The Four Fingers of Death (99 page)

“I’d say,” Gibraltar admitted, “that there’s a likelihood—”

At this point Leona, scheduling flunky, interrupted the proceedings, and it took her a long time to do so, a long time to silence the short-tempered, pudgy, middle-aged men, the Caucasian men, the anxious men. Finally, Leona managed to make herself heard, in order to say, “Gentlemen, please rise for the president.”

All eyes on the door, which didn’t close on its hinges entirely, it being of an antique design. If even the sketchiest account of what transpired at the weekend residence were leaked through that cracked door to the instant news resources on the web, it would have meant the
end
of the administration, its party, perhaps even the NAFTA political establishment as it was known then. And yet the door didn’t close, and various members of the catering staff were coming through routinely to top off a beverage here and there, and to offer another bowl of sorbet.

There’s always an instant when
your time is over
, Gibraltar would say later, looking back on that momentous entrance. All the bravado that you once displayed, your fearlessness, suddenly vanishes, because of the sheer scale of history. This was
it;
this was the moment, and Gibraltar experienced it physically, as a sudden gnawing pain in his midsection, as if something were trying to chew its way out. Gibraltar was no stranger to physical discomfort, but there was something new about this particular kind of pain. It was the novelty part that got his attention, as the woodchuck chewing its way out radiated up his esophagus and flared down his flanks. There was nothing to do about it then, because all the men rose, and then the wall-mounted screen at the end of the room flickered on, and the face of the president, mostly shrouded in shadow, appeared on it. He was wearing a shirt and tie, that much was obvious, but there was a way in which he didn’t look like the president for whom they labored, not as he was seen in the press. There was the crackling of the audio portion of the signal beginning, a faint hum that was probably some kind of security apparatus in the room where the filming was taking place, and then the tinny second-generation sound of digital playback.

“Gentlemen, very good of you to come, and I’m really sorry that I’m not able to venture downstairs right now. Please accept my apologies. It’s possible that I might make it down before the end of the meeting. In case you’re wondering, this is a full teleconferencing program we’re running here, so I have been able to participate in the meeting so far. Leona is also taking notes for posterity. We’ll have the typed account as well as the video record. And I trust each of you will be preparing memoranda for your departments. So that we all know what we’re saving here.”

There was a murmuring of the conferees. Various discussants floated the theory that this was a
recording
of the president and not a live broadcast at all. But this was belied by the specificity of his next remarks.

“The way I see it, we have discussed two options so far, the first option being a general quarantine for the affected population in Rio Blanco. As I understand it, the problem here is that we can’t identify the affected population in order to quarantine them, which makes that proposal ineffective. Correct? The second option is the blockade, at least that’s how I’m interpreting it—the idea that we seal off the town of Rio Blanco. Then we either open the border to the south, or we just wait out the infection. Is that an adequate summary of that proposal, Major Beauforte?”

“Sir, we could easily air-drop food supplies into the town—”

“The blockade, option two. You know, gentlemen, I have spent a lot of time in the Southwest. It’s really one of the most attractive parts of the nation. I mean, before we go in there and do something drastic to the place, we should pause to remember what a beautiful part of the country it is. In fact, I was there last year or so, and I saw my first dust storm. Leona, have I told you about the dust storm?”

“Yes, sir, you—”

“Did I show you the—?”

“You did. It was—”

“Gentlemen, I had, with the Secret Service detail, elected to do some hiking in a remote mountain range, near the border of the state of New Mexico. Bear country, I should say, and while it would, it’s true, have been unfortunate if the leader of the free world were somehow mauled in a bear attack, it’s just black bears down that way, you know. I have never seen a bear in the wild. At any rate, I’d led the good men and women of the Secret Service up one of the peaks in this range, and we’d had quite a good time at the top, where there were still some tumbledown shacks that I suppose were meant for fire observation in a much earlier era. In fact, we’d passed a few blazes on our way out toward the state line, but they were not yet any danger to the local population. Anyhow, we summited the peak in question not long after lunch, and we had a relaxing time there. Those parts of the state are now so empty that there was no danger of running into constituents, and most of the trails had been closed by the security detail in any event. At some point, I was alerted to the fact that a dust storm was coming in our direction from the northeast. There was some thought of extracting us by helicopter, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Soon enough, in the distance, you could see the storm, like a sheer wall. The dust comes from as far away as Mongolia, I was told later, though I don’t know how this would be possible, unless it was blown over the Bering Strait. Still, it was maybe twenty or thirty miles out, on a day that was dry and clear as any day can be in the desert in autumn. We watched, kept an eye on the storm, as we all but jogged down the mountain, gentlemen, and if the security people were a little apprehensive, I was practically giddy with the simple fact that nature continues to behave in a way that is impossible to predict, and if I didn’t want to be blown off the mountain, I was, at the same time, not averse to feeling the threat of the thing, as it seemed to head with its own volition toward the range on which I stood, gobbling up acres as fast as any phenomenon of God’s creation. We had a representative from the forest service on the line; we were told that the storm was, in fact, covering twenty or thirty miles an hour, and our best bet was to find a cave somewhere on the side of the mountain, and if that was impossible, we should sit down somewhere recessed and wait.

