The Blue Death

by Joan Brady

  The directions for purifying tablets were hard to follow. Water wasn’t redelivered at once. Waiting in long lines like Third-World peasants for water – for water, for Christ’s sake – didn’t sit easily. By noon, people were driving their cars to containers and working in relays to fill up every bottle, bucket, kitchen utensil they owned. The eight hundred gallon containers were empty almost as soon as they were filled. Supplies of purifying tablets ran out at once. People jostled each other. Scuffles broke out.

  At two o’clock, Jimmy introduced a rationing system and a police guard to enforce it.

  At the same time, supermarkets all over town imposed their own rationing systems for bottled water, and these systems called for a police guard too. Since there was no electricity, supplies like charcoal for barbecues, kindling, container gas, batteries, also had to be rationed and quickly needed a police guard as well. Lines were long and slow. Tempers frayed easily.

  Cops moved black marketeers out of supermarket parking lots, but they clustered nearby, and the atmosphere was quite different; car boots overflowed with supplies from the east side and from neighbouring towns. Trade was lively. Haggling the rule. Waits were short. At three o’clock Coke soared to twenty dollars a bottle. By five it had dropped to its supermarket price. By eight, it was back up to ten.

  Poor families from the east side could make a month’s wages in a couple of hours. Late that night, the city got an injunction banning all outdoor trading within a quarter of a mile of supermarkets.

  37

  SPRINGFIELD: Saturday

  Saint Thomas says one of the joys of the blessed is hanging over the bar of heaven to watch the damned suffer in hell. Allan and Ruth Madison were the blessed of Springfield. The waters never touched them. All they had to do was lie back and enjoy the fruits of Allan’s clever anticipation of the crisis.

  To be sure, their freezer full of food was thawing, but he’d stocked the basement and the attic with enough canned goods for weeks. He’d never liked air conditioning anyway, and the lack of it bothered Ruth less than it did many people; their indoor swimming pool provided a huge supply of water for cooling off in as well as keeping clean. Not even sleep was difficult; a sheet dampened in the pool and spread over bare skin made for a reasonably comfortable night provided the lounge chairs they slept on lay in the path of open doors to catch whatever air was moving.

  The Madisons slept so well that neither one woke when the intruders stepped over them. It was the sudden blast of music – an ear-splitting heavy beat – that jolted Allan to his feet, and what confronted him was as unsettling as Donna’s first glimpse of her flooded house. He stood there gaping, too stunned to speak.

  The room flickered in light from torches the intruders carried. His eye picked out a potato-faced man in a Viking helmet and a T-shirt that said ‘You suck’, another guy in a balaclava wearing a purple satin tablecloth with a fringe, a naked woman in green full-body paint with three big dogs that strained at chains around their necks and began howling at the music. A dozen others danced to it, heads and bodies jerking side to side, back to front, up and down, all of them howling with the dogs. As Allan watched, half of them – and the dogs – jumped into the pool and began splashing.

  He pulled his damp sheet around him like a toga. ‘Hey!’ he cried. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ But the music was so loud that nobody heard him.

  Ruth pulled her own damp sheet around her, got up from her lounge chair, went over to the portable sound blaster and turned it off. The howling, dancing, splashing, went on for a minute, then petered out slowly; the intruders turned one by one, more baffled than angry, to face the sheeted Madisons.

  ‘It’s ghosts,’ one of them whispered.

  ‘Ghosts?’ another whispered.

  ‘Ghosts!’ a third shrieked.

  A chant arose. ‘Ghosts! Ghosts! Ghosts! Get ’em. Get ’em. Get ’em.’

  They rushed towards the Madisons.

  Several scrambled over each other to get at Allan. They shoved him down on the ground. They hoisted him up on their shoulders. They threw him into the pool and themselves in after him, pushed him back and forth between them in the water, dunked him, yanked him up gasping and choking, dunked him again.

