little boy’s hair, scratched a little girl, ate all the icing off your cake and threw up.’

  ‘I didn’t!’ she said despite herself.

  ‘The next summer you fell off your horse and dislocated your kneecap. That was very painful, but you didn’t cry. I was proud of you.’

  ‘Daddy told you all this?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘You must have been bored out of your wits,’ she said.

  He looked away, looked back. ‘I hated it when you went east to school. He’d sometimes tell me about your letters, but they were so cut-and-dried I couldn’t figure out what was going on in your life. You barely even mentioned that you’d been elected to give the valedictory speech at your graduation. I was proud of you for that too.’

  ‘David Marion, are you flirting with me?’

  ‘I used to be good at flirting. Long time ago.’

  ‘How the fuck can you flirt with me and humiliate my family?’

  He got up and went to tend the hash once more. ‘I don’t think your grandmother had any idea it would go this far.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus, David. Call the police. You can’t handle this. Nobody can. Call the cops. Call the FBI. Call somebody.’

  ‘And tell them what? A concerned friend worries that an old woman might be in need of medical help?’

  ‘Well, what the fuck can an ex-con like you do?’

  ‘Work out a security system. Look up some people I know. This house is a joke. Any fool can break in. She needs to get out of that wheelchair. She’s an easier target if she can’t move on her own.’

  Helen stared at him in fury, then all at once collapsed into laughter. ‘David, they can kill her, but she’ll never get out of that chair. How’s she going to rule me without it?’

  ‘It’s part of the deal.’ He turned to look at her, the spatula in his hand, and she could see a childlike triumph on his face. ‘She walks or she looks somewhere else for security.’

  Corned beef hash can be pretty good if you’re not too picky an eater. The bottle of wine turned into two, then three. By midnight he was stretched out on the floor; she was sitting cross-legged beside him when there was a sudden small movement in the dark forest beyond the windows.

  ‘David, there is a bird out there.’

  He raised himself up on an elbow. ‘Told you so.’

  ‘How come prisoners watch pigeons and starlings? They’re such dull birds.’

  ‘They won’t leave you.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘All the others fly away to sunny winters in Florida. Not pigeons and starlings. They’re always there.’

  She reached out to touch him, withdrew quickly, saw from his face that he’d noticed the gesture.

  ‘Goddamnit,’ she said irritably, ‘Why can’t I hate you? Why are you always on my mind?’

  His face softened.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ she said, ‘you’re not going to make me apologize, are you?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Getting mad.’

  ‘Why would I do a thing like that?’ He took her hand, kissed the inside of her wrist, then pulled her down on top of him.

  Helen woke abruptly with the first rays of dawn and reached out for David. He wasn’t there. Not a surprise. He was rarely beside her when she woke. People in prison tend to go one of two ways: learn to sleep through anything or lose the capacity to sleep for more than short stretches at a time. A couple of hours was David’s maximum.

  And yet this time, she bolted out of bed in a panic and began a frantic search. Calculus text? No. Purse? No. Grocery bags? God, how stupid. Her hands trembled as she reached into the pocket of the jeans she’d been wearing and pulled out the postcard she’d found at Aloysia’s house. She stared at the photograph of the Mississippi sidewheeler for a moment, then gingerly turned the card over to see the single-word message on the other side:

  The thing is, her father had been so obsessed with David that he’d discussed the case at breakfast, dinner, on the long walks they’d taken together. By the time she was ten, she was as fascinated as he was, thought of David as her secret brother, begged for more details. Hugh had shown her some of David’s homework then, and she’d made the puzzled comment that her own script was already more sophisticated than his, even though he was eight years older. She’d read his homework often after that; she’d watched that script grow up. Every stage of its progress was familiar.

  She was pretty sure ‘Remember?’ dated from the time he was about twenty.

  33

  KNOX COUNTY, ILLINOIS: Labor Day

  Black Jesus suffered from a condition called vitiligo. Areas of his face and arms had lost pigmentation; they made pink patches on his brown skin. Streaks in his eyelashes were dead white. Right now the eyes beneath them jiggled up and down, side to side in their sockets as fast as scintillating icons on the Web. ‘King the crown. Hold me down,’ he croaked. ‘Click away. Hold me down.’ But he didn’t need holding down. He sagged between two guards – knees dragging, sweat running – as they struggled him into Quack’s infirmary to die.

  This wasn’t another outbreak of the prison’s mysterious illness. This is what the weather can do when it really puts its back into the job.

