Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (46 page)

By some miracle of justice Sidonia Harper did not die. She was terribly ill, with draining sores and pain that was unbearable, and no one coming, delirium that wiped out days and made the nights endless; but she did not die, and then one morning—who could say how much later?—she had opened her eyes and her head was clear, and she was aware that her clothing stank until she got it stripped off, wheeling her chair around to hide from the icy blast from a window that had somehow gotten broken, and bathed herself from the washbowl, aware suddenly that she was desperately, unspeakably hungry. Cupboards were bare, milk rotting in the refrigerator, a handful of oatmeal and nothing else. Somewhere nearby a child was crying endlessly, somewhere else in the building, but when she tried a hoarse cry out the window herself, there was no response, and when she looked down at the alleyway and the street beyond she saw no people, no traffic.

No food. Nobody to help her. It was then that she knew with utter clarity that somehow she had to get downstairs.

She thought about it for a full day and night, trying to think out ways to make the unthinkable possible. For the past four years her major terror had been a fear of heights and falling; she had nightmares about falling, and woke up screaming. But now, alone, fear of falling or not, there was no other choice but to get herself down those stairs.

It took her most of another day to work up the nerve to actually try it. First she wheeled herself down the dark hall from the door of the flat to the top of the stairs, a yawning gulf stretching down and down to a landing and a wall, then farther on down the other way to the first-floor hallway. For a moment she panicked at the very sight of that gaping chasm; she pounded on the floor with the heavy cane she used to hook things to her, screamed out for help again and again, but no answer came. The place seemed empty, deserted. She considered trying to do it by brute strength alone, clinging to the banister with one arm and scratching at the wall with the other hand as she eased the chair down, but she knew she didn't dare. She was far too weak for that; she knew the agony of overtaxed muscles too well. She wheeled herself back into the flat, found an old piece of clothesline rope under the sink. Back at the top of the stairs she turned the chair, disengaged the left arm of it, tossed it down with a clatter, then seized the banister and slid herself off the chair onto the floor. She could ease herself down the stairs all right, that was no problem, but without the chair at the bottom she couldn't do anything once she was down there; the chair had to go first.

She tied the clothesline securely to the banister at the top, tied the other end around the axle of the chair. Seizing the banister with her left arm, she clutched the rope in her right hand, gently pushed the chair to the stairtop and over. It started down, bump, bump, bump, faster, the rope sizzling through her hand until she howled from the burn and let it go. The chair leaped downward, banging on each third step, came to the end of the rope in midair halfway down, snapped the rope and crashed down into the wall at the landing.

Siddie eased herself down, step by step. Eased down, rested. The strength she was used to wasn't there, and she wasn't thinking clearly; she was a third of the way down before she realized she had left the upper half of the rope tied to the banister above, and painfully had to work her way back up to retrieve it. Finally down at the landing, she tied the broken rope back together, then dragged her legs along to the chair, finding only that its back was bent from its upside-down collision with the wall.

This time she was more careful. She wound three turns of rope around the cane and wedged the cane into a banister spoke to control the rope's slide as the chair went down. She rested for an hour, dozing part of the time, before she dared try it, but it went smoothly, especially because at the last minute she wrapped her hand in her T-shirt tail before clutching the rope. Halfway down, the chair stopped and she followed, reached it, tore the tail off her T-shirt to tie the wheel to the banister before climbing back up to untie the rope. Long minutes later she had repeated the process, and the chair came to rest on the first-floor hallway.

The outside door hung open on one hinge—and that left seven steps to go, down the outside stoop onto the street. She was exhausted now, tired beyond words, no longer able to face the ordeal of hitching herself up and down stairs to get ropes. The seven stairs didn't look too steep, and suddenly something in her mind said
To hell with it all, I've got to get down there

NOW,
and she acted on it. She grabbed the iron rail and hoisted herself into the chair, replaced the left arm, then clutched the railing and started easing the chair down. She controlled it for three steps before the strength of her arm gave and she and the chair plunged down to the street, lurched to the right as a wheel gave and bent when they hit the bottom, banged down the curb into the street, across to the other side, struck the other curt) and threw Sidonia off, skidding on her face on the sidewalk as the chair turned over twenty feet away, the unbent wheel spinning and spinning in the air like a crazy thing.