  Others hovered around Ruth, encircling her, poking fingers at the sheet as though to find out just what might lie beneath it. She pulled it tighter. One of them – a man with missing teeth and orange hair in puffs – jerked at it, then ripped it off her. ‘Ooooooooh, ain’t this naked ghostie something?’ he said. He stuck his tongue out as far as it would go down his chin. She shrank away. He pulled his tongue in, stuck it out again, in, out, in, out. He grabbed at her with both hands. ‘Ooooooh, this sure do feel like—’

  ‘Your eyes is shit,’ interrupted the green-painted woman in disgust. ‘She’s a old bitch. I bet you can’t even do her. I bet . Okay, okay, lemme help you. Hey, old lady, stop fighting so hard. Come on! Stop it! I’m telling you— Now you’re home, Archangel. Hit her! Hit her! Hit her!’

  Half an hour later, the intruders were gone. Ruth’s bloodied hands could barely hold her mobile as she punched in 911, and Allan floated face down, dead in his own swimming pool.

  38

  SPRINGFIELD: Sunday

  Local hospitals were used to dealing with dehydration and heatstroke in people too poor to afford more than a fan. Now the numbers swelled by the hour with the wealthy who were too unfamiliar with the risks to recognize symptoms. Cases due to sewage came in even faster: the gastroenteritis, skin rashes, eye and respiratory infections that Morris Kline had told Becky were nowhere to be found after the first contamination episode.

  This is why medical staff were already busy when the first cases of some alien sickness appeared not long after dawn: a couple of small children rushed to St Margaret’s Hospital by their nanny in their mother’s Mercedes-Benz. The Emergency Room doctor diagnosed gastroenteritis and hospitalized the children, but the cases were much more severe than any of the others he’d seen. Half a dozen more cases like them appeared before lunch. The symptoms were extreme enough for one of the ER doctors to consult the hospital director. The Director had spent several years with Médecins sans Frontières in Africa. To her, this sounded too much like what she’d seen there; she put in a call to Jimmy.

  ‘Jimmy, I think we got a problem,’ she said. She’d known him for twenty years, and she was fully aware that suspicions like hers were political dynamite; she spoke softly, circumspectly, a little surprised that he let her go on without comment.

  ‘Sit on it,’ he said as soon as she finished.

  ‘Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear. What I’m trying to say—’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ he interrupted. ‘A cholera epidemic is just what we need to calm a social group of rich people who get hysterical if there are spots on the bathroom basin. Like I say, sit on it.’

  ‘I have to notify public health, Jimmy. It’s the law.’

  ‘You examine these patients yourself?’

  ‘Good Lord, Jimmy, don’t you think I can trust my own ER—’

  ‘So you’re just guessing cholera,’ he interrupted again. ‘You’ve got to grow – what did you call it? – a “culture” to be sure. How long is that going to take?’

  ‘Jimmy, I have a responsibility—’

  ‘How long?’

  The Director sighed. ‘Couple of days. Maybe three.’

  ‘Then you have to figure out what’s in this culture, don’t you? What it means?’

  ‘We ought to be able to identify it at once.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jimmy was taken aback. ‘Well, in that case, er . That gives us maybe three days, right? Before the law insists you report? We’ll have water running again in half that time, maybe even less.’

  She was abruptly excited; there was no water in her house either. ‘God, that’s wonderful. No kidding? When?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Maureen,’ Jimmy said irritably, ‘we have black markets operating all over this fuckin
g town. We got respectable people socking each other on the street. There’s a pack of weirdos roaming the town. They killed Allan Madison right in his own swimming pool. They raped his wife.’

  There was a pause. ‘The news didn’t say anything about a rape or a murder.’

  ‘What you want to do? Provoke more panic? We have to put a lid on this situation, at least until the National Guard shows. Or FEMA. Bastards. The Governor tried to get both in here as soon as I could see how bad that flood was.’ FEMA was the Federal Emergency Management Agency, charged with coordinating a response to disasters that are too much for local authorities to handle. But it was a cumbersome arm of Homeland Security, a lot of red tape including a formal request to the President himself. As for the National Guard, they were on a training exercise in some far-flung reach of the Canadian tundra. ‘We’re talking an explosive population here,’ Jimmy went on, ‘and until noon today we’re on our own.’

  She sighed again. ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Nothing. Not a word. I’ll do it when the time is right.’

