by Joan Brady
But there’s always so much confusion when disasters like this hit. The military took a careful count of hospital mortuaries; the number of deaths shot up to two hundred.
The four functioning hospitals in Springfield – fifteen hundred beds among them – coped with the early cases, but the numbers mounted up so quickly that the army had to fly in military cots from all over the Midwest. The hospitals began to look like refugee camps in Africa or concentration camps in the Balkans: military cots squeezing between regular hospital beds, lining the corridors, crowding into staff meeting rooms, public visiting rooms, the main lobby, even the basement.
The public? They had their hands full with garbage and the basic necessities of life, which had become as time-consuming as they are in a Third World village.
Besides, ever since Jimmy’s first speech in front of the devastated house on Willemore, he’d been warning people that if hospitals seemed crowded, it was their own fault. They weren’t being careful enough about exposure to sewage, and they must be more vigilant. He didn’t just scold though. Every day, sometimes two or three times a day, he spoke on the single radio station and the single TV station: tips about how to kill the rats that grew bolder by the hour, how to disinfect household items that the flood hadn’t destroyed, how to understand the ration books the army distributed, how to use them to collect food from the heavily guarded supermarkets. He sounded confident, on top of things; again and again he assured residents that ‘this too will pass’, that things were already getting better. And things did seem to be looking up. The army restored power so that Springfield could boil its own water and cook its food. There’d been no rioting since Sunday. Very little looting too.
Which meant the army might leave soon.
But when inflatable hospitals started going up, Jimmy had to rethink his strategy. An inflatable hospital is a technological marvel, fully functioning in just over a day, with its own electricity, air conditioning, fresh water, elaborate waste-disposal system, hospital equipment, nurses’ station, consulting rooms and hundreds of army cots for patients. But inflatable hospitals looks like giant fungal growths; they’re bulbous, enormous white tents with their roofs resting on scaffolds of inflatable tubes. When these sprouted up around town, nobody could pretend that exposure to sewage explained them.
Late Thursday evening, Jimmy knew he had to tell his people the truth. At least some of it.
‘My friends,’ he began, ‘it looks like we have a new situation.’
45
SPRINGFIELD: Friday and Saturday
Jimmy’s speech sent Springfield to bed that night trembling with fears that only fucking and liquor can ease – and only briefly at that. Donna couldn’t face anybody. She swallowed Valium and bourbon, slept fitfully, jolted awake every hour or so with childish nightmares of pursuit and entrapment.
She prayed for dawn.
But when dawn finally came, it filled her with dread. She dragged herself out of her sheets, dressed and stared from her window as she had every day she’d lived here. She still couldn’t quite believe the desolation she saw, and yet her neighbourhood was the luckiest in Springfield: it was the very first to have its garbage cleared. Front yards that had looked like landfill sites were now uneven stretches of dried mud, broken shrubs, broken driveways, dead trees, all of it blended together beneath a fine powder of grey-brown dust.
Odd to feel grateful for a desolation like this, but the stench of rotting meat was gone; the lingering smell of shit and methane was beginning to fade. And then hers wasn’t just a good neighbourhood. To her surprise, it turned out to be a neighbourly one, one capable of actual solidarity. People formed teams. The strongest did the heavy work; they’d shovelled mud and debris out of most of the houses, and were already rebuilding swept-away walls and broken window frames. The less able waited in line for rations, collected supplies and water, prepared meals, looked after children. A retired doctor turned his large house into an infirmary, organized an ambulance service, chose a team to tend the sick.
But there’d been so much fear even before Jimmy’s speech. People had known. They’d known. They’d learned the signs. A fever. An upset stomach. The runs. Nausea. Unable to keep food down. Every sniffle was cause for nervousness. A stomach ache inspired fear. But the colour blue! Usually blue is such a benign, peaceful colour – sky, sea – and yet it had taken on a terror like nothing else. You start turning blue, and you’re dead within the hour. That’s what people said. Maybe scientists were calling the disease Springfield Fever; the citizens of Springfield didn’t know anything about that. All they were sure of was that whatever it was, it was a killer and it came in blue.
