Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (36 page)

What happened was horrible in its veiy simplicity. When the vaccine and antibiotic shipments arrived, with distribution jointly entrusted to the governing authorities of the two major metropolitan segments of the city—the Missouri city and the city across the state line in Kansas—disagreements between the two governing bodies immediately appeared. Those two governments had seldom—if ever—agreed on anything whatever in the past, and the imminent crisis did not make them any better bedfellows. In fact, the two communities reached real agreement on one single point alone: that distribution of supplies to the
other
community should take place only after prudent and ample provision had been made for the protection of the entire governmental and health preservation organization of the first community—and since possession was indeed nine-tenths of the law, the "first community" was defined by its governing body as the community which managed to obtain actual physical possession of the whole metropolitan shipment of vaccine and antibiotic. And an early, frantic and very secret cashing in of political credits speedily greased the shipping skids so that the entire consignment arrived by air on the Missouri side of the line.

The city fathers there lost no time making prudent and entirely ample provision for the protection of themselves, their wives, their children, their nephews, their closest and most profitable business friends, their most reliable supporters in the second echelon of government, their most reliable supporters in the third, fourth and fifth echelons of government, including all their wives, children, nephews and close and profitable business friends, and so on into the night. All this was accomplished with positively breathtaking efficiency, amid a succession of highly secret and totally illegal meetings, and with the quiet collusion of certain highly placed commissioners and subcommissioners of public health on the Missouri side of the river, within hours of the time the consignment of medicinals touched ground, and a full week before CDC personnel and the actual working crew of the Missouri-side Public Health Department even knew the consignment had been shipped. During that time not a single carton of vaccine nor case of antibiotic crossed the state line into Kansas.

When at last a by-then-much-depleted supply of medicinals was finally released for distribution to public-health and CDC authorities on the Kansas side, virtually none of it actually reached its target. Distressed as they were at Missouri's rape of the shipment, the city fathers in Kansas said nothing; their police simply appropriated every bit of the consignment that crossed the river, quietly and efficiently, the moment it hit high ground and delivered it to City Hall. Of this supply, officials and subofficials on the Kansas side made prudent and extremely ample provision for their own protection in the same pattern as had occurred in Missouri. Thus, like wheat shipments to India since time immemorial, seven-tenths of the entire consignment vanished from the docks before anyone knew it had arrived, and only three-tenths ultimately sifted down to the hands of the public-health and CDC workers and finally, to the doctors and other health workers designated by the blueprint action plan to distribute it. Many of those people, angered in their turn by the city fathers' actions and panicking at the sudden appearance of the disease itself on all sides of them, used the materials available quite arbitrarily to protect themselves, their families, their office workers, their receptionists, their administrative personnel, their switchboard operators and billing clerks, selected business friends and finally, certain favored patients and their families. What little of the material sifted through
that
enormous sieve fell, for the most part, into the gentle hands of the most powerful Mafia family between Chicago and Houston and became available, as the city fell into increasingly extreme straits of illness, not for the free distribution intended, but for sale to the highest bidders. . . .

It was an example of greed and unenlightened self-interest of staggering proportions. It all happened
fast
and in secret, before Kansas City's most wide-eyed news hawks tumbled onto it—and when they did, suppression of news was ready and waiting on either side of the river. The Kansas City
Star
broke the first stoiy on the Rape of the Shipment, with screamer headlines and promises of details to follow—but details did not follow, because the Commissioner of Public Utilities, on his own recognizance, cut off the power to the newspaper's press with one flip of an enormous switch and then posted armed guards around the switch to see that it stayed flipped. TV news reporters, never famed for their follow-up capacity under the best of circumstances, emitted a single loud scream in concert and then were drowned out by endless hours of solemn denials by trusted city officials.

Of course, such a story could not long stay hidden. Very soon the people of both cities became acutely aware of increasing disease and death in their midst, at precisely the same time they became aware that virtually all of their public-health protection had been betrayed by their community leaders in the course of a single week. Public outrage began as a murmur, blossomed into a rumble and then a roar.

One morning a crowd of eighty thousand people converged on City Hall on the Missouri side, many of them armed and all of them howling for blood and heads on stakes; denied and turned away by an embattled police force, they dispersed through the downtown area, smashing department-store windows, looting shelves, raging into office suites and rending and tearing everything in sight. It took police two days to clear mobs out of the downtown shambles, with eight hundred dead, fully half of them police—but the looting spread and continued in widespread outlying areas of the city. Cars were dumped on their sides to blockade streets, windows were shattered, bombs exploded, small fires raged.

Ted Bettendorf believed every word of the accounts that came to him from CDC field workers: Kansas City was a city gone mad, enraged at betrayal in a place long familiar with the finer points of political betrayal. Governmental controls collapsed altogether as the angry mobs grew and officials were searched out and besieged in their houses, defending their doorsteps from pillagers and watching their families dragged away before their eyes. Utilities fell apart, electricity and communications were virtually obliterated. For days the city convulsed with a rage of street fighting. Functioning automobiles for escape came suddenly into demand, and street thieves came into their own, stealing first hubcaps, then tires, then wheels, and then whole engines out of cars that anyone was foolish enough to leave parked and unguarded for more than half an hour at a time. And then, as the real depth of the plague began to rack the city, now totally helpless and defenseless, protective fiefdoms sprang up from block to block to guard what was left to be guarded. Cellars were converted into hospices for the dying, barricades blocked two-thirds of the city streets, nine-tenths of the stores and most of the richer homes were looted and ransacked, the dead were burned on street corners in ever-increasing numbers and finally the ice-cold winter came as a frigid blessing because it kept down the stench. In a different way and much faster than New York, Kansas City also died.