  ‘My friends,’ Jimmy’s next announcement went, ‘I have some good news at last. We expect power to be restored by this afternoon. Once we have power, you can purify your own water by boiling it. Just hang in there, guys. The end’s clearly in sight.’

  But the UCAI water containers in the parking lot at Schnuck’s supermarket stayed empty for more than an hour. The lines waiting grew longer, the people more frustrated. Donna waited with them, as hot, thirsty, irritable as the rest of them. But the best supermarket in town, even without a black market to ease the pressure, needed no more than a lone policeman on duty to keep order.

  Until the rats, that is. It was just a pair of them at first. They bolted across the macadam like twin suicide bombers heading straight towards the line of people. A dozen more followed, bringing a stench with them, acrid, dank, faecal. As they reached the queue, people pulled back as fast as they could, falling over each other to get away, pushing, shoving, elbowing, throwing whatever was to hand: the containers they’d brought with them for water, their shoes, their mobile phones, their newly bought groceries.

  Then more rats came – and more – until they were a solid carpet of living flesh that boiled across the parking lot. They screeched. They squealed. They leapt at the legs and feet of anybody who couldn’t get out of their way quick enough.

  And then they were gone.

  But the people went right on screaming and throwing everything they could lay their hands on. They overwhelmed the policeman before he had a chance to call for backup, then rushed into the supermarket itself. Donna knelt beside him on the ground.

  ‘I’m okay. I’m okay,’ he said. ‘What’s got into these guys anyhow?’

  Donna shrugged.

  He frowned. ‘Mr Bridgeman hit me.’

  ‘Mr Bridgeman?’ she asked.

  ‘We discussed my mortgage only yesterday. And that woman with the red hair: she’s my kid’s teacher.’ He started to get up, staggered.

  ‘You’d better lie down again,’ Donna said. She folded her raincoat beneath his head. ‘I’d be happy to testify that Mr Bridgeman hit you.’

  ‘Jesus, no!’ the cop said, his face terrified. ‘I’ll never get a mortgage. Just forget it, huh? Please?’

  She helped him call for backup. As sirens became audible a few minutes later, people began pouring out of the store again with boxes of whatever had been closest at hand: armloads of groceries, toiletries, detergents, soft drinks. Some pushed trolleys full of the stuff. One pushed a pram full of Jack Daniel’s. Another trailed a sky-wheeler suitcase overflowing with frozen peas, ice cream, chicken dinners. Yet another, a child’s wagon full of tins and jars.

  Donna caught hold of a man whose jacket she knew was Armani. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  He turned a happy smile on her. ‘Because it’s free. Everybody’s doing it.’

  She stopped another man, a very old man, laden down with DVDs. ‘I don’t have any water in the house,’ he said. Tears began to flow down his face. ‘I don’t have any water in my house,’ he repeated.

  A little boy burst into tears too, his arms full of Popsicles. ‘They won’t be no Popsicles here tomorrow.’

  A dozen police entered the store to find people crawling up on counters, pushing over displays, grabbing everything they could reach. Smashed jars of peanut butter and jam on the floor glued together heaps of Cheerios, newspapers, spaghetti. There were pools of gin, milk, broken glass. A man rode a bicycle up and down through the mess. Grown men skidded through it as though they were on skateboards. Strangers laughed, hugged each other, swigged bourbon from stolen bottles.

  The atmosphere was so joyous that the cops too pocketed bottles of liquor before trying to restore order.

  About the same time, looting started out at White Oaks Mall. Downtown too, where a skirmish broke out between two groups of looters. A bunch of west side rich kids stormed the east side. They broke into houses where water was still flowing. They turned on all the taps, threw buckets of water over furniture and each other, danced in spray from hoses; east side families cowered out of their way, pleaded for them to leave, then finally got angry too. They threatened with shotguns and pistols. They attacked with brooms and shovels.

  As the afternoon wore on, it became clear that Jimmy’s promise of electricity was not going to materialize, and skirmishes flared up all over the downtown area. They coalesced into a crowd of hundreds of people in front of the Old Capitol where Becky’s protest had taken place. A fundamentalist preacher with a megaphone shouted that Judgement Day had come at last. The press was there in force, and Americans all over the country watched a disordered mass of people, fighting among themselves at first, begin to form a single-purpose mob in order to confront the phalanx of cops – white helmets with visors for faces, police batons, guns – that formed a line all the way across East Washington Street, one man deep, then two men, then three with trash cans piled up and squad cars strategically placed to block people in.

