Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (13 page)

After Chet's call, Shari talked DeeDee into covering the rest of her shift, and a few minutes later headed the few blocks home to her messy little walk-up flat. She bathed in the washbowl (somebody was using the shower down the hall, naturally—
But there '11 be that swimming pool anyway)
and made it back to the bar a few doors up from the Seafood Express to wait for Chet.

He was driving a T-Bird, like the last time, but he didn't look so sharp this time, his eyes all bloodshot, coughing a lot and spitting out the window. He kissed her when she got in the car, and it seemed to her his breath smelled funny, but he explained why he looked so ragged—the long plane flight, hardly any sleep, a little too much to drink. He turned the car north across the bridge and up the highway toward Hilton Head just as the sun was dropping behind the trees, leaving shadows across the road and bringing a little coolness. Shari relaxed a little. She tried to make some friendly conversation, but Chet didn't seem too responsive. Just didn't feel top rate, he said, but then a couple of drinks and a little TLC would take care of that. He took a pull from his silver flask and offered it to her. She took a stiff drink, and then another, before handing it back.
This could be a tough evening. . . .

They were rounding a curve through a grove of trees when Chet swerved sharp right, almost going off the shoulder into the ditch, to miss a figure walking toward them down the middle of the road. Shari had a brief glimpse of a skinny, raggedy kid, feet bare, hair tangled. Chet fought the car back on the road, then slowed and looked over his shoulder. "Did you see that bastard? Right in the middle. We could have ditched this thing!"

"I saw."

"Goddamn fool! I oughta go back and whip his ass."

"Aw, come on, honey. Let's go on to that nice place and forget him. Let somebody else wipe up the road with him."

"He'd damn well deserve it, too."

The place at Hilton Hotel was exactly as she remembered it— high ceilings, beautiful rooms, rich carpeting, a well-stocked bar and an enormous bed. Chet was coughing more than before, but he mixed stiff drinks for both of them, raw whiskey over ice. When he brought Shari hers he put his arms around her, tried to kiss her, and she turned her face away. "Honey, that business on the road kinda scared me, I need to settle down a little." She sipped the drink. "Why don't we try the pool first? Freshen up from all this sticky heat. And I brought my sexiest suit, too. Here, I'll show you what I mean."

She showed him. While he lay back on the bed, she slowly stripped down to the buff, poured, herself more drink and then twisted and tugged into the sheer black bikini. Chet disappeared into the bathroom to put on his trunks, and they headed for the pool elevator together.

The pool turned out to be a bad idea, for Chet. Shari went in like a nymph, laughing and urging him to catch her, but the minute he hit the water he was in trouble. Suddenly he couldn't breathe; the slightest movement was an impossible effort, and a strangling spasm of coughing came and wouldn't go away. He floundered to the edge somehow and hung on, waiting for the coughing to stop, waiting for strength enough to get out of there. Finally he found a ladder, lunged out and collapsed on the poolside. She was up on the diving board now, large breasts and slim body and tight buttocks cn full display, but he couldn't even
look
at her. His breath wouldn't come, and then suddenly, still dripping from the pool, he was chilling, shaking so violently he could barely make it to the poolside chair and sit staring stupidly at the water.

Sometime later he stopped chilling and she was there beside him, bending over him. "Honey, are you okay?"

"Yeah."

"You aren't sick?"

"No, no, no," he gasped. "I'll be all right. Just gotta get warm."

"Let's go on up. You look sick."

She half supported him to the elevator, opened the door with his key when he couldn't hold his hand still enough and somehow got him over to the bed. He collapsed on his back, panting. "You need to see a doctor, honey," Shari said.

"Nah, screw the doctor. It's just that damned swimming that got me."

She sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at him, for once in her life completely at a loss. His hand came up to her breast. "Chet, honey, maybe you need to rest a little while. . . ."

"Don't wanna rest," he gasped. He pulled her down, started to kiss her, and then began chilling again more violently than before.

"Maybe if we get those wet old trunks off," Shari said. She untied the string, tugged them down and off him and barely stifled a scream. He had a huge purple welt on the side of his penis, as if somebody had kicked him. Higher up, in the groin, She saw an angry purple lump the size of a plum, with a gray spot on top for all the world like a huge boil about to burst.

Quite suddenly Chet sat upright with his hand over his mouth and bolted past her into the john, stark naked. She heard him vomiting again and again; then the second evolved into ragged coughing and gasping. It went on for a long time. Then, finally it stopped.

She sat dead still on the edge of the bed, looking at the half-open bathroom door, and listening, listening. There was no further sound. "Chet, honey?" Still no sound. She walked to the bathroom and looked in.

He was kneeling over the toilet bowl, blood splattered all over his face and chest and the tile floor. The bowl itself was full of bright crimson clotted stuff. His head and shoulders were ash-gray. She took one shoulder, tried to raise him up, but he just slid sideways onto the floor, banging his face on the toilet bowl as he went.

He wasn't breathing, and it didn't look like he was going to start again, either. An intensely practical girl, Shari dismissed the hulk on the floor.
No help for him. But Jesus! What if somebody walks in here ? What if somebody phones, expecting him to answer?
She walked back into the bedroom, licking her lips.
Nobody saw us come in, and there was nobody else in the pool.
Moving fast, she went through his pants, tossed the car keys and his wallet on the bed.
Good, I can park the T-Bird on a downtown street with the keys in it, and when the bulls find it they'll call Hertz.
She stripped off her bikini, stuffed it in her purse and put on the blouse and slacks she'd come in. She needed to go to the john, but she decided that could wait. Finally, she stripped all the cash from his wallet, $2,420, and stuffed the wad into her bra. With a final look around, she peeked out into the corridor, closed the door and headed for the elevator and the parking lot.

