Alas, Babylon

by Pat Frank

  He found the carton in the fourth corner he probed. He lifted it out, tore at the foil, and exposed it for them to see. "I put it away for an emergency. I'd forgotten it."

  Lib whispered, "It's beautiful." She examined and fondled the jars and cans.

  "There's beef broth in here - lots of other stuff." He gave up the carton. "Give him everything he wants."

  Dan drank the broth and chewed hard candies. Randy wanted to question him but Helen stopped it. "Tomorrow," she said, "when he's stronger." Helen and Lib were still in the bedroom when Randy stretched out on the living-room couch. Graf jumped up and nuzzled himself a bed under Randy's arm, and they slept.

  Randy awoke with a gunshot echoing in his ears and Graf, whining, struggling to be free of his arm. He heard a second shot. It was from the double twenty, he was sure, and it came from the direction of the Henrys' house. He slipped on his shoes and raced down the stairs, Graf following him. He grabbed the .45 from the hall table and went through the front door. Now was the time he wished he had live flashlight batteries.

  The moon was up now so it wasn't too difficult, run­ning down the path. From the moon's height he guessed it was three or four o'clock. Through the trees he saw a lantern blinking. He hoped Ben Franklin hadn't shot the shadows.

  He wasn't prepared for what he saw at the Henrys' barn.

  He saw them standing there, in a ring: Malachai with a lantern in one hand and in the other the ancient single-barreled shotgun that would sometimes shoot; Ben with his gun broken, extracting the empty shells, the Admiral in pajamas, Preacher in a nightshirt, Caleb, his eyes white-rimmed, tentatively poking with his spear at a dark form on the ground.

  Randy joined the circle and put his hand on Ben Franklin's shoulder. At first he thought it was a wolf. Then he knew it was the biggest German shepherd he had ever seen, its tremendous jaws open in a white snarl of death. It wore a collar. Graf, tail whipping, sniffed the dead dog, whined, and retreated.

  Randy leaned over and examined the brass plate on the collar. Malachai held the lantern closer. " 'Lindy,' " Randy read aloud. " 'Mrs. H. G. Cogswell, Rochester, New York. Hillside five one-three-seven-nine.' "

  "That dog came an awful long way from home," Preacher said.

  "Probably his owners were visiting down here, or on vacation," Randy guessed.

  "Well," Malachai said, "I can see why we've been losin' hens and how he could take off that pig. He was a mighty big dog, mighty big! I'll get rid of him in the day, Mister Randy."

  Walking home, Ben Franklin said nothing. Suddenly he stopped, handed Randy the shotgun, covered his face with his hands, and sobbed. Randy squeezed his shoul­der, "Take it easy, Ben." Randy thought it was reaction after strain, excitement, and perhaps terror.

  "I did exactly what you told me," the boy said. "I heard him coming. I didn't hardly breathe. I didn't pull until I knew I couldn't miss. When he kicked and I thought he was getting up I let him have the choke bar­rel. I wouldn't have done it if I'd known he was a dog. Randy, I thought it was a wolf!"

  Randy stopped in the path and said, "Look at me, Ben."

  Ben looked up, tear streaks shining in the moonlight.

  "It was a wolf," Randy said. "It wasn't a dog any longer. In times like these dogs can turn into wolves. You did just right, Ben. Here, take back your gun."

  The boy took the gun, tucked it under his arm, and they walked on.

  [10]

  Randy was having a pleasant, recurrent, Before-The-­Day dream. He was awaking in a hotel in Miami Beach and a waitress in a white cap was bringing his morning coffee on a rolling table. Sometimes the waitress looked like Lib McGovern and sometimes like a girl, name for­gotten, he had met in Miami. She was always a waitress in the morning, but at night she became an air-line stewardess and they dined together in a little French restaurant where he embarrassed her by eating six choco­late eclairs. She said, as always, "Your coffee, Randy darling." He could hear her saying it and he could smell the coffee. He drew up his knees and hunched his shoul­ders and scrunched his head deeper into the pillow so as not to disturb the dream.

  She shook his shoulder and he opened his eyes, still smelling coffee, and closed them again.

