Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (33 page)

Well, there was no point standing here in darkness, waiting for the worst. Suddenly he was thinking of Warehouse 14, stacked full of precious vaccine and other supplies, with fire moving north toward the riverfront, and he knew'what he had to do. At least the vaccine and antibiotics had to be salvaged—but how? Hell, if he could reach the warehouse he could
carry
the vaccine out. Carry it where? Who could say where? Into the river, if necessary.

With a course of action in mind, he ducked back out to the street. There was supposed to be a squad car assigned to this headquarters in case he or somebody else needed to get somewhere fast. It hadn't been there when he arrived, but he might just possibly snag one going by. On the sidewalk a hot stiff breeze struck his face, and he could see that the conflagration from Roanoke Plaza was spreading. Other sections of red in the sky suggested more fires, and the DeSoto Hilton tower was visible from where he stood as a ghastly pillar of fire. He waited ten minutes before he saw a squad car approach an intersection near enough for him to whistle and flag it. Carlos identified himself. "I've got to get to Warehouse 14, try to get the plague vaccine and drugs to a safer place," he told the driver. "Can you help?"

"The streets are alive down there, Doc. People've gone crazy in this town."

"I've got to get that stuff out of there, one way or another."

"Well, climb in. We can make a try."

The officer had a riot gun and a huge .38 pistol on the seat next to him, canisters of tear gas on the floor, one obviously leaking because the cop was weeping and Carlos was too in half a minute. They were just pulling away from the curb when a group of dark men materialized out of nowhere. One of them used a long two-by-four to smash out the squad car's right headlight with an enormous thudding blow. Another fired a shotgun blast, shattering the middle of the windshield. The cop slammed down the accelerator and the motor roared, but the group was too well organized; there was oil under the rear wheels already and somebody was busy slashing the front ones.

The cop shoved the pistol into Cados's hand. "Use it, man!" he said and shoved the riot gun through the hole in the sagging windshield, fired four shells blind and point-blank. Then the left side window exploded inward under a smashing blow, and black hands reached in and dragged the cop out through it bodily. Somebody else was beating in the hood and roof and Carlos, the pistol lost on the floor somewhere, was hauled out by his collar.

Once out of the car, he staggered for footing, looking for some direction to run, but he didn't have time. He caught a flash of the two-by-four plank swinging at him broadside, felt it crash into the side of his head, and that was all. He didn't even feel his knees give.

He didn't know when it was that he recovered consciousness. It seemed like hours later, but his cheap watch had been smashed when he had fallen. Someone had torn the diamond-braided wedding ring off his finger and his pants were torn half off, his wallet gone. The side of his head was screamingly painful as he lurched to his feet, and he couldn't see too well out of one eye. Worse than that, he couldn't think, and
knew
he couldn't think. He couldn't place where he was, or when it was, or what was happening except that buildings were burning on all sides, and he knew he had to do something about some vaccine while there was still time. . . .

That one thing flared into focus: the vaccine in Warehouse 14. That was urgent. He had to get there before the fire did. It made no sense, and he
knew
it made no sense, but some ingrained, dogged fatalism took control and he turned and stumbled down the street.

He could already see that the fire in Roanoke Plaza had spread: it looked like the whole restored Old Section of antebellum mansions and plazas was one vast, roaring conflagration now. He staggered down the street, heading vaguely toward Factor's Walk and the river and then saw flames to the east in that direction too: the farther waterfront warehouses were burning too, with flames driven west up River Street toward him by an active offshore wind. Fragments of flaming debris flew past him in the air; breathing was hot and difficult. Presently he stopped to tear off his necktie and rip open the neck of his shirt. A moment later he pulled off his jacket, looked about foolishly for some safe place to leave it. Then he saw a woman lying dead in the gutter, faceup, eyes wide open and staring at the smoke-filled sky, and he dropped the jacket over her face, and blocked it instantly, and went on.

