Plague (26 page)

He drove the
mile up to the barricade and stopped. Adelaide was still standing there, looking
around in a strangely dazed way, supporting herself against the side of her
car.

He got out, and
walked across to her.

She turned. Her
face was bruised, and her lips were swollen. Her hair was mussed up and filthy.
She was dressed in nothing but a red coverall with MacDonald’s embroidered on
the pocket. Her eyes stared at him as if she was having difficulty focusing.

‘Adelaide?’ he
said quietly.

He came nearer,
and held out his arms towards her. She kept on staring at him like a stranger.

‘Adelaide? It’s
me – Leonard.’

She said
nothing.

‘Adelaide –
what’s happened?’

She lowered her
eyes. Tears dropped down her cheeks, and stained her red coveralls with damp.

‘Oh, Leonard,’
she choked. ‘Oh, Leonard, I’m sorry.’

He took her
arm. She was shivering, in spite of the heat, and she couldn’t seem to stop.

‘Sorry?
Adelaide – what’s happened to you? Who’s made you like this?’

‘I’m sorry,
Leonard,’ she wept. ‘Oh, Leonard, I’m so sorry.’

He said, ‘Adelaide-’
But then she dung to him, and cried in great desperate, agonized gasps. She
tugged at his sleeves, at his wrists, and wound his shirt in her hands, shaking
and trembling with anguish. He couldn’t do anything else but hold her, and
soothe her, while Prickles sat in the car and watched them both with a
concerned frown.

The National
Guardsmen were all very young, and they were all dead. The plague had touched
them all during the night, and they lay where they had been infected by it.
In their bunks, beside their truck, in their command posts.

Dr. Petrie kept
Adelaide and Prickles well away while he checked over the barricade and its
twenty corpses, and he wound a scarf around his own nose and mouth in case he
wasn’t as resistant to plague as Anton Selmer had suggested. The whole place
was buzzing with glistening flies, and stank of diahorrea and death.

Beside one
young guardsman, he found an open wallet with a photograph of a smiling woman
who must have been the boy’s mother. But this was not a war – the mothers
didn’t wait at home, fondly smiling, while their sons died on the battlefield.
If the mother lived in Florida, she was probably dead, too. Plague did not
discriminate.

When he had
finished his cursory check of the command post, Dr. Petrie roughly kicked down
the wood and barbed-wire barricade. Then he went back to the Delta 88, which he
had decided to drive in preference to the Torino. Its air-conditioning worked,’
and it had nearly twice as much gas in its tank. He climbed in and started the
engine. Adelaide tried to give him a small smile.

‘I guess it’s
no use posting guards against diseases,’ said Dr. Petrie.
‘Not
this disease, anyway.’

‘No,’ she
replied.

Prickles said,
‘Why do those men let flies walk on their faces?’

Dr. Petrie
looked around. ‘They’re dead, honey. They’re all dead, and because they’re
dead, they don’t mind.’

‘I won’t let
flies walk on my face, even when I’m dead.’

Dr. Petrie
lowered his head. He said nothing.

They drove into
Georgia in the early hours of Thursday morning, and it was only then that they
saw how rapidly the plague had spread. Leonard Petrie kept on 75 towards
Atlanta, but even as they drove north-west, away from the polluted eastern
shores, they saw suburbs where dead housewives lay on the sidewalks, towns where
fires burned untended, abandoned cars and trucks, looted stores, blazing
farmland, rotting bodies.

Throughout the
long hours of the morning, Adelaide sat silently, her head resting against the
car window, saying nothing. Dr. Petrie didn’t press her. He could guess what
had happened, even if she hadn’t told him. He had seen rape victims before, and
knew that what she needed now, more than anything, was reassurance.

Dr. Petrie
drove fast, and one by one they began to overtake other cars. Most of the
stragglers were old family Chewys and Fords, stacked high with belongings. It
was almost bizarre what people felt they desperately needed to keep – even to
the extent of hampering their flight away from danger. Dr. Petrie saw a Rambler
groaning under the weight of an upright piano, and a new Cadillac bearing, with
frayed ropes and great indignity, a green-painted dog kennel.

