Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (54 page)

And during these times when the telephone was also out, so that she could not keep in touch with her various "spies" around the community, Carmen spent long silent hours over coffee at the breakfast table in the kitchen, staring out at the wasteland of the backyard. Something about the raid and Jack's part in it and his wounding and Hal Parker and the whole nauseating mess had come suddenly into focus for Carmen Dillman, and she found herself looking back on the wasteland of their lives together, all those long wasteland years, dragging a veritable Marley's chain of cruelties and infidelities and hatreds and missed opportunities, many of the links—not all, but too many—of her own forging, and it was not entirely with self-pity that she regarded the stultifying barrenness of those years, those desert years.

And now, with Jack sick almost to death, she began glimpsing for the first time perhaps in her life the meaning of an actual loving relationship with another human being; she saw infection whittling away at a person she had scorned and belittled for decades who suddenly was very dear to her in ways she had never imagined possible. Mysteriously, as she changed dressings and tried to fix food that Jack could or would try to gag down, they found themselves talking; she found a wry, almost whimsical humor in her husband, so subtle sometimes as to be almost indistinguishable, yet present just the same, and, amazingly, an unbelievably powerful sustaining force for him, time and again helping to pull him out of pain, helping him rally from a bad spell as if solely to have a chance to pass on something bizarrely funny that had come into his mind a few moments before. Then, at one point, the abscess became almost the size of an orange under his arm, and there was a crisis of pain and fever; he lost the use of the arm again, indicating pressure on the brachial plexus, according to the doctor on the phone, who promised to come over and try to install a drain when he had a chance—but never had a chance. One evening while Carmen was applying the hot wet dressings, the swollen, inflamed area opened quite spontaneously and drained copiously and, unbelievably, a still-recognizable chunk of embedded torn shirt came out in the drainage, and by morning the fever was down to ninety-nine degrees and Jack, for the first time in weeks, found himself halfway hungry for some breakfast. ...

All this, fortunately, came before the onslaught of plague began in Brookdale. With Jack suddenly less of a worry, Carmen began turning more and more of her awesome energies to getting ready—and, as his strength increased and his capability grew, nagging Jack to get ready too. "It's going to be us against it, buddy," she told him. "There's nobody going to help—but when it comes, it's going to have its work cut out for it, because we're going to beat it, you and me, or go down trying. None of this wailing and gnashing of teeth like I hear from Nancy Tollman every time she talks to me, the idiot. None of that for me."

Good as her word, she started out by learning what she could. They had actually accumulated a huge library over the years, with all kinds of books, including medical references, that Jack had used from time to time. She read everything about plague she could find in the house from the Merck Manual to Defoe's
Journal of the Plague Years
to articles in an assortment of family medical encyclopedias and a dozen other references. Of course they all talked about rats and fleas and didn't say anything much about direct respiratory convection of the organism—but then one night when power was on she caught a rerun of a PBS plague special on TV—she'd seen it once before way last October, with that blonde biologist Monica Jan-somebody from the CDC lab somewhere in Colorado patiently explaining how this plague microorganism (the woman said "mahcro-awg'nism") was a virulent mutant form that liked lung tissue better than anything, a different kind of plague bacterium than had ever been seen before—and there were charts of how the current plague could jump over the man-flea-rat-man cycle and go straight from man to man (or woman) and how it grew faster lhan most—time-lapse microphotographs of the organism actually growing in lab cultures of lung-tissue cells—and the measures one could take in the home to protect oneself and prevent contact and prevent spread if one followed the rules of sterile and isolation techniques to the very letter—and how with these simple home measures, together with the ample supplies of effective antibiotics and new forms of vaccines available through your local state and county Public Health Service offices or your doctor's offices, this epidemic of a dangerous disease could readily be contained and controlled and wiped out. . . .

