Plague (18 page)

Dr. Petrie
lowered the gun, and peered into the darkness.

‘He got away,’
he said, as the smoke drifted away across the car-park.

‘You might have
killed him,” Adelaide gasped. ‘You meant to.’ She sounded very frightened.

Dr. Petrie put
the revolver in his pocket.

‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I meant to. But I didn’t.’

They drove out
of the car park in silence, and out into the plague-ridden streets of Miami.

They switched
on the car radio. It was now just past midnight, into the early hours of
Wednesday morning. What they heard on the news and what they saw as they drove
through the dark broken streets of the city were so different as to be totally
bizarre.

The calm, rich
voice of the mayor, John Becker, was reassuring citizens throughout Florida and
the United States that the breakdown in communication between Miami and the
outside world was ‘purely temporary and technical, and in the best interests of
all concerned.’

Dr. Petrie
glanced across at Adelaide, and shook his head. She smiled him a tight little
smile.

Mayor Becker
went on, ‘This epidemic, which is still awaiting medical analysis, is proving a
little more difficult to control than we had originally hoped, and for the
protection of residents and folks on vacation, we’ve had to restrict some of
the highway traffic through the city. But we can assure you that there’s
nothing to worry about, provided you follow a simple safety code and remain at
home whenever possible.’

It was while he
was saying this that, without warning, the city lights of Miami began to go
out. Most of the downtown office buildings and stores were already in darkness,
but now the street lights flickered
out,
and
everything electrical dimmed and died. Like stars obscured by the passing of a
murky cloud, the bright subtropical city with its glittering strip of hotels
and its garish downtown streets was gradually overtaken by a shadowy gloom, as
dark and threatening as a primitive jungle.

‘I expect it’s
the power station,’ Dr. Petrie said. ‘They’ve got the plague.’

He switched on
the car’s headlights. The streets seemed wrecked and deserted.

Store windows
were smashed, and there was garbage and junk strewn all over.

Despite the
threat of summary shooting, the looters had obviously been out in force.

As they turned
north on to 95, they saw a small group of blacks running furtively through the
shadows with television sets, stereo equipment and records.

Abandoned cars
– some with their dead drivers still sitting in them – cluttered the highway.
From the height of the expressway, Dr. Petrie and Adelaide could see small
fires burning all over Miami in the tropical darkness, and a few buildings
uncertainly lit by emergency generators. The whole city echoed with the endless
warbling of police and fire sirens, and the crack of spasmodic shooting.

In just over
four days, from the first signs of plague in Hialeah, Miami had collapsed into
pandemonium. It was like an old painting of hell with lurid flames and demonic
shadows; and above everything was the terrible wail of sirens, the smashing of
glass and the ceaseless blast of car horns, pressed down by the weight of their
dead owners.

Dr. Petrie
opened the car window and slowed down for a while, listening and looking in
cold disbelief.

‘It’s like the
end of the world,’ whispered Adelaide. ‘My God, Leonard, it’s like the end of
the world.’

The stench of
burning and the inhuman sounds of a dying city filled the car, and Dr. Petrie
wound up the window again. He felt exhausted beyond anything he had ever known
before. He had to open his eyes wide to clear them and focus them, and even
then he found it difficult to drive through the debris and jetsam that strewed
the highway.

They were
almost level with Gratigny Drive when he had to pull the Torino up short.

The road was
entirely blocked by two burning cars. One of them, a Riviera, was already
blackened and smoldering, but the other, a Cadillac, still had its tires
ablaze, like a fiery chariot from Heaven.

Dr. Petrie
opened his car door and got out. The heat was oily and fierce. Shielding his
eyes, he went as close to the wrecks as he could, and to his horror, he saw a
woman still sitting in the Cadillac – her face was roasted raw, but she was
lifting her smoking arm up and down, trying to call out. A lurch of nausea made
his empty stomach turn over, and he had to look away.

Adelaide called
out, ‘What is it? Can we get past?’

Dr. Petrie
shouted back, ‘Stay there! Just stay there!’

He took the
security guard’s revolver out of his pocket, held it tight in both hands, and
hoped to God that he wouldn’t miss. He inched as close to the blazing car as he
could, and then fired. The woman jerked sharply back into her ruined seat as if
he had kicked her. She disappeared in a torrent of rubbery smoke.

Dr. Petrie
climbed back into the Gran Torino.

‘Was there
someone in there?’ Adelaide asked quietly.

He nodded, and
laid the gun on the parcel shelf. For some reason, the killing seemed to have
purged something within him; to have quelled his broken nerves.

Maybe it was
because, for the first time since Mr. Kelly had woken him up on Monday morning,
he had been able to act, to do something positive.

‘Honey – I’m
going to have to ram my way through there.’ he said. He twisted around in his
seat, and backed the car up thirty or forty yards. He stopped. ‘All you have to
do is hold tight.’

He licked his
lips. Then he shifted the car into 2, and stamped on the gas. The back tires
screeched and slithered as they fought for traction on the concrete, and then
the Torino bellowed forward – straight towards the two smoking wrecks.

There was a
heavy smash, and for a moment Petrie thought the car was going to roll over.
But he forced his foot harder on the gas, and their car gradually shoved the
black carcass of the Riviera, its buckled hubs scraping and shuddering on the
road, right to the edge of the expressway. Then Dr. Petrie backed up a foot or
two, turned the wheel, and drove the Gran Torino over broken glass and oil and
litter until they were clear. The car gave one last snaking skid, and they were
driving north again.

‘Are you all
right?’ asked Dr. Petrie.

Adelaide
brushed back her hair. ‘I bruised my knee when we collided, but that’s all.

I’m okay.’

Dr. Petrie
checked his watch. ‘Another two or three minutes, and we’ll be there. Then we
can try and get out of this godforsaken place.’

They drove
without talking for a moment or two, and then Adelaide said, ‘Was it a man or a
woman?’

Dr. Petrie
frowned. ‘Was what a man or a woman?”

‘In that burning car.
I just wondered.’

He rubbed at
his left eye. The road was dark and confusing, and he had to swerve to avoid an
abandoned police car.

‘It was a
woman,’ he said baldly. “Does it make any difference?’

‘I don’t know.
I got the feeling you needed to kill someone.’

He glanced
across at her. ‘What made you think that?’

‘It was the way
you fired at that security man. He wasn’t doing anything. He was just doing his
job. Somehow, you looked as though you really needed to kill him.’

She was right,
but Dr. Petrie could no more analyze his reactions than she could. It was
connected with his present sense of helplessness as a doctor, with the need to
protest, however ridiculously, against the outrage that was sweeping through
his city.

‘I don’t know,’
he said. ‘I guess I’m just tired and frustrated.’

They didn’t say
anything more until they had driven through the dark suburbs of North Miami
Beach up to Dr. Petrie’s former house. He pulled the Gran Torino up to the
kerbside, and climbed out. With Adelaide he walked across the grass to the
house next door. It was a pink Spanish-style ranchette, called El Hensch, and
owned by the Henschels. There was a bright gas-light burning in the
living-room, so Dr. Petrie assumed his erstwhile neighbors were at home. He
rang the doorbell, and it played
The
Yellow Rose of Texas
.

The
frosted-glass door opened half-an-inch. Dr. Petrie saw one bespectacled eye and
the muzzle of a .38 revolver.

‘Who’s that?’
said David Henschel. ‘You get along out of here before I put a hole through
ya.’

‘Mr. Henschel,’
said Dr. Petrie. ‘It’s me. Leonard Petrie. Used to live next door – remember?
I’ve come for Prickles.’

There was a pause,
then Dr. Petrie heard Gloria Henschel saying, ‘David – open the goddamned door,
will ya? It’s Dr. Petrie.
I seen
him through the
upstairs window.’

After a lot of
rattling of chains and locks, the door was opened. Dr. Petrie took Adelaide by
the arm and stepped inside. Mr. Henschel, a fat, fiftyish man with a check
shirt and a pot belly, opened the living-room door for them.

On the
living-room table was a butane camping lamp. It made the room seem like a
dazzling religious grotto.
Pickles was
lying on the
red velvet-style settee, with her thumb in her mouth, and her long
honey-colored hair tied back with a pink ribbon.

She was holding
a worn-out teddy bear with a peculiarly maniac smile on its face, and she was
wearing a red dressing gown and one red slipper.

Dr. Petrie
knelt down on the floor beside her, very quietly, and watched her sleeping.

Her cheeks were
flushed, but she didn’t look as if she had contracted plague. He ran the tip of
his finger down the middle of her forehead, and down the small curve of her
nose. Adelaide came up behind him, and put her arm around him.

He looked up.
‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ he said, shaking his head – a proud father who
couldn’t believe that his luck was real.

Mrs. Henschel
came into the room in a dazzling yellow bathrobe and pink-rinsed hair in
curlers. She looked like a giant canary.

‘Dr. Petrie,’
she crooned. ‘Well, it’s been a long time! Have you come to stay awhile?

You know you’re
welcome.’

Dr. Petrie
looked at his watch. It was 12:35. ‘I’m sorry, Gloria,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to
collect Prickles, and then we’re getting out of here.’

Mr. Henschel
frowned, ‘Getting out? You mean, leaving town?’

‘Sure. Don’t
you know how bad it is?’

‘How bad what
is?’

Dr. Petrie felt
like a time-traveler who has accidentally stepped into the past.

‘The plague.
The epidemic.
The
whole of Miami is sick with plague.’

Mr. Henschel
looked suspicious. ‘Plague?’ he said. ‘You mean – like sickness? I heard on the
television there was flu, and that forty or fifty people was dead, but that’s
all. We haven’t been out of the house
today,
this is
my week off work.’

‘Is that all
they’ve been saying on television?’ Adelaide asked.
‘Forty or
fifty dead?’

‘Sure. They
said it wasn’t
nothing
to worry about.’

Dr. Petrie sat
down on the edge of the settee where Prickles slept. ‘I’ll tell you how much it
is to worry about.’ he told them. ‘Margaret died of this sickness just an hour
or two ago, and she’s just one of thousands.’

While the
Henschels stood there, barely able to grasp what he was telling them, he
explained the raw facts about the plague, and how long it was going to be
before fire or bacilli were going to destroy the Miami way of life for ever.

As he spoke, he
saw the growing desperation and terror in their faces, and he understood for
the first time why nobody from city hall or Washington had considered it
prudent to let them know before.

‘I’ll get my
rifle,’ said David Henschel, his voice unsteady. ‘I’ll get my rifle and I’ll
blast my way out of this town, even if I die trying.’

‘Mr. Henschel,’
said Dr. Petrie, as the old man went for the door.

‘What is it?’

‘I’m afraid you
probably will.’

‘I probably
will what?’

‘Die trying.’

Mr. Henschel
stared at him balefully for a moment, and then without a word, went off to
fetch his gun.

K
enneth Garunisch eased himself back into his big Colonial armchair
and took a swig from his ice-cold beer. Pulling his necktie loose, he propped
his feet up on the Colonial coffee table. It had been a hard, long night, and
he felt as if he had been beaten up by three Polish muggers in a Turkish bath.

The lavatory
flushed, and Dick Bortolotti came out, wiping his hands on a towel.

‘Is there any
of that beer going spare?’ he asked, coughing.

‘There’s a
six-pack in the icebox,’ growled Garunisch. ‘I couldn’t face any breakfast.’

‘What time is
it?’

Garunisch
peered at his watch.
‘Five-forty-five.’

Bortolotti came
back with a beer and sat down next to him. There was a large-scale map of
Florida and Georgia on the coffee table, and it was marked in several places
with red felt-tip pen. During the night, Garunisch, apart from the US Disease
Control Center and the federal government, had been one of the best-informed
people on the spread of the unstoppable plague. His members in hospitals all
the way up the East Coast had been reporting outbreaks as they happened, and
although he didn’t yet know that Miami had been completely sealed off by
National Guardsmen, he did know that the hospital system there had virtually
collapsed.

‘What are they
saying on the television news?’ asked Bortolotti.

‘They’re still
making out that
it’s
swine flu or Spanish flu or some
other kind of flu. But
they’re having
to fess up that
it’s getting worse. They can’t hold the lid on this thing for ever.’