Dark Advent (18 page)

“No offense,” Travis said, treading lightly, oh so lightly, “but that thought had already crossed my mind.”

“I’d be surprised if it hadn’t,” the man said. “And alone, maybe you’d even have a good chance at it. But taking is easy.
Keeping
…now that’s something else. Hanging onto what you’ve taken, that’s where ambitious men start losing sight of the big picture. Either way, with me…” Hot, dry air, burning with smoke—had this man blinked even once? “Well, I can make a difference.”

This is crazy, I don’t even know this bastard, but I’d bet my balls he’s telling the truth.

“You know that now,” he said. “Don’t you?”

Travis felt himself nodding.

Peter Solomon smiled with feigned relief. “I’m glad. I think you made the smart move. And there are a few things I expect from you in return. From
all
of you.”

Then, in explicit detail, he told them what those things were.

5

He’d never known that silence could be so complete.

His name was Whitley Kramer…
Doctor
Whitley Kramer, if you please. As of late he’d worked as a field chief for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. For all he knew now, though, that shining example of the way a government branch
can
run efficiently no longer existed. His last contact with them had been a week ago, give or take.

No longer existed.
Just like this hollowed-out St. Louis hospital he still haunted. He could walk its halls and hear his own heartbeat, although the stench of unburied dead spilled out and made him ill.

Over and over he wondered why he hadn’t turned around and fled back home to Atlanta. Home? Such as it was. His ex-wife had begun to hate him in absentia. To his children he was a stranger. These were too often the fates of a CDC employee. Home? He had nothing to go home
to.

In that case, he would die in the line of duty, like a captain going down at the helm of his ship.

“And we thought AIDS was a nightmare,” he said to the nurse across the table from him. They were seated at the table in a break room adjacent to one of the labs. Recent issues of both medical journals and
People
lay scattered across its dusty top, as well as plates encrusted with petrified food. “We didn’t know the meaning of the word
nightmare.
”

“What went wrong on us?” he thought the nurse said. Had her mouth moved? “Why couldn’t we stop it?”

He chuckled wearily, removed his glasses. A red saddle was left impressed into the bridge of his nose. “It’s like Nature kept one step ahead of us the whole way. We’d run off looking one direction, and she was running along another. And by the time we got wise, well…too late. Much too late.”

The nurse stared over his slumped shoulder, past him, toward the blank wall behind him.

“Dogs,” he said quietly, cradling his head in his hands. “Who’d have thought it would be dogs?”

In the beginning, they’d been so preoccupied with finding an endemic rodent population, it was as if they’d been trotting along a raceway wearing blinders. The plague bacillus was
Pasteurella pestis
…a radically mutant strain, but still the same. It had always been rodents before.

But Nature always loves to catch you with your pants down.

And in the end, it looked as if Man’s best friend had also been his savior.

There were two kinds of immunity, they’d found. First, those rare cases of natural immunity, the elite in that .4 percent whose systems simply burned the bacillus out. The others had indeed been infected, but had
grown
immune. And Kramer and his staff had finally located a common link among them…contact with a dog that was already carrying it. Whether they were bitten by the dog or a flea or had somehow absorbed the dog’s saliva into an open wound or sore, the results were the same: a direct injection of the bacillus into the bloodstream. Something the CDC had experimented with endlessly, to no avail. But the experimental injections were pure plague, while the dogs had provided an extra little something that made all the difference: a common enzyme that kept the bacilli in a dormant state, allowing a natural immunity to develop.

Given time, they could’ve easily synthesized a vaccine based on this new knowledge. But sometimes time is the scarcest commodity you have…and you’re allowed only one fatal mistake.

So what did that mean for the human race? While the next census, ha ha, would see some stark downward shifts, he saw no reason to project extinction scenarios. But civilization had taken a thousand-year step backward.

Start with a country of around 230,000,000. Stir in a highly contagious disease with 99.6 percent fatality. Yields 920,000 survivors. St. Louis County population drops to small-town levels of 4000. But don’t forget the canine influence. It was extremely hit and miss, and there were no
national figures on it, but locally, they’d been seeing about two acquired immunizations for every natural immunity. So triple these survival estimates. Even so, those 2.76 million survivors would now roll around the nation like BBs in a boxcar. Extrapolate outward and you had one big, near-empty world.

“I don’t know about you,” Kramer said to the nurse, “but I’m damn well going to see this through to the end.” He replaced his glasses, smoothed back his oily hair. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

He held up a syringe filled with an amber-tinted liquid. An untested vaccine. Would it work? Only one way to find out.

