Plague (38 page)

Edgar ran
across Third Avenue and turned down 52nd Street. Now he was out in the open,
his confidence was shaken. It was menacing and strange, and the fires that
burned through the drizzling rain cast enormous shadows. He had no idea where
he could find a doctor, and he peered hopelessly at all the signs and
nameplates he saw.

From Third
Avenue, he reached Lexington Avenue. Uptown, he could see immense fires
blazing. Whole blocks were alight. Downtown, it was all darkness and savagery.

He crossed the
street and walked quickly towards Park Avenue, panting hard and clutching his
pistol tight.

He didn’t see
them until he had turned the corner. There were eight or nine of them – marauding
black teenagers with clubs and knives and razors. They had raided three hotel
bars on the East Side, and they were fiercely drunk. The day before, white
hoodlums had come up to Harlem and thrown gasoline bombs in their neighborhood
stores and their houses, and they were out to fix honkies and nothing else.

Edgar raised
the .38.

‘Don’t you
come
a step nearer, or I’ll shoot!’

The black kids
jeered and laughed. Edgar, holding the pistol in both hands, aimed directly at
a silhouetted head.

It went through
his mind like an action replay.
The supermarket doorway.
The laughter in the car park.
The
shot.
One of the kids fell to the ground, without a sound.

The rest of
them scattered. ‘He’s dead all right. I got him in the head.’

And while his
finger froze on the trigger, a tall black boy in green jeans ducked under his line
of fire and stabbed him straight in the face with a broken gin bottle. The
glass sliced into his cheeks and mouth, and he dropped the gun on to the
sidewalk in a slow-motion twist of agony.

They cut his
face up first. He felt knives in his eyes. Then one of them grappled his wet,
petrified tongue, and they sliced it off with a razor. The last thing he felt
before he died, in a hideous burst of agony, was the broken bottle they forced,
laughing, into his rectum.

Shark McManus
died that night, too. As he lay on the floor of the office, helpless and weak
and soaked in diahorrea, the rats came scampering in. He was so close to death
that he scarcely felt them running over him, and at one moment he thought of
the kitten his father had given him when he was six, and he opened his arms to
embrace the scuttling gray tribe that bit at his flesh and turned his hands
into raw bloody strings.

‘Paston?’ he
said hoarsely.

There was no
answer – He heard a squeaking, pattering noise that he didn’t understand.

‘Paston?’ he
said again.

No answer.

‘Paston?’

After the
hideous chaos of the night, the morning was gray and silent. The rain stopped,
and a smeary sunlight filtered across the East River and into the broken
streets. Uptown, fires still burned in Harlem, and the black carcasses of buses
and cars were littered all over the streets of the midtown hotel district,
smoldering and smashed. The sidewalks were
glittering
with powdered glass, and amongst it, like frozen explorers caught in a strange
kind of snow, were the bodies of plague victims and riot casualties.

One or two
police cars patroled the streets slowly and cautiously, driving over rubble and
bricks and debris. The cops all wore respirators and goggles, and were heavily
armed. There were still a few stray looters around, and they had orders to
shoot to kill.

The rats were
still in evidence – swarming into abandoned delicatessens and restaurants, and
over the corpses that lay huddled up in every street.

Every office
block and apartment building was locked and guarded and under siege.

But even if the
residents were able to keep out the looters and most of the rats, they couldn’t
protect themselves from the plague. During Monday morning, the fast-breeding
bacilli brought painful death to thousands of New Yorkers, transmitted by
minute specks of infected saliva. It only took a word of encouragement to pass
the plague
on,
or the touch of a hand in friendship.

Some people
died slowly, in prolonged agony, while others succumbed in two or three hours.
By midday, almost seventeen thousand people were dead, and several apartment
buildings had become silent, pestilent mortuaries. As the People collapsed, the
rats scurried in, devouring food and flesh in a suffocating orgy of
self-indulgence.

Other people,
trapped in elevators since Sunday by the power failure, began to collapse from
exhaustion, thirst and lack of air. There was no one to rescue them, and they
died in a squalid confusion of darkness and urine.

