Collected Short Fiction, page 768
I listened to a stifled coughing fit and asked what he knew about Eric.
“Just that he won’t be here. I’d hoped he and LeMoyne could give us a handle on the epidemic. Now—I just don’t know—”
Coughing again, he hung up.
I tried Eric’s number again, and got a computer voice that said all channels were busy. When I looked at Susan, she was flushed and drenched with sweat. In spite of her protests, I tried to call a doctor. All I got were beeps.
“Love you, Ben.” She sat bolt upright in bed, staring at me strangely before she smiled. “Dreamed about you.”
She said she wasn’t hungry. I brought her a glass of water, and she went back to sleep. The restaurant was closed, but I found snack crackers in a vending machine. Alarmed by then, I tried the TV, and found no comfort.
The suddenness of it stunned me. We had always ignored what we didn’t want to see, and nobody was prepared. I got nothing but stale commercials and bits of taped sitcoms and the last of an incomprehensible special bulletin. Before midnight the set and the room lights flickered out. The phone was dead. All I could do was sit with Susan in the dark.
A long night. Too anxious to sleep, I walked the floor and tried the dead phone and sat holding her hot hand. Sometimes she gripped my fingers or mumbled in her sleep. Once, I heard angry cursing and running footsteps in the hall. Headlights flashed through the windows, and I heard the diminishing howl of a car racing away.
Total silence followed. Higher over far gray hills every time I looked, the full moon seemed oddly peaceful. Susan breathed more quietly. Late in the night, her hand quivered and relaxed in mine.
She was dead.
Just the sniffles, and now she was dead. Alone with her there in the cold moonlight and the musty odors of the room, I felt too numb to grasp anything. Her hand grew cold in mine. When at last I found the will to move, I groped my way down to the dark lobby and banged on the door behind the registration desk until the manager shuffled out with a candle. He was a wheezy old asthmatic in rumpled blue pajamas.
“I feel for you, sir.” His watery eyes blinked as if he couldn’t really see me. “This killer flu.” His teeth out, he was lisping. “My own woman has it. Just a bad cold, the doctor said.” His puffy lips twitched over bare red gums. “Our cook—he died last night.”
I asked how I could get an ambulance or a doctor or any help at all.
“I don’t—don’t know, sir.” His voice was a broken whisper. “Nobody knows anything.”
“I’ve got to get somebody.”
“Nobody.” He tipped his white-wisped head, a blue-veined hand cupped to his ear. “Nothing. Just listen.”
All I heard was his raspy breathing.
“A bad time, mister.”
I stared till he went on.
“Power out.” He blinked at the flickering candle. “We sat all night with an old battery radio. Dialing for news. Nobody knew anything. Not even the president. He came on to say the crisis was only unproven rumors. No terrorist threat. No enemy attack. No natural disaster. No reason for panic except this Siberian flu.
“Just the flu!” A croaking laugh. “It ain’t no common flu. Not here and not in Atlanta. Crazy people trying to run away. Peachtree Plaza blocked with piled-up cars. The whole city burning and no fire trucks. Announcers too frightened to make any sense. Till the radio died.”
“Bad,” I said. “But I’ve got to get help with my wife.”
“Your problem, mister.” Bleary eyes squinting across the candle, he coughed at me. “When the cook keeled over, the rest of the help cleared out. You’re the last guest. I hope—” Raspingly, he cleared his throat. “Hope the damn bug hasn’t got me.”
“Can’t you—”
“Sorry, mister. Nothing we can do.” He shrugged and turned away. “Unless old Jeff comes in.”
Jeff was the bellman. He limped up that grand stair at sunrise. Whatever he had heard or seen, it had left him queerly calm. He was left alone in the world, thankful to be spared to his work. The Lord’s will be done.
He helped me dig a grave in the weedy yard behind the lodge, and said a prayer when we had Susan’s body covered. He unlocked the restaurant to find a simple breakfast for me, and carried my bags down to the rented car and shook his grizzled head when I offered him a twenty.
“The good Lord has spoken, sir. Money don’t matter no more.”