“Care to join me?” he asked.

He waited for her reply. And waited. And waited.

Finally, in a moment of rationality, Kramer saw her for what she really was…bloated and putrefying, one side of her face crisscrossed with blood that had trickled from a tiny hole in her temple days ago. One bluish hand rested on the table where it had fallen, the fingers loosely clutching a .25 automatic. A lady’s gun, no purse should be without one.

“You left me,” he said, beginning to weep. “You shouldn’t have done that
.
”

Kramer stared at the syringe in his hand, then at the gun in hers. Crossroads.

After many long minutes, he finally chose, taking the only route whose outcome was certain.

6

He traveled by day, because it seemed safer that way. He never traveled very far at once, because he still didn’t know where he was going.

Caleb Enright was beginning to regard himself as a human tumbleweed blown by the winds of chance. Only those winds blew slow and gentle. In the three-and-a-half weeks since he’d buried his wife and left the subsequent nightmare behind in New Holland, he’d not even covered two hundred miles. His peeling, cream-colored 1964 Comet puttered along as faithfully as ever, but why rush when you don’t know where your road is supposed to end?

It had so far been unlike any journey he’d ever taken. At the start you could still buy gasoline, but first you had to find a station that was open and then you had to fork over double or sometimes triple the cost per gallon that it had been a month prior. Now, though, he had to siphon from the tanks of cars he hoped had been abandoned. The good Lord probably still didn’t look too highly on stealing…but maybe He wouldn’t much mind if it was just a matter of appropriating what was no longer owned.

Food was the same story. Nowadays it was impossible to find a grocery store or restaurant still open. Breaking and entering was getting to be second nature to him, although that too brought on the guilts.

Traffic wasn’t much of a problem anymore, but then, he was running almost exclusively through rural areas. He’d tried to pass through Cincinnati last week, but found the I-71 expressway within the city hopelessly logjammed with wrecked and abandoned cars. Looking back, he doubted there was even a twentieth of the traffic he’d encountered at the first of the month. Even those ever-present army trucks had seemed to quit rolling.

It was a hard pill to swallow. But the biggest choke of all was the breakdown of every semblance of order. Back in Ohio, he’d watched the town of Hillsboro burn right down to the ground. Somebody fleeing told him that a corpse-fire had gotten out of hand, and nobody was there to put it out. So it grew until there was no more Hillsboro. Erase it from your maps, folks.

Back in Ohio
…that didn’t mean as much as it once might’ve. Here in Indiana things were pretty much the same.

“Ain’t no states anymore,” he said aloud. Dusk was settling in, and around him the countryside breathed with the sounds of crickets and frogs and unknown things scuttling through the woods to his left. A campfire kept him company as it warmed a can of Dinty Moore stew.

“Nope. No such things as states anymore.” He fished for a cigarette, lit it, then exhaled smoke at the deepening sky. And shook his head in sorrow at the thought of a nation laid to waste, turned into so many ghost towns, junkyards, and graveyards. “’Cause whatever this is, it ain’t America.”

* *

It sounded like the shots were coming from over the next rise.

The last town he’d passed through was Cross Plains, a few miles back on 62. He’d pulled off for a moment to relieve himself at the side of the road.
In broad daylight! How long’s it been since I’d’ve dared to do this!

He was zipping up when the first shots sounded, big loud ones, three or four at least. Then came the sound of screaming tires. A couple more of the loud gunshots. And then silence…just the aura of a scorching summer day when it feels too hot to move.

Caleb jumped back into his Comet, reached across the front seat to pull his rifle closer. Just in case. Maybe he wouldn’t need to use it. Maybe the most he’d have to do was wave it, and the threat would do the job.

No. Shouldn’t try fooling myself like that. Gotta be ready to use it.

He geared the car, gradually gaining speed up the gentle rise. At the top, he peered down at the scene playing out below. It looked like an ambush was going on down there, and he braked to a halt there on the hill’s crown.

A green sedan sat cockeyed in the road, almost crossways. Some of its glass was gone. Three fellows were approaching the car, two from one side, one from the other, and all of them carried rifles or shotguns. The driver’s door opened and out tumbled someone wearing vivid yellow…a woman.

Caleb grabbed his rifle, fumbled with the door latch.

