Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (15 page)

The effect on the people in Canon City was immediate—and ominous. Before the broadcast, in this mountain-foothills town of twelve thousand souls, people had realized there was a medical problem and that some people had died, but life had gone on much as usual just the same. There was a lot of local gossip going around; people had commiserated with the families who had been hit, and pursed their lips at the idea that the State of Washington would export this sort of thing; they had watched the teams of CDC people coming and going, and cooperated with them in their investigation; there was an almost touching esprit de corps about it all—nothing this big had happened in Canon City, Colorado, since the train had derailed over the Royal Gorge thirty years ago—and when the town officials passed the word that anyone who had had any contact with any sick person should report to the Fremont County Health Department to be interviewed and receive preventive medicine to take, they queued up dutifully, congratulating themselves and everybody else that Something Was Being Done. For most of them, it was an excitement that was around them but not quite touching them.

JTLM-TV changed all that.

The broadcast brought the horror home to the very people who were, they actually heard for the first time, living at the center of the horror. Pneumonia was pneumonia, but the Black Plague, proclaimed baldly on the television like those horrible medieval epidemics, was something else. Within a day of the broadcast, Canon City, Colorado, took on the aspect of a ghost town. The Mayor and the local police, succumbing to panic, spread notices urging everyone to stay home, to stay in, to go nowhere except in an emergency. The Shoeleather Boys now had to pursue their contacts; they met with locked and bolted doors and had to conduct interviews through cracked-open windows. Business doors slammed shut as the local radio station— the only one many Canon City radios would pick up—repeated feckless and largely useless advice, over and over and over, every hour on the hour. One supermarket remained opened to sell "emergency supplies," but few customers were bold enough to go shopping; they lived from their pantry shelves instead. Streets were deserted except for an occasional rattletrap pickup truck going by. Only the small local hospital and doctors' clinic remained busy, crowded with people suddenly terrified of
every
ache and pain.

Meanwhile, plague continued to surface—two new cases here, three there—all too often appearing among contacts of earlier victims who had been seen by EIS workers and were already taking full doses of prophylactic antibiotics. Carlos Quin-tana was slightly cheered that a few of these people were only developing the bubonic form of the disease, with raging fevers and circulatory collapse and swollen, painful, draining glands but none of the devastating respiratory symptoms—"But not many of them," he reported to Ted Bettendorf, "not nearly enough. The balance is all wrong." People wore face masks, supplied for free at the Public Library in Canon City, when they went out; others wore bandanas over their faces like western-movie bandits. Nobody knew if either did any good.

On the third night after the broadcast, at 2:30
a.m
. , the manager of the local bank and one of Canon City's social and business pillars packed his wife and two children and dog and stereo set into the back end of his van and took off down the highway for parts unknown, leaving the house lights on and the doors banging and all of their furniture right where it was. The protective antibiotic they all had been taking was left on a bathroom shelf, an unfortunate oversight. By morning the whole town knew they were gone. Rumor had it that they had headed down toward Texas, but despite this, and very suddenly, Getting Out Of There seemed to be an idea whose time had come. By noon an alarming assortment of cars, vans, trucks, pickups, Jeeps and even tractors began moving out of town in all directions, first a few, then a steady stream, by nightfall a deluge. Carlos and his people pleaded, the local radio station pleaded, the town councilmen pleaded—the ones who hadn't left—but people kept on moving. The State Patrol set up hasty roadblocks to try to screen the outflow, in the midst of one of the torrential summer thunderstorms that swept in from the plains that afternoon; the roadblocks obstructed things somewhat but did not stop the movement because even the State patrol was not sure that they could legally block traffic indefinitely, and in the face of outraged challenges didn't quite dare stop someone from going through in a legally licensed vehicle. In the midst of one roadblock, in a narrow gap between the sandstone hills west of Canon City on the road toward the Royal Gorge, a superannuated farm truck piled high with household goods overturned across both lanes of the highway, effectively blocking traffic from
both
directions and trapping a whole caravan of rub-berneckers who had been coming from the west to have a look (from behind closed car windows) fiisthand at the "Plague City." The net result could not have been a greater mess if a chunk of road had been blocked by a mudslide; there were cars in ditches, cars backed into each other, trucks driven halfway up hillsides and turned over, people screaming at each other from car windows, patrol cars with blue flashers blinking, helplessly entrapped in the middle of the mess, patrolmen wandering past each other in opposite directions waving their arms and shouting bullhorn orders that nobody whosoever paid any attention to, children and dogs and a few chickens running wild underfoot. . . . Carlos Quintana got a survey look at it all from a Forest Service chopper that made a couple of low sweeps over the scene of carnage, and nodded his head glumly. "It figures," he said, "it's all part of the pattern. And it hasn't even started yet. Get me back to town, okay? I've got work to do."

