Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (5 page)

Surrounded by ghosts and bitterness, feeling the whiskey bite, he nodded in the chair, cjozed off. When he started awake later it was almost dark and the phone was ringing. It was the Super. "Are you okay, Frank?"

"I'll make it. Thanks."

"Why don't you just bag it tomorrow, get your feet back under you? Larry can finish the mop-up on Rattlesnake. I can always give you a call if something bad breaks loose."

If something bad breaks loose!
"I think I'll do that," Frank said. "Thanks again."

"Well, I just wanted to check," the Super said. "Doc was going to bring you a copy of his report on his way out to his ranch, but he's not feeling very good, so he's staying in town. Matter of fact Barney Block, one of the trail crew that went up in the chopper, isn't feeling so hot either. That must have been quite a shock."

Yeah. Quite a shock.
Frank muttered something appropriate and hung up the phone.
Quite one hell of a shock.
He sat back in the chair, pushed the stale whiskey and water aside. Then, in the dying light, his eyes fell on Pam's green backpack propped against the wall. Beside it was a rolled-up tent with an aluminum support sticking out.

. He threw all the lights on, pulled out the tent and unrolled it. He wrinkled his nose and stepped back—it smelled like a dead rat. Inside it the walls and floor were stained and smeared with stiff, brownish stuff. Holding his head aside, Frank grabbed it all up and dragged it in to the bathtub, began running hot water and turned on the exhaust fan.

Then, carefully, he went through her pack. No clues there, except that practically nothing was used. Extra clothes and extra socks untouched, the little white-gas camp stove still almost full, a bundle of freeze-dried food unopened. Poncho, crampons, rope—all emergency equipment. A dozen other ordinary things.

A little notebook fell out on the floor, together with a pad of Forest Service citations. He picked up the notebook. Her personal log book, sort of a private diary she kept of odd or unusual things she saw or thought of on her patrol trips. She'd never let him read it. Told him once that
her
idea of "odd or unusual" might upset his balance. Now he leafed through it quickly, found last Monday's date, began to skim through the day's entry in her tight, cramped hand. Early start from Icicle River, hot morning, three dead ground squirrels . . .

A chill went up his back and he took the notebook over to a desk, sat down where the light was good, began reading it closely, word for word. Three dead ground squirrels on the trail, one below Nada, one right at the lake, one on the approach to the Snow Lakes. Something weird about a dirty barefoot kid going up the trail; she'd tried to stop him and he vanished. Thought maybe she dreamed him.
Dreamed him?
Trail work at Upper Snow all day, headache and cough by evening. Nasty crowd across the lake with three camping violations, man armed with a .38 pistol. They started squaring away when she threatened citations, but with ugly grace. But she thought maybe she gave the big guy the flu, at least, with all of her coughing. . . .

Three dead ground squirrels.

The next day was a terrible scrawl, he could barely make it out at all. Written at Lancelot—that was where the Super said they'd found her. Sick all day, chills and fever, coughing, violent headache. Four hours to make it up to Vivian, another two to Lancelot—Christ, she
must
have been sick. The rest of the afternoon making camp. Handwriting even more scribbly. And then, before it all degenerated into delirium, there was something written to
him,
as surely as if she had been writing him the letter she had never written, and he read the words, and all the held-back grief finally caught up with him, and tears were pouring down his cheeks, and he buried his face in his hands and sobbed.

After a while it eased up, and he pushed himself back away from the desk and stared stupidly around him. The answer had come while he was weeping. He knew now what had killed Pam Tate.

The job now was to prove it, and then figure out what to do about it. He went back to her pack again, dug out the little personal bag, found her medicine bottle. He knew what she carried there. Some ampicillin gone, maybe three or four doses, and a few aspirin. He picked up the citation book, found the smudged carbon of a ticket she had written, somebody Comstock from Canon City, Colorado. He dialed for long-distance information, got a number to match the name, direct-dialed it. The distant phone rang and rang, but nobody answered.