But she got the pair closing in on her first. Caleb didn’t know where it came from—her purse, maybe?—but the next thing he knew she had a decent-sized gun of her own out, and definitely knew how to use it. The two coming up in front of her never saw it coming.

The one closing in from behind was another matter, but Caleb was out of his car by this time. He aimed his rifle, breathed a quick prayer for forgiveness, and dropped the third one with a single shot. The woman looked up at him, at the newly fallen body, and then slumped in the road beside her car.

Caleb was down the highway in another minute. He was very much aware that despite the two red blotches staining her sleeveless yellow jumpsuit, her revolver was trained steadily on him. He left his rifle in the Comet, stepped out with his hands held palms out.

“I take it you’re not with them.” She cocked her chin at the two she’d taken out.

“No ma’am. I’m just here to help. If you want it.”

She paused a moment, the gun wavered slightly, and then she nodded. “Yeah,” she said, lowering the gun. “I think I could use it.”

Caleb squatted beside her and checked the bloodstains. One on her thigh, the other, the larger, along her left side. “How bad are you shot?”

“I don’t know. Have you ever known anybody who’s been shot
good
?”

“You’re right,” Caleb said. “Dumb question.”

“First thing,
please
get me off this damn road,” she said, wincing. “It’s hotter than hell.”

Caleb told her to let him know if he hurt her, then scooped her up in his arms. The woman slung an arm around his neck and he carried her over to a line of trees several yards past the road. He put her back down in the grass, well shaded.

She tore at her clothing over the wounds. The leg wound looked superficial, not much to worry about so long as it got cleaned and bandaged. The side wound was worse, without a doubt. It still bled freely.

Caleb pulled off his shirt, the only spare cloth on hand. He balled it up and pressed it to her side. She gritted her teeth and made a low sound, deep in her throat, then pounded the ground beneath her right fist.

“I’m gonna need a doctor,” she said, starting to pant. “Bad.”

Quick, think…compress the wound to stanch the bleeding. What else could he do? Anything? Anything at all? Yeah. Yeah, there was. It had been a long time, but…

“Can you hold this in place yourself?” he asked. “I’ll be right back.”

She moved a hand to her side, and he flinched at the touch of her fingers on the back of his hand. She pressed in, grimacing, then nodded. Caleb was up and running.

He carried a first-aid kit in the car, but that wouldn’t do much good. Aspirin, disinfectant, small bandages…fine for later, and great if all she had were a cut finger and a mild sunburn, but this time things were a mite more serious.

But he had another kit, of sorts. Another storehouse of knowledge. He hadn’t been called upon to use it much in the past decades, as modern medicine had gotten better and better, and doctors were plentiful. But within Caleb had always lived a healthy respect for keeping the old ways alive…if not in deed, then at least in spirit. He had the lessons from Grandpap Elmer to thank for that.

From the back seat of his car, which also gave home to a forked ash stick, Caleb pulled an old athletic bag stenciled with a Cincinnati Reds logo. Inside were a wealth of roots, herbs, leaves he’d collected during his travels along the back roads. He took a swatch of cheesecloth, spread it on the Comet’s hood, then dumped a couple handfuls of ground tea leaves in the center. He then wrapped it up.

Gotta stop that bleeding, first off,
he thought while hauling his big plastic waterjug from the car and setting it beside the Reds bag. He opened the spigot to soak the tea poultice until the runoff was a rich amber-brown.

Caleb glanced her car over on the way back. Nice one, a new Lincoln. A couple bullet holes graced the driver’s door, as well as the grill and windshield. One tire was flat. Connecticut plates, he noticed. She was a long way from home.

When Caleb reached her again, her breathing was rapid and shallow. She was still conscious, and opened her eyes.

“Listen,” he said. “We both know there ain’t no time for me to hunt you down a doctor. That’s the bad news.”

“I sure hope you’ve got some good,” she said softly.

“That I do.” He gently pulled her hand from her side. The sodden shirt fell away to the grass. “All I ask is that you trust me on this. This’s all probably newer’n a baby’s butt to you.”

With that, Caleb pressed the poultice to her side, both over the entry wound in the front and the exit where the bullet had shot cleanly through to the back. He ripped away a bit of the poultice, cheesecloth and all, and pressed it over the leg wound.

“What is
that?” she said.

“Home remedy.”

The woman watched him mold the poultice to her side, gently patting and probing, and her eyes rapidly grew heavy-lidded. She uttered one last dreamy groan and laid her head back. Probably just as well, sleep was best for now. She was a lot less apt to move and disturb the poultice.
And
to start having doubts about him. But there was a good reason for what he’d done. The tea contained a chemical, tannin by name, that was one of nature’s better blood coagulants.