In their second-story tenement in south Chicago, Sidonia Harper and her mother watched the nationwide network re-broadcast of the JTLM-TV show on their ancient black-and-white set, Sidonia from her wheelchair in the living room, her mother from the adjoining kitchen. When it was over the girl sat clutching her arms across her breast, hearing the summer sounds coming in the screenless window, shaking her head. "That's no good," she said finally. "That's no good for anybody."

"Ain't nothin' to worry about," her mother said, putting down her cooking spoon. "That's way out west there."

"They said it was rats that caused it," Sidonia said.

"I think them's
western
rats," her mother said dubiously.

"Don't matter where the rats are," Siddie said. She waved her hand toward the window. "You ever look down in that alley, just when it gettin' dark? Got rats all over down there. Come in the door at night, up the stairs. You seen 'em well as I have."

"Honey, we can't do nothin' about
them
rats. They always been there. What you worry in' about?"

"Don't have to have 'em," Sidonia said. "Nasty things, gnawed Miz Beny's baby's ears off. We could get rid of them."

"How?"

"Man come around, over in the block where Jerry live, over near the park. Gov'mint man, talked to everybody in the block. Laid out traps and poison down in the basements, long as peo-pie promise to pick up their garbage, clean up the trash a little. Used gas in one of the buildings killed a lot of rats. Man said they keep workin' at it, they gon' be a rat-free block pretty soon. Lots of blocks already that way. Why not this one?"

Her mother laughed. "Ain't no man been around here, honey."

"Maybe we ought to get 'em."

"Well, you work on it, Siddie. Maybe you can get a gov'mint man to come round. No harm tryin', I suppose."

The girl looked at her mother retiring back to the kitchen, a long, level look her mother didn't see. Then she wheeled her chair over to the window and gazed down to the darkening street. "Maybe I will," she said, too quiet for her mother to hear. "Maybe just do that. Lots of things people think you can't do, you can do all right." She looked down at her withered legs. "Lots of things."

23

Yersinia pestis
was the name Monique Jenrette best knew it by. Textbooks described it as a poorly staining gram-negative rod-shaped bacillus fatally pathogenic to certain rodents, certain other mammals, and man. Unlike the viruses,
Yersinia
was not an obligate parasite—it did not require living cells in which to propagate. It would grow and multiply quite vigorously in cell-free dilutions of blood plasma, on certain nutrient agar plates, or in various pH-controlled sugar or peptide solutions. Stained with Wilson's stain, a special preparation from which the organism took up staining pigment more readily than from others, it looked like a pale, slightly bent rod with bits of genetic material staining more heavily in each end, thus appearing under the microscope lens rather like a tiny closed safety pin.

All this, of course, you could learn from any textbook. Monique Jenrette was concerned about things you could not find in any textbook.

In the special Hot Lab she was charged with setting up and supervising at the CDC installation in Fort Collins in northern Colorado—a rigidly structured, high-security lab designed for the safe propagation and study of violently dangerous bacterial organisms. She was joined by a team of microbiologists flown in from Stanford and the University of Washington, people thoroughly skilled in bacteriologic techniques. Three of them were particularly experienced in recombinant DNA studies with gram-negative bacilli, one of them a prominent Nobel Prize contender for his work pioneering techniques to recom-bine the genetic material in certain harmless coliform bacilli to make them produce gamma-interferons, growth hormone, Hepatitis B vaccine antigen and multiple sclerosis neutralizing factor. None except Monique had any particular personal experience working with
Yersinia pestis
and none had more than a nodding acquaintance with high-security Hot Lab procedures.