  He heard her say, "Damn it, Randy, if you won't wake up and drink your coffee I'll drink it myself."

  He opened his eyes wide. It was Lib, without a white cap. Incredibly, she was presenting him a cup of coffee. He reached his face out and tasted it. It burned his tongue delightfully. It was no dream. He swung his feet to the floor and took the saucer and cup. He said, "How?"

  "How? You did it yourself, you absent-minded mon­ster. Don't you remember putting a jar of coffee in what you called your iron rations?"

  "No."

  "Well, you did. A six-ounce jar of instant. And pow­dered cream. And, believe it or not, a pound of lump sugar. Real sugar, in lumps. I put in two. Everybody blesses you."

  Randy lifted his cup, the fog of sleep gone entirely. "How's Dan?"

  "Terribly sore, and stiff, but stronger. He had two cups of coffee and two eggs and, of course, orange juice."

  "Did everybody get coffee?"

  "Yes. We had Florence and Alice over for break­fast - it's ten o'clock, you know - and I put some in an­other jar and took it over to the Henrys. The Admiral was out fishing. We'll have to give him his share later. Helen has earmarked the broth and bouillon for Dan until he's better; and the candy for the children."

  "Don't forget Caleb."

  "We won't."

  Again, he had slept in his clothes and felt grimy. He said, "I'm going to shower," and went into the bath­room. Presently he came out, towel around his middle, and began the hopeless process of honing the hunting knife. "Did you know," he said, "that Sam Hazzard has a straight razor? He's always used one. That's why his face is so spink and unscarred and clean. After I've talked to Dan I've got to see Sam."

  "Why?"

  "He's a military man and I need help for a military operation,"

  "Can I go with you?"

  "Darling, you are my right arm. Where I goeth you can go - up to a point."

  She watched him while he shaved. All women, he thought, from the youngest on up, seemed fascinated by his travail and agony.

  Dan was sitting up in bed, his back supported by pil­lows, his right eye and the right side of his face hidden by bandages. His left eye was purpled but not quite so swollen as before. Helen sat in a straight-backed chair close to the pillows. She had been reading to him. Of all things, she had been reading the log of Lieutenant Ran­dolph Rowzee Peyton, heaved up from the teak sea chest during last night's burrowing for iron rations. "Well, you're alive," Randy said. "Tell me the tale. Start at the beginning. No, start before the beginning. Where had you been and where were you going?"

  "If the nurse will let me have one more cup of cof­fee - just one - I'll talk," Dan said. He spoke clearly and without hesitation. There had been no concussion.

  Each day when he completed his calls it was Dan Gunn's custom to stop at the bandstand in Marines Park. One of the bandstand pillars had become a spe­cial bulletin board on which the people of Fort Repose tacked notices summoning the doctor when there was an emergency. Yesterday, there had been such a notice. It read:

  Dr. Gunn-

  This morning (Friday) two of my children became vio­lently ill. Kathy has a temperature of 105 and is out of her head. Please come. I am sending this note by Joe Sanchez who has a horse.

  Herbert Sunbury.

  Sunbury, like Dan, was a native New Englander. He had sold a florist shop in Boston, six years before, to migrate to Florida and operate a nursery. He had ac­quired acreage, built a house, and planted cuttings and seedlings on the Timucuan six miles upstream of the Bragg house.

  Dan pushed the Model-A fast up River Road

  . Be­yond the Bragg place the road became a series of curves, following the serpentine course of the river. Dan had delivered the last two of the Sunburys' four children. He liked the Sunburys. They were cheerful
, indus­trious, and thoughtful. He knew that unless the emer­gency was real and pressing Herb would not have dispatched the note.

  It was real. It was typhoid. It was the typhoid that Dan had half-expected and completely dreaded for weeks, months. Typhoid was the unwelcome, evil sister of any disaster in which the water supply was destroyed or polluted and normal disposal of human waste diffi­cult or impossible.

  Betty Sunbury said the two older children had been headachy and feverish for several days but not until Fri­day morning's early hours had they become violently ill, a rosy rash developing on their torsos. Fortunately, Dan could do something. Aspirin and cold compresses to re­duce the fever, terramycin, which came very close to being a specific for typhoid, until the disease was licked; and he had the terramycin.

  He reached into his bag and brought out the bottle, hoarded for this moment. He could have used the anti­biotic a score of times to cure other patients of other diseases, but he had always made do with something else, holding this single bottle as a charm against the evil sister. Now it would probably save the Sunbury children. In addition, he had enough vaccine to innocu­late the elder Sunburys, the four-year-old, and the ba­bies, and just enough left for Peyton and Ben Franklin, when he returned to the house. Correct procedure would be to innoculate the whole town

  Dan questioned the Sunburys closely. They had been very careful. Their drinking water came from a clear, clean spring bubbling from limestone on high ground across the road. Even so, they boiled it. All their foods, except citrus, they cooked.

  Dan looked out at the river gliding smoothly by. He was sure the river was the villain. "You haven't eaten any raw fish, or shrimp, or shellfish, have you?"

  "Oh, no," Herb said. "Of course not."

  "What about swimming? Do you swim in the river?"

  Herb looked at Betty. "We don't," Betty said. "But Kathy and Herbert, junior, they've been swimming in the river since March."

  "That's it, I guess," Dan said. "If the germs are in the river, it only takes one gulp."

  Somewhere near the headwaters of the Timucuan, or in the great, mysterious swamps from which slender streams sluggishly moved toward the St. Johns, a typhoid-carrier had lived, undetected. A hermit, per­haps, or a respectable church woman in a small truck-farm community. When this person's sanitary facilities failed, germ-laden feces had reach the rivers. Thus Dan reconstructed it, driving back toward town on the wind­ing road.

  Dan was so absorbed in his deductions and forebod­ings that he failed to see the woman sitting on the edge of the road until he was almost abreast of her.

  He stepped on the brakes hard and the car jarred to a stop.

  The woman wore jeans and a man's shirt. Her right knee was drawn almost up to her chin and she held her ankle in bath hands, her body rocking as if in pain. A swatch of metallic-blond hair curtained her features. Dan's first thought was that she had turned her ankle; his second, that she could be a decoy for an ambush. Yet highwaymen rarely operated on unfrequented and therefore unprofitable roads, and had never been re­ported this close to Fort Repose. The woman looked up, appealingly. He could easily have switched gears and gone on, but he was a physician, and he was Dan Gunn. He turned off the engine and got out of the car.

  As soon as his feet touched the macadam he sensed, from her expression, that he had stepped into a trap. Whatever her face showed, it was not pain. When her eyes shifted, and she smiled, he knew her performance had been completed.

  Behind him a man spoke:

  "All right, Mac, you don't have to go any further."

  Dan swung around. The man who had spoken was one of three, all oddly dressed and all armed. They had materialized from behind scrub palmettos at the side of the road. The leader was squat, and wore a checked gold cap and Bermuda shorts. His arms were abnor­mally long and hands huge. He carried a submachine gun and handled it like a toy. His belly bulged over his waistband. He ate well. Dan said, "Look, I'm a doctor. I'm the doctor of Fort Repose. I don't have anything you want."

  The second man advanced on Dan. He was hatless, dressed in a striped sport shirt, and he gripped a baseball bat with both hands. "Get that, Mick?" he said "He don't have nothing we want! Ain't that rich?"

  The third man was not a man at all but a boy with fuzz on his chin. The boy wore levis, a wide-brimmed hat, high-heeled boots, and twin holster belts slung low. He stood apart from the others, legs spread, hefting a long-barreled revolver in each hand. He looked like an immature imitation of a Western badman holding up the Wells Fargo stage, but he seemed overly excited and Dan guessed him the most volatile and dangerous of the three.

  The woman, grinning, got in the car, wrestled the back seat to the floor, and found the two bottles of bourbon Dan kept hidden there. "Just like you heard, Buster," she said. "The Doc keeps a traveling bar."

  "That's my anesthetic," Dan said.

  Without looking at the woman, the leader said, "'Just leave the liquor in the car, Rumdum. We'll take every­thing as is. Start walking, Doc."

  Dan said, "At least let me have my bag. All the in­struments and medicines I've got are in there."