Caleb sat beside her against a tree, watching, waiting, as she slept. Satisfied that she was comfortable, he meandered along the roadside until he came upon a comfrey plant about fifty yards back, growing in a ditch. It stood nearly a yard tall, broadly tapered leaves at intervals up the stem, topped with a curled cluster of pale yellow, bell-shaped flowers. He stripped the plant of its leaves. Within three weeks, it would look as good as new. And best of all, its regenerative abilities weren’t limited to itself. Comfrey was hard to beat when it came to promoting speedy tissue growth.

He returned to his vigil by her side, and she slept for nearly six hours. During that time, a couple of cars passed by, and neither stopped. They merely detoured their way past his and the woman’s cars, then sped along. At one point, Caleb retrieved his Reds bag.

In the late afternoon, as she lay newly awake and still groggy, Caleb peeled the drying poultice from her side. He held his breath, imagining reopening the wound into a fresh gusher. But the tea had done its work well. The wound was a pair of ugly, puckered circles, caked in blood, but it had indeed crusted over.

“Easy,” Caleb said. “Don’t move much. How do you feel?”

“Worn out, I guess. Weak. I’ve never been shot before, so I don’t quite know how I should feel.”

He took a bottle of rubbing alcohol from his bag and gingerly swabbed the area, disinfecting it and wiping away the smeared blood. Then he mashed up a few of the rough-haired comfrey leaves and placed them over the wounds, prepared to bandage them into place.

“Hey,” she said, suddenly stronger of voice. “What are you
doing
down there?”

He grinned. “It seems strange, I know. But it’s a tried-and-true folk remedy. If it was good enough for our ancestors, it’s good enough for you.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? Look at the life expectancy those people had.”

“Still longer’n yours would’ve been if I hadn’t showed up.”

Her eyes softened at that, and she reached down to lightly touch her stained, inflamed skin. In silence, she watched him finish bandaging her side, then the minor leg wound. He finished, gave her an encouraging smile.

“You best not plan on going anywhere tonight. We’ll camp here, try to find you someplace to heal up tomorrow. It’s a hair too early to move you just yet.”

The woman finally gave him a pained smile, grimaced, and made herself more comfortable. “Looks like I owe you.”

He shook his head, grinned. Said nothing.

“I don’t even know your name,” she said. “Mister…?”

“Caleb.”

“Mister Caleb?”

“Nah, just plain Caleb is fine.”

She extended her hand and they gently shook. At a better time, her grip would probably have been firm. “Diane McCaffrey.”

“Pleased to meet you, Diane.”

“Likewise.” She pointed to him, his sun-browned torso. Sixty-eight years of gravity hadn’t left him untouched, but the hard work had lessened its effects. “You know, for a man your age, you don’t look bad at all.”

She smiled at his obvious embarrassment. With the other responsibilities, he’d forgotten all about replacing his shirt. He returned to his car for another, and brought back food and water as well. After some coaxing, he got her to swallow a few mashed garlic cloves. To purify the blood, he said. A natural antibiotic.

Diane was thirty-six, he learned as they ate and talked, a divorcee from Hartford, Connecticut. Her ten-year-old daughter was spending the summer with her ex-husband, who’d since moved to Denver. Once the plague had really taken hold, she’d been unable to complete a phone call, or get a letter through, so far as she knew.

“Cross-country on your own,” he marveled. “
That
takes courage.”

Diane shook her head. “Not really. It’s just the only way.”

He nodded. “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” He pointed toward the road.

“My ex is a lawyer. He made some enemies here and there. And once he insisted on putting us through shooting lessons.” An elfin glow touched her eyes. “Yeah. I
did
give those guys a surprise, didn’t I?”

“Surprise and a half.”

She nibbled at a sandwich of bread and cheese and mustard. Washed it down with a gulp of water. “You don’t have any children, do you?”

He looked toward the ground and shook his head. “We couldn’t. How’d you know?”

“Because you seemed surprised at me going after my daughter. Like you’d never known what it meant to love a kid that much.” She stopped, rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry. That was really none of my business.”

Caleb waved it off and told his story…the farm, Emily, her death. And when night began to take hold in the sky, Caleb cleared the road, moving their cars off to one side and dragging the three bodies across the road to the opposite tree line. He returned with blankets for them to lie on.