The materials they had to work with, at first, were none of the best: cultures taken from early victims, mostly in Washington State and a few later ones from Colorado, that had been old when originally flown to the lab in Atlanta for confirmation and now had been plated and replated waiting for somebody to come and do something with them. Many bacterial strains, having been grown and regrown through repeated reculturings, would typically begin losing certain of their characteristics, changing themselves, altering their behavior, especially "frail" bacteria such as
Yersinia
strains. Under Monique's guidance the team at Fort Collins did what they could do in studying bacteria from these cultures, plating them against antibiotics, performing various fermentation tests and agglutination tests to identify genetic characteristics, undertaking animal inoculations to document infection patterns and virulence, but for all their care, the results were unpredictable, varying from specimen to specimen from the same culture, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, sometimes indeterminate. They worked in a specially sealed, specially ventilated wing of a lab building, scrubbed, gowned, masked and gloved under the full aseptic precautions of any surgeon in an operating room about to perform open-heart surgery; inside the lab they did their work in a long, sealed, transparent tunnel, using built-in shoulder-length rubber gloves to manipulate specimens, nutrient tubes, culture plates, incubator trays, equipment for enzyme and protein assays and so forth. Death was afoot inside that sealed transparent tunnel, invisible and treacherous and silent and very final; there must be no possible way for any trace of it to escape while they studied the unnatural quality of it.

Those first studies were suggestive, perhaps, but maddeningly inconclusive. Monique knew full well that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were going to have their lives altered by what might be discovered in that sealed transparent tunnel; at the very least they had to find out what it was those people were dealing with; at the most, her work here might reveal to her colleagues what they might best do. But she couldn't commit them to widespread action on the basis of inconclusive data. From time to time, like maybe about once every hour during those first few sixteen-hour days, she wished that she were working in the absolutely fail-safe, microbiologically flawless Maximum Security Lab in Atlanta, a sterile room within a sterile room within a sterile room, confining Death from any possible escape within a nest of laboratories built like a nest of boxes—but perhaps, she consoled herself, that would be overkill when dealing with a mere antibiotic-vulnerable bacterium. Maxi had been built for studying and manipulating the truly terrifying and world-threatening viral killers: the Lassa fever virus, the Marburg virus, the hideous Argentine bovine encephalitis virus that turned ninety-eight percent of its human victims into turnips in forty-eight hours—all virulently infective new viral agents with largely unknown spread characteristics, staggeringly high mortality rates, no vaccine whatever and no known treatment. But if
Yersinia pestis
was really so much less frightening, so much more benign than those wild viral bastards, then why was she suddenly breaking out in sweats and having waking nightmare fantasies eveiy time she walked into this lab?

On her third day there the first chipmunk arrived by special courier, reaching her not terribly long after having been bagged by Carlos and Frank in the wild.
Fresh meat, indeed.
Well, Monique was ready for it. The bag went into a separate, sealed tank in the sealed, transparent tunnel, relieved of the outer transportation bag, which itself was sent down the belt to the autoclave and thence to the incinerator. The polybag inside was filled with fleas no longer interested in the dead, cold rodent hulk they had once inhabited; they were hopping about on its nose and eyes, on its belly, and swarming around on the inside of the bag. Telephone conversations ensued with some rather specialized people in Atlanta to figure the best agent to use under Hot Lab circumstances in order to kill eggs as well as fleas, to get them all, but as dead as possible. A nonflammable gas was chosen and applied to the polybag in a pressure-cooker affair, capable of permeating the capture bag without opening it. Two hours should be plenty of time, but let's give it three just the same. Endless minutes spent waiting out the time; Monique broke scrub and paced the adjoining corridor for a while, nervous as a cat, smoking one of her rare cigarettes
—God forbid this job should drive me back to that foolishness again.
Finally, after a full three hours the cooker was opened, the bag opened in the long transparent tunnel, and a million dead fleas collected, six million eggs, totaling about a half-tablespoon of specimen. The dead fleas and eggs crushed in a special nonporous quartz-crystal device. Half of the material was placed in a special holding broth for later use, the rest divided in hundreds of aliquots for initial plating and culturing that had been so carefully planned.