  A breakaway group of teenage boys corralled a weak flank of cops; they clapped and chanted in a circle around them, ‘Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo’. Another group of people broke away to systematically smash police car windows and turn over the cars themselves. Children ran between the cops’ legs to light fires under the trees that decorate that area of town. The rest of the crowd threw bottles, eggs, crystal glassware, anything they could get hold of.

  None of them even noticed the first shots, and when they did become aware they were being shot at, they panicked. The police seemed to panic too, firing tear gas and rubber bullets – hard blocks of plastic that hurt badly when they hit – into unarmed people, women and children as well as men and teenagers. People started running in all directions: cops, kids, protesters, even the fundamentalist with his megaphone. Dozens were injured.

  A police helicopter flew above and kept repeating, ‘Everybody needs to leave immediately.’

  When it was over, a surreal quiet fell over the area around the Old Capitol. Store windows and street lights were smashed, awnings torn down, garbage cans overturned and contents strewn, benches ripped out of the pavement, trees scarred and blackened, columns daubed with paint. Trash littered the streets.

  The fading daylight turned dusty yellow, a colour as surreal as the landscape itself.

  39

  SPRINGFIELD: Monday

  At midnight, a parade of evenly spaced headlights entered Springfield along Route 55 from the north.

  By the time the parade reached Clear Lake Avenue, cameras and mobile phones were capturing footage of armoured vehicles all in white and armoured people carriers all in white too, some with tarpaulin down and some with tarpaulin up to reveal a white grid of scaffolding with dark shapes beyond like circus beasts on their way to the big top.

  The convoy made its way across South Grand and turned into Macarthur, then disappeared beyond the gates of Camp Lincoln, home of the Illinois National Guard. All night l
ong, cyberspace frothed with this fresh excitement. Everybody knew they’d seen the US Army out in force. A couple of hours later, the National Guard field troops at last returned from their training exercise in the Rockies. Everybody knew about them too. And yet when patrols fanned across Springfield before dawn, people couldn’t take in what was happening to them. It had the feel of a clip from an animated movie. The armoured cars had square edges, clumsy, klutzy, like poorly made toys. The guns looked like toys too, huge, outlandish, ridiculous. The soldiers carrying them were avatars out of a virtual world: wraparound sunglasses with blue helmets on top, noses poking out beneath. True, there wasn’t anybody who hadn’t seen scenes like these on TV. But they belonged in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, faraway places where people spoke funny languages, wore funny clothes, stepped warily through bombed-out buildings. But in Springfield? It couldn’t be.

  People who’d burned Jimmy in effigy yesterday waited uneasily for word from him. It came before breakfast. The camera honed in on a tired, rumpled mayor dressed in dirty jeans, shirtsleeves rolled up, a smear of oil across his cheek. Beside him a group of firefighters and volunteers as dirty as he was were pumping out a basement on Willemore.

  ‘We’ve got a long road ahead of us,’ he began. ‘All these memories, all these years of development just stripped away. All these things we loved—’ His voice broke and in an attempt to cover it, he waved his hand at the wreckage of what had once been one of Springfield’s most desirable houses in one of its most desirable streets and gave a helpless shrug. ‘Look, we’re all scared. It’s stupid not to be. Nobody can control a freak storm like the one that hit us. The one thing we can control is ourselves, and we just plain didn’t do it. That’s how come we have soldiers all over the place.’

  He explained that those armoured cars were Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles designed for Iraq and Afghanistan. The guns were the newest M16s, capable of shooting nine hundred rounds a minute. The soldiers were combat troops. ‘We will survive this thing – of course we will – but we have to have order if we’re going to survive it with some dignity. That’s what they’re here for. Do your damnedest to be polite. They’re here to help with the donkey work as well as the babysitting, and they’ll go away as soon as we show them we can behave ourselves.’ He glanced again at the bedraggled house on Willemore. ‘Now I got to help get this basement clean.’