The retired doctor’s ambulance service was too often in use with new victims. Shortly after he opened his infirmary, it was full. When his first patient died, shock vied with an abrupt awareness that his house was probably a better place to die in than the hospitals. Just thinking about it was enough to bring on all those symptoms.
Donna was about to turn away from the window and get something to eat when she saw the first patrol of the morning. If soldiers with automatic weapons and wraparound sunglasses had seemed an unwanted and alien force in town before, their new garb made them into a sci-fi horror. Their heads were harnessed into full-face, black biomasks with a voice membrane and exhalation valve: neoprene pig snouts and blank insect eyes. They looked like men from Mars.
Soldiers afraid to breathe the very air? The air the rest of them had no choice but to breathe?
Donna’s shock at the sight of biomasks on soldiers was so visceral, so fierce that she ran to the car without a thought in her head, no breakfast, no mobile on her, no money either. She just had to get out of there. She’d drive east. Lots of people on the east side were sick – so many had been working on the west side during the night of the flood – but green things still grew there. Trees still looked like trees, yards like yards, houses like houses. It looked normal.
But she’d barely turned the corner when she saw a new set of sci-fi invaders pulling up at the far end of the street in front of the doctor’s house-infirmary. Their truck was yellow, the colour of epidemic. A sign on the outside of it carried the black arcs-in-a-triangle sign and the words:
Warning
Biohazard
As she drew nearer, three creatures got out in full biohazard masks that made the neoprene pig snouts look almost homely: shiny hoods in the same yellow as their vehicles with bubbles of glass over their faces. Their uniforms were white, the Communicable Diseases Center’s costume: here came the ghosts that Allan Madison’s killers had feared.
Just looking made Donna’s stomach feel odd. Her own fault. She’d had an awful lot of Valium and bourbon last night. Her head felt hot. No wonder; the day was well into the eighties. It would pass. Of course it would. She started towards the Fair Grounds where Becky had held her Auction of Promises. Why? No reason. None at all. Except that she’d heard there was an inflatable hospital there, and an inflatable hospital in such a place was so incongruous it might take her mind off the cramps she could feel just starting. She could see the white plastic structures long before she reached them; they’d commandeered the entire grounds where the auctioneer had brought in so much money. Only a few days ago there’d been so much excitement and gaiety here, so much hope for the future.
As she approached the Ferris wheel, she finally admitted to herself that she’d driven here because she knew she had no choice. She pulled the car off on a verge, locked the door and headed towards a tent beneath the wheel, in between the merry-go-round and the Tilt-a-Whirl: ‘Admissions’, the sign said. She’d almost reached it when a jolt of agony from somewhere deep inside her threw her to her knees, doubled her up on the ground. The pain was so great that she was barely aware of soldiers manoeuvring her inside.
‘Name?’ somebody said to her.
She couldn’t straighten herself up enough to focus on who it was. Another jolt of pain shook her so violently that she cried out loud, fainted e
ven as her body’s contents exploded from every orifice. There was a brief moment of clarity as she was being lifted onto an army cot that was one in an endless line of cots. Consciousness was fitful after that.
It never occurred to her that the inflatable hospital ward she lay in wasn’t beneath the Ferris wheel but in the race track where she and Becky had placed bets every year, that the intravenous scaffold hovering above her and the hydration fluid dribbling into her came from a storeroom in the batting cage – a mechanical pitcher that fired baseballs at fair-goers – or that the adventure playground’s miniature train (she’d pined to ride it, never dared say so, certain that Becky would brand her puerile) now carried supplies from the batting cage to her.
By Saturday morning, a disorderly line began to form outside the Ferris-wheel tent where she’d been assessed at once and admitted. By noon, the line was long, men, women, children all too ill to weep or wail, too ill to do anything but wait. Some died there, just waiting. By Saturday noon, Donna was dead too.
