Plague (6 page)

The policeman
examined the identity card suspiciously. ‘Are you sure you’re a doctor? You
don’t look like a doctor.’

Dr. Petrie
raised his eyebrows. ‘What’s a doctor supposed to look like? Marcus Welby, MD?’

The policeman
shrugged, a little embarrassed, and handed the card back. ‘I guess
it’s
okay,’ he said, ungraciously.
‘Seems
like they’ve got some kind of epidemic around here.
They just told me to
keep people out. Through there.’

‘I know the
way,’ Petrie said, and pushed through the swing doors into the brightly-lit
hospital corridors.

There was
obviously some kind of panic in progress. The corridors were lined with
trolleys, all waiting to collect patients from the ambulance bay; and there
were nurses and doctors everywhere, bustling around with medical report sheets,
diagnostic kits and bundles of sheets and robes and plastic gloves.

He reached Dr.
Selmer’s office and rapped on the door. A nurse answered it, wearing a cap and
mask, her forehead glistening with perspiration.

‘Yes? What is
it?’

‘I’m Dr.
Leonard Petrie. I came to see Dr. Selmer. I thought I could help.’

‘Just hold on
there. Don’t come inside. He won’t be a moment.’

Dr. Petrie was
about to say something else, but the door was shut firmly in his face.

He shrugged,
and leaned up against the corridor wall to wait for Dr. Selmer. As he stood
there, a medical trolley was rushed past, with a young woman lying on it. Her
face was deathly white, and she was shivering and trembling. A young doctor
came hurrying in the other direction, calling out for a nurse to bring him some
blankets and antibiotics.

It was ten
minutes before Anton Selmer appeared. He came out into the corridor, freckled
and ginger and worn out. He managed a weak smile as he pulled off his cap and
mask, and let out a long, exhausted sigh.

‘Hi, Leonard.
Glad you could make it.’

Dr. Petrie
inclined his head towards the door of the emergency ward. ‘How long have you
been in there?’

‘All day.’ said
Anton Selmer, rubbing his eyes. ‘It looks like it’ll be all night, too.’

‘Is it the
plague?’

Dr. Selmer
scratched his head tiredly. ‘We’ve had twenty-eight more cases since eight
o’clock. They’re picking them up all over the place. We’ve had a bar-tender, a
supermarket manager, two cops and four ambulance crew. We’ve even had a hooker.
They come from all over town.
Most from the south – Coral-
Gables and South Miami.
But two or three from Hialeah,
and some from the Beach.’

Dr. Petrie
stepped back to let a trolley rattle past. ‘What about treatment? Are they
responding?’

Dr. Selmer
didn’t look up. ‘Five of them are dead already. Two were dead on arrival.

We’ve tried
streptomycin, tetracyclines and chloramphenicol. We even tried
aureomycin
, in case the bacilli were resistant to
streptomycin. I’ve brought in plague antigens from Tampa, and I’m having serums
made up from avirulent strains flown in right now from Los Angeles.’

‘And?’

Dr. Selmer’s
voice was unsteady with emotion. ‘It’s not going to work, Leonard, It’s not
going to work at all.’

Dr. Petrie
frowned. ‘What do you mean – not going to work?’

‘Just that, Leonard.
The plague is not responding to the
normal methods of treatment. Not sulfonamide, not anything. I guess it’s
because it’s some kind of mutation. It’s totally resistant to antibiotics, and
it’s even resistant to heat.’

‘What about the
antigens?’

Dr. Selmer took
out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. Then he blew his nose loudly. ‘They
slow it up, that’s all. Usually, they cut the mortality rate. You can save two
out of three. But with this plague, they hardly help at all. Whatever we do,
Leonard, they’re dying just the same.’

Dr. Petrie
leaned back against the wall. He tried not to think of Prickles and Adelaide.

The corridor
was bright and clinical and smelled of disinfectant. Outside, through the
constantly swinging doors, he could see the red flash of ambulance lights, and
the clatter and shuffle of trolleys. He heard someone shouting and moaning, and
someone else trying to argue in a high, persistent voice.

‘Have you told
the health people?’ he asked quietly.

Dr. Selmer
nodded. ‘I told them around half-past nine. They didn’t really believe me at
first.
Wanted proof.
So I brought Jackson and Firenza
down here, and let them see for themselves.’

‘What are they
going to do?’