In the subways,
imprisoned in darkened trains, people moaned and cried and waited for the help
that would never arrive. Old people and invalids sat in their apartments in
front of dead televisions, waiting for nurses who didn’t dare take to the
streets. Drug addicts, shivering and sweating, haunted the Lower West Side looking
for fixes.

Dr. Petrie, up
on the sixteenth floor of Concorde Tower, stared down at the city for almost an
hour. Adelaide and Esmeralda had taken Prickles to meet the Kavanagh children
on the floor below, and Ivor Glantz was locked in his study, laboriously
working out the mathematical probability of destroying the plague with
radioactive rays. Dr. Petrie drank coffee and tried to relax. He had slept
badly, with nightmares of travelling and suffering and violence, but he felt
better than yesterday. He was just wondering how long they could survive on the
sixteenth
floor,
without food supplies, or any
guarantee that their water or power would hold out.

He was going to
pour himself another cup of coffee when there was a rap at the door. He walked
across the sitting-room and switched on Ivor Glantz’s closed-circuit TV. The
building super was standing outside, looking agitated. Dr. Petrie opened the
door.

‘Hi,’ said the
super. He remembered Dr. Petrie from the night before, when they had banged on
the glass doors of Concorde Tower and shouted to be let in. He was a thin,
nervous man with greasy hair and a neatly-clipped mustache. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Sure.
Professor Glantz is working right now, but if it’s urgent...’

The super
worriedly chewed at his lip. ‘It’s getting pretty serious, to tell you the
truth.

I got
assistants going round the whole building, informing everyone.’

‘What’s the
problem?’

‘Well,’ said
the super, ‘we got quite a crowd outside. You know – people who were caught on
the streets when the power went off. They want us to let them in, and they’ve
started cracking the front doors already.’

‘How many are
there?’

‘Well, it’s
hard to tell, maybe a couple of dozen. I took a look off the roof, and the same
thing’s happening to other condos, too. I guess quite a few people got caught
out last night, and now they want to get back inside.’

‘You can’t let
them in – you know that, don’t you?’ Dr. Petrie said. Even if they’re
residents, they may have plague. This whole apartment building could be wiped
out in an afternoon.’

‘Well, yes,
sir, I know that. But I was trying to figure how to keep them out. They’re
smashing down the doors, and some of them have guns.’

There was
another knock at the door. Dr. Petrie turned around, to see a stocky, bristle-headed
man standing in the doorway, wearing a turtle-neck sweater, plaid pants and
bedroom slippers. His face was bruised, and he had a magnificent black eye.

‘I hope I’m not
interrupting you people,’ said the man. ‘But I was thinking we ought to get
together and have ourselves a pow-wow.’

‘Good morning,
Mr. Garunisch,’ said the super.

‘My name’s
Kenneth Garunisch,’ said the new arrival, walking in and holding out his hand
to Dr. Petrie.

‘How do you do.
I’m Leonard Petrie. Dr. Murray at Bellevue
said I should blow a hole in your head.’

Kenneth
Garunisch chuckled. ‘That sounds like Murray, all right. Are you a doctor, too?
I guess I’m not too popular with doctors. What’s the matter, Jack? You look
like you ate something that disagreed with you.’

The super
nodded. ‘I was telling this gentleman here, Mr. Garunisch. We got a pretty mean
crowd of people down on the street, and they’re trying to break their way in.’

Kenneth
Garunisch took out a cigarette and lit it. ‘You got top security locks and
doors down there, haven’t you? That should keep ‘em out.’

‘For a while, I
guess. But they look like they want to get in real bad.’

‘Do you want
some help?’ asked Kenneth Garunisch. ‘I have an automatic, and some rounds.’

‘I’ve got this
rifle here,’ said Dr. Petrie, pointing to the automatic weapon he had left in
Ivor Glantz’s umbrella stand.

Kenneth
Garunisch said, ‘I think we ought to get ourselves together and form a defense
plan. Is Professor Glantz around? Maybe we can rope him in, too.’

‘Wait there,’
said Dr. Petrie. ‘I’ll go see.’

He walked
across to Ivor Glantz’s study and rapped gently, on the door. There was a
pause,
then
Glantz said, ‘Come in!’

