Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (37 page)

But even that disastrous war was of a different nature entirely from the present fire storm. In this case there wasn't any six months in which to mobilize. Within a couple of months or so after Savannah the major cities were buried in corpses, and the wherewithal to fight simply didn't exist. A year before the storm began, a total of twenty-three cases of plague had been reported in the entire year, confined to eight western states, all but six cases bubonic and flea-borne in nature. In all common sense, there had been nothing to be prepared and mobilized
for
until Pamela Tate was carried down the mountain, and within days all rational efforts at mobilization were already running frantically merely to catch up with a disaster far out of control. What was worse, for mobilization to be possible at all, the gears of national commerce, health controls and communications would all have had to mesh perfectly—but as the storm spread, the gears failed to mesh in too many areas at once, and quickly ground themselves to powder. Nothing of any significance could be accomplished because
nothing really continued working enough of the time in enough places at once.
Highway shipping could not accomplish anything when crosscountry truckers fell sick at the wheel halfway to their destinations, or refused to drive their trucks into plague-stricken cities or simply walked away, leaving their vehicles planted on the highways. Without effective medications the medical establishment was reduced to the prayers, promises and post-mortems of a bygone age. Locally operated public utilities worked valiantly to keep such basics as heat, light and electricity going part of the time in most places, shoring up areas that broke down as best they could, but all too soon generating capacities began to Crumble from lack of coal and oil immediately at hand to power the generators.

Telephone communications worked better than most things, at first, with at least the main trunk lines functioning to most areas part of the time and with overloaded satellite facilities pressed to the utmost—yet in counterpoint to this, the postal system ceased to work at all except on the most local, hand-delivery levels—and who wanted to do the hand-delivering? Checks that were mailed never arrived; heaps and mountains of mail piled up in central dispatching offices and overflowed into the streets; orders for goods and cash were never confirmed if they were ever received; nobody got paid. Normal commercial air traffic ground to a halt, amid a massive confusion of counterdirections, impaled on the horns of dilemma—the acute, agonizing need for fast transport of people and knowhow and materiel on the one hand, and the acute, agonizing knowledge that airplanes were spreading the disease worldwide on the other hand, so that the Horseman had leaped cities and countrysides and borders and oceans long before he was even recognized. . . .

And so it was, Ted Bettendorf reflected, that hell followed after Him Who Rode. Paralysis spread hand in hand with plague; first the cities and then the towns and villages and hamlets were stricken in the ever-growing fire storm, and the nation headed into a dreadful winter without food or fuel or medicine or leadership enough to go on for six more weeks, and no idea on God's green earth where any of those things were going to come from. . . .

In a ruined industrial-warehouse area on the outskirts of Wichita, Sally Grinstone wrestled the wheel of the old Dodge van to avoid the larger potholes and craters in the street, cursing under her breath as she steered the rig around heaps of rubble, expecting a tire to go at any minute. It was late afternoon and she was heading straight into a baleful yellow-brown sun still trying to burn through the lead-gray overcast of a wintry Kansas sky. She shivered despite the soiled down jacket she was wearing and glanced approvingly at the wrapped-up gin bottle jouncing on the seat beside her. Sally at heart was a creature of the warm countries, the lands of few clothes and many palm trees, the sun-drenched swimming pools of Florida and New Orleans and The Coast; she had nothing but dread for what that lead-gray Kansas sky might hold in store when the white stuff started coming down, with an icy northern wind behind it—
Ugh. Going to need that gin bottle, especially with the work we've got lined up. . . .

