Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (39 page)

She turned and started down the stairs, kicked a carton out of her way with a vicious swipe, stamped back to the living quarters they'd set up in the rear of the main factory and began smashing bottles.

Tom followed her down, alarmed, when the bottle-smashing suddenly stopped. She had an old suitcase out on the bed and was tossing blouses and pantyhose into it. "Sally, listen, for God's sake! I didn't mean I was planning to quit, or anything like that. I know how much you've given up coming this far—"

She whirled on him like a furious kewpie doll. "Listen, you dummy, I haven't given up one goddamned thing coming this far. It just dawned on me sometime back that you couldn't fight plague by writing newspaper stories, that's all. Anyway, I already tried that. I wrote that blast about Sealey and the drug-juggling, and look what it accomplished: not one damned thing. Oh, it took care of John Mancini and Hiram Lunch, all right—they got chopped down by machine-gun fire that day when a mob of angry people who read the story converged on the Sealey Plant in Indianapolis and burnt half of it to the ground. Sliced them right in half, I heard, so at least the story accomplished
that.
But for the long run, not much more. I thought that publicity blast would nail Sealey Labs to the door like a deer skin, just sink 'em in the sea. Well, it didn't, and the fire wasn't more than a fleabite to them. The Justice Department can't even decide whether to convene a grand juiy or not, and don't worry, they're not going to decide. Nobody that I can see is going to do
anything
about Sealey Labs, they're too bloody busy trying to figure out what to do about Chicago. And meanwhile, Sealey Labs is busy producing a lousy drug in trickle quantities for whatever the traffic will bear, which is quite a hell of a lot, from the last quotes I've heard, and most of the people that go blind or shaky from taking it aren't going to complain because there's nobody to complain to and they're just happy to be alive, and Sealey has got
your
drug locked up in their vault, or so they think, they sure are not making it, and it just makes me blind with fury to sit around and watch this. So I'm
doing
something,
anything,
I don't care what, as long as it's something. And I thought you were doing something too."

"I am. I will. I promise." Tom looked at her, stricken. "Sal, stop packing that damned bag. I don't know what I'd do if you took off now."

"Took
off?
She followed his eyes to the suitcase and then suddenly her face melted and she was in his arms, hugging him to her fiercely, her face buried in his neck. "Oh, Tommy, you dummy, you dum-dum-dwm/ny, can't I get a little pissed off at you when you're so stupid and blind and gray and won't think? I'm not
leaving.
I've got to take a little trip, that's all. I've got to get you back on the track and
working
first, but then I've got to get away and do
my
part of it—but I'm not taking off. I need you more than you need me. Times like these,
everybody
needs
somebody,
even somebody stupid and blind. Nobody just takes off. But dummy, you've got to get off this gloomy kick and get working, that's all. Quit worrying about sticks in the wind, just do what you can do as fast as you can, and I'll do what I can. You keep that fluffy green powder coming down into the pan, and tell me what you need, and I'll get it. Just start building that stockpile up—"

"But I need a million things," Tom said, "and I need them all
now.
I need help, just plain
hands,
if I'm going to turn that pilot line into production. I need help with the quality control. I need lab animals for testing, some really sophisticated lab equipment, a million other things. I need a hot lab with some live plague cultures and a microbiologist to work with them, somebody who really knows what he's doing with those bugs. You don't just make stuff like this in the kitchen and turn it loose on people."

"Well, maybe you do, right now," Sally said. "Maybe for now we've got to do things all the wrong way because we haven't time or facilities to do them right. But remember, that green powder had some testing at Fort Collins. Maybe we're going to have to count on that. And maybe I've got to go recruiting, get you some people—I've got some ideas." She told him about the spaniel-faced Indian with the shotgun. "You've got to grab what comes to hand and try to work with it," she said. "He may turn out to be a thief and nothing more, but maybe not—his heart wasn't in it, and he had kind eyes." She sat down on the bed. "Well, he might be a start. I haven't just been lying on my back wagging my tail all this time, I've been thinking about what we might do when the pilot line was finished and the stuff started coming down into the pan, and I've got some ideas. First we cover ourselves and anybody that's helping us—we don't need testing for that, and if we go, it all goes. Then we've got to find someplace, some small place, for a
real
test. We'll need help, we'll need cooperation, we'll be illegal as hell, we may have to fight our way through mobs, but if we can get this stuff moving, somehow, and stop the damned thing cold in one small place,
just one
—God, Tom, can't you see what that would mean?" She kissed him and gave him a shove. "Now go unload that van before somebody steals it. I've got to go see a couple of doctors in a little burg up north of here, and I'd just as soon get up there before it starts snowing. I'll just be gone a day or so. And meanwhile, for the help you're talking about, I think I know what our next step has got to be—and I think you're going to like it."

49

Harry Slencik was driving his old red pickup out the Grizzly Creek road, coming back from Bozeman with another ten cases of coffee for the hoard, when he saw the light flickering down on the creek in a brushy area just below Ben Chamberlain's place. It was almost seven in the evening, and daylight was failing rapidly.

Harry pulled his pickup over, snapped out his lights and

peered through the brush. A campfire—he could see somebody moving. Too late for hunters, the season was over. There was an old logging road that went in to the creek a short way back, and he
thought
he'd seen fresh tire tracks. . . .

Harry pulled his shotgun off the gun rack and stepped down to the road. He loaded a shell into the chamber of the gun with a loud clack and pushed two more into the magazine. Then he walked back to the logging road. His flashlight picked up the tire tracks; a little farther on it glinted on the side of a small camper backed into the brush. Wyoming plates, and Harry made the connection. Someplace down there—was it Laramie?—had been hit real bad with plague, just about wiped out the town. This could be somebody that got out of there.

