Plague Bomb

by James Rouch

  Only a special order clearing the prison of men fit for the front had saved his sanity and very likely his life. Like most of the rest of the draft he’d had to crawl to the trucks and as they’d been driven away he had heard the screams of the men left behind, begging to be allowed to join the fighting. With those pleas and screams had been the laughter of the guards as they trooped back inside to quell the noise from the cripples in their own sadistic fashion.

  Complaining loudly, Ripper surrendered the length of bench on which he’d been reclining, and sat up.

  ‘You lot, you just ain’t got no feelings for the sick.’ ‘You’re fit enough. Get into a fresh suit, that one’s in bloody ribbons.’

  ‘Hey, come on Sarge, you’re kidding me, ain’t you. Since when have I been a bendy toy. I’m wounded, see? How am I going to struggle into an NBC outfit.’

  ‘All that’s wrong with you is a few minor burns. You’d have worse if I’d stubbed a couple of cigars on your scrawny carcass.’ Hyde was about to let it go at that, but he had an idea to speed the American’s change. ‘But then maybe I’m being unfair. How about if I get one of the others to help you, someone with a delicate and caring touch, maybe Dooley…’

  ‘Sarge, you just don’t appreciate my condition. I could do with the help, but not Dooley. He ain’t learned to dress himself proper yet. I’d end up crammed into a sleeve with my head poking out the cuff.’

  ‘How about Andrea then,’ moving aside Hyde let her pass. ‘I will not hurt you, much...’

  Ripper yelled at her approach and clutched together the gaping front of his NBC suit as Andrea went to slit it open with a razor honed bayonet. ‘I ain’t about to let no woman near my vitals with a blade. Get her away from me.’

  ‘That’s enough.’ Hearing the commotion Revell ducked down from the command cupola. ‘Quit the games and get back to your positions. Ripper, you get a fresh suit on without help. If you’d been watching the chemical level indicator you’d have noticed that the contamination reading is going off the scale under these trees. If the air conditioning fails we’ll only have a minute or so before this much starts to find a way in.’

  Nothing more was needed to prompt Ripper and he found the sudden use of his bandaged arm and shoulder as he started to shed the torn garment.

  Slowly and very deliberately Andrea sheathed the bayonet, letting the back of her hand brush against Thorne. Her eyes met the major’s, and held them for a long moment.

  Resentment and jealousy difficult to suppress near overwhelmed Revell’s self- control when he saw their fingers briefly touched. The contact looked accidental, but he was well aware that there was very little Andrea ever did by accident. Searching for a pretext to part them, he told Andrea to bring the map board to the radio console. Pushing Boris from his place, he accepted the board and then pretended preoccupation with marking their precise location.

  Provocatively Andrea leaned over his shoulder to examine the map. He could feel her firm right breast against his back, and immediately sensed the acute discomfort of an erection suddenly stiffening when he could not put his hand down to arrange its more comfortable accommodation among the tight folds of his pants.

  She didn’t wear any perfume, but she still managed to smell feminine. In an utterly shapeless NBC suit, the curves of her body further hidden by the grenades and other weaponry festooning it, she exuded sexuality. Her breath was on his neck and cheek as she bent closer to speak.

  There is something I want from you.’ They were the words he’d have given anything to hear, but despite the leaping sensation in his chest he said nothing, waiting for her to go on.

  ‘After we have caught those civilians, those traitors, there is something I want you to do. It is some thing ... special.’

  He didn’t dare to speculate, to hope what her next words would be. Was this a sign that she had chosen him in preference to Hyde? The pause became ago- nizingly long, and his impatience grew with it. ‘Well? What is it, what do you want me to do?’ Damn it! He’d have done anything, couldn’t think of a single thing he’d have refused her.

  ‘After we catch them, when we have them safe, I want you to give them to me.’

  Disappointment, bitter anger and frustration surged through him. Fighting to control the rage that whirled and merged with the overpowering emotions bottled inside of him, he didn’t feel the marker pen clenched in his tightening fist deform and burst to stain his palm red.