He turned the lights out, sat back in the chair, rubbing his forehead in the darkness for a long while. The question was: what to do now? Call the Super and tell him what he was thinking? Sure, and get treated like you were some kind of nut. A dangerous nut—you don't wave
that
flag around unless you have solid, inarguable medical proof, and all he had to go on was a gut-deep hunch.
And that's not good enough, man. You've got to build a case. All you '11 have is panic and bad trouble if you don't. You need proof. Support of some kind, real support. . .

Support.
He thought about that for a long while. There was something poking up from the bottom of his mind, something down in Oregon months and months ago—what was it? He knew Shel Sieglerdown in Deschutes National Forest; Shel had been his boss for a while up here when he had first.joined the Forest Service, working trails, after the medical-school thing had fallen apart. A great joker, Shel, but very sharp. Suddenly something jelled in Frank's mind, the right question to be asking, and he sat up straight. He checked a number in Bend, Oregon, and dialed the phone. Moments later he heard Shel Siegler's nasal Brooklyn voice on the line. "Frank, you old son of a bitch! Long time no hear. How they hangin'?" .

"Pretty low, right now," Frank said.

"Oh, yeah? Well, you don't want to let 'em drag in the dust. The Super handin' you a heap of shit or something?"

"No, no, it's personal. But Shel, I've got a funny question to ask you."

"Yeah, that's all I get these days, is funny questions. You'd think I was Henry Youngman or somethin'. So what's your funny question?"

Frank braced himself. "I wonder if you guys down there have taken a dead rodent count in Deschutes lately."

There was a long, long silence. When Shel finally spoke there was no trace of humor in his voice. "Odd that you should ask," he said. "Why?"

"I need to know, Shel."

"Okay, Frank, this is off the record, you got that? Okay. We've been doing dead rodent counts every week for the last six months. The counts have been high, and getting higher every week. Frankly, some of us are scared, and we don't quite know what to do about it."

"Have you had any actual plague?"

"Three cases, down in Sisters, about six months ago. First cases in Oregon in years. All three of them died before we had time to get a diagnosis."

"What kind of plague?"

"Pneumonic. All we could do was send sputum samples and a couple of dead squirrels—talk about a nightmare, baggin'
them
up—down to Atlanta, Centers for Disease Control. They pinned the diagnosis, very much post-mortem. I mean, those people went like a brush fire. So CDC sent a guy named Quin-tana up here, Mexican chap, and he looked around a bit and said, 'Very interesting, don't pat any ground squirrels,' and caught a plane back to Atlanta. Of course, like he said, he didn't have anything to work with, the cases were all six feet under long before he got here, and we didn't have any tissue samples for him. Our medical people wrote it off as some weird kind of pneumonia at first and didn't even take cultures, since the people were dead, and no new cases were turning up, and Quintana was a busy man, so you couldn't blame him going back to Atlanta. Nice guy, in fact, but he was just in and out. Suggested we start doing dead rodent counts, so we did." Siegler paused. "Now, why all the questions? You got some cases up there?"

"Just one," Frank said. "So far."

"What does the Super have to say?"

"He doesn't even know. I'm not so damned sure / know, not sure enough to get the whole state of Washington stirred up. What I need is some hard data about what's going on in the woods."

"Well, shit, man," Shel Siegler said. "Don't just talk to me. Get hold of—what's his name?—Kessler in the Humboldt in northern Nevada and Tad Okito down in the Big Sur. Then there's Murph Miller over in the Salmon in Idaho, and Don Whitney up in the Kootenai. Get on the horn and
find out
what's going on in the woods. It may be pretty raw data, but if we've got dead rodents down here and you've got a funny case up there, even just one, somebody better find out what's happening. Keep me posted, and if you need any help, any way at all, give me a buzz, okay? And Frank . . ." The man paused. "Did you have any contact with that case up there?"

Frank sighed. "You might say so."

