Dark Advent (12 page)

Travis grinned very wide. “I bet they do at that.” He slapped his new friend on the shoulder. “Tell you what, Pit Bull…this one’s just for you. You and you alone.”

Travis moved across the cell with casual ease. For a moment it looked as if he would simply return to his bunk. But suddenly he hopped left and his arm flashed out like a lightning bolt made flesh and his fist caught Miles squarely in the middle of his still-reddened face. Miles slid down the wall again, this time until his rump touched the cold floor. And there he stayed.
Third-rate Charles Bronson my ass.

Travis glanced back over his shoulder. “Just for you.”

Pit Bull nodded mutely. His eyes seemed to grow misty. With what? Gratitude? Love, even? Maybe both.

And Travis felt quite sure that if he’d asked, Pit Bull would have killed for him in that moment.

14

Computer transmission from Barnes Hospital, St. Louis, to Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta; Monday, July 13, 1987:

7-13 0938

DR. WHITLEY KRAMER, FIELD CHIEF, EPIDEMIC INTELLIGENCE SERVICE TO: SPECIAL PATHOGENS BRANCH RE:
PASTEURELLA PESTIS,
POTOSI STRAIN

ETIOLOGY

……………………………………………………………

FUNDAMENTALLY SIMILAR IN STRUCTURE AND PHYSIOLOGY TO STANDARD BUBONIC PLAGUE BACILLUS
PASTEURELLA PESTIS
WITH FOLLOWING DEVIATIONS:

LARGER SIZE, RANGING FROM .6 TO 1.50 MICRONS

BACILLI EXHIBIT CILIA; HENCE MOTILE BEHAVIOR

MORE COMPLEX ANTIGEN STRUCTURE, WITH AT LEAST 18 ANTIGENS PRESENT, INCLUDING 2 AS YET UNIDENTIFIED ANTIGENS NOT SEEN IN PREVIOUS PLAGUE STRAINS

REPORTS CONTAINING DETAILED ANALYSES, ELECTRON MICROSCOPE PHOTOGRAPHS, AND BACTERIA SAMPLES TO ARRIVE BY EIS COURIER TOMORROW.

PATHOGENICITY

……………………………………………………

SYMPTOMOLOGY APPEARS DERIVATIVE OF ALL 3 MAJOR CLINICAL PATTERNS, I.E., BUBONIC, PNEUMONIC, AND SEPTICEMIC PLAGUES. INCUBATION PERIOD OF EXTREMELY SHORT DURATION, RANGING FROM A FEW HOURS TO 3 DAYS, FOLLOWED BY ACUTE FULMINANT ONSET OF SYMPTOMS CHARACTERIZED BY CHILLS, FEVER OF 103° TO 107° F, RAPID PULSE WITH HYPOTENSION, SEVERE HEADACHE. ENLARGED LYMPH NODES SOMETIMES APPEAR SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH FEVER, COMMONLY INGUINAL AND/OR AXILLARY AND/OR CERVICAL. CHEST X-RAYS SHOW RAPIDLY PROGRESSING PNEUMONIA DEVELOPING WITHIN 24 HOURS. PULMONARY LESIONS COMMON: SPUTUM IS MUCOID WITH PROMINENT PRESENCE OF BLOOD, AND CONTAINS LARGE NUMBERS OF PLAGUE BACILLI. SYMPTOMOLOGY IN LATER STAGES MAY INCLUDE DELIRIUM, CONFUSION, AND INCOORDINATION, WITH SUBCUTANEOUS HEMORRHAGING MORE COMMON THAN IN STANDARD PRESENT-DAY STRAINS; IN THIS RESPECT, BACILLUS IS MORE AKIN TO MEDIEVAL STRAINS OF “THE BLACK DEATH” THAN TO OTHER CONTEMPORARY STRAINS. CASE-FATALITY RATIO SO FAR 99.6%, WITH DEATH GENERALLY OCCURRING WITHIN 24 TO 72 HOURS OF ONSET OF SYMPTOMS. DEATH OCCURS DUE TO MYOCARDIAL FAILURE, OVERWHELMING LUNG CONGESTION, OR BLOODSTREAM TOXINS, DEPENDING ON WHICH SYMPTOMS HAVE BECOME MOST ADVANCED DURING PROGRESSION OF DISEASE.