Well, so much for the miracles of modern medical science, Carmen thought sourly, that little blonde may have known her mahcro-awg'nisms but she sure didn't have the rest of the scenario straight. Carmen had heard the broadcast, or part of it, those long months back and tuned it out for the latest' 'Sour Apples" show, but she listened intently to the rerun—the two-thirds of it that played before the power went out for the day—and then caught it again two or three more times at odd hours. She doubted from what she'd heard that there were going to be any antibiotics or vaccines around when the ax dropped, but that business of sterile techniques and isolation and simple measures in the home began to sound plausible and not even all that difficult, once you understood what you were doing.

When Jack was on his feet enough to be left alone, Carmen went out to stockpile things. While other people stockpiled Froot Loops, she stockpiled Clorox, gallons upon gallons of Clorox. She stockpiled cheap kitchen rubber gloves and ripped up old bathrobes to make face masks and set up a changing room in the back entry so that clothes worn outside wouldn't come inside and kept a kettle of water ready on the fireplace hearth so that they could burn the furniture, if need be, to boil water.

She discovered to her horror that there really were rats in the basement, they got into one flour sack and a bag of oatmeal, so she dressed up in clothes soaked in Clorox until she looked like a one-woman decontamination crew and moved all the untouched stockpiled food into the kitchen, and then put the contaminated flour in bowls mixed half-and-half with plaster of Paris and left them for the rats; she'd read about that once in some country journal she'd subscribed to. Then she nailed the cellar door shut and enlisted Jack in the enormous task of decontaminating the house—with Clorox. That operation nearly killed them both; they scrubbed walls and ceilings down with Clorox, soaked down chairs and sofas and mattresses with Clorox, tore carpets up and hurled them into a heap in the backyard ("Millie says fleas just
live and breed
in carpets") and mopped the bare floors down with Clorox, running outdoors gasping for air, their eyes streaming because the whole place reeked with Clorox until finally Carmen declared the place adequately decontaminated. And when the day finally came that one sick patient unexpectedly contaminated the whole Community Hospital and plague began in earnest, Jack and Carmen Dillman were as well prepared as anybody in Brookdale, Connecticut.

The Horseman rode the streets of Brookdale with typical swiftness. One day there were people still to be seen occasionally on the streets, the next day, no one. From Jack's upstairs study window they could see many of the homes around, see candle lights at night when the power was off, saw the candle lights going out one by one, as night followed night. A man down the cul-de-sac, Jerry Berman, Millie Berman's husband, was out back one night digging a hole by flashlight, and no one answered the Bermans' phone anymore even when the phone was functioning, and two nights later there were no candles burning in the Bermans' house. Only the silent echo of hoof-beats past the Bermans' house, around the cul-de-sac, down the next street—

Carmen heard rats gnawing on the fourth and fifth evening, found a hole in the floor almost big enough for one to squeeze through, fought down a wave of hysteria as she stared in the flashlight beam at the corner of the kitchen floor and saw a hairy nose and yellow teeth sticking through, working furiously. She cut up a tin can, spread it out flat and nailed it down over the hole, then spent the night searching for other weak spots. Each one that appeared, she plugged, poured a gallon of Clorox down the hole—they didn't seem to like Clorox—and then she and Jack made a twice-daily inspection of every inch of floorspace and Carmen's fright and revulsion gave way to anger—"The bastards," she went around muttering, "the dirty, slimy, nauseating bastards. . . ."

They marked days on the calendar, and waited. The phone was out more and more, Carmen could get through to her "spy" network only rarely and then presently not at all. They ate oatmeal and biscuits or bread baked in the fireplace in a reflector oven Jack ingeniously devised from a couple of ply wood scraps and some aluminum foil; it caught fire one night, but only one corner burned before they rescued it. Carmen set out other rations like Captain Bligh in the lifeboat—half a can of tuna one night, a can of so-called beef stew (lots of stew and little beef) another. They filled the bathtub with drinking water when water would run from the faucets, at least a couple of hours a day, and they took sponge baths out of a common saucepan of water heated on the fire.

