Plague (43 page)

He nodded.
‘That’s what Margaret used to say.’

‘Margaret?’

‘My ex-wife.
She’s dead now. She died in the plague.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Well – I think
the only reason she wanted me to realize my potential was so that she could
bask in reflected glory.’

Esmeralda
smiled. He couldn’t be sure, because his vision was so blurred, but she might
have been crying.

‘There’s only
one sort of glory that counts, Leonard,’ she said. ‘And that’s the glory of
survival. You’d better go now. They’re waiting for you.’

He held out his
huge swaddled arms, and held her close,
then
he turned
around and padded back into the sitting-room. Adelaide was waiting for him, all
wrapped up, and Prickles was nothing more than a big blue bundle on the settee.

‘All right,
everybody,’ said Dr. Petrie. ‘This is it!’

Kenneth
Garunisch and Nicholas helped him to get Prickles on his back. She clung around
his shoulders, and they tied her firmly in position with a long leather belt
from an old suitcase.

Nicholas
prepared to open the door to let them out. Garunisch and his wife held
broom-handles in case the rats rushed in.

‘Are you
ready?’ said Nicholas. Dr. Petrie nodded.

‘Okay then –
now!’

The front door
was flung open. The rats scrambled at them like a tide of filthy water,
squealing with ravenous hunger. As Dr. Petrie stumbled forward with Prickles on
his back, urgently pushing Adelaide in front of him, he could see nothing
through his facemask but a torrential swarm of furry bodies, filling the
hallway and writhing on the stairs.

They made the
first flight down to the fifteenth floor with rats suspended from their quilted
shins and hanging from their shoulders. Dr. Petrie kicked the rats around his
legs with every other step, and tried to smash them against the walls, but even
when they were dead they clung on, until their bodies were pulled away and
devoured by more clamoring rats.

Adelaide, her
arms heavy with the rodents, tripped and fell against the stairs. Dr. Petrie,
with Prickles on his back, could do nothing more than nudge her. She managed to
struggle up to her feet again, turning and twisting herself to try and shake
some of the rats off, but all they did was sway on her arms like over-heavy
tassels from a curtain.

They made it down
to the twelfth floor with rats all over them, gnawing and tearing at their
quilts and blankets, and turning them into shambling man-sized beasts of
wriggling brown fur. Adelaide fell again, and Dr. Petrie had to tear rats away
from her back to try and reduce their disgusting weight. He was now so
overwhelmed by the creatures that he was literally tearing them in half to pull
them off.

It took them a
further ten minutes to reach the ninth floor. Dr. Petrie was smothered in
sweat,
and panting for breath in the foul air. The
building’s air-conditioning had stopped with the power failure, and the
corridors were so soaked in the acrid urine of rats that his eyes smarted and
he could hardly make his lungs work.
Prickles, clinging to
his back, was
a muscle-tearing load that he could barely even think
about.

He waded
knee-deep through squirming rats towards the fire door to the next flight of
stairs. The door was locked – and jammed. Beating rats away from his quilted
hood, he forced his way over to Adelaide and shouted, ‘It’s stuck! I can’t get
it open!’

Adelaide
stumbled against him. ‘You have to!’ she screamed. ‘I can’t take any more!

You have to!’

Dr. Petrie
peered around the hallway through his face-mask. The gilt settee was still
wedged in the open elevator doors, and he grabbed Adelaide’s shoulder and
pointed towards the shaft.

‘Can you
climb?’ he yelled. ‘Can you slide down the wires?’

She shook her
rat-decorated head, making their tails swing. ‘Leonard –
it’s
nine storeys! I can’t!’

‘You’ll have to!
If you don’t, you’ll have to go back! Just do what I do!’

Shifting
Prickles higher on his back, Dr. Petrie battled his way through the clinging,
tearing rats to reach the elevator doors. He climbed laboriously up on to the
settee, and then reached over towards the elevator cables. At the first try, he
missed, and for a moment he thought he was going to overbalance. Through his
facemask, he could see the dark shaft dropping over 130 feet to the ground.

Adjusting
Prickles’ weight, he reached out again. This time, his gloved hand reached the
cable. It was slippery with grease, and difficult to cling on to. He reached
over with the other hand. His weight made the settee slip a few inches, and he
had to pause, stock-still, in case it tipped down the shaft completely.

Adelaide
shrieked, ‘Hurry! I can’t bear it!’

Tentatively,
Dr. Petrie reached out once more, and this time he managed to grasp the cable
with both hands. Sweating and gasping, he pushed himself off the settee, and
let his legs dangle in space. He then slid awkwardly down beside the settee,
until he was able to curl his legs around the cable below it, and climb down
further.

‘Adelaide!’ he
shouted. ‘Adelaide – come on!’