EPIDEMIOLOGY

……………………………………………………..

DISEASE APPEARS CONFINED SOLELY TO HUMAN POPULATION, WITH TRANSMISSION OCCURRING BY USUAL DROPLET NUCLEI INFECTION DURING EPISODES OF COUGHING BY INFECTED PERSON. NO INFESTATIONS AMONG RODENT POPULATION IN ENDEMIC AREAS HAVE BEEN FOUND. ORIGIN OF INFECTION UNKNOWN, THOUGH FIRST REPORTED CASES EXIST IN POTOSI, MISSOURI; INVESTIGATION CONTINUING. RELATIVELY SMALL NUMBER OF ASYMPTOMATIC HUMAN CARRIERS HAVE BEEN FOUND, WITH APPARENTLY DORMANT BACILLI IN THEIR THROATS. UNDER CONTINUED OBSERVATION, THESE PHARYNGEAL CARRIERS EXHIBITED NO ONSET OF SYMPTOMS. IMMUNITY SEEMS CERTAIN: SUBSEQUENT COVERT EXPERIMENTATION ON SELECT CONTROL GROUP OF SUCH SUBJECTS RENDERED 100% INABILITY TO INDUCE DISEASE SYMPTOMS. SUBJECTS’ MODE OF INITIAL ACQUISITION OF PLAGUE BACILLUS IS UNKNOWN, HOWEVER, AS HUMAN TRANSMISSION INVARIABLY RESULTS IN MORTALITY. TRAIT COMMON TO ALL ASYMPTOMATIC CARRIERS YET TO BE ESTABLISHED.

TREATMENT

…………………………………………………………

ALL STANDARD CHEMOTHERAPY USED SUCCESSFULLY AGAINST PREVIOUS STRAINS INEFFECTIVE. TETRACYCLINES, CHLORAMPHENICOL, STREPTOMYCIN, AND SULFONOMIDES ALL INEFFECTIVE, IN INTRAMUSCULAR, INTRAVENOUS, AND ORAL ADMINISTRATIONS. THIS APPEARS DUE TO BEHAVIORAL DIFFERENCES PECULIAR TO THIS MUTANT STRAIN: MOTILE ACTIVITY ALLOWS FREE MOVEMENT OF BACILLI TO ADMINISTERED DRUG MUCH LIKE ANTIBODY ACTIVITY, FOLLOWED BY PINOCYTIC BEHAVIOR. IN ESSENCE, ADMINISTERED DRUGS ARE BEING CONSUMED BY MASS QUANTITIES OF PLAGUE BACILLI AND STORED HARMLESSLY WITHIN CELL BODIES, MUCH IN THE MANNER MAMMALS HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO “POCKET” DOSES OF POTENTIALLY LETHAL MATERIAL. ALL ATTEMPTS AT INOCULATION AND SYNTHESIS OF ARTIFICIAL IMMUNIZATION AGENT INEFFECTIVE. DIRECT INOCULATION OF LIVE VIRUS HAS RESULTED IN DEATH OF EXPERIMENTAL SUBJECTS. ISOLATED PLAGUE BACILLI EASILY KILLED BY EXPOSURE TO ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT; HOWEVER, IMMUNIZATION AGENTS DERIVED FROM SUSPENSIONS OF KILLED DILUTED BACILLI AS WELL AS LIVING DILUTED BACILLI INEFFECTIVE.

MORE TO COME FOLLOWING YOUR RECEIPT OF DATA AND SPECIMENS.

………………………………………………………………KRAMER

15

The day starts early in the summer. And it starts earliest of all on the farm. Even with rising before the roosters, there never seems to be enough time to get it all done. Over his sixty-eight years, he’d never truly gotten used to that final hour before dawn, which is not night, not morning, which is a peculiarity utterly unto itself, as if the entire world holds its breath in anticipation. Or dire apprehension.