‘Wait and see.
Firenza said he thought it was probably an isolated outbreak.’

‘Wait and see?
Are you kidding? What makes him think it isn’t going to spread around the whole
damn city?’

Dr. Selmer
shrugged.
‘Precedent.
The worst outbreak in American
history was New Orleans, in 1920, when eleven people died. Firenza doesn’t
believe that we’re going to lose more than twelve.’

‘Didn’t you
tell him you’d lost five already? Jesus, Anton, this thing is far worse than bubonic
plague. Doesn’t he understand that?’

Dr. Selmer
pulled his surgical cap on again. He looked at Leonard Petrie with his pale,
worn-out eyes, and when he spoke his voice seemed hollow with tiredness.

‘I think he
understands that, yes. But he’s like everyone else. They watch Dr. Kildare and
Ben Casey, and they don’t believe that American medicine can ever be licked.

They don’t
understand that we can make mistakes. Officially, we’re not allowed to.

Officially
we’re not even permitted to be baffled.’

Dr. Petrie
looked serious. ‘Anton,’ he said, ‘how bad is it really?’

Before Dr.
Selmer could answer, his nurse came out of the emergency ward door and said,
‘Doctor, he’s almost gone. I think you’d better come.’

‘There’s a mask
and a gown spare, Leonard,’ Dr. Selmer said. ‘Come inside and you can see for
yourself how bad it really is.’

They pushed
their way into the emergency ward. Dr. Petrie tugged on a tight surgical cap
and laced a mask over his nose and mouth. The nurse helped him put on green
rubbers and a long gown. She gave him transparent latex gloves, and he pulled
them on to his hands as he followed Selmer into the glare of the surgical
lamps.

It was the
middle-aged man that Herb Stone and Francis Poletto had picked up in Alton
Road. His face was drawn and lividly
pale,
and his
eyes were rolled back into his head so that only the whites were showing.
Beside the couch, on the luminous dials of the diagnostic equipment, his
respiration, heartbeat and blood pressure were slowly subsiding.

The nurse said,
‘His breathing is failing, Dr. Selmer. We can’t keep him much longer.’

Dr. Selmer,
helpless, stood at the end of the couch and watched the man gradually die.

‘This is how
bad it really is,’ he said to Dr. Petrie, in a hushed voice. ‘This man’s wife
told us that he felt sick just after lunch. By the evening, it had gotten so
bad that he decided to go and look up his doctor. He was on his way there when
he was picked up by the cops for drunk driving. He wasn’t drunk, of course. He
was dying of plague.

Twelve hours
from first symptoms to death.’

Dr. Petrie saw
the pulse-rate drop and drop and drop.

The luminous
ribbon of the cardiac counter was barely nudged by the man’s weakening heart.
‘Is his wife here?’ Dr. Petrie asked.

Selmer nodded.
‘We’re keeping every relative and friend in the waiting-room, under
observation. The way this plague seems to develop, you show your first symptoms
three or four hours after you’ve been exposed to it. We had a young girl
brought in about three-and-a-half hours ago, and her father’s showing the first
signs. Dizziness, sickness, diahorrea,
shivering.
It’s
the fastest infectious disease I’ve ever seen.’

Dr. Petrie said
nothing as the man on the couch died. Whoever he was, whatever he did, his
forty-five years of life and memory and experience dwindled to nothing at all,
and vanished on that hard, uncompromising bed.

Dr. Selmer
motioned to the nurse and they drew a sheet over his face and disconnected the
diagnostic equipment. One of the doctors called for a porter from the mortuary.

‘Poor guy,’
said Dr. Petrie, ‘He never even knew what it was.’

Dr. Selmer
turned away. Though an emergency ward doctor he was torn apart by losing his
patients. He was skilful and talented and he never lost his enthusiasm for
other people’s survival. What was happening here today was, for him, relentless
and unstoppable
agony.

‘There’s one
consolation,’ said Dr. Selmer hoarsely. ‘It looks as though we’re not going to
get it ourselves.’

‘We’re not? I
always thought doctors and nurses were first-line casualties with plague.’

‘Maybe they
are. But it was nine o’clock this morning when you came into contact with David
Kelly, wasn’t it? And are you sick yet? I came into closer contact than you,
and I’m okay. Perhaps we’re going to get lucky, and stay alive.’

‘I still think
you ought to call Firenza. Tell him again how bad this is.’