On the eighth day the unseasonable thaw came to an abrupt end with a screaming blizzard down from Canada, dumping eleven inches of snow on the ground in seven hours, heaping in drifts around the houses, and that night the temperature dropped through the floor, icy, brittle, pipe-bursting cold. For most of the day they made do huddling in blankets and sleeping bags, running the furnace for an hour at a time just to take the edge off—no response from the oil man for four days—but by evening Jack said he'd had enough and went to the changing room, dropped his inside clothes inside the entry, got on his outside clothes and waded through drifts to the dwindling supply of cordwood stacked in the locked tool shed against the house, brought some in for the fireplace after changing out of outside clothes and sloshing down with Clorox. He didn't notice Carmen shivering violently, wrapped in a blanket in the middle of the living-room floor, until he had a fire built. "Jesus, you
are
cold," he said, looking at her blue lips. "Well, the fire will help, and I'll give the furnace a goose too."

"I don't think it's that," Carmen said.

"Come on, you just got overchilled—"

"I'm not cold. I'm burning up," she said through chattering teeth. "You'd better get a mask on and some gloves and get some water on to boil your clothes. This started about an hour ago, and I'm already aching all over."

Silently Jack went to the bathroom, got the thermometer. "A hundred and four," he said.

"That's what I thought." Her voice was very small. "Jack, you mustn't come near me."

"Sorry, kid. I'm not running from you, plague or no plague. For once we're in this together."

"Then get me some aspirin. I've got to stop this shaking."

After the aspirin he pulled her over to the fire, wrapped her in more blankets, sat and held her as she shook. There seemed nothing else to do; no doctor was going to help; they had done everything reasonable that they could do. Yet something now was tugging at Jack's mind.
No help but what we have in the house. Not much in the house but a little stored food—and Clorox.
And yet—and yet—
something
like a fishhook in his mind. "Carmen, honey? You remember back when you were such a pillhoarder?"

"Hmmm?"

"Back ten years ago when you were going to the doctor all the time? Before you got disgusted with doctors altogether?"

"Yes. I remember. Why?"

"And you'd never finish a prescription but you'd never throw the pills away? While you were having all those damned bladder infections? What did you do with all those pills? It seemed to me you had
boxes
of them.''

She looked at him, herteeth still chattering, "/don't know. I suppose they're still up in the linen closet, I had some boxes there once. But they'd all be out of date—"

He was running up the stairs to the master bathroom, grabbing a flashlight on the way, tearing open the linen-closet door, tossing towels and washcloths and sheets and pillowcases in a flurry around him. Back on one of the shelves, way back, long forgotten, two large pasteboard boxes—full of pill bottles. He took them out, shook them out on the bed. All dated ten, eleven, twelve years ago. Some with the names on them, some without. White pills, gray-and-white capsules, blue-and-yel-low capsules, red-and-green-coated pills. A bottle of pills marked
V-Cillin K,
probably no help if the books were right. A large bottle of white capsules with a gray stripe with
CHLOROMYCETIN 250 mg
typed on the label—he remembered something about that, she had had this fierce bladder infection and nothing else had worked and Doc Jensen had finally ordered up something like this, but he'd so thoroughly scared the shit out of her about how dangerous they were, how they might depress her bone marrow and all sorts of horrible things that she hadn't taken a one of them. . . .

He gathered up pill bottles in both hands and went on downstairs. She had stopped chilling now and was drowsy. "Armpits sore as hell, and down between my legs—God, they hurt," she said.

"But you're not coughing."

"No—I'm breathing all right. What's—what's all this you've got?"

"Pills," Jack said.

"Don't be silly, we can't take those. We don't know what they are."

"Does it matter?" Jack said. "Maybe something in here will help some, I don't know. Don't care, either. They can't any more than kill us, and you can only die once. What you've got is going to get worse if we sit here, and we
know
it can kill us. If we're going to die of plague, we might as well die eating pills." He got some water and returned to her side. "Here, this one for your bladder—two four times a day, it says, and there's enough here for both of us for two days. Might as well pile another one on while we're at it, and vitamins—hell, vitamins can't hurt us. . . ." He counted out pills, dumped about nine of them in her hand. "Here you go. Down the hatch."