  ‘Why do you want them, so you can get in some practice killing civilians?’

  ‘You should know that I hardly need that, Major. Have you forgotten Hamburg so soon?’

  Revell felt his mind being crushed by her words as though each were another massive weight loading a press. There was a question that begged to be asked, but he couldn’t bring himself to utter it. Instead he tried to read an answer from her beautiful face but it had set hard and was as devoid of expression as Sergeant Hyde’s. With nothing to be learned that way, the question rose through the many layers of repression that tried ineffectually to smother it and emerged in a hesitant stutter.

  ‘I remember ... Hamburg. You were wounded ... non-combatant ... you worked with a radio location unit in the city ... took no part in the fighting ... When ... when would you have had the chance?’

  ‘On the last day, when the garrison broke through the Russian cordon, many of their agents in the city were desperate to get out. They became careless, broadcast for too long. We heard them pleading for instructions, and we found them. Did you know that your friend, Inga, was an agent?’

  All Revell could do was give an almost imperceptible shake of his head. It was not the whole truth, but the words that would have qualified his denial would also have choked him.

  ‘We had a long talk. About you.’

  Now Revell could see a trace of expression in her face, a subtle alteration of the line of her lips, a slight widening of the eyes. It was a rare blend of amusement and cruelty, of contempt and self-assurance.

  ‘Surely you are interested in what we discussed?’ Leaning forward a fraction more so that her mouth was by his ear, Andrea feigned absorption with the map. ‘She told me everything, everything that you did together, or perhaps I should say what she had you do to her. I think she was well pleased, especially when you used your tongue. She said you made her very wet, so wet that you were almost sick when it filled your mouth. But you didn’t stop, did you? You did as you were told, as she ordered.’

  The words came whisper soft, so faintly that they were on the threshold of his hearing, but to Revell it seemed that each was screamed so loud that all the crew must hear. He would have made her stop, somehow, anyhow, but was hypnotized by her voice and the memories it brought back.

  ‘And also I had her show me how you kissed. She did it well.’ ‘You’re lying, you’ve got to be lying.’ Revell hissed the combined accusation and denial and though audible only to Andrea it was more filled with feeling than yelling it at the top of his voice would have conveyed.

  ‘Perhaps you would like to believe that, but I know that you do not. Do you recall the taste of her lipstick, of her mouth? I do, it was sweet, like tasting a perfume.’

  ‘Where, when did you talk to her?’ There was a sickening frightened feeling welling inside him. He had to know, and she was going to tell him anyway. Better that it came quick so that he start to learn to live with it, if he could.

  ‘It was at her apartment, at about the time you were leading the attack on the Russian trenches, I should think. You had done so much together ... for her ... that it took a long time to tell, and to show me.’

  ‘And what do you intend doing with the information you share?’ ‘Oh, I am sure I can find a use for what I know, but you are wrong about my sharing the knowledge with Inga, Major Revell. I never share, not anything. Before I left the apartment I made sure that there was no one to share it with.’

  TEN

  ‘For fuck’s sake, can’t you keep him quiet?’ Unable to tolerate the howling a
ny longer, Gross left the room and went out into the overgrown beer garden. Shit, he’d had enough. If it’d be up to him he’d have turned the Range Rover about and headed back, except that there was a good reason why they couldn’t. They’d literally burned their bridges behind them.

  Not bothering to find a place out of view of the window he opened his pants and emptied his bladder on to the defoliant withered stems of lupines. In the hope that the woman would look out and see him he took his time over tucking his penis away, shaking it thoroughly and playing with its circumcised head between his pudgy fingers before reluctantly conceding that she was not going to be so obliging.

  If that autocratic prig Webb hadn’t been with them he’d have screwed her by now, opened those plump thighs of hers and given her the full benefit. He could almost imagine it. Best if she was sprawled back over a table, legs wide apart and dangling, so that he could see his penetration over the rim of his paunch.

  It’d be lovely to hear her shout of protest as he withdrew at the moment of coming and shot the full load, in jerking spurts over her belly and into her fanny hair.

