by Joan Brady
He turned his back on the cameras and joined in with a couple of firefighters hoisting a pump into position.
Know how the mercury in a meat thermometer climbs abruptly when you stick it in a hot leg of lamb? Within an hour, Jimmy’s popularity – close to nil after the riots – took an upward jolt in every online poll. Could it be Springfield’s despised mayor was turning into Springfield’s everyman?
An hour later, Sergeant Olivia Dulcan, in command of one of those armoured cars, spotted three people splayed out beneath a tree. ‘What the fuck do they think they’re doing out here?’ she demanded of her driver. ‘Wake them up. It’s fucking stupid to be that drunk this early in the morning.’
The driver got out, approached the three, examined them quickly. ‘You’d better notify burial detail,’ he yelled back.
About noon, the Director at St Margaret’s Hospital called the Illinois Department of Public Health.
She didn’t tell them she’d called Jimmy less than twenty-four hours before, but she told them, as she’d told him, that she’d had experience with Médecins sans Frontières in Africa, and that now she had more than a dozen patients suffering with some illness that looked a lot like cholera. She knew that deep blue-purple colour of the skin. In cholera patients the dehydration can reach a point where the blood literally congeals in the veins. She’d seen it only in black-skinned people of course – it showed only in mouths, genitalia, palms, fingernails, toenails, soles of feet – but some of these people, these white people, were turning blue all over. And there was something else. Some had bloody urine; their kidneys were failing. That doesn’t happen with cholera. Yet the first two cases to appear – the two children – had died of kidney failure so quickly and so unexpectedly that they’d lain dead in their beds for half an hour before a nurse noticed them.
Almost as soon as the Director of St Margaret’s finished her call, both Memorial Hospital and St John’s contacted Public Health too. Between them they had over a hundred cases and eight dead.
By mid-afternoon, there were twenty-three dead. The first notice of the real potential of Springfield’s disaster reached the White House as the President was sitting down to dinner with two prime ministers and an emperor:
Number of dead approximately 35. Transmission: likely waterborne, possibly airborne. Diagnosis unknown. Incubation period unknown. Treatment unknown. Quarantine imperative.
Terrorist link probable.
40
SPRINGFIELD: Tuesday, the day of the Referendum
Within an hour, an executive order extended Springfield’s state of emergency to a full quarantine under the Official Secrets Act, the Patriot Act and Homeland Security.
All public and commercial transport halted at once. Abraham Lincoln Capital Airport became a military flight base. So did the half dozen heliports in the town. Soldiers with rifles barred civilian personnel from the Amtrak train station on Washington Street. Government technicians jammed radio signals in a cordon around the city and blocked landline communications to and from any area code beyond city limits; the Army and the National Guard began setting up a double perimeter, two road blocks across every major and minor route in or out of Springfield.
During the morning, the news to the citizens of the city itself came via loudspeakers atop a fleet of army trucks airlifted to Springfield from all over the Midwest.
‘As of 1900 hours today, a military curfew is in effect. Anyone found on the streets between 1900 hours and 0800 hours will be subject to immediate arrest. All public meetings are cancelled. All schools are shut. Any public gathering of more than five people will be dispersed. Please be aware that floodwaters can carry infection. To ensure that nobody spreads infection, we request that you do not leave town. This is your duty as responsible Americans, and you will be subject to arrest if you try. If you are feeling sick in any way yourself, please call 911 or go to your nearest hospital.’
Leaflets followed, repeating the message. So did the single local radio station permitted to broadcast. All other radio stations gave out only static. So did TV screens. Mobile phones went dead in the middle of conversations. Internet connections failed in the middle of downloads.
There was no mention of epidemic. There was no mention of terrorists. Nor was there any mention of the cordon around the town or that anyone attempting to leave was going to end up in a military detention camp. All these directives had come straight from the White House, and the reasoning had been the same as Jimmy’s: the last thing this town needed was panic. It needed control, diagnosis, medical attention, containment. Every hour increased the military presence on the streets.
How could the irony have been harsher?
This was the very day Springfield had scheduled to demonstrate its democratic right to quash UCAI’s hostile takeover of the water that its citizens had owned for a century and a half, ever since their ancestors laid the first pipes. Voters should have been rushing to the polls to have their say, but the polls were shut by military order. Combat troops guarded them. Whatever the town’s residents had thought of themselves last night, this morning they were a captive people, a conquered people, imprisoned in their homes, listening to military boots tramp along their sidewalks, watching military vehicles patrolling streets that once belonged to them, knowing soldiers could enter and search their houses at will, stop and search them personally when they went out for supplies or water, arrest them at any time without charge.
Their one hope seemed to be Jimmy Zemanski, the man they’d been calling Springfield’s Hitler only days before.
Armies didn’t mean just regular soldiers either. Most people in Springfield thought of the armed forces as Uncle Sam’s tax-funded boys and girls. Not so. Despite a high unemployment rate and aggressive recruitment campaigns throughout the country, Uncle Sam couldn’t find enough young people willing to join: pay too low, conditions too uncomfortable, risks too great, prospects too poor.
This meant mercenaries.