"Then take some medicine. Don't wait to get hit in the head."

Frank set the phone down and found that his hand was shaking. Dead rodents in Deschutes, lots of them, and three cases of plague. Nobody had done a rodent count up here since that rabbit hunter from Ellensburg died eight years ago. Everybody had thought it was tularemia and only confirmed bubonic plague on autopsy later. They'd counted dead rodents like mad then, for a while, and found nothing. AH of the Forest Service had plague shots and ate a lot of some antibiotic that was supposed to stop it, and the press—he flinched. Talk about whipping a dead horse. From the press reports, you'd have thought the Forest Service deliberately
planted
that case of plague just to spite the tourist industry.

The fact was that isolated cases of plague had been turning up in the West for years, and more in the last decade or so—a dozen or more cases a year scattered here and there, mostly in the Southwest. The disease was kept alive by flea-ridden wild rodents—squirrels, chipmunks, ground squirrels, marmots, even prairie dogs and gophers. A tiny percentage of those creatures were always infected, dying, passing the infected fleas on to other rodents, ever since the plague had turned up in San Francisco in 1900, transported from Hong Kong by way of Hawaii.
Endemic
was the word they used for it, a quiet ground fire of infection smoldering in the wilderness, never moving very fast or very far, just waiting. And the only humans ever infected were those rare, unfortunate individuals unlucky enough to happen to be bitten by an infected flea. . . .

And Pam? Was that what she had been? One of those twenty million-to-one victims of sheer, blind bad luck? His Pam? Frank stared into the darkness, refusing to accept it. There had to be something more.
So fast, so incredibly fast. To cut down a superbly healthy girl in less than forty-eight hours ? Too terribly fast to believe. No infection known to man moves that fast. What ghastly kind of plague could do that?

He got on the phone again, working on the names Shel

Siegler had suggested, adding some others that he could think of. Every call he made was met with caution, great hesitation— why did he want to know? Cautious himself now, he evolved a cover story: no cause for alarm, but he'd run into some high dead rodent counts up here in the Wenatchee. He just wondered if maybe others had too. It was flimsy, but it had to do. Very guarded responses from half a dozen. But from those who answered at all, a sort of consensus: there were dead rodents around, more than normal. At one place in California and another in Colorado, quite a few more.

Frank walked into the bathroom and found the old shoe box of pill bottles he kept on a linen shelf.
What was that stuff they handed out to us when that rabbit hunter died? Chioro something. Great big bottle. Chloramphenicol.
He still had half a bottle full of the white capsules with the gray-blue bands around them. The typing on the yellowed label said
Take two four times a day,
with a double dose to start with. Probably way outdated, he thought, but maybe better than nothing. He looked at the tent in the bathtub and took four capsules with a glass of water.

He found a piece of cold chicken in the refrigerator and ate it with some milk. Then, back at the desk, he tried the Colorado number again. There was still no answer. He sat in the darkened room staring at the wall for a long, long time, his mind racing.
Twenty people or more in the camping party—where are they now? In what mortal danger?
He felt as if his mind would explode with the thing he was considering. Moment by moment the pressure became more unbearable.

Finally he stirred. He knew he could not sit there a moment longer—he had to
move, do
something. He couldn't bear the thought of facing the Super or Doc Edmonds again just now. They knew what had happened, they could put things together with just a nudge from him.
But none of those Colorado people know. . . .

His decision finally made, he dialed a Seattle phone number. Then he took a pad and pencil out and wrote a brief note to the Super,
i think pam tate died of plague, check

with doc edmonds about those cultures. dead rodent counts high throughout west. pam was sick when she came in contact with those colorado campers. am flying down to check them out. will phone in two or three days.

He sealed the note in an envelope with the Super's name, locked the house and fired up his old pickup. It was 2:00
a.m.
He stopped by the Forest Service office and stuck the envelope in the mail slot. Then he turned the car north toward Stevens Pass and the road to Sea-Tac airport.