The Physician's Tale

by Ann Benson

  He hesitated. “We picked up a sample a number of months ago, just like you did. Based on that, I’d have to conclude that they’ve been field-testing it for some time now—that’s probably how it got into the area where your friends found it. We weren’t looking for it; it was pure coincidence.” He lowered his head. “We lost one of our people to it; otherwise we might not have even known it was out there. Like your friend said, it looked like plague.”

  “Was he following one of them?”

  “She. And no. She came into contact with it outside of here. Since then we’ve all pretty much stayed inside, unless we absolutely have to go outside. The only reason we were out today was to observe the delta meeting—hopefully without them knowing we were doing so. We grabbed you because we thought you were doing the same thing and we didn’t know why. We were there to protect them, and we didn’t know what you might be up to.”

  “But if you haven’t been outside much, how do you have so much information?…One person’s infection couldn’t provide that much data.”

  “We take remote readings.”

  It all seemed completely absurd to her. She said, in a voice that bordered on snide, “What, do you send out little robots or something?”

  Bruce gave a wistful little laugh. “I wish,” he said. “They’d probably be more cooperative. But we do send out emissaries, of a sort—we use eagles.”

  “What?”

  “Eagles.”

  Bruce saw the stunned look on Lany’s face but misunderstood.

  “Come on,” he said, “I’ll show you if you’d like to see them.”

  He took out a key ring and unlocked the handcuff that held her to her chair. “I’m assuming you’ll behave. And you should believe me when I tell you that you’d rather be in here with us than out there on your own right now.”

  “Look,” she said, “I’m not your enemy. Can I at least use the PDA to call in to my folks and let them know I’m safe?”

  He gave her a long look. “Maybe later.”

  She followed him out the door. Two young men fell in behind and stayed with them in an almost military fashion as they made their way through a labyrinth of tunnels and hallways. They passed labs and classrooms and offshoot hallways Lany thought might have once led to dormitories; it was all vaguely familiar. After nearly five minutes of meandering, they came to a stop outside a metal door. Lany looked in through the glass window and saw dozens of cages. She heard occasional shrieks, though they were dampened by the glass and the thick door.

  “Welcome to the aerie,” Bruce said as he pushed the door inward.

  The shrieking intensified dramatically when they stepped inside. Lany put her hands protectively to her ears and wrinkled her nose against the smell. She followed Bruce to the first cage.

  “This little lady’s about six months old,” he said, pointing to a magnificent young bird with shiny feathers and a proud, sharp beak.

  “She’s gorgeous,” Lany said. “But I don’t get it. Do you train them?”

  “We try,” he said, “but we haven’t had much success. They operate pretty much on instinct. We have to work within their biological parameters.”

  He moved along to the next cage and pointed at the eagle’s leg. “When they’re fully grown, we put those things on.”

  There, attached just above the ankle, Lany saw the small metal box. She caught her gasp before it got out.

  He brought her to a small cafeteria. There were several other people there, mostly youngish men, who all stared at her.

  Bruce pointed to the serving area. “Go ahead, help yourself,” he said. “There’s plenty.”

  There were green vegetables and ripe red tomatoes. Lany was awestruck as she filled her plate. “Where does this all come from?” she said when she sat down.

  “From our greenhouse in the winter; in summer we grow things in the quadrangle. We have water and power and sanitation, all within this little area.”

  “Are there more people than this?”

  Bruce’s broad smile highlighted the oozing cracks on the burned side of his face. “Eagles aren’t the only thing we breed here.”

  It was a complete society all contained within the university—mind-boggling to a woman who’d had to settle for what seemed in comparison a pioneer life. “How have you kept this all hidden?”

  “Very tight security. No one goes in or out unless we’re completely sure of them.”

  “You weren’t sure of me,” she said.

  His expression changed. “We still aren’t.” He looked directly at her with the eye on the good side of his face. “You won’t leave until we are.”

  She became very quiet on hearing this and gave herself over to the food on the plate in front of her. She ate in silence for a while; Bruce remained at her side, saying nothing. When she had finished her food, he started in on her again.

  “So,” he said, “we went first. You know a lot about us already, and we know a little about you. Now that you’ve had a good meal, a tour, some lemonade, time to tell us more about you.”

  Lany sat back in her seat, quiet and thoughtful. “Soon,” she told him, “but first I think there’s something else I should tell you.” She paused again, then said, “We took a tissue sample from the body we found.”

  On seeing his dismayed look she quickly added, “But the person who was with me is used to handling infectious materials, so she knows how to avoid contamination.”

  Bruce rose up and began to pace. After a period of what appeared to be intense thought, he turned again to Lany. “What will this other person do when you don’t come back?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but if it were me in her place, I’d get the hell out of here.”