She eased the rig around the fallen brick wall of a burned-out warehouse. It was the most inauspicious-looking vehicle imaginable, a big, boxy, mud-brown van, top-heavy and awkward, with one side panel crunched in as though it had been stepped on by an enormous foot. Not the sort of rig that anybody was likely to stop and hassle, she had thought, which was exactly why she and Tom had stolen it, if you could call it stealing. They'd seen it standing abandoned on a street in Des Moines one day, forlorn and wrecky-looking, the crunched side panel forced open, windshield smashed with a rock, tires so lousy nobody'd stolen the wheels. Sally had crawled in under the dashboard upside down and hot-wired the thing to get it going while Tom stood chickie against cops and looters, looking acutely embarrassed, and then gaped as Sally left her little red Fiat sitting with the keys in the ignition in the exact same spot as they drove away in the van. "Fair enough trade," she'd said. "Nobody could use this wreck but us; they'll take
that
little bomber apart right down to the chassis and make a fortune selling the parts."

Now Sally watched the rearview mirror, a line of worry creasing her baby face. A blue Ford pickup was about two blocks behind her, pacing her rather too neatly; she was sure she had seen it a couple of times earlier. She hit a pothole and heard a sloshing sound in the back of the van, glanced over her shoulder at the half-dozen acid carboys riding back there in their wood packing frames—the object of this trip in the first place. It had taken her two days to track down a supplier and some highly ingenuous lying to explain just what she wanted with them.
Maybe they didn't believe me that women use the stuff in shampoo,
she thought, glancing again at the pickup in the rearview. But Tom had said he needed acetic acid, reagent grade, and innocently left it up to her to get some, and that was what she had done—

She took a sudden left and stamped hard on the gas pedal, running the van down the obstacle course of a little side street as fast as she dared. The pickup passed on its way behind her without even slowing, and she breathed easier. A real nervous pain, she thought, this business of back and fill and dodge, you just couldn't trust anything or anybody, the number of weird people running around was just incredible, almost to the point that anybody seen wandering the streets afoot or on wheel was by definition weird until proven otherwise—

The street she had turned into was really just an alley with brick-walled buildings tight on either side and trash and rubble strewn everywhere. Twice she had to get out and move overturned garbage cans to get through the single block to the next avenue—and then, just as she reached it, the blue Ford pickup swerved in from the other end and decisively forced her into the right-hand wall. A swarthy man leaped out with a shotgun in his hands, and the shotgun was trained on her.

For a moment Sally just froze. Then, very deliberately, she uncapped the gin bottle, took a long pull and rolled down the window. "Okay, dummy, what's your trouble?" she demanded.

The man was short and fat, either Mexican or Indian, with a long, droopy black mustache and a face like a discontented spaniel. He motioned to her with one hand. "Hop out," he said.

The shotgun drooped as she hopped, gin bottle under her arm. She squinted hard at him as she climbed down.
Definitely Indian,
she thought. "You'd better push the safety on that thing," she said, "before you shoot your foot off." The man's face darkened, but she heard the click of the safety.

He pointed a finger toward the back of the van. "What you got in there?" he said.

"Vinegar," Sally said.

"Vinegar?" His mouth tightened. "Open it up," he said.

She threw the side door open and the man peered inside. Then he moved closer, frowning, and sniffed. "My God, it
is
vinegar,'' he said.

"Thirty bloody gallons of it," Sally affirmed. "Good and strong. You wanted some vinegar, dummy, you got it."

The fat man edged away from the van—and from her. "What you doin' with all that vinegar?"

"I mix it with my gin," she said evenly. She offered him the bottle. "Have some?"

He shook his head quickly and edged away another step. "Stomach wouldn't take it."

"Well, then, I suppose you're going to rape me," Sally said impatiently. She glanced at her watch. "Where? Hood of your pickup? Let's get on with it—"

"Jesus,
lady, who said anything about rape?" The man was in full retreat now, his spaniel face a study in distress.

"Well, hell's fire, man, if you don't want my vinegar and you don't want my gin and you don't want to rape me, why are we hanging around? Get that junker out of there so I can go home." She started climbing back into the van, then paused to peer at the shotgun. "You ever actually shoot that thing?"

"Once or twice."

"You want a job as a bodyguard?"

"Jesus, lady, you don't need no bodyguard."

