Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (44 page)

Ben stood up and poured himself some more whiskey. He looked at Amy and then at the others. "Okay, now everybody listen to me real carefully, because I'm going to tell you the bad news. I don't care if nobody else came up this road all winter, it wouldn't matter a whit. No matter
what
we do, we're not going to keep plague out of this Freehold."

"Like hell we're not," Amy snapped. "That's why we've got the Freehold, and that's why we've got to control it. Look, I'm not worried about
me,
for God's sake. I'm just an old woman—or at least I sure feel like one, these days. I'm not worried about Harry, or Mel here, or even you, Ben. We've all had our turn, and if something hits us, then something hits us. But I've got two boys with wives that are pregnant, and I sure do want to see those babies safe. Mel's got his son, and Kelley's got his daughters, and we've got to keep this Freehold safe for
them,
not for the whole wide world. And the only way to keep it safe is to keep plague out of here, and we can't do that if we don't keep people out."

Ben shook his head. "Sony, Amy, but you're dead wrong. I'm telling you, no matter what we do, it's going to hit here, sooner or later. We can't keep it out. We can't make it through the winter totally isolated. We can't fight a war to keep people away from here, and we can't stop the wind from blowing over the hill."

"It's
people
who are going to bring it, not the wind," Amy said. "And we can shoot people dead to keep them out if we

have to."

For a moment the room was still. Mel Tapper shuffled his feet as if embarrassed, his craggy features working. The other men stared fixedly at the fire. Finally Ben Chamberlain sighed. "Well, I'm sorry, Amy. Maybe you can shoot people dead to keep them out, or think you can, but I sure can't. And if somebody's sick and needs help, I can't throw them out of here on their asses in the middle of November, either.
I
've spent most of my life trying to help sick people get well, trying to put broken bodies back together again, and
I
'm too old by now to start killing them with bullets or neglect. I don't know what's happening in Bozeman.
I
'm not going in there to find out, either. The damned thing is going to hit there sooner or later if it hasn't already, and there's not much any of us can do to help anybody back in town. But we can sure take in the ones that turn up here, and do the best we can with what we've got."

Harry Slencik shook his head. "Look, Ben, you've got Amy all wrong. She's not seriously planning to shoot anybody, for God's sake. And she's not going to drive anybody out that's already here, leastwise not if they're trying to pack their own weight a little bit. We're not going to drive Dan Potter here away—he's been working a miracle with this water system of his—it's already delivering permanent house water for year round, and it's almost set up to irrigate the whole valley when the ground melts next spring. And how many others have we got in here now besides ourselves, including kids? Maybe twenty, twenty-five. Well, we can squeeze by with that and keep the place safe too. But we can't just be sitting ducks for anybody that wanders in and decides they like it here. Amy's dead right about that. Sooner or later somebody's going to bring something bad in with them, and what do we do then? We've got to keep the ones out that don't have to stay. Like this family with the four kids and Grandma. They're not in any real, immediate trouble. They're just plain squatters."

"They've got to go somewhere," Ben said mildly.

"Sure they do—but it's a big world. They don't have to pick us to squat on, and we don't have to let 'em. If they're out of food, that's all right, we can help 'em out. We can give 'em a ham and a pound of cornmeal and pack 'em out of here tonight. Tell 'em we're sorry, but they've got to move on, and that's that. And while we're at it, we can sure manage to live without those faggots and their dog, too."

"They've also got to go somewhere," Ben said.

"Well, not here," Harry said. "You've just got to listen to reason, Ben. We're not going to go fighting any wars with anybody, but if we have to make a little show of, like, hostility or something to keep more people from pilin' in here, then we're just going to have to do it. The way I see it, it's getting pretty close to being them or us."

"I see," the old doctor said.

"You can understand that, can't you?"

"I take your point, Harry." Ben looked around the room. "What about you other folks?"

Mel Tapper shuffled his feet. "I—I guess I've got to go along with Amy and Harry, Ben.'' Across the room the rancher nodded vigorous agreement. "Damn right," he said. "It's private land. We've all sweat for it. We can keep it private."

"Potter? How about you? You don't have any land, you came in here like a plucked chicken. What do you think?"

The little engineer grimaced, glanced at Amy. "Hell, Doc, I can't really say much. But I do think everybody ought to contribute
something,
at least. Keep as tight a ship as possible."

"I see." Ben Chamberlain scratched his chin. "Well, like I say, I take your point. But I've got a point too, and I guess I might as well make it. In four short months this epidemic has already brought misery and nightmare and death to millions of people in this country, all over the world, and I don't think we've seen the half of it yet. So far, by the grace of God, we've all stayed clean as an elk's horns, we haven't even been touched, but that's not going to last, and I'm sorry, but just watching our own asses here on the Freehold is not going to work. Before it's all over there's going to be grief and suffering enough for every soul around, and I for one am not going to add to the total. When the crunch comes here, people are going to need
people
more than anything else. The only thing people are going to be able to do that'll amount to a damn is help other people as much as they can and do the best they can, and that's all." He set his glass down, put on his cap and zipped up his windbreaker. "Well, that's all I've got to say, so take it easy. Thanks for the drinks, Harry."

"Well, sure, but hold it, Ben. We've got some other things to talk over while everybody's here."

"Not me, Harry. I'm all talked out."

"What do you mean?"

"Look, I can't fight you people—but I damned well don
't
have to stay with you, either. I'll mark my comers down the creek here and put up a little fence line tomorrow, and I'll take care not to be trespassing on any private land. Best you folks do the same."