An hour later she left the car parked at the corner of Oglethorpe and Broad in downtown Savannah after wiping away prints, and hurried to her flat a few blocks away. It was only 10:30
p.m
., and she was afraid she'd meet somebody who knew her coming in, but all she did was startle a huge rat on the stair. It disappeared into a hole in the wall. Once inside her room, she took a long drink raw from the gin bottle and collapsed on her bed.
Home again,
she thought. Thank Christ for that.
Home and safe,
she thought.

20

During the next week Dr. Carlos Quintana and a growing army of epidemiologists and other CDC personnel put in grueling twenty-hour days trying to define and control the brush fires of plaguelike illness that now centered in Canon City, Colorado, but were also springing up elsewhere in a long arc stretching from Chihuahua State to the south, up through mountain villages in New Mexico, through Colorado and north into Wyoming, almost all traceable directly or indirectly to somebody in that first ill-fated camping party. Many of the workers were the Shoeleather Boys Carlos liked to refer to—members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, many of them experienced epidemiologists, but more merely recruits-in-training, working out of offices all over the West and shipped in because Canon City was where they were needed. Their job was staggering and wildly varied: tabulating and interviewing each new individual case of plague, meticulously listing all possible contacts that might have occurred while the victims were infectious, then painstakingly tracking down each of those contacts—and their contacts—and
their
contacts—to New York, to Anchorage, to Hong Kong, to literally anyplace in the world, in order to gather information, urge medical observation and, when necessary, prescribe prophylactic antibiotics. Since every plague victim had dozens, sometimes hundreds, of potential contacts, and since each one had to be traced out individually, the reason for the Centers for Disease Control's unofficial insignia—a shoe sole with a hole in it—was soon painfully apparent in Canon City and environs. To make matters worse, the EIS workers were made fully aware that the patterns that might ordinarily govern the spread of plague might not apply—that failure to account for any rodent or flea exposure, for instance, did not in any way mean that a possible contact could be considered safe. This plague was heavily loaded with cases of plague pneumonia, a form of the infection easily spread from person to person.

With the enormous amount of data they were collecting, it was easy for these workers to imagine that they were covering everything and forget that multitudes of contacts like Chet Benoliel might be slipping through their nets. With the sheer magnitude of the task created by first twenty, or twenty-three, or thirty cases of plague, it was easy to be fooled into thinking that pages and reams of raw data somehow equaled accomplishment, and to imagine they were really getting somewhere when the fact was they were merely getting buried in figures.

In addition to the Shoeleather Boys, some elite specialists came in, setting up shop either at the Fort Collins CDC installation, at the Colorado Springs motel headquarters or in Canon City itself; chemists, microbiologists to work with Monique, nurses, physicians, public health advisers to work with the local doctors, veterinarians, entomologists, rodent-control experts to help assess local rat populations, live-trap the rats and send their fleas up for examination and bacteriological culture—the list of jobs to be done seemed virtually endless.

That first day Carlos called a council of war to establish and discuss certain basic ground rules. "We can't assume that we're dealing with plague the way the textbooks describe it, or the way any of you may have encountered it before," he said as the workers crowded into the small Holiday Inn conference room. "We've got to assume that anyone who's had direct or indirect contact with a proven infected person is in mortal danger, and we simply don't dare sit around and watch what happens. We have to move as soon as we have a presumptive history."

"But we can't treat somebody who isn't sick, can we?" one worker asked.

"In this situation we may have to. So far it looks like ninety percent of the people who have developed symptoms have been dying no matter what was done. That's one hell of a mortality rate, and I don't think we can fool around waiting for a labora-toiy diagnosis."

"Why didn't the antibiotics stop it, up at Rampart Valley?"

"Maybe just too slow," Carlos said. "It takes any antibiotic three hours or more to reach an effective blood level, unless it's given intravenously, and then another twenty-four hours for the antibiotic to knock down enough, of the invading bacteria to slow the attack. Here we have an organism that seems to move like greased lightning. Maybe it just walks right over the antibiotic. Maybe there's already an overwhelming bacteremia before symptoms really begin to show up. Or maybe the bug just isn't very sensitive to the antibiotics we've been using. Until Monique can define the organism better, up at Fort Collins, we aren't going to have answers—but meantime, we've got to do something, and as long as the outbreak is small and localized enough, I think that means full-dose antibiotic prophylaxis for every person with any suspicion of contact."

There was a general discussion of that. What antibiotic to use? Tetracycline alone? Carlos shook his head. "We've got to hit it harder than that." Streptomycin, then? Better hold the streptomycin for people with symptoms, we don't want everybody in Colorado going deaf. Well, that leaves chloramphenicol—in quantity. But where are we going to get enough? Nobody stocks that drug in quantity. "True, the local supply is low," Carlos said, "but Parke-Davis says they can get us a whopping big supply straight into Canon City by noon tomorrow. I talked to them this morning."

"Why not use broadside vaccination?" a young woman asked. "There
is
a plague vaccine, isn't there?"

"Yes, there
is
a vaccine, such as it is, and every one of you people are going to take it, too—but that's really about the weakest weapon we've got. For one thing, it takes three or four weeks to build up an antibody level, so it's not going to stop anything that's moving fast
right now.
Even then, at best, the vaccine is only about forty to sixty percent effective in the field, depending on the particular microstrain of
Yersinia
we're dealing with. It's a killed-bacteria vaccine, and like the cholera vaccine, it may not be worth too much of a curse when you really need it. And as for broadsiding it into everybody around, hoo boy! Just this one little town would put a dent in the national stockpile of the stuff. We could have more made in a hurry, but you're talking about weeks or months of lead time. We'll use the vaccine for health workers, yes, but for a broadside weapon here, forget it."