Since she hadn’t been able to get out her name and had no identification on her, her death certificate read ‘Unknown Female’. They zipped her into a body bag – the town had run out of coffins days ago – and took her out to the old ticket office that abutted the race track and now served as the Fair Grounds’ morgue. Dead bodies are supposed to just lie there, nice and quiet, but Donna didn’t. Rigor mortis jutted out her legs as though she were a kick-boxer in mid-attack. She wasn’t the only one either. Corpses often refuse to behave. Body bags can look more like they’re filled with half-broken furniture than with limp humans. Given such disorder, who would notice three extra bodies deposited there Sunday night? Who would have the stomach to look inside them if they did?
By the time identification of their bodies came around, the best coroners could do was to note that with these three, the cause of death was unknown – but not Springfield Fever – that one of them was painfully young and scantily bearded to hide his severe acne, that another had only one arm and that the third had ‘Boss’ tattooed across the knuckles of his right hand.
46
CHAMPAIGN-URBANA: Sunday morning
Professor Richard Stands loved his morning bath. In hot water and bubbles, he was a free man. Nobody could get at him. This morning he was contemplating the pleasures of the day ahead of him.
It’s the detective work that makes microbiology fun. Prof Richard Stands may have been pushing eighty, but he’d felt like the young Sherlock Holmes on a new case when samples of Springfield Fever arrived at Champaign-Urbana’s Department of Microbiology late yesterday afternoon. The department tolerated such an old man partly because he’d won the Marjorie Stephenson Prize for his study of protozoan metabolism but mainly because he was a popular science expert on TV. That brought in funding. Also he still carried the title of Head of Department, and he’d be damned if he’d let that go. How would he fill his time if he retired? Besides, he loved labs.
Not that Champaign-Urbana had been singled out to work on the Fever case. Springfield was so shrouded in military secrecy that the Communicable Diseases Center in Georgia wasn’t officially notified until Jimmy’s speech late on Thursday. On Saturday morning samples went out to labs all over the country. Neither Prof Stands – nor any of the other recipients of samples – had real grounds to believe this sample was related to an epidemic in Springfield or anywhere else. Nobody said so. But every technician assumed it was because identifying it was ‘top priority’, because all of them had to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements before accepting the work and because they’d been ‘requested’ to begin work this very morning, a Sunday.
The hunt to identify a bug isn’t unlike the hunt for a terrorist. Investigators convene, draw up plans, assign tasks. But microbiology is law enforcement’s poor relation. Terrorists are profiled on international databases. Not so bad bugs. Most of their genomes haven’t been sequenced anywhere; the ones that have, aren’t centrally computerized. Flushing them out is very labour intensive, yet nobody has the money or the manpower for the job.
But what dwarfs even these shortcomings is the sheer number of suspects. Microbiologists guess – they guess – that they have information on about one per cent of the bugs that share the earth with us. But it could be ten per cent. Or a tenth of a per cent. Or a hundredth. The vast majority of bugs seem to be friendly or indifferent. The rest? The world’s genetic tree has a mere five kingdoms. There’s animals. There’s plants. There’s a kingdom that doesn’t properly contain bugs. In the remaining two, we have so many potential enemies that we can make only more wild guesses at numbers.
Army epidemiologists had already identified the sample from Springfield as a member of the kingdom Protozoa and of a species called cryptosporidium parvum. Such a good name for a terrorist suspect: crypto means ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’; sporidium tells of the four devil’s tails that emerge from it as though they were a pack of witch’s familiars. That does leave, er, parvum, which means ‘little, small, petty, puny’. It is small. No denying it, no bigger than half the size of a red blood cell, and its big brothers – other cryptosporidia – are a hundred times bigger. But ‘petty’? ‘Puny’? It’s a slap across the bug’s face. The bug doesn’t like it.
This is a nasty beast.
47
SPRINGFIELD: The first ten days of October
‘I need money,’ David said to Becky on Monday evening.
‘Why?’ she demanded. ‘This place is costing me a fortune already.’
‘You complaining?’
She ruffled her shoulders irritably. She had no idea that Donna was dead, but she was all too aware that her friends had had to face the terrors of an unknown disease on top of the destruction of a flood. Most of them were still waiting for excavators to clear away the mountains of garbage, and all of them were queuing like Third World poor people for water and then for food, subject to the humiliation of an all-powerful invading army. Not Becky.
Because of David, she and Helen hadn’t had any contact with the flood waters or any of the sick. Because of him, they’d enjoyed the Hilton’s glass aerie of bleached cedar, gently warm slate, dapple of earth colours and daily maid service, not a whiff of anything but the smell-less smell of air conditioning. Food appeared magically, supplied by the Janus Secure troops that guarded the building and controlled the black markets. Water was rationed but safe and delivered to the room. The only people who’d fallen ill at the hotel were cleaning staff who’d been working second shifts in the Capitol area and all over the west side on the night of the flood. Neither Becky nor Helen had even noticed that they’d gone.
But security was David’s business. He’d noticed and carefully vetted every replacement who served the Freyl Executive Suite. He’d been brooding over what Quack had told him about the disease too: not airborne, seems to be going wild but instead stops short after about ten days, as though the bug has only a single life cycle in it. After less than twenty-four hours of wearing biomasks, the troops abandoned them. Which would seem to indicate that the epidemiologists in yellow had realized what Quack knew already: water was the carrier, not air. This very morning, the news announced that the death rate seemed to be declining. And that just might indicate that Quack’s additional theory was true too: a pathogen limited to a single life cycle.
David stood with his back to the plate-glass window that looked out over the whole of Springfield as lights went on across the town. ‘I never can figure out why places like this have such bad security systems,’ he said to Becky. ‘You’re going to be vulnerable here when UCAI realizes you still threaten their profit margin.’
Becky pursed her lips. ‘Why would I do that? How could I?’
‘No idea. I just know you’ve planned something. I don’t have to know what it is, but it might help if you told me why.’
She kept her lips pursed. It was all so puzzling. This hated man had become the only person outside of Lillian she could trust with her life, and to her extreme annoyance she realized ev
en her hatred was softening. ‘You say Galleas needs something solid,’ she said to him. ‘I understand that. They want criminal activity directly attributable to the Slad twins. Something they can’t possibly pin on Jimmy or some underling at UCAI. The question is how we get it.’ She watched David’s eyes watching her. There was a childlike quality to the unrelenting gaze. Could it be innocence she was looking at? A cold-blooded murderer? Innocent of what? ‘I can’t imagine anybody knows better than you,’ she went on, ‘that finding an opponent’s weakness isn’t always easy. You watch. You wait. You listen. If nothing shows up, you have to rattle cages. If you’re lucky, something interesting falls out. We need to buy Galleas time to make a move. If we don’t – maybe even if we do – UCAI will take over soon after the army leaves. I don’t see how we can help except by rattling somebody.’
David nodded. ‘I’ve hired a crew of forty,’ he said. ‘I’ll get your house ready as soon as I can.’
‘Forty? You! You failed to maintain a crew of five for your own project. How could you possibly expect to handle forty?’
David nodded again. ‘A photographer spent today at your house, and she’ll be with us throughout the clean-up to record what we do for the insurance. The first twenty labourers begin work in the morning, and I want to pay them in cash at four in the afternoon when the second shift begins. I’ll pay the second shift at midnight. For this I need money.’
‘I will wait no longer than ten days,’ Becky said. I have to get moving on this.’
‘Two weeks would be stretching it.’
‘Why do I listen to you at all?’ Her voice as tart as of old. ‘Ten days from now is Thursday. I institute my programme then from Freyl House if you can control this crew of yours well enough to make it habitable, which I sincerely doubt. If not, I will take my risks here. It’s all so ridiculous. A crew of forty! Fiddlesticks. Even if there were some truth in such a fanciful tale, you have to have clean water to clean a house. How are you going to get it? There isn’t any. How are you going to get materials? There aren’t any.’