Dr. Selmer
shrugged. ‘It’s not that he doesn’t believe me. It’s his reputation. I don’t
think he wants to be known as the health official with the highest mortality
rate in the history of Florida.’

‘That’s
absurd,’ said Dr. Petrie.

‘You think so?
Go and talk to him yourself. Meanwhile, you can do me a favor.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Tell this
guy’s wife that he’s gone. Her name’s Haskins. She’s waiting by the water fountain,
just down the corridor.’

Dr. Petrie
lowered his head. Then he said, ‘Okay,’ and went back to the wash-up room to
take off his mask and robe. He glanced at himself in the mirror as he
straightened his jacket, and thought that he looked tall, tired, handsome and
helpless. Maybe Margaret had been right all along. Maybe it was futile, caring
for rich and hypochondriac old ladies. Maybe his real work was here, in the
thick of the blood and the pain, the failing hearts and the teeming bacteria.

He opened the
door and peered down the crowded corridor. Mrs. Haskins was standing on her own
– a gray-haired woman in a cheap brown print dress, holding a plastic carrier
bag with her husband’s clothes and shoes in it. She seemed oblivious to the
bustle of medics and porters, as more and more sick people were wheeled swiftly
into the hospital. Outside, as the doors swung open, the ambulance sirens
echoed through the warm night streets of Miami. Mrs. Haskins, alone by the
water fountain, waited patiently.

Dr. Petrie
walked across, and took her arm. She looked up at him, her eyes pink with
tiredness and suppressed tears.

‘Mrs. Haskins?’

‘Yes, sir.
Is George all right?’

Dr. Petrie bit
his lip. In a few short words, he was going to destroy this woman’s whole
world. He almost felt like saying nothing at all, prolonging her suspense. At
least she would believe her husband was still alive. At least she would have
some hope.

‘George was
very sick,’ said Dr. Petrie softly.

She nodded. ‘I
know. He was taken bad right after his lunch. He took his swim in the morning,
and then he came back and was taken real bad.’

‘He took a
swim?
Where?’

‘Where he always does.
Off the beach.’

Dr. Petrie
looked at the woman’s weary, work-lined face. First it was David Kelly, and
he’d taken a swim. Then it was Margaret, and she’d taken a swim. Now it was
George Haskins. And all along the beaches, raw sewage was floating in from the
Atlantic Ocean.
Poisonous, virulent, and seething with
diseased bacteria.

‘Mrs. Haskins,’
he said simply, ‘I’m sorry to tell you that George is dead.’

Mrs. Haskins
stared at him. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.

‘George died,
about five minutes ago.’

She frowned,
and then looked down at her carrier bag. ‘But he can’t have. I’ve got all his
clothes in here.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs.
Haskins. It’s true.’

She shook her
head. ‘No, that’s all right,’ she said, with an attempt at brightness. ‘I’ll
just wait here.’

‘Mrs. Haskins...’

He was
interrupted by the public address system. ‘Dr. Petrie, telephone please. Dr. Leonard
Petrie, telephone.’

He held Mrs.
Haskins’ hand. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he told her. ‘You just wait there, and
I’ll be right back.’

Mrs. Haskins
smiled blandly, and agreed to wait.

Dr. Petrie
pushed his way past trolleys and anaesthetic cylinders, nurses and porters, and
made his way to the phone outside the emergency ward. He picked it up and said,
‘This is Dr. Petrie. You have a call for me?’

‘Hold on,
doctor,’ said the telephonist. ‘Okay, ma’am, you’re through now.’

Dr. Petrie
said, ‘Adelaide?’

Adelaide
sounded jumpy and frantic. ‘Leonard? Oh God, Leonard, something awful has
happened! I’ve been trying to call you for the past twenty minutes, but the
hospital lines were all tied up.’

‘What is it? Is
it Prickles? Is she sick?’

‘No, it’s not that.
It was Margaret. She knocked at the door, and I opened it up, thinking it was
you. She came straight in, like she was drunk or
something,
and she pulled Prickles out of bed and carried her off.’

‘She what?’

‘She carried
her off, Leonard,’ said Adelaide miserably, bursting into tears. ‘I tried to
stop her, but I couldn’t. Oh God, Leonard, I’m so sorry. I tried to stop her.’

‘You say she
was drunk?’

‘She seemed
like it. She was swaying around and cursing. It was awful.’