Ironic, then, that Emily died in that hour.

Caleb Enright had long known that his wife’s end was near. She’d been steadily declining since midweek, and they’d both known there was nothing to be done about it. She hadn’t been the first. They lived near New Holland, Ohio, and now there wasn’t much of a town left anymore. He tried to tell himself it was a blessing they’d managed together this long. The first of the strange and apparently incurable illnesses to strike the area had come two weeks ago, and then all of a sudden it was rampant.

Caleb wished she’d lived to see the dawn of another day, at least, the time of day she’d always loved best. She saw a beauty in each and every one of them, as the sun rose warm with promises through and then over the cornstalks to the east, higher still, bathing the line of trees behind their house with light until they no longer resembled an impenetrable wall, higher, until it was God’s eye shining down good favor. The dawn of this day, a Friday, was the close of July. Had she seen it, he thought at least she could’ve died a little happier.

“I’m sorry about Rachel,” Emily had said in a very soft, misty voice. Her eyes, normally brighter than new pennies, stared out from masses of wrinkles to gaze up through the ceiling. He didn’t think she could see him anymore. He tightened his hand over hers, her fingers twitching back. Crickets outside creaked on endlessly, the steady cadence of a death march.

“So so sorry.” Her head, trailing long strands of silver-white hair, shook gently from side to side.

“Hush yourself, Emmy,” Caleb said, tears smarting at his eyes. “That’s long past.”

“I’ll see her soon.” Emily smiled vacantly and a trickle of foamy red saliva ran from the corner of her mouth. “She should be all grown now, Caleb. She’ll be sooo pretty.”

He nodded as a pair of tears finally fell, zigzagging down through the furrows and seams worn into his brown face, catching on two-day-old stubble. Finally they halted, a glistening line down each cheek, like the paths of slugs that crawled over the flagstones out in the yard.

Emily winced with pain, her free hand moving awkwardly over one shriveled breast and to the center of her chest. Over her heart.

Not now, no, please just give her a little bit longer.

Her breath snagged in her throat, and it sounded for all the world like a gasp of surprise. “Caleb,” she said.

“I’m here, Emmy.” He squeezed her hand to reaffirm it.

“I…I smell flowers.”

And then she died.

Caleb sat beside their bed a long while, holding onto that limp hand. He kept waiting for a floodgate of grief to open, the dam to burst. Instead, all he had were those two pitifully inadequate tears. All he felt within was a numb emptiness, and beneath it, maybe a small sense of relief.

He glanced at the clock on their rickety nightstand, hands frozen at ten-twelve. It had stopped sometime yesterday, but he couldn’t remember if it had been day or night. Or had that happened Wednesday?

He sat.

So when’s it gonna come?
They’d scarcely been apart in the last fifty years. What the Bible said about two coming together as one flesh, they’d
lived
that way.
So can’t I work up anything more’n this?

He rubbed his eyes, burning fiercely with lack of sleep over the past days. None last night, maybe a couple hours tallied up from little naps here and there the night before.

Somewhere beyond the windows, down the road at the Bascombs’ place, out there in the nether-light, a rooster let go with the first sound of morning.

And as if awakening from a trance, Caleb arose and wearily shuffled out of the room, down the well-worn stairway, outside. Toward the shovel out in the barn.

The day starts early on the farm.

* *

Caleb stumbled in the barn, catching one booted foot in a small depression in the dirt floor, and was asleep almost as soon as he hit the ground. It was a fitful sleep in which he tossed and turned and sometimes cried out with dreams.

It was almost as if he were the one dying, because it seemed as though his entire life was passing parade-style before his eyes.

He saw himself as a ten-year-old boy again, ears sticking out from his head at near-right angles, his Adam’s apple looking like a half-swallowed peach pit, his overalls always too short and leaving his ankles exposed. He was with his grandfather Elmer down in Ross County, and was getting his first lesson. Caleb had a tradition to carry on someday: He came from a long line of dowsers.