The manager had found his teeth. His wife was still alive, and he wanted to keep me with them. Following anxiously out to the car, he asked where I was going.
New Mexico, I said.
Still dazed and numb, longing for escape, I recalled the open spaces and the peace of my ranch childhood. Susan was dead. Nothing could ever bring her back, but I had LeMoyne’s preprint. If I could get it to Eric, if he could use the discovery to end such viral scourges—this hope became my reason to stay alive.
“A long haul, mister, the way things look.” The manager blinked away into the haze of sunlit smoke that must have come from fires in Atlanta. He turned abruptly back to clutch my sleeve. “Free room, sir, if you’ll stay here with me and the woman till things get better.”
I said thanks, and shook my head.
“Won’t you—won’t you think about it?” His old voice cracked. “After all this, who can you trust?”
“Ill have to trust a man I know in Albuquerque.”
“I place my own trust in God.” Old Jeff turned from stowing my bags in the trunk. “He sent the visitation because the world has sinned.”
“Mister, if you’ve got to go—” The manager backed uneasily away when I had a fit of sneezing. “Better stay out of Atlanta.”
I did, driving west and south along back roads through a landscape eerily emptied since yesterday. Fall colors still splashed the hills. I saw cattle grazing, and once a fast-driven pickup passed me, but the harvest had stopped. The living must have been shut up with the sick and the dead.
A harder impact hit me when I stopped before noon on a hill above the interstate, not far from the Alabama line. Black smoke was still boiling up from piled-up wrecks that blocked a curve. Dead cars and pickups and buses stood in an endless line on the pavement or beside it. I saw live survivors walking, or some of them squatting in little groups around smoky fires, but they seemed terribly few.
Soaked with sweat, I felt suddenly cold and shaking, even in the hot car. My head was throbbing by then, and nothing seemed entirely real. I sat there a long time, coughing till my throat felt raw. Once I dreamed that I was back with Susan at Raventree, black Jeff serving us mint juleps nestled in ice-filled silver bowls. Sipping hers, she joked that she was trying to be a happy guinea pig.
Awake again, or half-awake, I knew she was dead, and remembered Eric. I drove on till the chills came back. I remember a truck stop where I traded my watch for a tank of gas and a six-pack of warm sodas. I remember dead cattle in a meadow, bloated grotesquely, legs stuck straight out, as if they were inflated toys. Black crows were wheeling over them. I remember women and children gathered in a field around men digging a grave. One of the men came out with a rifle to wave me away.
The car stalled when I tried to turn on a muddy road. I tried to walk away, and found myself so weak I had to crawl back on hands and knees. I remember shivering when night fell around me, and trying not to sleep because I thought I would never wake.
I did wake, on a cot under a high metal roof. I heard a woman’s voice, and thought for one happy instant that she was Susan. The flu and the panic seemed stark nightmare till I caught the stink of sickness and heard the drum of a diesel generator and saw the woman over me. A brisk little lady in apron and sunbonnet, she had come to bathe me.
“This killer flu.” She answered my hoarse questions. “It hits everybody, but Doc Franken pulls a few of us through.”
The hospital was a hasty makeshift, a warehouse built to hold farm equipment. Dr. Franken was a frail oldster who had tried to retire years before. Most of the nurses were farm women and shopgirls whose old jobs had vanished.
They saved my life.
The man on the next cot was Jason Madden, a Taos painter and onetime college professor. The contagion had caught him on the Blue Ridge, he told me, sketching and photographing autumn scenes for a calendar. He had found me unconscious in the car and brought me here before he collapsed.
Where was the LeMoyne preprint?
“Your Holy Grail?” He laughed when I asked about it. “You’ve been crazy about it, asking everybody and looking for it under your pillow. If it’s anything you’ve got to have, it’s probably still in your car.”
“I’ve got to have it,” I told him. “If I get out of here alive.”
We did recover together, and he became a friend. I remember his talk at night, when the lights were dim and others lay sleeping or brooding with me over all we had lost. I heard his life story. Divorced, with no close kin, he tried to be philosophic about the viral holocaust.