Five minutes later she opened her eyes, realizing she was still alive and miraculously unhurt except for scrapes and bruises. She tested the limbs she could move. Only then did she become aware of the perfectly enormous human figure towering over her.

56

Frank Barrington liked Dr. Sam Maclvers from the moment he saw him on that sunny winter morning in Willow Grove, Nebraska. The dour little sandy-haired man, senior physician of the two-man Willow Grove Family Medical Clinic, was not really all that senior—maybe forty-four or forty-five, Frank thought—but he had that certain wiry agelessness about him, the look of having stood out in the wind and weather too long, so common to many Scots. Maclvers had a long crooked nose and a face like a prune, which could wrinkle into a wry smile once in a while, and a pair of tired gray eyes that looked as if they might have been watching far too many less than pleasant things for far too many years at far too close quarters.
No flies sitting on this one,
Frank thought, five minutes after he met him,
and if I'm going to have to have some people on my side up here, this man looks like a mighty good one for openers.
And aside from first impressions, there was something else that Frank liked: there was no possible doubt, after the first ten minutes together, that Dr. Sam Maclvers saw with utter bleak certainty just exactly what was coming down the pike toward Willow Grove, Nebraska, and was damned well ready to do anything necessary to stop it.

Frank had driven up from Wichita that morning on frigid, snow-packed roads through endless miles of flat winter-stub-bled wheat country, the monotony of the trip broken only on occasion when the road dipped down into small creek or river valleys, probably verdant enough in summer but now lined with tall, skeletal leafless trees and small towns that looked battened down for a long, cold winter, lights on behind frosty win-clows in the late morning dawn, woodsmoke curling from chimneys and rich in the air. Willow Grove lay in one such river valley, bigger and more sprawly than other towns, a pretty place as the sun broke through, many evergreens planted among the stark elms and oaks and sycamores.

Frank found the small, neat clinic building with no trouble, following Sally Grinstone's directions. He paused with Maclvers just long enough for a fast cup of coffee before they took off together in the doctor's well-worn Chevy. "I'm free for the day," Maclvers told him, "as long as I stop at the hospital and check an OB who may be going to do something. So you tell me what you want to see."

"Everything," Frank said. "The lay of the town, where things are, the medical facilities, the countryside around. The broad geography, so I can snoop myself later. Things like what (lie school gymnasium looks like and where the telephone office is and where the power company keeps their boom trucks—"

"Yes, if you're going to be the commissar of this little opera-lion, I guess you'll need to know where things are located."

"Aren't we going to pick up the public-health man first?"

"You mean Periy Haglund?" Maclvers frowned. "That was the plan, but he called me an hour ago and said he couldn't make it."

"I see," Frank said. "That's not so good. Maybe we can catch him later in the day."

"Afraid not. He said he'd be out of town for a couple of days. He didn't say where. I'll just have to brief him when he gets back."

It was a typical southern Nebraska town, flat as a pancake except for the little dip down to the river, a major Main Street on the old highway, now broken up in the main shopping area to form a grid of one-way streets and angle parking, some care in the planning, pleasant-looking even in winter. The usual roadside sprawl at either end, and the inevitable grain elevators standing like giant sentinels—"the Nebraska Rockies," Mac-Ivers called them. Neatly kept homes on the side streets, some looking very old, and a couple of 1910-vintage buildings downtown, restored and well kept. A look of quiet prosperity about the place. Kids on bicycles, pickup trucks parked in driveways alongside the little Toyotas and other compacts. Not many Cadillacs or Lincolns that Frank could see, and that added up, too.
Too damn smart to buy Cadillacs,
he thought,
or too tight.
"Any sign of infection yet?" he asked the doctor.