There were dozens of private security firms in operation. America had been using them for years; they’d fought in every war, helped keep every peace. They had every power a US soldier had too; they could carry combat weapons, operate combat vehicles and artillery, enforce military orders on civilians. But they got triple the pay, weren’t subject to military law, claimed nearly half the US military budget – and were never at a loss for volunteers. A handful of these companies arrived in Springfield to reinforce government troops. Task forces from them marked out territories around the Capitol buildings, the banks, the rich of the town: DynCorp, American Security Group, Kroll, an Israeli company with the astonishing name of Instinctive Shooting International. Every mercenary and every mercenary vehicle displayed a logo. Blackwater, responsible for the murders of dozens of Iraqi civilians, was the most famous one: a black bear claw in red cross-hairs. The biggest and newest on the scene was Janus Secure: a one-headed, two-faced hawk in full flight, one beak to the east, the other to the west: goes anywhere, eyes everywhere.
Even without logos, everybody could tell the mercenaries from the regular soldiers. They were testosterone machines – no women allowed – all in ammo vests or Flak jackets with ammo pouches, all with guns strapped to their legs as well as automatic weapons in their hands. Most wore T-shirts that showed off the bulging muscles of their arms, and all had the commanding walk as well as the iron-pumped bodies of professional wrestlers.
Or of prison gladiators like David.
From the top floor of the Hilton, David couldn’t see them, but he could see the lights from road blocks across several of the major routes into Springfield.
‘So you just might pass for one of those guys,’ Helen was saying to him. ‘This is a stupid idea.’
‘What do you care?’ David said. He kept his cigarette in his mouth as he spoke.
‘Why the fuck won’t you listen to me?’ She stroked his back. ‘All that matters is a turned-around collar. Nobody stops a man of God.’
‘I hate that.’
‘Nobody’s going to stop me.’
She stroked his back again. ‘It really suits you, you know, that turned-around collar. You remind me of one of those fire and brimstone Methodists in old movies. Now listen to Mommy: “Preachers don’t steal cars.”’
David put his cigarette down and pulled her around to face him. ‘Cars are convenient.’
‘Preachers go by bus.’
‘I hate buses too.’
But she was abruptly angry. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she shouted at him. ‘You accuse me of having tantrums. You accuse me of being irrational. What do you call this? If this isn’t irrational, I don’t know what it is. You think you can play me, and you’re wrong. I know you.’
‘Why are you angry?’ He was truly puzzled.
‘Nothing stops you, does it? You go right ahead, ploughing through whatever’s in front of you. David the invincible. David the conquering hero. Don’t you ever think of anybody else?’
So far as he could see, this second argument was no more rational than its predecessor. These people outside prison – lazy workmen, complacent aristocrats, irritable wives – often made him long for the easily decipherable order of South Hams.
‘Why are you angry?’ he repeated.
She started to slap his face, burst into tears instead, ran out of the room and slammed the door behind her. She didn’t emerge until just before eleven.
‘Ready to go?’ she said, her mood wholly changed again. Courage on display now. Love. He knew it because he could feel her hands tremble on his arm as she went with him to the fire escape above the laundry. She stood there tense, fearful; she watched him drop to the alleyway below and wait in the Hilton’s shadow for her all-clear.
David knew these alleys at the backs of downtown buildings; he knew how they connected to each other and to the alleys where householders in residential districts put out their garbage. Alleys don’t change. Those residential alleys had been his childhood territory, his beat. He could only guess at the number of times he and his friend Tony had dashed through the ones that divided the backyards on the west side: two little east side boys laden down under televisions, radios, fan heaters, men’s wallets, women’s purses (no computers back then) – half their minds on the cash to come and half on the game of evading cops in pursuit who hadn’t chased them often enough for their liking. And hadn’t ever caught them.
They’d both got done for shoplifting, dealing and stealing car radios. But theft from houses? Never.
The old routes were as viable tonight as they’d ever been. They brought David out to the badlands at the edge of town, mile upon mile of commercial fringe that looked in the dark like the ruins of a civilization bombed out of existence, well away from the street patrols in the town. Behind this fringe lay fields of crops flattened by the derecho. The wooded country beyond them took him to the abandoned washrooms of Broadwell Tavern at the decaying stagecoach stop of Clayville Rural Life Center, ten miles west of Springfield.
41
KNOX COUNTY: Wednesday
Nobody would ever find the Honda that killed Morris Kline in Chicago simply because it was one of so many Hondas that are stolen there every day. But not just Chicago. Hondas are the most commonly stolen car all over America. What half-decent thief doesn’t keep an old Honda key? So a master key isn’t easy to find, so what? The key to almost any other Honda will do: a little jiggling and sawing, and it’ll start the engine as well as open the door.
David stole a Honda in Pleasant Plaines, drove to Galesburg and spent a couple of hours at a shopping mall there, splitting his time between the best men’s stores and the charity shops that perched their tattered wares in the windows of fancier shops gone bust. By noon he was approaching the thirty-foot high walls of South Hams State Correctional Facility. The last time he’d been here, the Tent City at their base had looked huge to him, a dozen tents big enough to sleep a hundred men. Now it was more than double the size. Maybe triple. Its inner enclosure of razor-wire fencing and the outer enclosure separated from it by some three metres made a barrier long enough and impenetrable enough to guard Auschwitz. A group of guards, dogs straining at leashes, were patrolling inside as David drove past. One of them glanced over at him, smiled, waved.
