Last Gasp (61 page)

“Photographs and on film, that’s all.”

“Pray to God you never see one in the flesh,” Ruth said. “The symptoms are most evident in children under five—sore throat, slight temperature, nausea—what you’d think of as the usual children’s complaints, nothing too serious. In the early days in fact many doctors diagnosed scarlet fever because the symptoms are very similar. Then it was found that the kids didn’t respond to penicillin, which is the standard treatment for scarlet fever.

“In the next stage their temperature shoots up to one hundred and six and the lymph glands in the child’s neck swell to the size of golf balls. The lips and tongue turn bright scarlet and red blotches appear on the chest and back and buttocks. After about a week, during which the high fever persists, the blood vessels in the eyes become congested and burst, rashes break out all over the body, and the skin starts to peel from the fingers and toes.

“The damage isn’t only external. They develop aneurysms—that’s an irregular thickening of the coronary arteries, which weakens them— which leads to abnormalities in the heart rhythm and the rupture of the coronary artery itself. When that happens it’s invariably fatal.”

“Is there no treatment?”

“We can lower the fever. That reduces inflammation and prevents the blood from clotting, but there’s no real cure. The death rate is between fifty and sixty percent, most of them under five.”

“And the cause is pollution in one form or another?”

Ruth nodded, watching the blur of road through the windshield. “We still don’t know precisely how or why. It could be a hereditary factor, some weakness or deficiency that’s triggered by the deterioration in the environment. It’s probable that these kids were genetically damaged to begin with and lacked the normal defense mechanisms to withstand pollutants in the air and water. We know from studies as far back as the eighties that environmental factors can cause abnormalities—the white blood cells contain broken fragments of chromosomes that jumble up the genetic message. This can cause cancer, spontaneous abortions, miscarriages and birth defects. The miscarriage rate over the past fifteen years has jumped from a national average of eight and a half percent to over thirty percent. The women who don’t abort or miscarry produce offspring who are ripe candidates for pollution sickness. The poor little bastards can’t win,” Ruth added without emotion. “They’re either aborted or born damaged.”

“What about anoxia?” Chase asked, thinking of Cheryl. “Is it as common as pollution sickness?”

“Less so in people below the age of twenty-five.” Ruth propped the rifle between her knees and eased back in the bucket seat. “It tends to affect the older age groups, presumably because they’ve been exposed to oxygen deficiency over a longer period and their tissues aren’t as flexible and can’t cope with the additional strain. It’s a far more complex problem than pollution sickness and the medical background is sketchy. For one thing we don’t have any reliable figures on the number of people affected and how many survive.” Her mouth twisted sourly. “That’s what I’ve devoted the last seven years of my life to finding out. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say wasted the last seven years.”

“You did all you could. You’re not to blame.”

“Oh, no, I don’t blame myself,” Ruth corrected him. “I just feel so fucking angry. How could we do this to ourselves? How could we have been so stupid and shortsighted?” She shook her head, gripped by a kind of impotent amazement. “You know, it was all in your book, every last damn word of it? Not just the stuff about environmental war, as if that weren’t bad enough, but how we’ve crapped in our own nest, polluted the air we breathe with chemicals and turned the oceans into toxic soup. And Christ, we’ve known for at least half a century what we were doing and we kept right on doing it! What kind of species are we, for God’s sake? Are we crazy or just plain stupid?”

“There are no votes in sewage,” Chase muttered.

“What?”

“Something Theo Detrick once said. He meant you can’t blame the politicians, because they’d never get elected to office on an ecology ticket. Cleaning up the environment, much less protecting it, doesn’t have the instant easy appeal the public demands. More production, more growth, more cash in the pocket, more goodies—those are what people vote for. Certainly not for some earnest do-gooder preaching the doctrine that consumption is bad and will lead to ruin.”

“So who is to blame? Is it us, each one of us individually? Is that what you’re going to say?”

Chase looked across at her grim pale face. He smiled and shrugged. “Hey, don’t get angry with me, Ruth. I’ve done my share of consuming—and preaching if it comes to that. If I knew the answer I’d have spit it out long ago. But I don’t.”

Wheeler Peak was behind them now, the road curling downward in a series of spirals to Connors Pass. Forest stretched on either side, lush and thick and green. At certain points along the road were shaded recreation areas with wooden tables and benches set in concrete.

On a day such as this, not many years ago, Chase reflected, cars would have been parked between the diagonal yellow lines and families would be eating at the tables and kids pitching baseball and chasing one another on the neat smooth grass. No families today. No kids. No baseball. The scene was eerily empty, like a vast, lavishly expensive sound stage complete with cyclorama of mountains and forests and sky waiting for shooting to begin. But Equity was on strike. There were no actors. All this beautiful setting had been built for no purpose, a complete and utter waste.

Was this how the future would be? Empty? A deserted planet?

In dreams he’d had visions of what the end would be like (it was how he imagined New York had become: steel and glass towers poking out of shit-colored murk), but this was worse, infinitely worse, because the beauty remained like a mocking taunt.

Yes, much worse, like a direct reproach from God. The planet had been entrusted to mankind, given into its care, and in just a few thousand years out of a four-and-a-half-billion-year history the species had succeeded brilliantly in transforming a paradise into a cesspool.

They were on highway 50 in the heart of the Humboldt Forest. Up ahead a white-lettered green sign announced a small town, and Chase pointed it out with a grin. The town was called Ruth.

After studying the route, Chase had provisionally picked out a spot to camp overnight between Austin and Frenchman, somewhere along Railroad Pass. If possible he wanted to keep clear of towns, in fact any places of habitation. With the continuing exodus northward he guessed that the locals would be suspicious and perhaps hostile to strangers. Neither could he rule out the possibility that there were shanty settlements of immigrants from the southern states.