  During the first few days in September, Springfield’s thermometers edged towards a hundred and twenty, humidity hovered around ninety per cent, no air moved – not so much as a whiff of a breeze. Earthquakes? Hurricanes? Volcanos? They’re small fry in the armoury. Heat is the big killer, and it was killing all over Illinois: a thousand people so far and thirty thousand head of cattle. Most of the dead people were old or sick; Becky had been one of the luckier ones, just a lack of water, quickly replenished. Heatstroke is what killed the young and healthy. The media went wild over three high school athletes who keeled over in the middle of Springfield vs. Bloomington track events and a couple of soldiers on punishment detail at Sparta, not far from Carbondale.

  But nobody reported what was going on at the canal site. Nobody got within a mile of it. Armed guards, razor wire and those signs reading:

  WARNING

  EXTREME DANGER

  Army practice range

  Guard dogs

  US Government Property

  NO

  TRESPASSING

  kept eyes away from the first man who’d dropped to his knees like a stunned beast at a Chicago meat market. He died in Quack’s infirmary. That was yesterda
y. Right this very moment Black Jesus was getting ready to follow him into the prison cemetery, where dead men with no families ended up.

  When the body’s internal temperature climbs as far as forty-one degrees Celsius, the internal organs start to cook. Cooling down as fast as possible is the only emergency treatment known, and there’s no seriously effective method for it that isn’t expensive. Patients in the infirmary were naked. Inmates with spray bottles walked among them, moistening the bare skin again and again, a cold water film that a bank of fans evaporated within minutes. Andy went from bed to bed with rehydrating solution. Quack himself tended to subcutaneous lines for the sickest.

  Maybe fans and water sprays were primitive but they were what Quack had asked for; more modern equipment really was out of the question, and the fans had arrived only days ago. The hospital-sterile subcutaneous equipment came at the same time. So did many of the beds. There was morphine in the infirmary medicine cabinet as well as supplies of drugs for many of the ailments that Quack had been unable to treat for years. He had thermometers, bedpans and an unbroken sphygmomanometer for blood pressure.

  This bounty constituted the fallout of a week-old miracle that had him pinching himself just to be sure it was real.

  Back in June, hats and water breaks every half hour had been enough to keep the work on the canal going at an acceptable speed even though the heat was already breaking records. That’s when there’d been a first outbreak of the mysterious ‘gastroenteritis’. Nobody except Quack paid much attention to it, but the whole prison knew about the July outbreak. How could they not know? Four men died.

  The heat got worse too, and a rebellious grumbling began in the prison population: riot on the horizon. Prison riots are bad enough when there isn’t a production target to be reached. They bring out journalists, and UCAI would crucify the Warden if media people started chattering about thousands of shackled men labouring like chain gangs from the 1930s or slaves before the Civil War.

  That wouldn’t be the extent of it either. Once rioters started talking to media people, they’d blabber about those outbreaks of ‘gastroenteritis’. The Warden could refer to Medical Services Direct; he could sing their praises and the sophistication of telemedicine; he could even reveal copies of the death certificates, all of which reflected gastroenteritis. But the outbreaks were hardly far in the past. Why had nobody alerted the health authorities about a whole spate of cases with very unusual symptoms? Especially when four prisoners died?

  With the support of Medical Services Direct, the Warden declared an emergency cut in work hours on the canal and arranged authorization to ship convicts into Knox County from UCAI prisons in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana. The Tent City around the prison ballooned in size until it almost obscured the high stone walls; canal progress stayed on schedule, and tensions eased.

  But August had come in even hotter, more humid, air barely moving at all. Fights developed over anything and everything. The cell blocks simmered with resentment. So did the mess hall, the prison yard and the acres of Tent City. Talk of a riot began to sound like more than just talk; the Warden summoned Wolfie, General of David’s old gang, the Insiders.

  After the Warden, the General was the most powerful person in South Hams. The call for a riot would come from him. He was also a lucky General, and as Napoleon once said, lucky generals are the best kind. Only the day before his interview with the Warden, Quack had approached him with Little Andy’s work on the Warden’s computer: usernames and passwords that revealed the Warden’s rape films, little girls in pigtails and Sunday school dresses. The timing couldn’t have been better. The General was fighting to re-establish the McDonald’s-style drug trade that had flourished under David’s management and fallen to pieces when he was released. So far, he’d failed.

  But when he entered the Warden’s office with Little Andy’s information, he had a deal all worked out. Within a week, it was operational. Every day a supply of pharmacopoeia-grade opiates and hypnotics made its way into the general population via Quack’s infirmary. Under strict controls of course. For use only after work hours. Quack’s part of the deal was that bounty of equipment and supplies to treat his heatstroke victims as well as medication for several dozen patients who hadn’t been able to get the treatment they needed.

  Even the Warden was a happy man. As the hottest Labor Day on record drew to a close, he knew he could stop worrying about canal progress. He could stop worrying about a riot and a media take on those strange outbreaks earlier in the summer. He could even stop worrying about the films he’d downloaded and that gave him such solace.