The vaccine is all that's left,
he thought. There were people moving out of buildings now and then, washcloths over their mouths, forearms over their eyes, but what Carlos saw were the rats, a veritable river of rats streaming from the buildings, up from the waterfront, under his feet, clinging briefly to his trouser legs, then moving on, silent as death they moved, silent as the death they sought to evade.

Somewhere ahead he saw Warehouse 14, or thought he saw it, down two levels on Factor's Walk, and he started to run. There was a narrow stone walkway down along a closer warehouse, the easiest way to reach it, if he could just get to the top of the stair.
Well, Monique, we '11 try, won't we?
He tore off his sweat-soaked shirt to cover his nose and mouth and bolted past the nearer warehouse to reach the stair—

With a dull boom like the blast of a ruptured gas tank the nearer warehouse burst into flame, burning on all of its floors at once. The wave of exploding, searing gas struck Carlos and knocked him flat on the cobblestone pavement. He struggled to his knees, gasping for air, engulfed in fleeing rats. He focused his mind on the vaccine, and tried to rise, but now he knew with a terrible certainty that he was not going to reach the vaccine, and it really didn't matter, anyway. Savannah was dying, and so was he.
Ave Maria
—he fought to get to his feet, moved his hand to cross himself—
Madre de Dios.
A slight shift of wind, a blast of hot and poisonous gas and Carlos Quintana collapsed among the few rats still able to flee, and his lips stopped moving in the middle of the prayer.

He died at three minutes past midnight on the night Savannah died, and was cremated ten minutes later, and nobody knew for four full months exactly what had happened to him.

Requiem for Savannah, Pearl of the South Atlantic Seaboard, loveliest of the antebellum cities of the South. Destroyed by fire in a single night, but not by General Sherman. Three-quarters of the central city razed in eight hours. In the words of the Chief of the Chatham County Fire Department, widely quoted later: "I can fight fire. I can't fight God."

Statistics gathered and published later, when no one had any reason to care anymore: Dead of plague in Savannah: 35,400; dead of fire and insurrection: 85,143. An odd figure, that last one, for a footnote to history.

On the night the fire was finally curbed, the President of the United States on national television made a moving speech in honor of "those valiant dead who fell in the City of Savannah, and those valiant living who remain in the health-protection corps throughout the nation, and who pledge to you tonight that the disaster that struck in Savannah will never happen again. I can tell you the plague is curbed there, now, and we are prepared—I repeat, we are fully prepared—to curb it wherever else it may rear its foul head. As your President, I solemnly pledge to you—"

On the CBS-TV news network, perhaps without precedent in histoiy, the President's message to the nation was interrupted at this point with an urgent bulletin. "Just moments ago, CBS news has learned from the Centers for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta that major outbreaks of plague of the same sort that laid waste to Savannah, Georgia, have been confirmed in Charleston, South Carolina; Atlanta; Canton, Ohio; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; New York City; Seattle; and San Francisco. Residents of these cities and others are urged to remain tuned to CBS-TV for the latest bulletins and instructions from your local Public Health Services."

Hail and farewell, Savannah.

In the cool dampness of the late November dawn Dr. Ted Bettendorf let himself into his second-story office at CDC-Atlanta and deposited his topcoat and muffler in the little corner closet. Chilly, these early mornings,
a warning,
he thought,
of another unseasonably wet, cold winter.
The office was spacious but untidy, the wall shelves piled high with jumbles of books and journals, the desk stacked with unfinished business and the nightly collection of dispatches, the newly installed eight-line telephone and the vital intercom to Mandy's desk outside—
God, how he
was
leaning on Mandy these days!
Through the window he could see the familiar view of this charming section of Atlanta, the huge old trees dipping their branches in early winter greenery. It was barely past
5
:00
a.m
., an hour before Mandy would be coming in, at least an hour before the first calls from the West Coast would be coming through, but for Ted Bettendorf it was the one quiet hour he could count on all day, an hour before the murderous pressure began once again, an hour between the nightmares of the slow-passing night and the raging nightmares of the day about to begin. . . .