"Maybe not—but I sure could use a runner. I've got errands to run all over this broken-down town, and this hijack-the-woman-driver crap gets old, believe me. Yesterday it was a cop in uniform—how about that? So maybe you'd like to run errands."

The fat man eyed her nervously. "What's in it for me?"

"Maybe some food and a place to hang out, if you're worth it. And some medicine to keep bad things away. What's your name?"

"Willie."

"No, I mean your
real
name."

"Dog Runs Quickly."

"There, you see? So give me an address or phone number. I'll send for you if I need you."

She left him scratching his head as she turned the van out of the alley, then wove through a series of back streets, caught a broader avenue going south and then turned into a concrete drive beside a ragtag-looking, gray-green, two-story building and stopped to activate the gate in a chain link fence. The fenced-in yard to the south of the building was filled with loading pallets and a totally demolished forklift; beyond the yard was a huge black building marked
skinner iron works
. Muffler City and a very dead-looking plumbing and heating wholesale place were just across the street.

She backed into the loading dock of the gray-green building. Two sides were covered with faded aluminum sheeting, with the north and south elevations of both stories mostly painted-over windows. Several that were smashed had been boarded over with fresh-looking plywood—
Good, Tom got that lower one closed up, finally.
She killed the ignition, got out and walked up a ramp to a door on the loading platform. A faded sign on the door said
international pharmacals, wholesale.

They had spent the better part of three weeks searching four different cities before finally settling on this place, staying in the cheapest motels they could find and living on Egg McMuf-fins and gin while they searched. In St. Louis Sally had pulled the one trick she'd never pulled before on an editor: wired for a huge cash advance on the promise of a red-hot story, and then simply vanished into the sunset in her little Fiat with Tom Ship-man in the passenger seat beside her, still wondering dazedly what exactly he was doing there. Sally wondered half the time, too; aside from his obvious and undeniable expertise in chemistry, she had never encountered quite such a totally inept human being. Tom Shipman would lose every motel key she gave him, get lost walking around the block, agonize for twenty minutes over what kind of hamburger he should order and wear the same shirt for seven days end-running until Sally couldn't stand it anymore and said, "God, Tom, that thing will never wash; burn it and we'll buy you another one." By common agreement they headed vaguely north and west from St. Louis, mostly because east seemed to be where more trouble lay. They had stopped for a day in Lincoln, Nebraska, while she had rapped out the entire story of the Sealey drug switch and telephoned it to the paper (not the story they had sent her funds for, but enough to hold them, she figured—enough indeed) and then wired for (and waited interminably to receive) all the cash she could muster from her several bank accounts, together with the couple of thousand Tom had stashed away—but all that money was for capital, not spending, and they lived on dirty socks and fingernails as they groped their way westward looking for precisely the place they needed to set up their bizarre operation.

Tom was, at least, quite clear and succinct about what it was, exactly, that they needed. The idea of trying to build the sheer physical plant for any kind of serious pharmaceutical manufacturing venture from the ground up was clearly insane. True, he
had
told Sally Grinstone that his "pneumomycin" drug could be made in a bathtub out of ordinary tetracycline, vinegar and a few other reagents, and in point of fact, it
could
be—but the claim was perhaps a bit of an oversimplification all the same; along with the quantities of his "pneumomycin" one might precipitate out of such a bathtub slurry, one might also find a number of other things one would rather not offer to unsuspecting patients. A simple chemical process that could be carried to completion on a kitchen stove was one thing; preparing and packaging a large quantity of a reasonably pure drug in a form suitable for human consumption was something else. An abandoned truck-tire warehouse wouldn't do as a site for manufacture and packaging. Even the most pristine of headquarters would require an impossibly long time and far, far, too much capital to start up even minimal production unless it offered certain basic rudiments of equipment and facilities. Tom recognized as starkly as Sally that time was both their enemy and their ally; if they were to do anything effective at all, they could take time to do it right without fear of interference, but they had to do it fast, in a matter of weeks, not months. Sometime next year would be altogether too late.