The Stand, Page 5

  A heavy silence fell. Joe Bob went to the drink machine and got a bottle of Fresca. The faint hissing sound of carbonation was audible as he popped the cap. As Joe Bob sat down again, Hap took a Kleenex from the box next to the cash register, wiped his runny nose, and folded it into the pocket of his greasy overall.

  "What have you found out about Campion?" Vic asked. "Anything? "

  "We're still checking," Joe Bob said with a trace of importance. "His ID says he was from San Diego, but a lot of the stuff in his wallet was two and three years out of date. His driver's license was expired. He had a BankAmericard that was issued in 1986 and that was expired, too. He had an army card so we're checking with them. The captain has a hunch that Campion hadn't lived in San Diego for maybe four years."

  "AWOL?" Vic asked. He produced a big red bandanna, hawked, and spat into it.

  "Dunno yet. But his army card said he was in until 1997, and he was in civvies, and he was with his fambly, and he was a fuck of a long way from California, and listen to my mouth run."

  "Well, I'll get in touch with the others and tell em what you said, anyway," Hap said. "Much obliged."

  Joe Bob stood up. "Sure. Just keep my name out of it. I sure wouldn't want to lose my job. Your buddies don't need to know who tipped you, do they?"

  "No," Hap said, and Vic echoed it.

  As Joe Bob went to the door, Hap said a little apologetically: "That's five even for gas, Joe Bob. I hate to charge you, but with things the way they are--"

  "That's okay." Joe Bob handed him a credit card. "State's payin. And I got my credit slip to show why I was here."

  While Hap was filling out the slip he sneezed twice.

  "You want to watch that," Joe Bob said. "Nothin any worse than a summer cold."

  "Don't I know it."

  Suddenly, from behind them, Vic said: "Maybe it ain't a cold."

  They turned to him. Vic looked frightened.

  "I woke up this morning sneezin and hackin away like sixty," Vic said. "Had a mean headache, too. I took some aspirins and it's gone back some, but I'm still full of snot. Maybe we're coming down with it. What that Campion had. What he died of."

  Hap looked at him for a long time, and as he was about to put forward all his reasons why it couldn't be, he sneezed again.

  Joe Bob looked at them both gravely for a moment and then said, "You know, it might not be such a bad idea to close the station, Hap. Just for today."

  Hap looked at him, scared, and tried to remember what all his reasons had been. He couldn't think of a one. All he could remember was that he had also awakened with a headache and a runny nose. Well, everyone caught a cold once in a while. But before that guy Campion had shown up, he had been fine. Just fine.

  The three Hodges kids were six, four, and eighteen months. The two youngest were taking naps, and the oldest was out back digging a hole. Lila Bruett was in the living room, watching "The Young and the Restless. " She hoped Sally wouldn't return until it was over. Ralph Hodges had bought a big color TV when times had been better in Arnette, and Lila loved to watch the afternoon stories in color. Everything was so much prettier.

  She drew on her cigarette and then let the smoke out in spasms as a racking cough seized her. She went into the kitchen and spat the mouthful of crap she had brought up down the drain. She had gotten up with the cough, and all day it had felt like someone was tickling the back of her throat with a feather.

  She went back to the living room after taking a peek out the pantry window to make sure Bert Hodges was okay. A commercial was on now, two dancing bottles of toilet bowl cleaner. Lila let her eyes drift around the room and wished her own house looked this nice. Sally's hobby was doing paint-by-the-numbers pictures of Christ, and they were all over the living room in nice frames. She especially liked the big one of the Last Supper mounted in back of the TV; it had come with sixty different oil colors, Sally had told her, and it took almost three months to finish. It was a real work of art.

  Just as her story came back on, Baby Cheryl started to cry, a whooping, ugly yell broken by bursts of coughing.

  Lila put out her cigarette and hurried into the bedroom. Eva, the four-year-old, was still fast asleep, but Cheryl was lying on her back in her crib, and her face was going an alarming purple color. Her cries began to sound strangled.

  Lila, who was not afraid of the croup after seeing both of her own through bouts with it, picked her up by the heels and swatted her firmly on the back. She had no idea if Dr. Spock recommended this sort of treatment or not, because she had never read him. It worked nicely on Baby Cheryl. She emitted a froggy croak and suddenly spat an amazing wad of yellow phlegm out onto the floor.

  "Better?" Lila asked.

  "Yeth," said Baby Cheryl. She was almost asleep again.

  Lila wiped up the mess with a Kleenex. She couldn't remember ever having seen a baby cough up so much snot all at once.

  She sat down in front of "The Young and the Restless" again, frowning. She lit another cigarette, sneezed over the first puff, and then began to cough herself.

  CHAPTER 4

  It was an hour past nightfall.

  Starkey sat alone at a long table, sifting through sheets of yellow flimsy. Their contents dismayed him. He had been serving his country for thirty-six years, beginning as a scared West Point plebe. He had won medals. He had spoken with Presidents, had offered them advice, and on occasion his advice had been taken. He had been through dark moments before, plenty of them, but this ...

  He was scared, so deeply scared he hardly dared admit it to himself. It was the kind of fear that could drive you mad.

  On impulse he got up and went to the wall where the five blank TV monitors looked into the room. As he got up, his knee bumped the table, causing one of the sheets of flimsy to fall off the edge. It seesawed lazily down through the mechanically purified air and landed on the tile, half in the table's shadow and half out. Someone standing over it and looking down would have seen this:

  OT CONFIRMED

  SEEMS REASONABLY

  STRAIN CODED 848-AB

  CAMPION, (W.) SALLY

  ANTIGEN SHIFT AND MUTATION.

  HIGH RISK/EXCESS MORTALITY

  AND COMMUNICABILITY ESTIMATED

  REPEAT 99.4%. ATLANTA PLAGUE CENTER

  UNDERSTANDS. TOP SECRET BLUE FOLDER.

  ENDS

  P-T-222312A

  Starkey pushed a button under the middle screen and the picture flashed on with the unnerving suddenness of solid state components. It showed the western California desert, looking east. It was desolate, and the desolation was rendered eerie by the reddish-purple tinge of infrared photography.

  It's out there, straight ahead, Starkey thought. Project Blue.

  The fright tried to wash over him again. He reached into his pocket and brought out a blue pill. What his daughter would call a "downer." Names didn't matter; results did. He dry-swallowed it, his hard, un-seamed face wrinkling for a moment as it went down.

  Project Blue.

  He looked at the other blank monitors, and then punched up pictures on all of them. 4 and 5 showed labs. 4 was physics, 5 was viral biology. The vi-bi lab was full of animal cages, mostly for guinea pigs, rhesus monkeys, and a few dogs. None of them appeared to be sleeping. In the physics lab a small centrifuge was still turning around and around. Starkey had complained about that. He had complained bitterly. There was something spooky about that centrifuge whirling gaily around and around and around while Dr. Ezwick lay dead on the floor nearby, sprawled out like a scarecrow that had tipped over in a high wind.

  They had explained to him that the centrifuge was on the same circuit as the lights, and if they turned off the centrifuge, the lights would go, too. And the cameras down there were not equipped for infrared. Starkey understood. Some more brass might come down from Washington and want to look at the dead Nobel Prize winner who was lying four hundred feet under the desert less than a mile away. If we turn off the centrifuge, we turn off the professor. Element
ary. What his daughter would have called a "Catch-22."

  He took another "downer" and looked into monitor 2. This was the one he liked least of all. He didn't like the man with his face in the soup. Suppose someone walked up to you and said: You will spend eternity with your phiz in a bowl of soup. It's like the old pie-in-the-face routine: it stops being funny when it starts being you.

  Monitor 2 showed the Project Blue cafeteria. The accident had occurred almost perfectly between shifts, and the cafeteria had been only lightly populated. He supposed it hadn't mattered much to them, whether they had died in the cafeteria or in their bedrooms or their labs. Still, the man with his face in the soup ...

  A man and a woman in blue coveralls were crumpled at the foot of the candy machine. A man in a white coverall lay beside the Seeburg jukebox. At the tables themselves were nine men and fourteen women, some of them slumped beside Hostess Twinkies, some with spilled cups of Coke and Sprite still clutched in their stiff hands. And at the second table, near the end, there was a man who had been identified as Frank D. Bruce. His face was in a bowl of what appeared to be Campbell's Chunky Sirloin Soup.

  The first monitor showed only a digital clock. Until June 13, all the numbers on that clock had been green. Now they had turned bright red. They had stopped. The figures read 06:13:90:02:37:16.

  June 13, 1990. Thirty-seven minutes past two in the morning. And sixteen seconds.

  From behind him came a brief burring noise.

  Starkey turned off the monitors one by one and then turned around. He saw the sheet of flimsy on the floor and put it back on the table.

