Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (29 page)

Standard procedures had been of little help—it had never even remotely been a standard problem. From the very beginning, geographic containment of the plague had been the essential priority —and a totally unachievable goal. First of all, the disease had to be contained within the city, and disease-free areas of the city had to be identified and kept disease-free. Only then could disease-affected areas be identified, blocked off and treated in order to reduce plague areas to smaller and smaller segments. It was simple enough in principle: knock it down where it exists and don't let it spread. But how to achieve this? At every step of the way the "simple" principle had fallen apart. You needed tight civil control—but there was no way in the world to establish it. You needed resources, but the resources didn't exist. You needed an organized army of experienced field workers. You needed a million things you didn't have.

Nor did breaking the problem into segments prove any more fruitful. You needed rodent control immediately and desperately—but how to achieve it on a crash basis in a swarming, superheated city like Savannah? It was worse than useless to try to evacuate rat-infested tenement blocks and then kill the rats—the infected fleas would simply hop off the dying rats and lie in wait, fully virulent and ever more hungry, for the people to return, or the dogs, or the cats or anything else the fleas might feed on. To accomplish anything at all, the rat warrens first had to be sprayed to kill the fleas, and then sprayed again a week later, to hit the fleas' hatching nits. Meanwhile, the rats, not pleased at being sprayed, moved out of the target areas in droves, only to pick up new infected fleas in the adjacent unsprayed areas. The city's Rat Squad tried throwing up crude barriers to prevent this defeating migration, but the barriers were promptly torn down each night by the people
inside
who wanted the rats
outside
; some adventurous rats scaled the barriers like ladders, while others took to the sewers to turn up in other, disease-free portions of the city. An army of 100,000 experienced rat fighters working diligently night and day with unlimited resources and holding large segments of the population at gunpoint might conceivably have made some inroads into the problem—but a Rat Squad of five hundred volunteers with ten spray trucks and no real authority whatever to demand and obtain either obedience or compliance from an ever more sullen and surly populace were—literally—whipped before they started. The very best results they could manage were along the immediate waterfront where nobody actually lived except drunks and vagabonds, killing rats by the thousands and hoping forlornly that the fleas from those rats would not find their way to where people
did
live. And on the waterfront, those thousands of rats were the merest drop in the bucket. . . .

Holding down the disease in infested areas was equally unsuccessful. The tiny supplies of the old vaccine were used, but the effectiveness was barely noticeable as far as Carlos could tell from such muddled statistics as he could rally. Correct the figures for this and correct them for that and very soon you had corrected the life out of your data and you didn't know what was what. And further to this, another thing soon became certain: attempts to contain the plague within the city itself clearly were not working. Especially after the Ice House riot, people began leaving the city by the thousands. Some left in cars and pickups and flatbeds loaded with household goods and bedding and rats, often with one or two family members already sick and others fast on their way. Many, many more left the city on foot—mothers and fathers, and barefoot kids straggling along the edge of the road, loaded up with nothing more than what they could carry on their backs or in crude two-wheel carts, drinking the mud-yellow ditchwater, eating peanuts and beans and sugar and what little else they could cany, easing the kids' hunger pangs with stale Twinkies stolen from neighborhood groceries as they passed.

Of course these people ran a gauntlet of roadblocks and deterrents. They were warned repeatedly to turn back, that there was nothing up ahead for them, that farmers were driving people off with pitchforks and shotguns—but what were a few state troopers and sheriffs deputies supposed to do, standing on top of their shiny squad cars and shouting into bullhorns as endless streams of ragged people kept coming down the road at them, pausing to mill around the obstructing squad cars and then shuffling down into the ditches to go around them and up onto the road beyond? What were they supposed to do—shoot them? There was no
law
that said they couldn't go down the road, and the long-promised National Guard hadn't turned up to help yet, at least they might have created a physical barrier, but even then the people would just have scattered out through the fields to go around, and who was going to be the first to shoot kids, for Christ sake?

The fact was that the plague had already and long since crept out to the surrounding villages and farms anyway. Farmers had hauled their trucks full of dried-up, drought-ruined produce into the city for whatever they could get for it, and came back home carrying an infinitely more spoiled cargo. Nobody had any idea how many sick, dying or dead there might be in these outlying areas because nobody out there wanted to bring their sick into the city, hearing what they'd heard, and the dead were disposed of in shallow graves dug just above ground-water level in remote corners of the back forty. Public-health investigators who tried to check the countryside were greeted by snarling dogs and no information. Meanwhile, the barn rats took their infected fleas on to neighboring farms, and people who hadn't even been near the city at all began falling ill.

Thus it was that the city refugees who headed away weren't really heading for the outlying farms and villages at all. Even if they hadn't believed the roadblock police, they had soon learned for themselves that the fanners
were
driving them off with pitchforks and shotguns. Those refugees raided what fields they could raid at night for whatever food they could find as they passed through, but they were not country folk anyway. Though they fled Savannah, they tended to bypass the incomprehensible terrors of the country in favor of the known terrors of the city, heading northward toward Augusta, east across South Carolina toward Charleston, south toward Albany, west toward Macon and Atlanta. And those and other cities, soon aware that they were coming—only a trickle now, but a trickle that could become a deluge later—were slamming their gates and hauling up their drawbridges like medieval fortresses.