“There
was
a cave some way down. And so, gentlemen, it was a race against time. Given the velocity at which that dust storm was now engulfing the lower peaks in the range, there was little chance that we were going to make it to the cave. And so we did not. We had perhaps another two miles of trail below us, and we were somewhere around the six-thousand-foot level when the big tan cloud of particulate folded over us, like a blanket of the uninhabited earth, blotting out the sun, blotting out the trail, blotting out the expanses and vistas before us, until there was nothing but the ten or twenty feet in our vicinity, all of it whirling and weaving in the great cloud of Mongolian steppe, and why was it that I felt nothing but a tremendous relief? Why was it that the dust storm seemed like the
best
that nature had to offer us that day, assuming that we were not going to see a black bear, as indeed we did not? There were a few raindrops concealed in that cloud, but mainly there was just the grit of it, in our mouths, in our eyes, and so on. It would have been a fine time to mount an assassination, true, if any revolutionary groups were following the course of natural history in the desert, and for this reason, the security detail eventually made use of flare guns, their sidearms, flashlights, whatever else was available in order to keep casual hikers or other members of the general population away, as we carefully picked our way through the curtains of dust toward the canyon below—”

“Mr. President—”

“I know, Leona, I know, gentlemen, you are wondering what the story has to do with the situation at hand.”

“That’s right, sir,” said someone intrepid from a spot that could have been hard for the cameras to pick up.

“What did I learn on that day? Is that what you’re asking? What I learned, from a strategic point of view, gentlemen, was about the value of natural phenomena when subduing a population in order to preserve law and order. If someone had been clever enough, that day, to harness the dust storm, they could have paralyzed the government of the United States. You might ask how I could do something so cavalier while upholding my oath of office, but I think, on the contrary, that the question is how to make the scourges of the desert submit to our will when we need them to perform for us.”

“Mr. President, are you suggesting some kind of wildfire?”

Gibraltar felt again the sharp pain in his midsection, and he worried that he might need to be escorted from the meeting on a gurney. He thought about his family, and about his second family—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—and he knew what was to be said next, and he therefore knew that he not only needed to
survive
the meeting, he needed to start moving his people out of range.

“Well, that’s a useful question, gentlemen. Is incineration going to do the job in terms of eradication? Would that insure that we root out what we need to root out?”

The CDC, who was already looking a little ashen himself and liable, with the president more or less in the room, to say anything, remarked, “Sir, we don’t know for certain yet what the effect of higher temperatures is going to be. But even if the bacteria does experience higher motility in a temperate Earth climate, it can’t have adjusted to extremely high temperatures. It’s a pretty rare pathogen that can manage that, and only after many hundreds of thousands of years of adaptation. Along these lines, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that with
M. thanatobacillus
, we find the body temperature goes
down
significantly. As if the pathogen is hostile to warmth. People with the infection start to move toward room temperature. Like a, well, like a corpse.”

The president, on the screen above, had turned three quarters from the camera, so that all but his neck, the sinews of his neck, was shrouded in the gloom of his artificially lit office. A contemplative pose.

“Then, gentlemen, I suggest a plan be drawn up, the third option, a
last
option, in which we subject the city of Rio Blanco to incendiary bombing. Obviously, we don’t have time to evacuate, nor to attempt to separate the healthy from those already exposed, and this is a shame. The kind of shame that will weigh on all of us in this room a long time. But let’s get the plans in motion, and we’ll speak by teleconference later. And if incendiary isn’t good enough, Mr. Beauforte, be so kind as to get me some ideas about tactical nuclear devices.”

It wasn’t long after that the meeting was adjourned.

Omnium gatherum
invites you to a flowering of the arts at the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf, ides of the month, 11:59 P.M. The one true law of this place, the tendency of objects to fall to Earth, will be repudiated. Clothing optional
. These were the words of the prototype invite, as composed by Denny Wheeler, slight and pale, whose exclusive diet of yams had not resulted in the kind of pigmentary robustness you found naturally in the desert. He insisted that there was numerological and symbolical significance in the fact that the name of the
yam
was the name of the month in which he was born, reversed. No one, any longer, least of all his father, Zachary Wheeler, bothered to challenge the diet. In fact, Denny had prepared a policy statement on how a diet of yams could promote ecstatic visions. Whether this was owing to a vitamin B12 deficiency or not went unexamined.

The plastic arm that accompanied the invitation, manufactured by undocumented emigrants in an uncooled airplane hangar just south of the border, concealed, at first blush, an additional feature, besides its ability to declaim the invitation out of a recessed speaker at the thumb joint: the arm issued sparks from its base. This to indicate the ultimate goal of the
flowering of the arts
, as referred to above, the firing of the crawling hand back into space, toward the gods. The Wheelers, or at least Denny, because his father was so nodded out on OxyPlus and role-playing software that he wasn’t good for anything anymore, had spent the better part of the past couple of days procuring custom-made jet packs for the
apotheosis of the arm
, which was how Denny referred to the climax of the party on the web site and in any official announcements. From space it had come, to space it would justly return.