He couldn’t
wait too long for her. He was barely able to keep his grip on the slippery
elevator cables as it was, and Prickles was now an agonizing burden of pain. He
tried to kick a few rats from his
legs,
and two or
three of them plummeted down the breezy elevator shaft to the basement, turning
over and over as they fell.

At last, he saw
Adelaide, alive with rats, crawling out on to the settee. He saw her peer down
the depth of the shaft, and
hesitate
.

‘It’s all
right!’ he yelled. ‘Just keep your head, and it’s all right!’

Adelaide put
her hand out and tried to reach the cable. The settee groaned and shifted
downward again, and she held back. Then she tried to reach out once more, her
arms heavy with clinging rats.

She caught hold
of the wire and gripped it.

‘Now the other
one!’ shouted Dr. Petrie.

Adelaide
paused,
then
lunged forward to seize the cable. There
was a scraping sound, and the gilt settee tilted under her weight. It slid
downwards against the wall for a few feet, and then dropped, with a hideous
crashing and banging, nine storeys down to the ground. They heard it hit the bottom,
and smash.

Adelaide was
clinging tightly to the wires. She was sobbing out loud, and it took Dr. Petrie
several minutes to make her hear.

‘Slide down
slowly!’ he said. ‘Hand over hand! Don’t go too fast or the wire will burn
through your gloves!’

‘I can’t!’ she
wept. ‘I’m too frightened! I can’t!’

‘For Christ’s
sake, you’ll have to! There’s no other way!’

Burdened with
rats, Dr. Petrie began his cautious descent. Every few moments he rested,
gripping on to the wire until he felt as if his hands were painfully locked.
His face was running with sweat, and his heart felt as if it was grating
against his ribcage. He could hear Prickles saying something muffled, and
shifting about in her duvet, but there was nothing he could do. He just prayed
to God she would try and stay still.

They reached
the eighth floor. Dr. Petrie paused for another rest. He was breathing in
coarse whines, and he was beginning to shake and tremble all over. He was just
about to start climbing down again when Adelaide said, ‘Leonard!’

‘What is it?’

‘I can’t – feel
my hands!’

He tried to
look up. ‘What?’

‘I can’t feel
my hands!’

He blinked
sweat out of his eyes. ‘Try wriggling your fingers!’

There was a
pause. Then she screamed, ‘I can’t feel them!’

She must have let
go. She dropped past him without a sound, knocking him a glancing blow on the
shoulder. He didn’t hear anything, not even when she hit the ground. He clung
on as tightly as he could, a tattered quilted figure hanging to a wire, and he
wept silently as he climbed down floor by floor, one after the other, with his
hands bleeding and his body raw with pain.

It had just
been raining. A flat watery sunlight glossed over the wet streets, and
reflected from windows and spires. Dr. Petrie drove slowly through the broken
debris of downtown Manhattan towards the Holland Tunnel, his hands roughly
bandaged on the steering-wheel, his face strained and exhausted. Prickles, her
hair damp with sweat, lay on the seat beside him, fast asleep.

On the back
shelf of the car, in its canvas map bag, was Ivor Glantz’s work on plague
control by irradiation.

As he drove,
Dr. Petrie sang softly, under his breath. The day faded into early evening, and
early evening faded into night. He drove through the Holland Tunnel and into
Jersey. He drove south-west, across a derelict and deserted continent, towards
the distant end of the plague zone, if there was one. It seemed, for a while,
that the whole of America was his, and that he and Prickles
were
the only people left alive.

It was when he
stopped singing that Prickles woke up. She looked at him, in the dun green
light of the instrument panel, and he was sweating and pale.

‘Daddy?’ she
said.

He didn’t
answer.

‘Daddy?
What’s the matter?’

Dr. Petrie
smiled as much as he could. There was a sharp pain in his groin, and he wasn’t
sure how much longer he could drive. He gradually slowed the Mercedes down, and
pulled it in towards the side of the highway.

He stopped the
car and switched off the engine. They were in Delaware, just outside of Wilmington.
The night was dark, and there was the sound of insects from the highway verge.

Prickles said,
‘Daddy – are you sick?’

Dr. Petrie
shook his head. He touched her honey-colored hair, and her serious, beautiful,
unpretty face.

‘Do you know
something?’ he whispered. She looked at him attentively. The pains were worse,
and he was beginning to feel nauseous.

‘What, Daddy?’
she asked, when he didn’t say anything more.

Things seemed
to be advancing and receding. Leonard Petrie felt sharp tearing pains start up
in his bowels.

He stared at
Prickles and said quietly, ‘You will never forgive us for this.’

END

Table of Contents

Book
One

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

Book
Two THE DEAD

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR