The Nirvana Plague (42 page)

“… as the riot continues,” ran the caption. “We’re currently unable to reach our correspondent in Juneau. However, it appears that the police and National Guard forces are pulling back.”

He sat down at the end of the bar.

He couldn’t think what to do, how to get out of here.

He felt in his pockets for his phone, turned it on. No signal. How could that be? He tried it anyway. As he put the pen-shaped machine to his ear, the mike-end curled inward toward his mouth. Nothing.

He remembered the military phone they’d given him for Roger to use. It was still on the table. He walked down the room to get it. It still had a signal. He sat down in the booth again to dial while he watched the scene outside on the news.

He dialed Ally’s number.

He let it ring until it rolled over to voice mail.

He hung up and tried the coffee shop.

It rolled over to her cell.

He hung up and tried their home number.

It rolled over to her cell.

He hung up and tried his office at Joplin. It rolled over to voice mail.

Was his office closed? What day was this? He couldn’t remember the day of the week. In the corner of the Newsline screen it said “3:35 pm, AKST, Thu 15 Apr”. The office should have been open on Thursday. — No, it was after hours in Chicago now. — But, it didn’t matter. The place was quarantined, wasn’t it? He couldn’t remember. Had he heard anything about it? How could he not know something like that?

He hung up and called Joplin’s main number. It rolled to a recording.

“By order of the Centers for Disease Control, the Joplin Psychiatric Care Center has been closed for an indefinite period.”

Finally, he hung up and tried Karen’s cell, hopelessly.

He let it ring a dozen times.

He wondered how he would go about calling Benford. He dialed 911. The military phone just bleeped. He was dialing into a defense communications satellite in geostationary orbit. It didn’t know anything about the local emergency network.

The shadow people continued to flicker against the violet windows. Eventually it would break up. He could wait it out. They didn’t seem inclined to come inside. What if they did? Nothing he could do about it. Hide?

Behind the bar, a long bank of liquor bottles flickered in the light of the video screens. A drink to calm the nerves!

He served himself. Double vodka, straight up. On the house.

He drank it standing, behind the bar, watching the television. The picture of the surging street outside was getting darker, grainier. The air was heavy. The camera hadn’t moved. It must be in a fixed position. The talking heads were talking:

NEWSREADER:
[Captioned.]
… with our local correspondents. We have been unable to reach anyone by phone or radio. They may have evacuated, or they could be hiding. It’s possible, I’m not saying it’s happened, but it’s also possible they’ve developed the disease, IDD. We just don’t know at this point.

He put the bottle on the bar, took a stool, and poured himself another double.

This is what it’s come to, has it? Hiding in a bar, getting drunk. Hiding from patients! Now there’s a switch.

The news rolled on and on. Like a recorded loop. The time in the corner of the screen seemed an abstraction, a meaningless number.

And then the screen went black. And the lights. The little red light on the coffee warmer winked out. Marley found himself sitting in semi-darkness, the shadowy purple gloom from the front windows his only light.

For a moment the panic was on him again. He felt it tightening around him. But the vodka had warmed him up. His skin was now a lambent shell—

He jumped up.

“Jesus Christ!” he yelled in the darkness.

Am I losing my mind? I can’t sit here all goddamned night!

He dug the useless bug out of his ear and dropped it into his empty glass. Leaving the clunky military phone on the bar, he got up and headed for the door.

The street outside The Purple Pony was swimming with people. What had seemed like a riot from the camera above, at street level looked more like an after-prom dance. But it was a strange sort of dancing they were doing. There were no partners, just amorphous groups, flowing in and out of each other. And no music. Just a kind of tuneless keening, paced by a semi-rhythmic humming and thumping.

There was little light. Night was falling and the power was out all down the street. A cold, sad drizzle fell softly from a dreary sky. But no one seemed to mind.

Marley pressed against the windows outside the saloon, unnoticed. No one touched him or looked at him. The whole surging crowd was obviously
gone
, dancing in a different world.

He looked around for Roger or Delacourt but did not see them.

He tried to see over the heads of the crowd if the communications van was still parked across the street. He couldn’t see well enough to tell, and he didn’t dare attempt to cross through the crowd.

He noticed there were uniformed police and Guardsmen in fatigues among the crowd — weaponless and vacant.

He made his way down the sidewalk, staying against the storefronts, afraid of being swept up into the mob.

Not everyone was dancing. He saw people standing very still holding each other for long minutes, others were sitting on benches, some rocking slowly back and forth, others with their heads in their hands, as if they were sobbing. He saw a young girl holding her mother’s hand as the mother gently danced along the street, the girl smiling widely at everyone they passed. He saw an old man standing with his arms crossed over his chest, his face turned up into the cold drizzle.

He saw no one talking. No one vocalized any words at all — nothing but the humming and keening that perhaps half of them kept up.

He had no particular plan in mind. He made his way along the street, back along the way they’d come in. Had it only been this morning? What had gone wrong with time? It seemed at once a week ago, and also just a moment. Had they really been talking all day in the saloon? What had been said in all that time? Nothing had happened. Yet everything had changed.

He kept looking for Roger and Delacourt as he made his way along, but he never saw them.

He came to an intersection, where a cross-street sloped uphill away from downtown. He realized then that people were still streaming toward Main Street, toward the epicenter of the outbreak. Cars and pickup trucks stood abandoned, doors open, like rocks in the current. The whole city was turning out, despite the gloom and the cold rain, they were leaving their homes and their cars and their jobs, and walking downtown, like they were answering a call to worship. They looked like zombies — happy zombies.

He crossed the street at a fast walk, compelling himself not to break into a run, and being careful not to touch anyone, and so continued making his way up the street. Whenever anyone drifted toward him, he’d stop, even reverse himself, or duck into a doorway or behind a garbage bin — anything to avoid being touched. His progress was slow. It was getting darker and colder. Many of the people in the streets were without coats. If they don’t get out of this weather, he thought, they’re risking hypothermia. Do they have enough sense to get the children out of this?

And he thought about the hospitals. Were they also emptying out? Were the staff walking out to join the parade leaving their patients alone? He tried to remember if he knew how many hospitals there were, and where, but he didn’t know.

He wondered what had happened to the power. Had they shut it down themselves? Had it failed because power station personnel were walking away from their monitors?

He stumbled over a curb in the darkness, and realized he didn’t know where he was. Main Street had run out. The crowd was behind him now, but he could still hear their weird song clearly. He wanted to get back to the bridge and back over the channel. He’d walk all the way to Abrams if he had to.

He looked all around, trying to get his bearings, and spotted a dim amber glow of light through the rain. Some place with power. And it was downhill. Toward the waterfront.

Leaving the street, he started toward it, cutting through open property.

He heard fast water flowing, and tried to find its source. It was very loud. He slipped on wet ground, and nearly fell into an open concrete channel choked with water. It sounded too big and too fast to cross on foot. He stumbled along the edge for a while, but, after falling twice more, he gave it up and picked his way back to the street.

He made his way through a dark neighborhood, at each corner turning in the direction of the dim blob of light, but all the streets dead-ended against the concrete canal.

Finally, he found a street with a narrow bridge over the rushing water. After that he made good progress. A couple of blocks beyond the canal he found a street that dropped down to the foot of Douglas Bridge, just a quarter of a mile further on. That’s where the light was. He could see military vehicles and barricades out on the bridge, standing in the glow of floodlights mounted on fixed poles.

Powerless traffic lights hung heavily over the intersection at the foot of the bridge. The wide streets lay nearly vacant, a few vehicles scattered at senseless angles. Out in the middle of the bridge, dark figures stood silhouetted by the floods, watching his approach. They looked unnaturally thick in their puffy fatigues and fat-headed helmets. Rifles, like sticks, sprouted from their hips.

Marley raised his hand and waved.

There was no response for a few seconds. Then an amplified voice burst out: “Dr. Marley?”

It was Benford.

“Are you all right?” she said.

She wanted to know if he had it.

“Yes!” he called back, “I’m fine!” and started walking onto the bridge.

“Is Delacourt with you?”

“No!”

“Come ahead!”

He came on quickly, breaking into a jog.

Benford emerged from the other figures and came toward him — moving like a shadow-puppet against the glare of floodlights. Someone else followed her, a few paces back — Tyminsky. They met him midway up the slope of the bridge.

She shook his hand warmly, gripping his upper arm with her other hand.

“I’m so glad to see you!” she said. “I thought we’d lost you too.”