  He’d pull her hand through it, to show her how much he’d done, then have her rub it all over her fat udders. Sweat coursed down him at the thought. Moving back toward the inn, he stopped where he could see her clearly and undid his pants again. Already blood-pumped to rock hardness, with practiced single hand strokes he began to masturbate.

  At the third, and most prolonged, application of the cleaning-fluid soaked rag over his mouth and nose, Professor Edwards finally gave up the struggle, and after gagging violently, lapsed into unconsciousness. Even then his head continued to loll from side to side and his clumsily bandaged hands made involuntary jerking movements toward those parts of his torso most thickly covered by the big mounds of yellow blisters.

  ‘That is all I can do for him.’ Webb threw the rag aside, then had second thoughts and retrieved it, stowing it in a pack with the dusty half-empty plastic bottle from which the makeshift anaesthetic had come, on top of the small metal- boxed medical kit that had proved so pathetically inadequate. ‘If I eke it out, and we make good time the rest of the way then he can be kept like that. The Russians will be able to treat him.’

  ‘He looks horrible. What is it?’ All of her will power had been needed to prevent Sherry vomiting when she’d first seen the old man’s condition.

  His emaciated body would not have been a pretty sight at any time, his anaemic flesh sagging in flaccid wrinkles, his withered genitals bracketed by the distended mounds of a double hernia. With much of it covered and discoloured by huge raised blisters that made it even less attractive.

  ‘There must have been a chemical in the water, a modern derivation of mustard gas perhaps. What ever it was it was present in sufficient strength to do what you see here. If he’d swallowed any quantity of it he’d be dead by now, but I don’t think he has, although a little of it does seem to have splashed on his face.’

  Sherry couldn’t bring herself to step close enough to see where Webb was indicating. From her youngest days, from as far back as she could remember, right from when her mother had enrolled her with the child model agency, virtually every moment of her life had been in some way concerned with her appearance. Cosmetics, clothes, her hair, how she walked, smiled, talked, how she smelled: every waking moment filled with such things and thoughts of them, and most of the people around her had been similarly occupied with themselves.

  A greater contrast with that narcissistic world than the Zone could not have been found. Any blemish, any deformed or ugly thing she found utterly distasteful and avoided, or had avoided. Here she was being presented with the incarnation of all that she most abhorred; gross disfigurement, old age, sickness, suffering ...

  ‘Feeling faint?’ Still beaded with perspiration from the effort of attaining his orgasm, Gross entered the room, pausing to wipe his sticky fingers on faded curtains that gave off clouds of dust. ‘You need a drink. This should be just the place to find some. This way I think ...’

  ‘We should only consume such supplies as we brought with us.’ Calling after the fat man, Webb’s words trailed off as Gross went down the cellar steps.

  ‘Don’t be such a fucking old woman.’

  His reply to the caution came back to them amid the clinking of bottles, and was followed by a loud crash in turn succeeded by the prolonged sound of breaking glass.

  ‘Shit, it’s as black as fucking hell down there. Get me a torch from the ... no, don’t bother, I’ve found a candle.’

  A minute later he reappeared at the top of the stairs, his arms laden with bottles, and more protruding from the baggy pockets of his sports jacket,

  ‘Really, I’m quite serious, you shouldn’t even consider drinking any of those…’ Webb declined the slim necked green bottle thrust at him. ‘…they could be contaminated.’

  ‘Oh piss off, you fucking kill-joy.’ Depositing his load on a table, not bothering to catch a Riesling that rolled off to shatter on the stone floor, he delved through the interior of the medical kit until he discovered a small bottle of antiseptic.

  Choosing a sparkling white completely at random, he liberally splashed a third of the disinfectant over the gold foil wrapped about the wine’s wire bound cork, wiping the surplus off immediately on his sleeve.

  ‘There, that’ll do it, you fussy sod. Here, try a bit.’ The cork came free with a bang as he wrenched at it, and a spout of foam splattered the floor and his shoes.