"Not yet, and it's not that we haven't been watching, either. The usual round of bronchitis and flu for this time of year, and a couple of cases of measles that we don't like to see, mostly in the older school kids. We thought we had that stopped. As far as plague is concerned, we've just been dead lucky, so far. Of course, this isn't exactly a world trade center, it's pretty dead during the winter. Not much traffic in and out. No place much to go, except for vacations to Mexico, and there hasn't been any enthusiasm for that this year, believe me."

"How many people?"

"Around twenty thousand in the town, another ten thousand out in the county and on the farms. Willow Grove is the major grain center for the region, but then we have the little satellite towns scattered around—Plunkett and Metuskie and Dust Bin— that's no joke, there
is
a place called Dust Bin—and Wattsville, and Oberon down in Kansas. They account for another few thousand people all together."

"Sounds very workable. People know each other, I suppose? And work together?"

"Pretty much, and pretty well." The doctor swung past a school, took Frank in to see the gym and meet the principal. "Matter of fact, everybody knows most everybody, and there's been a very positive response to the meetings we've been holding—lots of families represented by somebody. In town we're getting the block watches set up, like Sally Grinstone suggested, somebody on eveiy block responsible for people counts and reporting what's going on, so we should be able to get a picture of what's happening twice a day. See that church over there kitty-corner from the clinic? Big parish hall there is a natural storage and distribution center for your pneumomycin. People can get in and out without a lot of mingling, and it's within reach of everybody. We've got your tetracycline stored in there—you can take it on back with you if you want to." Maclvers looked at Frank. "I just wish you'd let us start stockpiling the stuff now instead of waiting until the ax drops."

Frank shook his head. "We just don't have it ready yet," he said, as earnestly as he could. It was a lie, and he found himself feeling bad lying to this little doctor, so he suddenly decided to level. "But that's not really the problem. The truth is, it's an arbitrary matter of policy that we've had to decide on for right now. Doc, you're smart enough to see the situation. We are totally extra-legal, and our necks are out there through the noose individually and personally. We're trying to do something ihat's absolutely insupportable, medically speaking, and totally unjustifiable as far as any constituted authority is concerned. We've got to test the efficacy of a brand-new drug very quickly on a whole lot of people who are getting sick, and right now Willow Grove, Nebraska, turns out to be our guinea pig. If some higher authority comes in and cuts us off here, we're
cut off,
and we're the only source for the finished drug, right now. We're trying something wild and crazy, and it's sink or swim, and to our minds, that means we've got to keep it a hundred percent under our own control. If we win on this, and get a really definitive profile of disease control in Willow Grove, it'll he the first place since Canon City that we've stopped this damned thing, and we'll all smell sweet, and the end will jus-tify the means. At the very worst, we're pretty sure it won't
hurt
anybody, and you must be sold on that, too, or you wouldn't be playing games with us at all—"

"We're playing games with you bacause there's no other ball fame in sight," the doctor cut in. "I don't think Perry Haglund is really sold, he seems to keep tossing up horror-story scenarios for us to bat down, but my partner and I don't foresee any horror story much worse than what's going to happen when that Horseman finally rides into Willow Grove unless we can do something to stop him. We just wish to hell you'd let us get ahead of him, that's all."

"Well, you think it through, Doc," Frank said. "Suppose you stockpiled the stuff now, right here in town. Everybody would know it, and you know what would happen then. You'd be on the dime, subjectively involved right up to the neck, and I don't think there'd be a way in the world you could keep from putting the whole damned town on the stuff before the infection even turned up. You'd just inevitably jump the gun. And if you did that, and then nobody got sick,
what would we learn!
Nothing. Not one damned thing of any use to anybody."