Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (49 page)

The crying started again, and she motioned to Joey. "You hear it?" He listened blankly and then nodded as if only now aware. "A baby. Downstairs somewhere, or maybe next door. Maybe all alone. Go look, Joey." "Look?"

"Find the baby. Go down and look. Bring it back if nobody's with it; person can't leave a baby alone. You go, and I'll start cooking some—"

Joey was shaking his head, looking fearfully at the door into ihe hall. "Don't wanna go. Dark down there."

"Nothing's going to hurt you, Joey. Go look. Here." She dug under the wheelchair seat and brought out one of her most prized possessions, a little pocket flashlight. "Use this, then it won't be dark. But you bring it back, you hear?"

It didn't take him long; in ten minutes he was back carrying a year-old baby boy over his shoulder, bare naked and filthy, blue with cold and wailing, but breathing well and not coughing. Siddie already had some thin oatmeal cooking on the stove with some cocoa mixed in. She held the baby tight against her, got Joey to wrap a robe around her and sat hugging the child until it began to get warm, cooing to it and rocking it and presently feeding it a little of the porridge until it stopped crying and finally went to sleep.

With the baby sleeping on a blanket, Siddie directed Joey to get some boards over the broken window to keep the cold out, and she lit the oven to make some heat and cooked something up for the huge man and herself, opened some cans, made a pan bread and some cocoa. Joey kept eating as long as she kept cooking, he must have been starved, but hungry as she had felt, she didn't have any appetite after the first few bites; she was almost too tired to swallow. Just as well, for now, but that would change soon enough and she'd be famished like Joey—

There were footfalls on the stairs while they were eating, voices in the hall, and then the door suddenly banged open. Two men came in, not really men, they looked about fourteen, but obviously scavengers, bundled up in brand-new looted sweaters and hats with the tags still hanging on them. They stepped to either side of the door, leaving it open behind them. Sidonia turned her chair to face them. "What you men want?" she said. "We got nothing here."

"You got eats," the smaller one said. "Bags full. We seen you come out of the store. Seen the big guy haul 'em up. We'll take 'em."

"Oh, you think you will?" Siddie laughed as Joey slowly rose to his feet. Face-to-face with the huge man in the confines of the small room, the boys looked at each other and began edging toward the escapeway. Siddie laughed again. "Is that all you big men got to do with yourselves, going around robbing cripples and half-wits? What you gonna do when we say no, cut us up? Well, not from me you don't steal. Get out of here!"

"You don't need all them eats," the smaller one said, almost wheedling. "Bags full of 'em."

"We'll share with civilized folk, not with thieves. Now get out, the two of you, before I tell Joey here to fix you both. You hungry and want to act like civilized folk, you can come back and knock on that door, nice-like, and I'll cook you some eats."

The boys departed down the hall, but they didn't go far; she heard them shuffling and debating, start down the stairs, start back, stop.

She held her breath, looked at Joey, who looked back at her, not tracking at all. It was all bluff, she had no idea in the world that she could get Joey to attack the pair or even defend himself if attacked.
Probably not. He's shivering like a puppy.
But then after a long while the smaller boy came back up the hall and peeked in the door. "We're hungry," he said. "You cook us some eats?"

They came in and .sat down on the floor, as far away from Joey as possible, while Siddie got busy. They were hungry, all right. With the menace gone out of them, they were just hungry kids. The big one didn't talk much, but the smaller one warmed up as his belly got full. They were brothers, lived just up in the next block; they knew about Siddie and her wheelchair from before. After the first wave hit, they'd teamed up and went "store-jobbin'," came back one night to find their mother and sisters gone, they didn't know where, maybe south, a lot of people were trying to go south for a while until too many got sick. For over a week now they'd been wandering, making it pretty much like Joey had, they weren't really big enough or strong enough to be effective bombers and none of the bigger guys wanted them around.

"You can sleep here if you want," Siddie told them when iliey finished eating, "there's blankets in the other room. But tomorrow you've got to do something for me. Go check all of this building and the other buildings on the block. Find out who's still here, who's sick, who needs help, and come back and tell me. You got legs and I haven't, you gotta be my legs tomorrow and my eyes too." She looked up. "No stealing, either. You go like civilized folk, just find out. Everybody's got a little food or blankets or clothes tucked away, and a lot don't need 'em anymore, and some got more need than others. We can bring the sick ones here, take care of them and maybe get some well, but nobody should have to die alone. ..."

She went to sleep in her chair that night, too exhausted to shift herself out and not willing to wake Joey up once he went to sleep. She'd slept in her chair a lot, she didn't care. Tomorrow she'd get Joey to heat water for her and get a bath, boil her own clothes. She got the baby changed when it woke up, fed it a little more, then pulled off her clothes and wrapped up with the robe over her shoulders. She saw Joey was awake, watching her, but he didn't move.

Later she woke up with cold winter moonlight coming through the good window. Joey was up, moving around in the dark, back and forth, back and forth. "Joey?"

In the dim light he stopped by her chair, knelt down beside her and took her shoulders in his huge paws. It seemed like his face was wet. "Siddie help Joey?" he said, his voice cracking. He touched her body almost delicately.

"I can't, that way, Joey. I can't move my legs right. Maybe when I get stronger I can find a way."

"Siddie get stronger."

' 'Can't get much weaker. Bound to get stronger, with a little time." She reached out, pulled his head to her breast, cuddled him like the baby. "You can wait a while?"

He nodded. "Wait a while. Sure." He remained kneeling, hugging her for a long moment, then looked up. "Siddie take care of Joey?"

It was a different question, totally different, the cry of a helpless child. "You bet, Joey," she said softly. "We'll manage, one way or another. Cripples got to help each other, don't they?"