Meanwhile, with no real authority yet established to
prevent
travel, and facing confused directives from a dozen different public-health and law-enforcement agencies, those who had the means to travel did so as they chose. Many truck drivers, more enterprising than sharp-witted, rolled their rigs wherever they wished whenever they felt like it, fighting like longshoremen for what dwindling cargo there was to be hauled into and out of Savannah, cash paid in advance. Some auto drivers were intimidated by the state troopers' roadblocks and threats and turned back, but others refused, and pitched battles at those bottlenecks became ever more frequent. The airlines serving Savannah and Atlanta were far too hungry for fares to come up with any coherent or responsible containment or quarantine policy, and the long-anticipated, long-expected, long-promised federal regulatory injunction on air and ground travel in and out of Savannah and Atlanta which Carlos had believed to be so utterly vital, and had spent days begging and pleading for, never quite seemed to materialize from the quagmire of conflicting directives, regulations, executive orders and proposed procedures emanating from the Corridors of Leadership to the north.

So containment had failed for so long already that it hardly made any difference anymore anyway. And without vaccine and drugs, even early containment could not have saved Savannah.
At least now,
Carlos thought,
we will have weapons, maybe too few and too late, but something we can work with.
He dispatched Ted back to the airport by taxi, completed some calls, and then started on foot down Emery Street in the already hot September morning sun to find Jack Cheney in his improvised public-health field office in the big museum basement just across from the Big Hospital, as everyone was now calling the Performing Arts Pavillion. Jack had proven a solid ally in the battle, a man with a cool, reasonable, practical mind, trying from the beginning to coordinate his very real responsibilities as the Director of the Chatham County Public Health Department with Carlos's often very different responsibilities as emergency epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control. Sometimes Jack had said no when Carlos had said yes, sometimes they had fought it out, and sometimes Jack had prevailed, but throughout the growing horror they had come to respect each other, see each other's viewpoints, and—inevitably-become friends. Carlos knew that Jack would be as delighted as he was at the news of the imminent arrival of the vaccine and the S-3147 supplies. . . .

Dr. Cheney had already left the field station, Carlos was informed, he was probably over at the Big Hospital; so Carlos headed across traffic toward the vast building that had been raised a few years ago as a new center for Savannah's cultural life, now turned into an enormous receiving hospital and treatment center for plague victims, a modern-day equivalent of the medieval pesthouse. He was just about to start across the main thoroughfare to reach it when he stopped abruptly and cocked his head. Somewhere far to the south he could hear the distant rattling and popping of fireworks. Fourth of July? Nonsense, Labor Day was already past. Some Civil War hero's birthday? More rattling and popping and popping and popping.

Fireworks?
He heard more of it, sporadically, as he saw a green light and dashed across the last traffic lane, narrowly missed by a rumbling truck. Rattle, pop, bang, all from the south side of the city.
Fireworks?
Fireworks, hell. Those were rifles and submachine guns he was hearing.

The sounds faded as he ducked inside the entry to the Big Hospital. He'd been here before, numerous times, but never could adjust to the sight that greeted him: the vast auditorium floor paved with row upon row of mats wrapped in white disposable paper sheets, each mat bearing a patient, some moving, some not, the heat and the stench and the noise of the place almost unbearable despite the great ventilators in the ceiling going full blast. Paper-clad, white-masked, rubber-gloved nurses and doctors and aides moving here and there along the narrow walkways, growing ever narrower as additional mats were shoved in, extending like a vast scene of carnage to the far, far end of the building. Carlos walked to the sterile bins near the door, slipped on mask and paper gown and gloves as he searched the upright figures for Jack Cheney and finally spotted him, halfway to the east wall of the place. He started across the floor toward his friend, sidestepping constantly to avoid stepping on a patient's leg flailed out into a walkway, somebody's arm flopped askew in his path. Fingers plucked at his pants legs as he walked. Paper garments clung to the patients, some half torn off. Here a man was coughing up great gouts of blood all over sheet and mat and floor around him. A woman, gray as putty, sat motionless except to slap at two flies that wanted to land on a crust of blood at her nostril. As Jack had told him a few days before, "We barely have time to take temperatures once a day, and get food out once a day, and haul away the dead ones. Nursing care? It's a travesty. We just do what we can. There's not enough time and not enough people."

Paradoxically, Jack was angry at the news about the vaccine and the Sealey drug coming. "The fucking bastards," he said.
"Now
they send us a teacup to fight back the ocean. Three weeks ago we might have had a chance of stopping this thing— but they had to spend those three weeks covering their asses. So now they've got their asses covered and the blood of all these people all over their hands—let's see how they put
that
into their goddam self-aggrandizing ads." He turned away, muttering to himself. "All the sweet little deer and chipmunks bouncing around the tree stumps—"

"Tree stumps?"

"You know what I mean. All the big, glossy look-how-good-we-are-planting-the-dear-little-trees ads the big timber companies publish in
Time,
make a clear-cut gouge in the forest look like some kind of paradise, while out in the real world they're turning whole beautiful mountainsides into rubble and slash, laying waste to the country. And oil companies telling you how
very
good they are while they busily rob the country blind. The drug companies are doing the same damned thing. ..."

Carlos shook his head sadly. "Jack, my friend, you're just too much of a dreamer.''

"I work day after day down in this hell-pit and you call me a
dreamer?"

"Like a five-year-old kiddie. In your dream world the rights and wrongs are all very clear, and evil should be struck down without mercy. But in the real world these piddly thieveries don't count for too much, really. To me, what really counts right now is that we're getting the vaccine and the drugs, finally, and maybe they'll give us a fighting chance, if we can just plan things right and work fast enough. They kept it from running away from us in Colorado—maybe they'll let us hold it here."

Jack shook his head. "And you call
me
a dreamer."

"In this one case, I prefer to be a dreamer. I dream that we're going to win."

"And the medicine? When does it get here?"

"Tonight. We'll store it down in Warehouse 14 if there's still room enough. Hell, we'll make room enough. Right now we need to get across the street and break out those master plans again and start fixing priorities and mobilizing personnel—"