He walked out into the darkness, stepped down off Harry's back porch in the darkness, and started on down the path along the creek toward his own place. He walked it firm-footed in the pitch dark, the path he'd walked down in the dark a thousand times before in those last twenty years; he knew every dip and rise, every bit of brush that slapped his face as he walked. For almost a full minute he heard only the sound of his own footfalls, the grumping of a nearby owl and the ever-present gurgle of the creek. Then he heard Harry's door crash open behind him and heard Amy screaming at him: "Ben! Come back here!"

He kept on walking. She shouted his name again, and a moment later he heard her coming after him, still shouting, crashing a short cut through the brush to cut him off, her voice rising to a wail as she came. She caught up as he reached the last turn down toward the creek; now, in the starlight he could make out her slim form and her ghostly face as she broke out of the brush into the path, clutched at his arm, tried to haul him around. "Ben! For God's sake, come back! You can't walk out on us now—"

"Sorry, girl, but I can. And I have to."

He tried to shake loose, but she held on, turned him to her, clung to him with amazing strength. "You can't go now, Ben, you can't leave us now, after all these years! We can't let you go-"

"I have to. You leave me no choice."

"You don't either have to! Please, Ben, you didn't hear me right—"

"I heard you, and I can't buy it."

"Then I'll take it back. Maybe I was wrong, all wrong. We can do it different, do it your way if that's how it has to be."

"I can't fight you, Amy."

"You won't have to fight me, I promise! I thought I was right but maybe I wasn't. Either way, you've got to come back. You
need
us, Ben, and God knows how bad we need you." Her voice was crumbling now and he felt her wet face on his neck as she clung to him. "/ need you. Oh, God, Ben, I'm
scared.
I'm so scared I don't know what I'm doing half the time, and Harry's scared too and he doesn't know what to do. None of us know what to do."

"I don't know, either," the old man said, "and I'm just as scared as you are. All I know is what I can't make myself do."

"That's all right, you won't have to. We'll do it your way and take it the way it comes."

'You'll say that loud and clear to the crowd back there?"

"I'll say it."

Very gently he disengaged her, supported her shoulder and turned back up the path with her. "Then we'd better get back," he said, "before you catch your death out here."

54

And as the winter deepened, the fire storm flared hotter and faster through the cities and countryside, leaving a deepening, paralyzing desolation in its wake. No major population center in the country escaped, although plans and preparations and de-lenses were hastily and desperately erected; in the end there was no way a population center
could
escape, for there was no way that movement of people could be stopped, and in those places like Pittsburgh and Dallas where city ordinances and state emergency orders and state militia movements and police firepower were all made part of the defense effort, to block the movement of people and attempt isolation, the fire storm licked into those cities anyway, leaping firebreaks in ways that no one could possibly foresee, through loopholes no one could plug, and the fiercest and sternest of martial-law measures quickly crumbled. One by one the cities took the bow-shock of the fire storm, and set their emergency plans and defense measures and desperation contingencies into motion, and fought back fiercely, and slowed the fury not one whit, and became overwhelmed, and gradually came unraveled like all the rest. In extreme cases like Spokane, bridges across rivers were actually blasted out and major throughways blown apart in hopes of isolating one part of a city from another, but there were all those side streets and water craft and back roads and country lanes to watch, and who would watch the watchers?

One thing seemed certain: the advancing winter did nothing significant to quiet the advancing plague storm. No one had really expected it to when it became blindingly clear that the mutant strain of
Yersinia
involved was spreading far more predominantly by respiratory contact than through the classic vector of the infected flea. Perhaps, during those winter months, the fire burned more swiftly in the great southern cities—New Orleans or Houston or Phoenix—than in those in the north. But who really could say? One terrible problem was that no one could really say much of anything about
any
affected area because solid statistical and epidemiological data was virtually nonexistent. Who had time to count the dead? Who had time to tabulate figures? Who could rely with any confidence on such figures as might happen to be available? There were more important and urgent things to do. Whatever figures did appear, here and there, had to be the sheerest blind guesses; who could calmly sit back and separate the plague-dead from those dead from conflagration or civil disturbance or riot or martial confrontations? Indeed, who could care? What
use
was such information? The dead were very dead. The sick of one day from whatever cause, or the wounded, or the hypothermically exposed, or the starving, were likely to be the dead of the next day, and did tables of figures matter? Most authorities ultimately thought not and soon stopped trying to compile them.

For those few people in government, or in the CDC or in the public-health offices, or in the military, who had access to some sort of an overview of what was happening, piecemeal as it might be—people like Ted Bettendorf, for instance—certain patterns of events could be perceived occurring in the great population centers. In place after place, again and again, effective public-health defenses were mustered and maintained control for a brief while; but in every instance, again and again, despite what anybody did, that control ultimately faltered; slipped away and finally crumbled.

It was not the fault of the health workers that this happened— Ted knew that better than anyone. Indeed, if there was major heroism to chronicle during those winter months of the fire storm, it was in the stubborn, determined efforts of individual nurses, doctors, public-health officials, epidemiologists, aides, orderlies and other health workers. Time after time, these people fought down to the line and beyond, did their work with or without protection, the best they could, long after it became obvious that they were losing beyond hope, their front lines broken, their flanks eaten away. Of course some quit and ran; some vanished into the woodwork; not a few sickened and died; but most held on, trying to do
something,
far beyond reasonable limits. It was not here that breakdowns came, but in all loo many places elsewhere.