Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (47 page)

"What you're saying is that we've got to have some corpses."

"I'm just repeating it. Sally already told you that."

"Sounds an awful lot like playing God," Maclvers said.

"Yes, and it's not fun. But it's the only game we can see that has a dream of winning. We had to make some rules, so that's how we're going to play it."

The doctor took a deep breath. "Okay, Commissar," he said. He grinned crookedly at Frank. "At least I know one thing for sure: you really
were
at Canon City; I checked that out three ways. So let's make Willow Grove Canon City number two. Okay, the parish hall is the stockpile, and maybe a good central headquarters, but the clinic has got better communications. You can check that out and see what you think a little later when you meet my partner Whitey Fox. Right now let's get over to the hospital; you can look around while I see if that OB of mine is ready to sprout or not. . . ."

In Brookdale, Connecticut, the call came late in the afternoon when Jack Dillman was just climbing out of the shower, and Carmen took it down below. A moment later she called up the stairs. "Jack, can you get it? It's Hal Parker."

That wimp,
Jack thought.
That fucking bastard is going to pull it again.
He took his time drying off, then walked to the phone beside his drawing board, still covered with the half-finished layout he was no longer working on because there was no way at
all
to deliver it anymore, and probably nobody to pay for it, either. "Yeah?"

"Jack, buddy. Hal here." The same bluff, hearty voice he always used, as rich and vibrant as Hal himself was confidently handsome.

"What's your problem, Hal?"

'' Buddy, I need a favor. Somebody to cover for me tonight.'' Me faked a cough and somehow made the voice less vibrant. '' Must have picked up a flu bug or something, it's really got me down and out today. How about you picking up for me tonight? I'll take your turn Friday in trade."

Jack hesitated just long enough. "Boy, Hal, I dunno. I had some work planned tonight—"

"Buddy, you know I wouldn't ask you if it wasn't desperate, but I tried Vince and Angelo and practically everybody else I could think of and they're all boxed in. I'll be okay to cover for you Friday, don't worry."

You bet your ass you will, you prick. You '11 be all taken care of by morning.
"Well," Jacksaid,''I suppose I can cover. But, look—you want Carmen to drive tonight, too, in Ellen's place?"

"Huh? Oh, no. No. That won't be necessary. Ellen's fine. She'll go ahead and drive."

"Okay, just thought I'd check," Jack said. "I'll meet Bud down at the Tav at eight-thirty."

"That's great, buddy, great. I owe you one. You know I'd do the same for you."

Yeah, I know what you'd do for me,
Jack thought as he set the phone down.
I'm not stone blind. And with me out of the house from 8:30 until 5:00
a.m
., and your Ellen out driving until at least
1
:00
a.m
., you'll have plenty of time to do it for me, too, old buddy. Where's it going to be, your place or ours? Probably ours, Ellen might stop at your place any old time to take a quick pee.

He walked downstairs and met Carmen coming out of the kitchen with the martini tray. "What was that all about?" she said.

"What would you guess?" He took a martini. That was what got him the most, he thought, the sheer indignity of it, all the pukey little lies he was supposed to swallow. "He's got the flu tonight, he says. He wants me to cover his watch for him."

"Really? I hope it isn't—something bad."

"Don't worry about it, dear. His blood alcohol's too high for anything to grow in there."

"Did he want me to drive in Ellen's place, too?"

Jack looked at her. "He didn't say anything about that."

Carmen turned away and set the tray down in the living room. "Seems to me this is the third time he's pulled this since you guys started these night watches."

"The fourth time, to be exact. One time it was a bad cold or something, and then there was a lodge meeting, except that I heard later there wasn't any lodge meeting that night. I forget what the other excuse was."

"Well, you didn't have to say yes," Carmen said. "You could have told him to shove it if you didn't like it."

"Yeah sure, but somebody's got to take the watch, and if old Hal isn't going to show up, somebody's got to show up for him."
And anyway, it wouldn 't do any good to refuse; he d just find some other way to shove it, big virile Hal Parker. . . .

Jack gulped down his martini without tasting it, drank another standing, staring out the front window. Then he went to the front closet and took the old M-l out of its rack, his old rifle from Korea, tested the action out of easy habit. He took a couple of filled clips off the shelf and stuck them in his pocket. At least he knew how to shoot the damned thing, more than you could say for some of the others on these patrols. He'd never bought a smaller or lighter rifle, never bought any other firearm, for that matter. He'd had to drag this one out of the attic and spend a day cleaning it when the watches had started. Actually, he'd always been pretty fiercely antigun in his thinking, l ight in the midst of a whole bunch of gun nuts living in this small community, arguing endlessly against their silly cant.
If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns
. Didn't sound so silly anymore, with what had been going on these past (wo or three months. He was glad he had this baby now. Probably couldn't actually make himself shoot anybody with it, but ihen so far they hadn't really had to. "We'll,
I
'd better get a little nap if
I
'm going to be out all night," he said. "Wake me up for dinner about eight."

He sprawled out on the daybed in the TV room and closed his eyes, but he couldn't relax as his anger and frustration mounted ,ii the cheap baldness of this pukey little affair, his own self-disgust at having played along with it. He might just as well have invited the bastard in for cocktails first. Of course he didn't have any real proof—he'd very carefully never looked too i losely for proof. Maybe it was all in his head. Maybe he was lust one more burnt-out exurban jackass with paranoid delusions about his still-beautiful, still-painfully-passionate wife. Hut there were so many things, the little things, the way the bastard kept pawing her at cocktail parties and her playing the innocent coquette, making sure Jack didn't fail to notice. The w;iy they'd disappear from the crowd for a half-hour at a time. I lie time she'd spend away from home, "having coffee" with oiiiebody, "shopping," even now when there wasn't anything in speak of to shop for. And old Hal, with his big, bearish Ivy I cague good looks, and all that family money so he only had to play at making a living, two half-days a week in the office, and ill that time on his hands, and all that booze. . . .