But most of all he wanted to avoid Reno, the only place of any size between them and Goose Lake. Apart from its reputation as a vacation resort and onetime divorce capital, he knew nothing about the city. But he mistrusted all cities, suspecting that that was where the frayed edges of civilization began to show first. In the backwoods there was only nature in the raw to contend with, whereas cities compressed the madness and hysteria into a volatile mixture that could explode at any moment with unpredictable results.

Thus far on the journey they had seen only a few other vehicles, so presumably the main interstate highways running due north were carrying the bulk of the traffic.

A couple of miles past Eureka (one of dozens of remote outposts with that name west of Kansas City, he supposed), they ran into the first real sign of trouble. It was midafternoon and Chase was silently congratulating himself on their unhindered progress when they came down a long sweeping curve out of the shadow of Pinto Summit into bright sunshine to find a truck, farm tractor and two patched-up cars with smeared windshields strung across the road.

Ruth got a grip on the rifle and was about to hoist it when Chase motioned with the palm of his hand, warning her not to make any sudden moves that might be misinterpreted.

He shifted down into second and brought the jeep to a halt about ten yards away. There were five men lounging about, all clad in farmer’s dungarees, two of them cradling shotguns in their brawny arms. One of the others was holding a thick pine stave in his right hand, which he thwacked menacingly into his left.

As casually as he could Chase unzipped the pocket of his Wind-breaker. The butt of the automatic was hidden but within easy reach.

The men were rough-looking, unshaven, their eyes slitted against the sunlight. Hard to tell whether they were God-fearing, public-spirited citizens or mean sons of bitches with something nasty in mind. The two men with shotguns ambled to either side of the road to cover the jeep while the man with the stave came forward, a grimy Stetson-style straw hat tipped forward so that the curled brim almost rested on his sunburned nose.

Chase took off his dark glasses, feeling that more amicable contact could be made if the man could see his eyes.

“Real pleasant day fer a ride.” The man had stopped a few feet away, his scratched red boots spread in an indolent stance on the blacktop. The greeting might have been innocuous enough, though Chase was uneasily aware of the double meaning it contained. “What ya got back yonder?” The soiled hat brim nodding toward the back of the jeep.

“Camping gear.” Chase hesitated and then said, “We’re driving up to Oregon. This lady is a doctor. We’re on our way to treat a sick friend.” The man tapped his palm with the stave jerkily, as if to the beat of a metronome that only he could hear. “What kind of speech d’ya call that?”

“Speech?” Chase frowned.

“That—what ya call it?—ack-cent of your’n. Where ya from, mister?”

“I’m English.”

“An’ you’re goin’ up to Oregon,” the man said in a mocking tone, “to help a sick friend.”

Chase moved his hands from the wheel and placed them, fingers spread, on his thighs. Ruth was sitting tensely in the seat beside him, her fingers wrapped around the burnished blue gun barrel.

“Would you mind telling us why you’ve blocked the road?” Chase said.

“Jest passin’ the time of day.” The man smiled without opening his lips. “Never know who’ll happen along.”

“Are you from around here?”

The man grinned, revealing a sliver of red gums. “I really dig that ack-cent. It’s right dandy. Ain’t that what you English say?”

“No, it’s what you Americans say. Listen, we have to move on. What I’m telling you is the—”

But the man ignored him and walked around to Ruth’s side of the jeep and stood looking at her from underneath the brim of his hat. It was difficult to see his eyes properly, but they could tell that he was taking everything in: her dark windblown hair and thickly lashed eyes, the wrinkled open vee of her shirt exposing her white throat and the slopes of her breasts swelling and falling as she tried to control her breathing, the blue denims molded to hips and thighs.

After his inspection he moved his eyes lazily up to her face again. “So you’re a lady doctor, huh?”

“That’s right. And my friend has just asked you why you’re blocking the road. Would you mind telling us why? This isn’t some kind of game. Please move those vehicles so that we can drive on.”

The man settled himself more firmly on the blacktop, legs wide apart. “Well, since you ask so polite, lady, I’ll tell ya,” he said conversationally. “We stop all kinds along this here stretch. Weirdos, acid-heads, crazies, mutes, the halt, the lame, and the blind. An’ what we do is this: We take what we find an’ have a little fun at the same time—harmless fun, that is, nuthin’ to it. But as you can see we’re simple folks and we like to enjoy ourselves once in a while with all the human dung that passes by. All them that’ve used up their own sweet air and fresh water. We reckon as how we’ve a right to do that, seem’ as how they’ve muddied their own drinkin’ hole and want to do the same to our’n. You dig me, lady?”

“You have no right,” Ruth said coldly. “This is a public highway and everyone is free to use it without hindrance. You’re breaking the law.” While Chase endorsed her sentiments he felt that Ruth’s psychological reading of the situation left something to be desired. These men weren’t playing games, neither were they going to be pushed into an accommodating frame of mind by accusations and threats.

The man cocked his head to one side and squinted at her. “Where you bin livin’ these past five years, lady? Backside of the moon? If you don’t already know it—and it sure sounds like you don’t—this ball of mud is cornin’ apart at the seams.” He leaned forward from the waist and held up the stave between his fingertips. “You talk about rights? Law? This thing I’m a-holding is the law and rights is what every man can get for hisself by usin’ it. Next you’ll be tellin’ me that the fine huntin’ piece between you knees is jest to get you an’ yer friend a rabbit supper.”

Chase said, “We’ve only got camping gear with us, that’s the truth. Nothing of any real value. Nothing that would be of any use to you.”

“Well now,” said the man craftily. “Wouldn’t be too sure ’bout that. Not at all sure.” His eyes under the brim glinted with sly amusement.