“Wipe it out,” he urged me once, when I was silently despondent. “Forget your lost preprint and your dead newspaper. Your dear Susan, if you can. When you stop to think back, our old world wasn’t altogether wonderful. Not if you consider all we used to fret about. Ozone and earthquakes. Clothes and success and the new cars we wanted. Politics and wars. Taxes and—”
“Are you happy?” His cheery tone had roused me to interrupt. “Are you glad?”
“Hell no!” He sat up on his cot, glaring at me. With my whole world dead?” On another cot, somebody cursed and called for quiet. Jason lowered his voice. “Of course we’ve got to try again. Right here we’ve seen the spirit that will keep the race alive. But—but—” His voice broke into a sob. “Sorry,” he whispered. “Sorry. Hard as it is, we’ve got to carry on.”
As I got stronger, he turned inquisitive.
“Who’s Eric?” he asked me. “This guy you raved about?”
“An old friend,” I said. “A medical researcher; somebody called him the wizard of the viruses. That preprint was for him. A new discovery—”
“Nordman?” he interrupted me. “Eric Nordman?”
I nodded on the pillow.
“I knew him.” He stared at me, his hollowed eyes strange. “He approached me to design and illustrate a book he’d written. The Ultimate Enemy. You know anything about it?”
I shook my head.
“A scary book.” Frown lines bit his fever-drawn face. “He wanted us to limit world populations. Painted a terrible future if we didn’t. He wanted me to do the Four Horsemen to head his chapters—four chapters on famine and disease and war and what he called the animal nature of man. His ultimate enemy was us. I never made the drawings, but his book still haunts me.”
“Eric himself was haunted—” Another voice shouted for silence, and I dropped to a whisper. “We were together in Africa, through a war and a terrible famine. He came back feeling he’d seen the whole world’s fate. Used to say we were prisoners of instinct, breeding ourselves to death. I suppose his book was meant to scare us into action.”
“Too scary.” Madden shrugged and lay back on his pillow. “His publishers called it too downbeat. Maybe the truth, but nothing the world would want to know. They decided to kill it.”
We went to work when we were able, mopping floors and emptying urinals and bedpans till our last patients were up and gone. The dead were buried by then. Power was on. Radio and TV stations were coming back on the air. Trucks from the refinery had come with gasoline. Surviving county officials were back in the courthouse.
I left the hospital with Madden. His plan was a return to his Taos studio, and he offered me a ride to Albuquerque. We found the LeMoyne printout safe in the backseat of my abandoned car, the pages crinkled a little from rain blown in an open window, but still entirely legible. I found a shred of hope in them.
“If I can find Nordman,” I told Madden, “if his lab’s still there, if that synthetic molecule can really capture viruses—”
Our drive West took time. Food and gas were scarce. Winter damage to the roads had not been repaired. People still feared strangers who might be carriers. Though the high summits were still white, a green blush of spring had brushed the Sandia slopes before we came down Tijeras canyon into Albuquerque.
South of Central, Madden dropped me off outside a locked gate under a fading sign lettered Nordman Research, Ltd I found a bell and waited a long time before a shabby old man came shuffling down the gravel walk from a long green metal building. He stopped a dozen yards away to shade his eyes against the hot noon sun and smile faintly at a sparrow flying past him with a bit of string. He shrugged and came on and stopped again to stare at me.
“Ben?” His voice was cracked and husky, but one I knew. “I never expected—”
“Eric! I didn’t recognize you.”
No longer the red-haired Viking, he was gray, bent, shrunken, too small for his baggy sweatshirt and threadbare jeans. After a moment he came on to unlock the gate and offer a lean-boned hand.
“So you made it?” His tone was flat, as if he didn’t much care. “How about Susan?”
I told him she was dead.
“Monica, too.” I saw emotion then, pain that cut deeper creases under his silver stubble. “We had three kids.”
His haggard eyes had found the preprint in my hand.