59

Back in Wichita, very late that night, Sally Grinstone was far from pleased when Frank told her he'd gone the straight route with Sam Maclvers. "Trouble with you, Frank, you're just too goddam honest," she said as he munched away at fried potatoes and pork chops and she drank gin and orange juice. "I'm very nervous about giving too much away at this point. I wish I could tell you what I'm nervous about, but I can't. Just one of old Sally's famous hunches, I guess."

Somewhere up on the second story of the big building Frank could hear voices arguing vigorously—Tom Shipman and Monique, having at it as usual, something that sounded very technical, unaware that he was back. "I figured it was the least I could do," Frank said. "And there isn't any doubt that those doctors are with us."

"Oh, they're with us, all right. Trouble is, they're only with us
second.
First of all, they're part and parcel of that community, that's
got
to be their first concern, and there's the rub. If they decide to second-guess us on the timing, or spring it to the wrong people . . ." She sighed. "I suppose you had to give them our location and telephone contact too."

"Just to Maclvers, and I made him swear he wouldn't share it with anybody. I also warned him not to cry wolf, told him we'd bag the whole thing if he pulled that on us. He sees the picture. And I only gave him Running Dog's number and address, not ours. The Dog can come flag us if word comes through."

"Well, that's all right, if that fat little bastard will just hang around for a while. I don't know what I'd do without him, but you never know what he's going to be coming up with next." Sally had contacted Dog Runs Quickly two days after her first encounter with him, and the spaniel-eyed fat man with the drooping mustache had soon become Sally's eyes and ears and feet. Despite appearances, Running Dog had proved uncommonly bright, perceptive and canny, possessed of a fascinating capacity to fade in and out of scenes with startling swiftness, entirely apt to turn up right at your shoulder when you thought he had to be five miles away on an errand. Fast on his feet, that man, and very quiet; once she had gotten him moving she couldn't slow him down, and the nickname, which he first applied to himself, perfectly deadpan, stuck. He was only five feet two, round as a pumpkin and capable of eating more food than three normal people combined; Sally once ruminated .iloud that maybe it was his thyroid but she was not about to check and find out. With security an ever-increasing concern, I >og's quicksilver ability to be all places at all times, to see and hear everything and know everything that was happening within a two-mile radius had proven absolutely indispensable.

"Yes," Sally agreed, "Dog will certainly flag us if he gets a message from Willow Grove. Meanwhile, I don't worry about our doctor friends one-tenth as much as I worry about this public-health chap Haglund. He should have been there with bells on today. In a half-assed way, he is our CDC representative in Willow Grove, Nebraska, our sole and single and absolutely only claim to legitimacy. So you went up there specifically to review the setup and the plan, and make sure everybody understood what was going to happen, and really essentially to cock the hammer for the trigger-pull—and Haglund is out of town at this particular time? What other business could be more important?"

"There wasn't any 'other business,' " Frank said around a mouthful of potatoes. "And he wasn't out of town, either. I saw him walking out of the Willow Grove Public Health office at three in the afternoon while I was driving around doing some last-minute geographicals before heading home. I recognized his face—he was one of the ones at Canon City."

"Oh, boy." Sally shook her head and took a belt of her gin. "Did he see you?"

"I don't think so. But he was headed for the hospital; I followed him a little way. He seemed to be in quite a hurry."

"Well, I don't like this," Sally said heavily. "I believe in my hunches, and I have a very bad hunch that when the time comes, we're never going to get this stuff up to that town— we're going to be intercepted and busted."

"On what grounds?"

"We're
illegal,
and from CDC's point of view, maybe very dangerous. I rang Haglund in because he and the doctors were all they have up there, and he understood epidemiology, and I would have sworn I had him sold—but maybe I didn't. Maybe he turned right around and got on the horn."

"To where?"

"Atlanta, maybe. Or the state bulls. Or Christ knows to where; anywhere that we wouldn't want. We could get busted right out of orbit at the wrong time and the whole thing could go down the drain."

Frank Barrington scratched his chin. "Maybe you're just begging trouble," he said finally. "Maybe Haglund was genuinely busy with something, maybe actually out of town in the morning. / don't know. But as for moving the stuff north, there's more than one way to skin a cat. If worst comes to worst, we can pull the old poacher's trick for getting the dead elk down the mountain."

"What's that?"

"He knows the terrain and all the roads, and he knows where the warden is going to try to stop him if somebody's blown the whistle on him. So he never goes up the mountain alone. His buddy takes a second rig, and they fill one rig with firewood :md his buddy takes it down through the checkpoint first. If it's all clear, his buddy comes back and they go on down together. If it's not clear, he goes through the checkpoint and right on home. Then when buddy-boy doesn't come back, the poacher ditches the elk and the tarps and comes down with a load of firewood himself and smiles sweetly at the warden and then comes back with his buddy at three
a.m
.—or else he goes down some other way, some long, hard, back road, figuring there's only so much of that warden to spread around."

Sally looked thoughtful. "I suppose you could take Running Hog to ride shotgun for you."

"Not shotgun, not if we're worried about state police. Just interference."

"And then sprout wings and fly at the right time, I suppose."

Frank grinned. "If we have to, we can get resourceful. But we'll get that stuff through there."

After a while Sally went back to her staging plans, and Monique and Tom apparently reached agreement upstairs, they were now talking quietly and using the blackboard, and Frank went to bed. There were lots of things to be done tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. They really needed at least two more weeks before they were ready to deal with Willow Grove, three would be better, but the word coming in on TV and radio, when there was any word, was that little places like Willow

They didn't get their three weeks. The word came from Willow Grove exactly eight days later.

60