  The boy giggled. "How about lettin' me put him out of his misery, Mick? He's too ignorant to live."

  The man with the machine gun took two steps to the side. Dan knew why. The car's gas tank was in his line of fire.

  The machine gun moved. "Get goin', Doc."

  Dan thought of everything that was in his bag, in­cluding the typhoid shots for Peyton and Ben Franklin. He took a step toward the car. He saw the baseball bat swinging and tried to close with the man, knowing he was foolish, knowing that he was awkward and clumsy. The bat grazed his face and he tripped and fell. As he tried to rise he saw the boy's high-heeled boot coming at his eyes and the man with the bat danced to the side, ready to swing again. His head seemed to explode. In a final split-second of consciousness he thought, I am dead.

  He awoke dazed, almost totally blind, and unable to determine whether he had been shot as well as slugged and beaten. He waited to die and wanted to die. When he didn't die he sat for a long time trying to decide which way was home. It required great effort to concen­trate on the simplest matter. He would have preferred to stay where he was and complete his dying. But the sight of ants wheeling excitedly around the drying blood on the road made him uneasy. If he died there the ants would be all over him and in him by the time he was found. It would be better to die at home, cleanly. The sun was setting. The Sunbury house was east of Fort Repose. Therefore, he must go west. With the orange sun as his beacon, he began to crawl. When darkness came he rested, bathed his face in ditch water and drank it, too, and tried walking. He could walk perhaps a hundred yards before the road spun up to meet him. Then he would crawl. Thus, walking and crawling, he had finally reached the Bragg steps.

  When Dan finished, Randy said, "It had to come, of course. The highwaymen killed off travel on the main highways and so now they've started on the little towns and the secondary roads. But in this case, Dan, it sounds like they were laying for you personally. I think they knew you were a doctor, and you'd be going way out River Road

  to the Sunburys', and certainly the woman knew you kept a couple of bottles of bourbon in the car."

  "All they had to do," Dan said, "was hang around Marines Park, look at the notices on the bandstand, and ask questions. I didn't know any of them, but I think I've seen one before, the youngest. I used to see him hanging around Hockstatler's drugstore before The Day."

  "They didn't have a car?"

  "No."

  "I guess what they wanted most was transportation."

  "They won't get much. We had only two or three gal­Ions of gas left." He added, apologetically, "I'm sorry, Randy. I was careless. I shouldn't have stopped. I've lost our transport, our medicines, and my tools."

  Leaning over the bed, Randy's fingers interlocked. He unconsciously squeezed until the tendons on his forearm stood out like taut wires. He said, "Don't worry about it."

 
"Worst of all," Dan said, "I've lost my glasses. I guess they smashed when that goon slugged me with the bat. I won't be much good without glasses."

  Randy knew that Dan's vision was poor. Dan was forced to wear bifocals. He was very nearsighted. "Don't you have another pair?" he asked

  "Yes - in the bag. I always kept my spare glasses in the bag because I was afraid I might lose or break the pair I was wearing, on a call." He sat up straight in bed, his face twisted. "Randy, I may never be able to get another pair of glasses."

  Randy stood up. "I've got to start working on this, Dan."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Find them and kill them." He said this in a matter­-of-fact manner, as if announcing that he was going downtown to have his tires checked, in the time before The Day.

  Dan said, "I'm afraid you're going at this wrong, Randy. Killing highwaymen is secondary. The impor­tant thing is the typhoid in the river. If you think things are bad now, wait until we have typhoid in Fort Re­pose. And it's not only Fort Repose. It goes from the Timucuan into the St. Johns and downriver to Sanford, Palatka, and the other towns. If they are still there."

  "All I can do about typhoid is warn people, which you have done already and which I will do again. I can't shoot a germ. I'm concerned with the highwaymen right now, this minute. Next, they'll start raiding the houses. It's as inevitable as the fact that they left the main highways and ambushed you on River Road

  . Ty­phoid is bad. So is murder and robbery and rape. I am an officer in the Reserve. I have been legally designated to keep order when normal authority breaks down. Which it certainly has here. And the first thing I must do to keep order is execute the highwaymen. That's per­fectly plain. See you later, Dan."