  Again Webb declined, instead going over to Edwards to wrap a blanket about him. ‘We should keep moving. There is still a good distance to travel.’

  ‘So what’s your hurry. If there was someone after us, there’s not now, not with that bridge down. Isn’t that right, my little aging starlet?’

  Sherry Kane also refused the offer of a drink, but immediately wished she’d accepted the offered bottle, just so as she could hit him with it. Gross made her shudder, he was so repulsive. There had been times, when she was resting, and the rent was due, when she’d had to take Johns like that ... like the slob in the green Chevrolet with the stickers in the windows. He’d wanted her to piss on him. When his offer had reached a hundred she’d done it, standing astride him as he lay in the filth of a service road behind Sunset Boulevard.

  Afterward she’d had to shower a dozen times. Not that he’d touched her, just laid there shining that pencil torch beam up her miniskirt and making gurgling noises like a baby. She’d been busting to go anyway, but it had taken a good ten minutes...

  Gross reminded her of that one. In fact he reminded her of all the bad ones, all rolled together; the orals when they wouldn’t use a sheath and forced her to swallow, the annals who wanted it rough and wouldn’t use cream, the fanny hair pluckers, the biters…

  Getting no response, no acceptance of his invitation to imbibe with him, Gross contented himself with sitting on a rail-back chair and making suggestive motions toward the woman by circling his fingers about the neck of the bottle and running them up and down.

  He drank fast, belching loudly after every other pull. ‘Not bad this stuff. Don’t usually drink much plonk myself, leave it to French peasants and the trendy wine bar crowd, unless it’s free that is, at some buckshee union do.’ He threw his head back to drain the last drops, then chose another from the selection before him. After an even more cursory decontamination than he’d carried out on the first, he opened and started into a hock.

  ‘Those stuck up gits I had to negotiate with probably drank this stuff, you know, the pin striped, poe faced captains of British industry. I killed one of them you know, really.’ Tapping the side of his wide-pored bulbous nose he winked at Sherry. ‘You don’t believe me do you, either of you?’

  ‘Believe what?’ Beginning to lose his patience, Webb was provoked into the snap. It defeated its own purpose, not silencing the union boss, but giving him encouragement.

  ‘That I killed a shitty white collar crud. Well I did, with this.’ He stuck
out his furred tongue and wagged it from side to side.

  A glimpse was enough for Webb, and he busied himself with lighting ornamental candles set in wall fittings, as the last of the evening’s light faded.

  ‘Nine hours the dumb fucker was sat opposite me.

  Every time he increased the offer, I upped the demands. When he said he’d introduce a bonus scheme I said the brothers didn’t want one, when he withdrew it I said we wanted it. He had to settle on our terms in the end, he had an important defence contract. Just when he thought he had it all sewn up, I put in a load more demands, he was practically bloody crying. On the way home he had a heart attack, drove right under the back of a bus, messy. The company went bust, I moved on, started it all over again somewhere else.’

  ‘You’re not fit to be a representative of the workers.’ Sherry made no move to prevent it, as in upending the second bottle Gross tipped over backward in his chair. He managed to arrest his fall by clutching at the table, at the expense of several more smashed bottles.

  ‘Workers? Don’t make me laugh, I don’t give a fuck about the workers.’ Walking unsteadily to the bar, Gross went behind it and relieved himself into a sink. ‘Who do you think it is who’s been paying for the life of luxury I enjoy. I got a union job when I saw what a load of cloth-capped ignorant sods were in charge. Inside a couple of years I was earning more as a union official then most of the university educated wankers I was negotiating with, and all paid by the thick shits slaving their guts out on the factory floor. Bloody lovely, and even better when you add in the free car and petrol, expenses paid trips abroad, a mortgage through the union at a fixed two percent and not forgetting private health care insurance and last but not least those big fat fees from the TV stations every time I went to the studio and put on my serious-and-oh-so-deeply concerned-and genuinely-sorry face to lie about the reasons for yet another piddling stupid strike.’