Up ahead a campfire was flaring, throwing mottled yellow light through the brush. For a moment he thought he heard a woman's voice. Then he stepped into the open along the creek, shotgun resting in the crook of his arm. He pushed his ten-gallon hat back on his head and cleared his throat.

A man was leaning over tending the fire. He leaped back and turned to face Harry. Behind him a woman sat on a rock clutching an old Pendleton shirt around her shoulders; she was shivering in the chill evening air. Beside her, two small children were wrapped in sleeping bags with just their noses sticking out. Harry saw no weapon, and relaxed his grip on the shotgun a little. "Nice evening," he said.

The man by the fire nodded. "Yeah." There was a long pause. "We were, ah, just fixing up a little supper. Ran out of bottled gas for the stove in the camper. You probably saw it sittin' there, back in the brush." He paused again. "Care to join us?"

"No, the wife'll have something ready when I get home, up the road a bit." Harry studied the people closely. The man was about thirty-five, Hany judged, short and stocky, solidly built, with a pointed nose and a shock of black hair over his eyes. The woman might have been pretty once; right now she looked utterly exhausted, dull-eyed and pallid. They both looked cold and hungry and tired, but otherwise healthy enough. "You just come up from Wyoming?" Harry said.

"Yeah. From Casper, before the trouble hit there." "That's right, I heard about Casper. Laramie too. Both of them damned near wiped out."

"True, but Laramie got it first. Some people must have brought it up from Colorado. We got nervous a month or so ago, figured Casper was going to be next—just about any town could get hit—so we stuffed everything we could into the camper and got out of there."

"Just been roughin' it ever since, huh?" Harry said.

"You might say that." The man tossed more driftwood onto the fire.

"Well, better not plan to stick around here," Harry said. "Cook up your supper, sure, but when you finish that, you'd better move on."

"Wouldn't hurt to let us sleep a few hours, would it?"

"I don't think we'd like that. Makes the wife kind of nervous."

The man glanced at the woman behind him. "You own this land?" he asked Harry.

"Me and a few neighbors. We didn't like the looks of Bozeman too much, and we've got a pretty good chunk of land between us up here along the creek, so we kinda went together on it. We figure we can make out."

"It's a nice place."

"Right. No sick people around. Plan to keep it that way, too, so we can't welcome strangers."

"I see." The man gave a bitter laugh. "Especially strangers that just came up from Casper, where everybody dropped dead last week. Look, I already told you—we got out of there three weeks before it hit. We had no contact at all—"

"Well, better safe than sony."

"I suppose you've got a point." The man pulled a grill out of a pack sitting nearby, carefully set it up over the fire, supported by rocks on either side. "By the way, I'm Dan Potter. This is my wife Ellen."

Harry nodded, but he didn't move forward to shake hands. "Harry Slencik," he said.

The man regarded him gravely. "Just out of curiosity, Mr. Slencik, how long do you people plan to stay out here? Just this fall? Going back to town for the winter? Or next spring?"

Harry shook his head. "We're not so damned sure there's going to be any town left to go back to," he said. "Nor any country left, either, for that matter. So this is where we are, and this is where we're stay in'."

"Sort of an independent Freehold kind of thing," Potter said.

"You could call it that."

"I guess there's a whole lot of them popping up, here and there. People get together, pool their land and resources, everybody contributes something important, like that. I suppose you plan to be, um, sort of self-sustaining."

"You got the idea," Harry said. "Completely self-sustaining."

"So you'll have gardens and grain and hayfields, run some stock, that sort of thing." Potter was watching Harry closely. "Lot of work to be done."

"Three or four of us got pretty good backs," Harry said. "We'll manage."

"I didn't mean just strong backs," Potter said. He chewed on his lower lip for a minute. "Pretty dry country around here. You're going to have to irrigate to grow anything."

"We know that. We've got the pumps and pipes all set up."

"Gasoline pumps, I suppose?"

"No way. Electric."

"So what do you do when the power goes off?"

Harry laughed. "We're way ahead of you, man. We've got two big gasoline generators, turn out enough power to light up this whole valley."

"Well, that's great, you're all set up." Potter dipped a pot into the creek, set it on the grill and began cutting up potatoes into it. "So what do you do when the gas runs out? Way things are going, one day the man ain't going to bring any more, sure as God made little apples."

Harry stirred uneasily. "So maybe we convert the generator to steam and burn wood," he said. "But that's a long time ahead. Hell, we can haul the water by hand then if we have to."

"For irrigation? Great system. They've been doing that in India for four thousand years. And look at India. And you've got to irrigate how many acres?"

"About sixty."

"Wow." Dan Potter pursed his lips, threw some beef bones into the pot and started stirring. Suddenly he turned to Harry.

"Listen, Mr. Slencik, let me talk straight out for a minute. We're none of us sick, or anything, but I'm sure as hell in trouble. I need someplace to go. I've got a wife and two kids here and they're getting hungry and we're about to the end of our rope. We can't keep moving on much longer. But I know we can't just come and freeload someplace, either. If I want a place to stay, I've got to be able to earn my keep, right?"

"That figures."

"Okay, now let me tell you something. I can give you people something you need, if you can let us stick around."

Harry tipped his hat back. "You can give us four more mouths to feed, all right. Why do we need that?"

"Because you're going to be stone dead for irrigation water to feed anybody by next spring, and that's going to be the end of your little Freehold, unless you find a way around it."

"We could have some problems. We know that. So what can
you
do about it?"

"Maybe a whole lot. When we first drove in here today, I walked up the road to the dead end. I saw what you've got going here. I saw how much water you were going to need. I also took a rough guess at the drop in the creek through your land, and I knew right then I could solve your water problem for you."