  At long last, South Hams State Correctional Facility was a calm and contented place despite its busy infirmary and its dead prisoners.

  34

  SPRINGFIELD: The first half of September

  September should have cooled things some. It didn’t. Death tolls throughout Illinois kept on rising, livestock keeling over, crops failing, farmers going broke. Outside their houses, the citizens of Springfield moved slowly, deliberately as equatorial peoples do.

  Despite David’s insistence that he could keep up with the construction at Otto’s Autos and arrange Becky’s protection, he didn’t raise a single objection when Helen hired a crew of fencers to close off the site. Nor did he object when she suggested they build the electrical enclosure he’d designed around Freyl House. The work went slowly because of the heat, but she could tell he was relieved that Lillian took charge of the men and had no difficulty managing them. Unlike the men who’d worked for him, they seemed to keep their tools in order, clean up their litter, tidy the site: all of this without being told. And then he clearly enjoyed being free to install and test CCTV cameras and motion sensors – a complex, demanding job – although the heat slowed him too. As for the men he interviewed who appeared from nowhere, who were not at all the kind of people that people like the Freyls employed but who set up camps at the corners of the property: Helen and Lillian stayed well away. Becky simply assumed they didn’t exist.

  The one thing that the heat didn’t affect was the groundswell of support for her referendum. Jimmy’s professional canvassers were objects of fun. He himself was a joke. So were his five-volume contract and his attempt to put Becky into St John’s. David suggested she make the most of that. ‘Best protection available,’ he said. ‘Anything happens to you, you make him the first one they’ll look at.’ As soon as school opened, Becky’s many years of devotion to Springfield education added a swarm of kids to the campaign. The first week of high school saw students exploring the democratic process at work in the referendum itself. Junior high schools concentrated on citizens’ rights and public ownership of natural resources. Groups of grade-school children accompanied campaigners and dragged copies of Jimmy’s vast contract in little wagons with parasols attached.

  Even Jimmy’s hard-bitten supporters laughed at that – and were sometimes persuaded to contribute to the cause.

  The effect of all this civic activity wasn’t limited to Springfield either. Water stocks were market leaders in New York, London, Tokyo, and the financial media watched the town carefully. Stories and editorials around the country were amused, supportive; the children with their wagons and parasols appeared on front pages from coast to coast. Every day UCAI stock slipped a little further. Only the growth in the booming prison industry prevented a dramatic fall.

  The Slad twins left St Louis on a whirlwind trip to top-secret conferences with some of the most powerful water companies in the world, the Russian RKS, Vivendi in Paris, the German giant RWA, Suez, Ferrovial and a consortium of Koreans just pulling into the big time. They scheduled Thames Water and Severn Trent in London for the end of September, planning to stay in England for Michaelmas, celebration of the warrior archangel Michael who defeated Lucifer in the battle for the heavens.

  They didn’t plan to come back until well after the referendum had its say.

  35

  SANGAMON COUNTY, NORTH OF SPRINGFIELD: Wednesday
r />   At midnight, long, jagged streaks of lightning lit up the countryside for miles around. The thunder was loud enough to split eardrums. The first rain in months came in huge plops that kicked up dust from the ground like scatters of buckshot. A whoosh of wind, then water just dumped out of the sky. Earth can’t absorb it that fast. Within minutes, ground everywhere was ankle-deep in streams. By now the wind howled; an hour later, the hail began.

  Here at last was a storm to justify the long-range forecast. Hailstones clattered against the aluminium tankers standing outside a small brick building enclosed in a chain-wire fence. Inside the building, three men stood waiting while a couple of pressurized pipes from the first of the tankers began to empty their load into a gauge-covered stainless-steel box that they’d connected to a heavy metal structure on a concrete plinth. One of the hoses began to tremble.

  ‘Turn them off!’ cried Boss.

  Not that ‘Boss’ was necessarily his name. People don’t usually tattoo their own names on their knuckles, but it’s what Lamar Bryant had called him before getting himself and his pretty Brittany burned to a crisp by an ancient air conditioner. The man with one arm – he’d been along with Lamar that night too – was already fighting his way out the door and into wind strong enough to rip the coat off his back. Lamar’s replacement stood staring from the hose that still trembled to the strange assembly that Brittany Bryant had imagined as a sex act between a jukebox and an ice-cream maker. He was very young, barely more than a boy, scantily bearded to hide severe acne.

  ‘Get away from there!’ Boss called out to him.

  Before the boy could bring himself to react, a jet-stream spray shot out from the trembling hose, caught his hard hat and knocked it off with such force that it smashed into the ceiling and ricocheted off a far wall. He staggered from the impact and fell to his knees. The one-armed man must have managed to close the valves on the tankers outside just then because the pressure shut off; the jet stream eased into the gentle arc of a drinking fountain.