And tonight—
Yes, tonight. The same old story. But then again, maybe not. Maybe tonight is the time to split it open like a rotten melon. Everybody else in town must already know— why not just bring it all out in the open?
Before, the thought of doing that had been repugnant, better just not to look, but now the pain was getting to be too much to take.
Why not tonight? Why not just leave old Bud safe and sound at the Tavfor half an hour in the middle of things this evening and drive up to the house about midnight?
He figured Hal would probably park his big blue Chrysler wagon in that half-hidden slot between the big tree and the fence, invisible from the street, he'd have to nose into the driveway to see it—and also block it. And then— well, he had a screamer in his car, too, that would bring all the lights on and the neighbors out in a hurry. . . . That was what this watch system was supposed to be all about, wasn't it? To drive thieves out into the open—wasn't it?

That, of course, had been exactly the point when Jack himself had first suggested the watch system two months ago. The plague itself hadn't really hit Brookdale, Connecticut, yet, even though it was savaging Boston and New Haven and outlying places like Guilford; Brookdale was more self-contained, more of a total bedroom community, and the very few suspicious cases that had turned up so far had been hustled away fast to the big county hospital. Somehow, too, affluent Brookdale seemed to have a reasonable supply of S-3147 stockpiled at the Public Health Service offices, enough to treat contacts and suspected contacts, at least so far. Not inexpensive stuff, that drug, two thousand bucks for a four-day course for one person, and nobody seemed to know how Brookdale happened to have supplies on hand when a place like New Haven just plain didn't and couldn't get it—but then, this was not something one asked too many questions about, was it? When one happened to be a solid citizen in Brookdale? No, not really.

The trouble was that if plague itself had not been hitting comfortable, affluent Brookdale, other unpleasant things had. Packs of midnight raiders had begun assaulting the residential community, first in isolated incidents, then with accelerating frequency. Men and sometimes women began turning up here and there at secluded homes at two in the morning, heads covered with nylon stocking masks, well armed, kicking in doors, holding the husbands at gunpoint, gang-raping the mothers and daughters, stripping the houses of jewelry and money and blank checks and stereos and TVs and liquor and any guns that happened to be around. Not many places, at first, one here, one there, but then more and more, bolder, more atrocious, shooting the ones who resisted, hitting harder and more viciously every week. The police did their best to cope—but Brookdale's small police force was spread pretty thin anyway, and were hard to contact in a hurry when telephones were out half the time, or wires were cut—

At first people thought the bombers were Brookdale's own kids running wild on some kind of hideous break-loose lark— Brookdale had a singularly wild crowd of kids in high school and just out, home and hanging around, with colleges slamming their doors as fast as they could on all sides—kids who didn't care to account for their time, with lots of parents who just didn't care or had given up trying long since. But soon a large network of parents, cooperating and communicating with each other as the raids became more frequent and closer to home, found they couldn't pin things down to
their
kids, at least not with any consistency;
their
hellers, it developed, were mostly just getting off at local coke and pot parties where nobody was going anywhere much except sprawled out on the floor with the music going and all those cool vibes. These raiders were coming in from outside—somewhere—who could know where? Brookdale was just a nice, juicy, defenseless target, like some other affluent communities in the area. . . .

Things had begun getting really raw when some of the raiders coming in obviously had the Horseman's hoofprints all over them in black and blue, coughing and spitting blood on their victims. The rawness intensified when they came into closer neighborhoods, when people could hear the carnage going on in the house next door and didn't dare do a thing, terrified to unbolt a door until they heard rubber squealing on the streets as the dog packs took off. It was about then that Jack Dillman and Angelo Curccio and Bud Elvin and a few others decided that Brookdale couldn't remain a juicy, defenseless target anymore, especially with the local police walking one by one through the town-council meetings demanding more money as hazard pay and threatening to strike, and no help from other towns because they were having their own problems—

It started off with block watches: porch lights and floodlights on, everybody supplied with screamers,
everybody
pledged to turn out at any hour, in case of trouble, everybody to watch everybody else's house throughout the night on regular shifts, to start a screamer going if they saw anything whatsoever that was suspicious. Firearms were voted down at first—Christ, somebody'd shoot some neighbor's ass off for sure—but in the first week they trapped three gangs by turning quiet little murderous raids into block-wide melees, blocking escape routes with cars sideways across streets and somebody snaking out to slash getaway tires and taking baseball bats and spading forks to the raiders until the cops came and hauled them away.

The effect was electrifying: the raids dropped sharply in frequency by the second week, and the raiders tended to bolt the minute the screamers went off. But the system didn't help the more isolated homes too much, and people were getting tired and going to sleep on watch. Fewer people could cover more territory, Jack pointed out at a meeting of twenty or thirty townspeople, if cars would just patrol all night and the drivers trigger screamers whenever they saw trouble. One person could cover several residential blocks effectively, and people living there would recognize which cars were theirs and which weren't. Some merchants from the neat shopping plaza downtown were at that meeting, and appealed for some citizen help patrolling the shops and stores—there had been looting, break-ins, trashing, and they didn't have any way to work all day and stand watch all night. Ultimately it was decided that wives could do the driving, they'd be safe enough in cars as long as everybody responded to a screamer alarm in any neighborhood. They could take half-night shifts on regular rotation, eight-thirty to one, one to five, while the men with firearms could foot-patrol the business district on all-night shifts, in pairs, spread out so that each participating man drew the duty one night out of seven.