Or so it seemed. Prison guards don’t wave at strangers.
Inside the prison, David handed over his Canadian passport as he had when he’d visited with Lillian. The response then had been the familiar mix of contempt and disgust. This time the guard took the passport and stared at it dreamily for a moment.
‘Mr Gwendolyn, huh?’ he said. ‘I had a girl called Gwendolyn once. Most beautiful girl I ever saw. Oldest of the six most beautiful girls in Wichita Falls, Texas. We’re all from Texas – shipped in by the truckload.’ He sighed. ‘I miss Texas.’ David followed another Texan into the Visitation Room.
‘Well, if it isn’t Richard François Gwendolyn,’ Quack said, sitting down in a yellow and blue plastic chair opposite David. Quite a few families had gathered today, but the usual smell of raw desperation was hardly present at all, and there was little sign of the standard forced brightness. A third Texan watched benevolently as a couple of children ran up and down the aisles.
Kids on the loose was strictly against the rules.
David handed a sandwich to Quack, who took it and bit into it greedily.
‘Am I dead or something?’ David asked. ‘Even the guards are high.’
Quack stopped chewing and wiped his hand across his mouth. ‘What about, “How are you, old friend? I’m so sorry I haven’t been to visit recently.”’
‘I’m feeding you. Isn’t that enough? What is going on here?’
‘Well, Richard . You don’t mind if I call you Richard, do you? We find we have a very, very efficient, er, McDonald’s franchise at work here. I think you’ve been surpassed, my friend.’
‘That how come you wanted to see me?’
David and Quack had been cellmates and business partners for many years. They’d developed a shorthand, a way of speaking to carry on the prison’s drug trade even if they were monitored. Mostly they played it by ear – they got a real kick out of the game – but there were a couple of code phrases for emergencies. Which is to say it wasn’t Andy’s email to Lillian that had prompted David to arrange this meeting but the email’s opening line, ‘Tomorrow there’ll be more fine weather.’
Quack used the same elliptical approach to explain Little Andy’s foray into the Warden’s computer, the rape and snuff films he’d found there and the Insider General’s stroke of genius that was bringing David’s old drug trade to an apotheosis that nobody could have imagined. And, true, now the guards were as drugged-up and friendly as the prisoners were drugged-up and calm.
David was amused, but he hadn’t expected the abrupt sense of foreignness; he no longer understood the way things worked here. Only last night he’d been thinking, well, fondly of the familiarity of this place, where he knew the rules, where things made sense. It was a shock to see that life here had changed profoundly since he’d left, that he was no longer an insider in a sense far more general than his old gang’s name, that South Hams had become practically as alien as Springfield’s west side.
‘Media blackouts don’t work any more,’ Quack was saying. If there’d been a transition, David had missed it. ‘I don’t know why people think they do. Or how they possibly could work. Officials can issue all the statements they want about calling out the army to stop looting and riots. But blogs, cell phones, Twitter: everybody knows that’s crap. Everybody knows there’s some kind of sickness. What’s funny – not so very funny, I guess – is that a disease is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about when I informed you of the, er, weather conditions. And now I’m afraid—’ He broke off, took in a breath. ‘Look, old friend, I know this sounds nuts. I think this is an entirely new disease, and I think they tried it out on us first.’
There weren’t many people
David had ever trusted. Of those few, everyone except Quack had betrayed him, and at the moment he wasn’t feeling sure of Quack. ‘It doesn’t just sound nuts,’ he said irritably.
‘Yeah, yeah. I know. Quite right.’ A glance found the Texan guard kneeling with the children, running a hand up the little girl’s leg. ‘Look, nobody’s ever accused me of a vivid imagination,’ Quack went on, ‘but back in early summer I saw a new disease right here: fever, vomiting, diarrhoea, dehydration severe enough to coagulate blood in the veins. Kidney failure too. Nothing fit. I’m sure it wasn’t food poisoning or anything like that. It wasn’t cholera. No antibiotic touched it, and yet it hit guys, killed some and then stopped. Not like flu or the measles either. No petering out through the community. It appeared, infected these men, did its damage. Then bang. Finish. Almost as though it had only one life cycle. I couldn’t get any answers from the Medical Services Direct people. “Gastroenteritis,” they said. “Gastroenteritis”? You have got to be joking.’
‘What’s “Medical Services Direct”?’
‘They’re the guys that took over telemedicine when South Hams went private. Real business acumen there. Never have to see a patient. Never have to touch one. Their predecessors occasionally had to produce a doctor and not all that rarely, a nurse. These guys have it all worked out. Doctors come under “not an option”. See what I’m saying?’ Quack’s voice was urgent. ‘First experiment on prisoners. Then toss the stuff at the civilian population.’
‘You talking terrorists or something?’