He sat at the desk, pushed the dispatches aside and took out a yellow legal pad. For a while he just stared at it, deliberately forcing the present out of his mind, fleeing back to the historical past he loved so dearly. Presently he began to write.

According to the account of Giovanni of Montealbano, in the Year of our Lord 1357 the city of Tekirdag on the western shore of the Sea of Marmara, between the Aegean

and the Black Sea, had been spared the terrible plague that had ravaged other eastern Mediterranean lands; but rather than rejoicing in their good fortune, the people of Tekirdag lived each passing day in fear and trembling lest the plague should even then appear. Because of the terror in which they dwelt, the people closed the harbor—their major source of commerce—and fortified the city, allowing no ship to enter there, and catapulted huge fireballs aboard any ship which defied them and ventured too close to their shores.

Most ships went away. But one day three Arab ships from Rashid appeared and begged safe harbor, and were denied. Now there was plague on those three ships, with many of their crew dead or dying; and being turned away from every harbor in their course, their food and water were gone and some among them were starving and dying of thirst. Thus the three ships risked the fireballs to approach the harbor and beg that casks of water and food be set adrift to float out to them on the receding tide—but the people of Tekirdag, fearing the air surrounding the ships to be unclean, answered their pleadings with fire and burned two of the ships, and all aboard were burned alive or drowned.

Then the Master of the third ship, when he saw this, was seized with anger, and ordered his own catapults to be manned, and ordered his ship to be brought about and driven deep into the harbor; and he filled his catapults with newly-plague-dead corpses, together with multitudes of rats that were gnawing on them, and hurled them over the city walls, as many as a hundred corpses, before fire destroyed his ship too.

And then it was, according to the account of Giovanni of Montealbano, that plague struck the people of Tekirdag with unheard-of ferocity, and within a month the living city was reduced to a tomb. . . .

The first light of a wintry sun came through the office window, and Ted left his writing to stare out at the street below.
And so The Plague made its slow steady way across Asia Minor and Europe in the Year of Our Lord 1357,
he thought. There had been no hurry about it, in those long-dead days; it moved sluggishly but implacably. Only in the coastal cities did it strike swiftly. Farther inland, it inched along from farm to farm, following the cow paths and rutted mud roads, from one tiny village to the next, from one baronial castle to the next—never moving more swiftly than a horseman could gallop. It had taken months and years—decades—for that plague to sweep across the populated world.
Ample time for men to have stopped it, even in those days,
Ted mused,
if only they'd had some inkling how. But not today: Today we have a different sort of plague, and time is running out.

The tall, gray-haired man sighed and walked back to his desk. More and more these days he found himself thinking about those ancient plagues, and the dreadful ironies of the past and present. Even when they
had
known how to slow it down, it hadn't done them any good. Like that little town in Tuscany, back in the mid-1600s—-as early as then, level-headed public-health authorities had had some ideas about plague that had been close to the target. They'd isolated the sickest ones. They had sent out orders barring large public meetings and fairs, ordering people to stay in their homes, even to avoid daily attendance at church—and then sent out an emissary to see to it that the orders were followed. An exercise in futility, of course, because the orders were simply ignored. The priest demanded church attendance in defiance of the authorities. The people went to the fair in the neighboring town whether the emissary liked it or not, and the emissary found himself enmeshed in the solution of a long series of deliberately created petty squabbles, ridiculous court cases and night brigandries instead of enforcing orders to save people from the plague.
Bloody-minded people, as the British would say, mule-stubborn to the point of self-destruction in the face of a terrible disaster, going out of their way to defeat the public-health authorities and everyone else around, themselves included, because things were not going precisely to their liking. It was the pattern in those days long past, and the pattern repeated in Savannah, and the ever-growing pattern everywhere in these terrible weeks since Savannah.