The plague
survivors were heading north, heading west. They drove with their car windows
dosed tight, and they hardly looked at each other. Pale, tense faces in locked
vehicles. As Dr. Petrie overtook more and more cars, the traffic became denser,
and the jams became worse. At last, twenty or thirty miles outside of Atlanta,
they were slowed down to a crawl, and way ahead of them, glittering in the fumy
sunlight like an endless necklace that had been laid across the Georgia
landscape, they saw a six-lane jam that obviously stretched the whole distance
into the city.

‘Oh God,’ said
Adelaide hoarsely. ‘What are we going to do?’

Dr. Petrie
stretched his aching back, and shrugged. There’s nothing we can do.

Maybe there’s a
turnoff someplace up ahead, and we can try to make it across country.’

The jam was
made even more hideous as drivers died from plague at the wheels of their cars.
Dr. Petrie saw wives and children mouthing frantic appeals for help through the
windows of their cars, but the vehicles were now locked so solidly together
that no one could open a car door. Anyway, every family was keeping itself
strictly quarantined inside its own cell, and no one would risk infecting
himself by going to assist anyone else.

It was the
ultimate experience in American hostility, but perhaps it was also the ultimate
experience in American togetherness, too, for the drivers and families who died
inside their cars were not left behind or abandoned, but irresistibly pushed
forward by the crushing metallic weight of the living refugees behind them.
Adelaide slept for two hours, and when she woke up she looked a little better.
As they bumped and rolled gradually northwards, she made them a lunch of franks
and canned mixed vegetables, and they drank Coke and orange juice. Police
helicopters flackered noisily overhead, warning drivers who felt unwell to try
and pull off the highway.

There was no
way they were going to be able to halt the exodus of
plague
survivors, and they didn’t even try.

Inside the
chilled confines of their air-conditioned car, Dr. Petrie and Adelaide and
Prickles were shunted northwards in a curious dream. Trees and road signs went
past so slowly and gradually that they grew tired of looking at them, tired of
reading them. As far as they could see ahead, there was nothing but a wide
river of car rooftops, wavering in the afternoon heat.
Behind
them, the same endless press.

The convoy’s
progress was further hampered by cars that had broken down or run out of gas,
and had no way of filling up again. Only the slow-boiling fear of plague kept
the immense and agonized jam inching forward. Dr. Petrie saw an old Buick that
had immovably seized up being deliberately shunted off the highway by the cars
around it. It overturned and rolled down a dusty embankment, with its family
trapped inside it. And there was nothing anyone could do to help.

They began to
pick up radio broadcasts. They were faint and crackly at first, and it was
plain they were coming from a long distance. Adelaide identified them first.
They were news programs from Washington D.C., distorted and faded by the
intervening peaks of the Appalachians.

Eventually,
though, they began to gain altitude, and as they did so the radio bulletins
became clearer.

‘... so far,
there have been no reported outbreaks of disease any further north than
Wildwood, on Cape May, New Jersey, but more than seventy miles of beaches on
Long Island’s south shore were closed just before noon this morning because of
sewage that has been washing ashore for the past week. Bathing has been
prohibited from Long Beach, practically next door to the Rockaways in Queens,
all the way east to the western edge of the Hamptons in Suffolk County.

‘Inland, two
cases of plague have been reported in Baltimore, and further south the disease
has taken a serious grip on Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia
and parts of Maryland. The President is remaining in Washington against the advice
of his aides, but it is understood that he is strictly quarantined, and that a
helicopter waits on the White House lawn for possible evacuation
measures ...

‘The Special
Epidemic Commission set up yesterday by the President at a moment’s notice has declared
New York City a primary quarantine zone, on account of the density of its
population and the seriousness of a possible outbreak of plague there...
Accordingly, all access to Manhattan Island will be filtered and controlled by
paramedic teams, and if necessary the entire island will be sealed off from
outside contact...’

Dr. Petrie
switched off. He wiggled his fingers to ease the cramp in them, and said, ‘It
looks bad. Maybe we ought to head west. Once we’re through Atlanta, we could
head for Birmingham or Chattanooga.’

Adelaide said
nothing. Dr. Petrie swore as the car behind them,
a big
bronze Mercury, nudged their Delta 88 in the rear bumper for the twentieth
time.