  Get home hung in Janie’s forebrain like a mantra. The distance she needed to cover was thirty miles at least; she’d gone perhaps twenty in the frantic ride out of Worcester. “Hill towns,” they’d once called the communities between that city and their mountain; now she understood why.

  She needed to travel quickly, but she was riding a horse whose ankle had given out not all that long ago; as she pushed Jellybean over hill after hill, she wondered why she hadn’t left the mare behind and taken Lany’s horse instead. It was habit, nothing more, that made her get up on Jellybean’s back. Habits had a way of coming back as bad news. She hoped this one wouldn’t do that.

  In the last of the day’s light, she stopped at a river that ran perpendicular to her route. She got off Jellybean and led her down the embankment so the horse could drink. The water was clear and cold and inviting, and she’d drunk what was left of the flat boiled-clean water that was in her canteen an hour before. With her thighs on fire from hours of riding, she crouched down at the water’s edge. Her rippled reflection stared back at her, but even through the distortion she could see the lines of exhaustion in her own face.

  Cryptosporidium, Giardia…

  “Stop it!” she said aloud to the bad-habit thoughts. Jellybean turned her great head in Janie’s direction and whinnied quietly.

  “Not you. Me.” She dipped her cupped hands into the water and brought up a delicious mouthful. She drank until she could drink no more.

  Under cover of darkness, she led them to the place where they’d left the horses. And even though she was coming to believe that she was in the hands of the good guys, Lany Dunbar was secretly pleased when they found only her horse at the edge of the wooded area, and no sign of Janie or Jellybean.

  “Looks like your friend did what you would have done,” Bruce said.

  By now, Lany thought, Janie would be well away, hopefully safe and on her way back to—

  Orange, or the mountain?

  She raised one leg as if to climb aboard the horse, but Bruce caught her by the arm. “Just lead him.”

  There were several young men along to ensure her cooperation. They all moved a step closer. “I’m not going to bolt,” she told him.

  He smiled. “I didn’t think you would. But a horse without a rid
er makes less noise when he walks.”

  It was a reasonable argument. “Okay. Sorry.”

  They went back by a different route, one that took a bit less time. They reentered the university compound through a service garage in the rear of one of the buildings. One of the followers took the reins of Lany’s horse and led him away.

  “We should get you settled,” Bruce said. “You’re probably going to be with us for a while.”

  He brought her to a dormitory room, furnished just as she would have expected. “Your own bathroom,” he said, pointing to a door. “You’ll probably want a shower. The towels are clean. Someone will come get you in the morning. Then we’ll talk some more.” He stepped backward toward the door. “Well, good night. I hope you sleep well.”

  “Wait,” Lany said as he neared the door. “One more thing.”

  He turned back; his ravaged face shocked her anew.

  “Why eagles? If you can’t train them…”

  He stopped, his hand on the door handle. “They can’t just go out in a bunch of airplanes and drop it. We don’t all intermingle the way we did before, so the Coalition can’t depend on a rapid deployment through normal social interaction. Eagles eat rodents,” he said. “The boxes we put on their ankles pick up the presence of bacteria when the eagles eat their prey.”

  “The eagles eat infected rodents, but they don’t get sick?”

  “No. They have a different immune mechanism. Most birds don’t get sick from the things they carry, except the bird flu, of course. They probably become carriers, but they keep to themselves, so it’s not much of a worry. We use all sorts of protection when we handle them.”

  “But how do you get the readings? Do those boxes send out some kind of signal?”

  “Only location signals. We know where they go, but we can’t tell if there’s contamination through the signals; we have to examine the boxes to find out. But we do that when they come back.”

  Again she didn’t understand. “They return here, like homing pigeons?”

  He shook his head. “They come back here because they know there’s easy food, and they come back to mate. We only release females; we keep all the mature males here. Eagles are like any other species—they take the shortest route to genetic continuity. There aren’t enough wild males out there to service all those ladies we’ve released. In a couple of years some of the young males that are hatching out there now will mature enough to start mating in the wild, but until they do, the females come back here. At least, most of them do.”

  In her mind’s eye, Lany saw the headless bird on the ground near Tom’s body.

  “I need to send an e-mail,” she said. “Right now.”

  Janie understood, as she prayed for safety, why people got religion. She would fall down on her knees and worship anything that got her through this terrifying night. She was somewhere along Route 9, in a dilapidated barn that was just far enough off the remnants of the road so it couldn’t easily be seen but close enough for a fast departure, should it become necessary. Her hunger made her want to press on, but exhaustion would not permit it.

  She laid her stiff and aching body on her blanket and wrapped what she could around herself. The dirt floor was hard; the few bales of straw she found were damp on their surface, so she didn’t risk opening them up in the darkness. The god she was about to start worshipping was the only one who knew what might be lurking inside the old straw.

  A mouse scampered by just inches from her head; she heard its tiny footsteps through the otherwise stark silence. “Go away,” she said, and wondered how long it would be before she started talking to herself.