The study was
dense with cigarette smoke. The walls, papered in dark brown art-deco
wallpaper, were covered in graphs and diagrams and illustrations of radiography
equipment. Ivor Glantz was bent over a large walnut desk, with a slide-rule,
log tables, dividers and a cramful ashtray. His shirt was crumpled and stained
with sweat, and he was frowning at columns of figures through a thick pair of
reading glasses.

‘How’s it
going?’ asked Dr. Petrie.

‘Slow,’ said
Glantz. ‘This problem has to have fifteen million permutations. Without a
computer, it’s like trying to write the Bible in two days.’

‘Do you think
it’s going to take you that long?’

Ivor Glantz
took off his spectacles. ‘Two days, you mean? Not a chance. It’s going to take
longer. The trouble is
,
I don’t have any expert help.
I need someone to double-check these figures, and give me some different angles
and ideas. This could take months.’

‘Then do you
think we ought to take the theory straight to Washington, and let them work it
out?’

Ivor Glantz
shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t wash. If we turned up in Washington with that kind
of theory, they’d laugh in our faces. They don’t have any bacteriologists on
the government payroll with any imagination or style, and this theory would
sink into the swamp of professional jealousy like a goddamned brick.’

‘But there are
lives at stake, for Christ’s sake! We have people dying in thousands!’

Ivor Glantz
stood up. ‘Dr. Petrie,’ he said, ‘I know people are dying but it’s no use.

What you forget
is that Washington, right at this moment, is being inundated with theories and
ideas and schemes for stopping the plague.
Some of them good,
some of them mediocre, and some of them totally crazy.
Unless we can
substantiate this theory with figures, it’s going to wind up in some minor
scientist’s in-basket, and it probably won’t see the light of day until the
tricentennial, if there’s anybody left alive to dig it up.’

‘You sound
pretty cynical,’ Dr. Petrie said.

Ivor Glantz
nodded. ‘I am cynical. If you think that big business is a cut-throat game, you
ought to try science. It’s a second-rate scramble for recognition, and honors,
and as much money as you can milk out of as many foundations as possible.
That’s why we have to waste our time here working out thousands of figures, and
letting millions of Americans die.’

Kenneth
Garunisch poked his head around the door. ‘Is this a private harangue or can
anyone
join
in?’

Ivor Glantz
grinned tiredly.
‘Hi, Mr. Garunisch.
I was just
sounding off about scientific ethics. You’ve met Dr. Petrie?’

‘Sure. Listen,
Professor – do you think we can get some of our neighbors together for a council
of war? Jack the super says there are people outside on the streets, trying to
break their way in. I think we ought to work out some plan of defense.’

Ivor Glantz
sighed. ‘Mr. Garunisch,’ he said, ‘I have to do a month’s work in a couple of
days. I don’t think I have time for councils of war. I don’t need
defense,
I need a first-class assistant bacteriologist.’

Kenneth
Garunisch pulled a face. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to oblige you
there, Professor. But let’s say you’re busy. I’ll ask Herbert Gaines and that
Bloofer guy. If I need your help – can I call on you?’

‘Surely.
Now, if you gentlemen will excuse me, it’s back to
the slide-rule.’

A
t five that afternoon, in Kenneth Garunisch’s mock-Colonial
apartment, the residents of the sixteenth and seventeenth floors of Concorde
Tower held a council of war. They were going to talk about self-protection,
food and survival, and then their elected representative was going to speak to
a meeting of representatives from all the other occupied floors. Mrs. Garunisch
had made some rather clumsy cold-beef sandwiches, because her cook Beth had
been out on the streets last night, and although Mrs. Garunisch didn’t know it,
Beth was lying dead and posthumously raped in a side doorway of Macy’s.

Herbert Gaines
was there, incongruously dressed in a yellow safari suit, and looking nervous.
Nicholas sat beside him, in a sailor sweater and jeans and rope sandals, as
sullen as ever. Adelaide sat possessively close to Dr. Petrie on the big floral
settee, and Esmeralda sat by herself, elegant and
cool
in a white pleated 1930’s suit.

Prickles was
allowed to sit in the corner, drinking coke and
reading a picture book.