“The secret’s in knowing just how to hold her,” Grandpap Elmer explained, holding a big forked stick in front of him. “’Course, the kind of wood it is helps too, leastways how
I
see it. Most of us Enright men have done our best with ashwood.”

“How come, Grandpap? What difference does it make?”

Elmer shrugged his big shoulders, still strong and broad even though he was past sixty. His face looked every year of it, except maybe his eyes, but he didn’t act it in any way. Even at ten, when Caleb was old enough to know about death and its finality, he still thought Grandpap Elmer was going to live forever.

“How come?” Grandpap Elmer repeated, his eyes going wide with mock surprise. “Shoot, I don’t know. Don’t reckon as I ever wondered how come before. The good Lord don’t mean us to know everything, Caleb. We go questioning too much and maybe it turns out we lose a little something in the knowing. That make sense to you?”

Caleb thought it over, scratching his head to make sure Grandpap knew just how hard he was thinking, and then nodded. He fished a fresh October-harvested apple from a rear pocket, took a huge bite. Smiled. October 1929…a good vintage for apples.

“Watch me when we get there,” Grandpap said. “Just stick close and watch how it happens.”

Caleb tagged along with Grandpap, scuffing along the dirt road for two miles or more until they got to where one of the area’s young men and his new bride were setting up home and farm. A fine autumn day it was, too, with the faintest of nips in the air and a soft breeze, with plenty of warm sunshine to wash it down with.

Grandpap joshed with the young man a while, laughing it up and nudging him in the shoulder and asking him how things were going with the wife and all, was she tired of him yet, ha ha ha, were those stars out of his eyes yet. Caleb amused himself by firing pebbles gathered along the road at birds as they zipped through the trees.

Finally, though, Grandpap went to work.

He got real quiet, and just stood there for a long while, his head tilted back a bit. He held his ash stick in front of him, one hand on each fork and the straight length poking away from him.

Caleb crept up close behind his grandfather, so quietly he didn’t even hear himself. Grandpap knew he was there just the same.

“Ready, partner?” Grandpap whispered, as if he didn’t even dare disturb the air around them with his voice.

“Yep,” Caleb whispered back just as quietly.

Elmer moved forward along one edge of the lawn near their house, stick held out like a lance. Caleb tiptoed alongside Grandpap’s elbow.

“Don’t hold her none too tight, none too loose, either,” he said. “Just enough so’s you got a nice easy grip on her. So you can feel her when she starts to
pull.
”

Caleb watched with rapt eyes as his grandfather trod slow and steady on a back-and-forth path across the young fellow’s property. And just when he was starting to grow bored and wonder what all the fuss was about, Grandpap stopped dead in his tracks.

The stick was quivering ever so slightly. And it almost looked as if the tip were trying to point downward.

Grandpap Elmer looked down at him, a twinkle in those old, wise eyes. Then he held the stick a little lower. “You can touch her if you want.”

Caleb reached a wary finger out to rest on the stick near its forked notch. A minute vibration coursed through the stick, and Caleb held his breath. It wasn’t like Grandpap was vibrating the stick in his own big liver-spotted hands. Caleb could plainly see from his loose grip that that was impossible. No, those quivers came from someplace else. The wood itself?

“You just gotta believe,” Grandpap was saying, that twinkle growing even merrier. “Believe, and let it happen.”

The young fellow and his own father and grandfather and friends commenced to dig the next morning. It was no surprise to anyone that beneath the crust of earth they’d broken through was a sweet, natural spring, as pure as water ever got, just waiting to be tapped for a well.

Grandpap Elmer and Caleb dropped back by the next afternoon to check their progress and to taste of the earth’s offerings. It was no surprise to Elmer either, and he was given a fat, squealing piglet to carry home for his troubles.

“A good dowser never lacks for friends, Caleb, remember that.” Grandpap reached into the pocket of his shirt, whose pattern resembled a horse blanket. He withdrew a cigarette he’d rolled before they’d taken to the road again, with the piglet held squirming in his other arm, and tucked it into one corner of his mouth. He flared a match with a cracked thumbnail, lit the cigarette, puffed sweet-smelling clouds of smoke into the October air. “Nope, you’ll never lack for friends. But some of ’em don’t get as close as they might. They keep a bit of distance ’twixt you and them.”