  It was late into the night when Lany finally finished telling Bruce, along with Fredo and another of his “lieutenants,” about their two little societies.

  “I’m so sorry about the bird,” she said. “But she was attacking Tom. He was still halfway up the pole. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Bruce said nothing about the bird. “This Tom is…whose husband?”

  “Janie’s. The pole came down on top of him. He lost a leg.”

  Bruce sat back in his chair.

  “It was terrible. Their son watched the whole thing.”

  “Their son.”

  Lany wondered momentarily why he seemed so focused on this one detail but dropped the thought to continue pressing her case for sending the e-mail. “They have samples of new bacteria that they found in an area near their compound,” she said. “It could very well be the same thing that the Coalition cooked up. I need to warn them about it.”

  Bruce snapped back to the present. “You can’t. Someone from the Coalition may intercept it and then they’ll know we’re onto them. We can’t risk that.”

  “Maybe I can get the idea through to them without actually saying it in so many words.”

  “How?”

  She thought frantically, trying to come up with something. “They called the specimens they collected SAM-pulls. I can use that. They’ll figure it out, but no one else will.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s too obvious.”

  “Please,” she begged. “My son is there. I lost both of my daughters to DR SAM. I can’t lose him too.”

  She saw hardness in his face. Give them names, she thought, make them human so he’ll soften. Just like with kidnappers. “Please just listen to me. There are other people there too, Caroline and Michael, their little girl Sarah…”

  She saw his expression change. For a moment, this scarred man she knew only as Bruce seemed lost in some deep sadness. Then he stood up, quite abruptly, and looked down at her. “All right,” he said, his voice shaking. “Figure out what you want to say, and if I think it won’t give us away, we’ll send it.” His comrades stared in shock as he turned and went out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Janie heard the sound of wings flapping overhead and opened her eyes to see a yellow finch fluttering up to the rafters of the barn. She came up on one elbow, wondering why it was light when she’d only intended to sleep for a short while. By the stiffness in her joints, she knew she’d been asleep for several hours, at the very least. The barn floor was cold, and her back was one big ache as she rolled first to sitting, then slowly rose upright.

  Jellybean stood placidly where Janie had tied her. The horse snorted on seeing her awake.

  “Yeah, I agree,” Janie said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The sun hadn’t yet breached the horizon; there was a thin layer of frost on the ground as they worked their way across a meadow to the road. The horse’s breath turned into little clouds of mist; Janie pulled up her collar and nestled her chin into it against the cold. The mare trotted along at a good clip, quickening her pace without command. They passed by abandoned farm stands and crumbling barns with their weather vanes tilted and rusty. A field where stalks of corn once grew tall enough to hide a basketball team lay drearily fallow. In less than an hour, they came off Route 9 and took the familiar back roads that led to the river.

  An hour after that, Janie saw the bridge.

  She guided Jellybean up a rise for a clearer view. She took out her field glasses and focused them on the near side of the bridge. The metal rails were red with rust from nearly a decade of neglect. She lowered the glasses and focused on the trusses, which were now inhabited to bursting with nests of all kinds. She lowered them again and saw the encampments.

  Her heart sank. The horror of her passage over that bridge with Tom came back in full. The banks below the high structure were already thick with encampments then; they’d almost turned back for fear of what might happen if they crossed. By the grace of some unseen benign force, they’d gone over and then later back again with barely a scratch. But those were the early days; whoever remained under that bridge now would likely be hardened by years of deprivation and far more desperate. And she was alone, with only a knife and bow as weapons, with no man to protect her, astride a horse that could go lame anew at any moment.

  Easy prey.
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br />   But the next bridge was ten miles north; she would have to cross there, then come all the way back down the river to the same position on the opposite shore in order to reach the road that led up the mountain. She scanned the shore, looking for some kind of barge or ferry, hoping against hope that some new-world entrepreneur would have put something of the sort in place. She would barter something—anything but Jellybean—for passage across the river. But there was nothing. Going north to the next bridge would mean another full day of travel; there simply wasn’t time.

  She went completely off the road to the riverbank and then down to the water’s edge. The bank was gentle, and the riverbed was visible under the water for at least thirty feet before it faded out of view. The bridge was positioned in this location, as Tom had pointed out, because at one time this had been a ford. She stared at the cold water. The current was swift, driven by the spring rains and snowmelt. But the river was naturally shallow, as low as three feet in some places along the ford. There was a gap of perhaps thirty feet that Jellybean would have to swim before her feet would hit the shelf on the opposite side.

  If I pole us along while she’s swimming, we might make it. She took a quick look around the water’s edge for a long branch and saw a young tree that had been felled by beavers. The teeth marks were fresh on the unweathered wood. The trademark circular gnaw pattern forced the end of the sapling to a point. It was as if the beaver had known they would be coming and had left them a perfect pole.