“Hugo LeMoyne’s paper.” I gave it to him. “His research report. The one he was going to read at Atlanta.” He squinted blankly at it, and I tried to tell him what it might mean. “LeMoyne describes a bioengineered antivirus molecule he’d engineered. His early test results were positive. I hope it’s something you can complete—”
“Hugo?” he broke in, no longer listening. “I had him here. Able enough in the lab, but a fool outside. I had to let him go.”
He thrust the paper back at me.
“Read it,” I urged him. “He said it came from a notion he discussed with you.”
He took it back to frown at the title page.
“Nothing that can matter. Not now.” He shrugged at me. “But come inside.”
I had expected a warmer welcome. He seemed harried and abstracted, as if absorbed in something more significant, but he locked the gate behind us and nodded for me to follow him down the weed-grown walk and into the low green building. Inside, I saw lab equipment pushed against the walls, autoclaves and centrifuges, computers and electron microscopes, benches stacked with glassware. Most of the floor was clear.
“Our hospital.” His rusty voice turned ironic. “Most of our patients are sleeping out behind.”
I followed him back into the austere little cubicle where he lived. Sterile Cultures Only was still lettered on the refrigerator door. Microwave, can opener, and coffee maker were arrayed on a black-topped workbench. He had a narrow cot and one hard-backed chair. He gave me the chair.
“Want a drink?”
The old Eric had never touched the hard stuff because it killed brain cells, but now he opened the refrigerator for a bottle of water and a laboratory flask that had the reek of straight ethanol. I accepted a cautious shot. He poured himself a stiff jolt of the burning stuff, and gulped it with only a dash of water. Sitting on the cot, he riffled through the preprint.
“Clever work.” He tossed it aside. “A bit late.”
“Can’t you duplicate it?” I pressed him. “LeMoyne hoped to stop the viruses forever.”
“Hugo’s crazy dream.” He paused to frown at one of the water-stained pages. “Though his data does look convincing. I suppose we might have tried it a year or so ago, but now—” He offered me the flask and poured himself another heavy shot. “No point to it now. Not with my staff all scattered or dead.”
“No point?” I was puzzled and astonished. “Suppose that virus strikes again?”
“It won’t.”
“Are you certain? Very little was known—”
“I know more.” He seemed very positive. “The agent was a mutant myxovirus. Airborne. It infected the whole population. Survivors are immune. It has run its course. With no carriers left, it will soon die out.”
“Hard comfort,” I muttered. “With so many millions dead.”
“Billions.” He was bluntly matter-of-fact. “I’ve got data from contacts all around the world. Mortality rates average 92 percent. Which should leave us around half a billion survivors. A normal load for the planet.”
“Normal? What do you mean?”
“We had a dreadful overload.” He set his glass aside and leaned toward me somberly. “That hit me hard in Africa. Don’t you recall our folly there?” He squinted at me oddly. “Feeling noble if we could save a million starving people. Shutting our eyes to 3 million of their hapless kids, doomed to a worse fate in the next generation.”
I pushed the chair back and sat shaking my head.
“We forget what we are.” He raised his raspy voice, as if lecturing a backward student. “One more animal species, evolved in natural balance. Our numbers kept in check by predators, disease, and food supplies—till we upset the natural system with modern sanitation and well-intended efforts like we made in Africa.”
I sat staring at him, chilled and trembling, recalling what Madden had said about his unpublished book.
“Remember the rabbit-coyote cycle?” Seeing my shock, he tried to be persuasive. “It acts to keep both species alive in a natural equilibrium. The coyotes eat the rabbits. They multiply till most of the rabbits are gone. After they starve out, the rabbits return.”
“I’ve heard you called the wizard virologist.” My voice was shaking. “Did you—”
I couldn’t finish the question, and he ignored it.
“We’re animals,” he repeated. “Back in prehistory, we had to respect our natural limits. When hunting was poor or the rains failed, we knew that some had to die. The problems began when we got too clever. Or maybe not clever enough. Beginning with fire and the ax and the plow, we violated nature. We burned the forests and plowed the prairies and hunted most animals into extinction. We kept on till we had to be stopped.”