Caleb stared down at the clodhoppers on his feet, at the stray puffs of dust taking flight in the breeze. “What do you mean?”

Grandpap squinted into the sun, an expression now built solidly into his weathered face. “You know how a cat is, don’t you, boy? A cat can be nice to you, it can rub up agin’ you, it might even bring you the little critters it kills out in the woods and fields. You know it likes you. But there’s always this little part of the cat that holds back. It’s not like a dog, that loves you and’ll even die for you. The cat always holds back.” He sighed, pulled out the cigarette for a moment. “And that’s the way it is with a dowser. Around us, some folks act kinda like cats.”

Caleb kicked this around in his head. Then he looked up at the big man beside him, gazing earnestly into his yellowed eyes. “How come? Is it okay for me to know
that
?”

Elmer chuckled. “Don’t guess that’d hurt nothing. Only I’m not so sure of that one myself.” He popped the cigarette back in. “We’re just a little different, I guess. Somehow we’re in touch with a part of ourselves, and a part of nature, most everybody else ain’t.” A faraway look narrowed his eyes, then he grinned down at Caleb. “That’s enough lessons for today. But you be sure it’ll be a while before I run out.”

Caleb nodded, feeling very good and warm inside. So long as he had his Grandpap to walk beside, to spout off his words of wisdom and explain the stranger nooks and crannies of the world, everything would be all right.

And more lessons were indeed forthcoming, as the old man passed along legend and lore that had already made the trek of generations upon generations. There’s no teacher quite like time. Grandpap Elmer showed him the gifts of the earth that were there for the taking—roots and herbs and berries and juices and dozens and dozens of wonders that, when properly combined and administered, were good for what ailed you.

Caleb dreamed.

He saw the dream-Caleb leave his boyhood behind, watched the years mirrored in his face. He saw the man he’d become, standing in the corner of a freshly cleaned barn with two friends, watching square dancers twirl to and fro. He saw the dreamy look on his own face when he spied a new girl spinning by, long black hair radiant, as if it still caught the rays of the sun, though dusk had fallen better than an hour before. He learned that her name was Emily, and while watching from the sidelines he figured he didn’t have a chance in hell with the beauty. She’d probably laugh herself silly over those jug-ears of his and that’d be the extent of it.

Only this time his dream came true.

Emily, now his wife, was great with child, greater every passing day. They both thanked God and prayed for the baby’s health, and for the wisdom and patience to bring him or her up in the right ways. Until that waking nightmare of a day when Emily had screamed and shrieked her way through a torturous delivery, and even the midwife was crying…and finally they had the still form of a girl-child before them. She would’ve been called Rachel. And in their failure to bring a child healthy and whole into the world, they were just as suddenly robbed of any further chances. Emily had been stricken barren.

Caleb had wandered amid the trees behind their home, a long, hickory-handled ax over his shoulder. He meandered and kicked at vegetation until he came to the largest tree he could find, then exploded in sudden fury, hacking out wedges and irregular chunks of the tree, until at last he sank to the ground, exhausted. And sobbing.

Why couldn’t she have died too?
he had thought.
I
could start over, still have an heir for everything I am and everything I know…

He stopped abruptly, horrified at what had just passed through his mind.
That’s the best I can do?
His wife lay half-dead back in their bed, and here he was wishing her even more ill, as if it were her decision he’d never be a father.

Why, he wasn’t even
fit
to be a father, not with selfish thoughts like that. And that made him cry harder.

Caleb dreamed.

He watched as his talent, or skill, or secret knowledge, or whatever it was behind the dowsing, grew and forged him his own reputation among his own generation. He’d done well for himself with his friends and neighbors, and had the free chickens and pork and eggs and beef and homemade wine to attest to the fact. But he also had Grandpa Elmer’s words in the back of his head, and he understood what his grandfather had meant by comparing people to cats.