In Chicago the plague itself struck more swiftly and widely than perhaps anywhere else in the country. In early October, multiple mini-epidemics sprang up simultaneously in various areas of the city, most of them ultimately traced to air travelers from the West and South, until all possible track of them was inevitably lost. Multiple nameless prediagnosis contacts, including a dozen-odd black families that had evacuated, already ill, from Savannah to Chicago, vanished into the fastnesses of the city slums, never to be heard from again except through outbreaks of the infection they carried. On-hand supplies of vaccine and Sealey 3147 were quickly exhausted protecting essential hospital and public-health personnel, while urgent appeals for more took their place at the bottom of the growing stack on Ted Bettendorf's desk in Atlanta. With incredible swiftness the infection spread, with first hundreds and then thousands of new cases appearing daily. In the deep urban tenements the Horseman could almost have been seen galloping from block to block, had any alert epidemiologist had the time or facilities to tabulate the wildfire spread; in the middle-class tracts and wealthy suburbs the firestorm burned less flagrantly, perhaps, but no less fast. In the endless flatlands of Chicago, of all places, the ground had been prepared for uncontrolled spread of pneumonic plague by an immediately prior epidemic of A/Montreal influenza which had struck the city unseasonably and hard in late September and left 400,000 people near prostration from a three-week illness
before
the plague appeared.

In Chicago, the spreading illness produced a confrontation between citizens and authority of a different order of magnitude than was witnessed elsewhere that early in the fire storm—a confrontation between huge masses of people determined to go elsewhere and a military authority empaneled and determined to keep them where they were. As the total inability of health authorities either to treat the infection or control its spread became increasingly evident, vast squadrons of people, both the quick and the dying, began a mass exodus to the south and west of the city in a hapless, hopeless search for open country, help, food, warmth and succor of some sort. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands began flooding the major expressways, open, pulsating arteries hemorrhaging people into the countryside, people with small possessions on their backs, dull eyes, coughs and high fevers, all afoot or on bicycles, since auto traffic was quickly and totally choked off by the sheer mass of moving bodies. In a matter of days those tens of thousands became hundreds of thousands, leaving their dead where they dropped, moving as relentlessly and mindlessly as a staggering army of human ants down the freeways and across the countryside. . . .

Local authorities quickly made the bold decision that these masses must not be allowed to leave the city—they faced certain chaos and slaughter to the south and west in a countryside that did not want them. But stopping them and turning them back was something else altogether. A National Guard militia composed of a few hundred exceedingly green, inept and combat-innocent farm boys flown in from southern parts of the state to barricade the expressways found themselves immediately stripped of clothing, shoes, arms, supplies and even underwear almost the instant that they took up their positions. As swiftly as possible, which was not quite swiftly enough, federal authorities then declared martial law for all of metropolitan Chicago and surrounding areas, and army and marine units moved in, complete with tanks, field artillery and quite a considerable air force of transports and helicopters with orders to stop the outflow. Yet not even the leaders of these units, much less the troops themselves, had any stomach for mass slaughter of helpless people. Rubber bullets and riot-squad attacks merely pushed masses of people from Point A temporarily over to Point B and then back to Point A again; tear gas produced instant chaos wherever it was used, effectively halting all motion whatever and reducing an advancing mass of people to a blinded, weeping
milling
mass of people—but a mass of people who were
not going back where they had come from
and couldn't even if they had wanted to because of the further masses of people piling in behind them. Tank commanders refused to send their tanks rolling north through masses of people moving south, and those foolish enough to try soon found the masses of people separating around them like buffalo and then engulfing them in a sea of bodies—and what tank commander wanted his troops in that close contact with
that
infected sea of bodies? The intent was sound enough, but the task was impossible; a solid line of D8 bulldozers forming an unbroken arc 150 miles long might have stopped those people from moving forward, perhaps even moved them back a few hundred yards, but presently the people would simply have climbed over the bulldozers. In the end, the total net effect of this military adventure in confronting people and stopping them from going where they wanted to go (or thought they did) was hopelessly perverse: a containing arc of militia and machinery and vehicles and helicopters all slowly
retreating
to the south and west in'the face of the oncoming horde, with no alternative to retreat other than chopping the horde down like wheat on the prairie, with lots more wheat where that came from.

As it was in New York and Kansas City and Chicago, so it was in the other cities, minor variations from one to another but the same major theme. As the fire storm raged on, government institutions and public-health facilities grew steadily less able to cope with, much less contain, the holocaust. In fairness, of course, the day-by-day disintegration of the government and authority could not be blamed solely on the ineptitude or venality or incapacity of national or local leaders. The President proved no better nor worse a crisis leader than any other President in recent history would have been; he was not stupid, nor blind, nor even overly concerned with the political implications of what he did. If anything, he rose far above his capacity in facing the fire storm and did as much as any other human being in his position might have done. Behind and about him, tens of thousands of others in high places in government worked valiantly and did the very best they knew how to do to preserve the reins of control. In the final tally there were far more heroes than cowards in those ranks.

The problem was, very simply, that the best those leaders knew how to do fell far short of what needed to be done, and the tools that were needed were not there. No government in modern history had ever faced a disaster of the magnitude and suddenness of this one. whether economic, medical or military. The great, crushing depression of the 1930s had taken
years
to mature to its most dismal depths. Later, in the midst of the most terrible war in all history, it had taken six full months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor before the country was fully mobilized to fight back, despite three full years of advance warning; by then the enemy had achieved their empire, and it took four long, bloody years to wrench it back—but the first six months did not see the total disintegration of the nation. It merely made the fight longer and harder and more costly.