Prickles, who
had been dozing on the back seat, opened her eyes sleepily and said, ‘Is it
time for Batman?’

Dr. Petrie
shook his head. ‘No Batman tonight, honey. We’re still stuck in all these
cars.’

Prickles stared
out of the window, disappointed. ‘Can’t we go home now?’ she asked him.

Dr. Petrie
reached over and took her hand. ‘We can’t go home for a long time, darling. But
what we’re going to do is find ourselves a new home.
You and
me and Adelaide.
Isn’t that right, Adelaide?’

Adelaide turned
and looked at him listlessly.
‘Whatever you say, Leonard.’

Prickles was
satisfied by that answer, but Dr. Petrie
wasn’t. As Adelaide turned away again, he said, ‘Adelaide, love, that’s not
like you. Not like you at all.’

She kept her
face away. Outside, the afternoon shadows were beginning to lengthen.

What’s not like
me?’ she said, as if her mind were on something else altogether.

‘Agreeing with
me, just like that. You normally refuse to do what I want, on principle.’

She stared at
the floor of the car. ‘Well,’ she whispered. ‘Things change, don’t they?’

‘Like what?’

‘Sometimes you
find that refusing doesn’t make any real difference.’

He didn’t try
to touch her. That would come later. Right now, he was intent on getting her to
say what had happened. Just explaining it would start the long painful process
of exorcism.

‘How did it
happen?’ he asked her, so softly that his words were scarcely louder than
breathing.

She raised her
head.

‘Was it back at
the restaurant?
At MacDonald’s?’

Slowly, she
turned to stare at him. Here eyes were glistening with tears.

‘You know,’ she
said, shaking her head. ‘How did you know?’

‘I am a doctor,
Adelaide; and more important I’m a man who loves you, and knows you well.’

The tears
rolled freely down her cheeks now. She couldn’t say any more, and right now she
didn’t need to. She leaned her head forward and rested it against Dr. Petrie’s
shoulder, and cried.

Prickles looked
at her with some interest, and said, ‘Why is Adelaide crying, Daddy?

Does she feel
sick?’

Dr. Petrie
smiled. ‘No, darling, she doesn’t. She doesn’t feel sick. I hope she’s feeling
better.’

They saw the
huge smudge of black smoke hanging over Atlanta before they saw the city
itself. The evening was warm and still, and the smoke was suspended above in
spectral stillness. Eventually, as the painful traffic jam edged nearer, they
could make out the sparkle of fires in the city’s downtown buildings, and they
knew that Atlanta was destroyed.

Dr. Petrie
turned the radio dial to see if he could pick up any stray news bulletins, but
all he could get was howling and static.

‘Maybe we could
get off the main highway here and try the back roads,’ suggested Adelaide.
‘This is getting insane.’

Dr. Petrie
said, ‘I’ll try. It looks like there’s a turnoff just up there on the left.’

Forcing their
way across two solid lanes of blocked-solid traffic was the worst part. It
meant holding up other cars, and after a day of inching forward in heat and
fumes and sickness, there weren’t many drivers who had the patience or the
inclination to let them past. Dr. Petrie rolled down his window and made a hand
signal, and then just turned the wheel left and crunched into the car beside
his.

The driver, a
fat redneck with a fat family to match, mouthed obscenities at him. The man
didn’t open his window, though. He was too frightened of catching the plague.

The redneck
gunned his engine and tried to force Dr. Petrie back into his own lane.

There was a
grinding of wheel-hubs and fenders.

‘Let us
through!’ screamed Adelaide. ‘We only want to get through!’

The man
wouldn’t budge. He sat stolidly in the driving seat, refusing to look in their
direction. For five minutes, the two cars crawled along side by side, their
fenders scraping and screeching.

After a while,
Dr. Petrie sighed impatiently and reached over for his automatic weapon. He
lifted it up, and took a bead through his open window at the redneck’s head.
Then he waited. The man, who was making a point of ignoring him, didn’t see
what was happening at first. Then his podgy wife nudged him, and he turned and
saw the rifle’s muzzle fixed on his cranium. He jammed on his brakes so quickly
that the car behind shunted into the back of him.