  "Come."

  It was Creighton. He looked grave and his skin was a slaty color. More bad news, Starkey thought serenely. Someone else has taken a long high dive into a cold bowl of Chunky Sirloin Soup.

  "Hi, Len," he said quietly.

  Len Creighton nodded. "Billy. This ... Christ, I don't know how to tell you."

  "I think one word at a time might go best, soldier."

  "Those men who handled Campion's body are through their prelims at Atlanta, and the news isn't good."

  "All of them?"

  "Five for sure. There's one--his name is Stuart Redman--who's negative so far. But as far as we can tell, Campion himself was negative for over fifty hours."

  "If only Campion hadn't run," Starkey said. "That was sloppy security, Len. Very sloppy."

  Creighton nodded.

  "Go on."

  "Arnette has been quarantined. We've isolated at least sixteen cases of constantly shifting A-Prime flu there so far. And those are just the overt ones".

  "The news media?"

  "So far, no problem. They believe it's anthrax."

  "What else?"

  "One very serious problem. We have a Texas highway patrolman named Joseph Robert Brentwood. His cousin owns the gas station where Campion ended up. He dropped by yesterday morning to tell Hapscomb the health people were coming. We picked him up three hours ago and he's en route to Atlanta now. In the meantime he's been patrolling half of East Texas. God knows how many people he's been in contact with."

  "Oh, shit," Starkey said, and was appalled by the watery weakness in his voice and the skin-crawl that had started near the base of his testicles and was now working up into his belly. 99.4% communicability, he thought. It played insanely over and over in his mind. And that meant 99.4% excess mortality, because the human body couldn't produce the antibodies necessary to stop a constantly shifting antigen virus. Every time the body did produce the right antibody, the virus simply shifted to a slightly new form. For the same reason a vaccine was going to be almost impossible to create.

  99.4%.

  "Christ," he said. "That's it?"

  "Well--"

  "Go on. Finish."

  Softly, then, Creighton said: "Hammer's dead, Billy. Suicide. He shot himself in the eye with his service pistol. The Project Blue specs were on his desk. I guess he thought leaving them there was all the suicide note anybody would need."

  Starkey closed his eyes. Vic Hammer was ... had been ... his son-in-law. How was he supposed to tell Cynthia about this? I'm sorry, Cindy. Vic took a high dive into a cold bowl of soup today. Here, have a "downer." You see, there was a goof. Somebody made a mistake with a box. Somebody else forgot to pull a switch that would have sealed off the base. The lag was only forty-some seconds, but it was enough. The box is known in the trade as a "sniffer." It's made in Portland, Oregon, Defense Department Contract 164480966. The boxes are put together in separate circuits by female technicians, and they do it that way so none of them really know what they're doing. One of them was maybe thinking about what to make for supper, and whoever was supposed to check her work was maybe thinking about trading the family car. Anyway, Cindy, the last coincidence was that a man at the Number Four security post, a man named Campion, saw the numbers go red just in time to get out of the room before the doors shut and mag-locked. Then he got his family and ran. He drove through the main gate just four minutes before the sirens started going off and we sealed the whole base. And no one started looking for him until nearly an hour later because there are no monitors in the security posts--somewhere along the line you have to stop guarding the guardians or everyone in the world would be a goddam turnkey --and everybody just assumed he was in there, waiting for the sniffers to sort out the clean areas from the dirty ones. So he got him some running room and he was smart enough to use the ranch trails and lucky enough not to pick any of the ones where his car could get bogged down. Then someone had to make a command decision on whether or not to bring in the State Police, the FBI, or both of them and that fabled buck got passed hither, thither, and yon, and by the time someone decided the Shop ought to handle it, this happy asshole--this happy diseased asshole--had gotten to Texas, and when they finally caught him he wasn't running anymore because he and his wife and his baby daughter were all laid out on cooling boards in some pissant little town called Braintree. Braintree, Texas. Anyway, Cindy, what I'm trying to say is that this was a chain of coincidence on the order of winning the Irish Sweepstakes. With a little incompetence thrown in for good luck--for bad luck, I mean, please excuse me--but mostly it was just a thing that happened. None of it was your man's fault. But he was the head of the project, and he saw the situation start to escalate, and then--

  "Thanks, Len," he said.

  "Billy, would you like--"

  "I'll be up in ten minutes. I want you to schedule a general staff meeting fifteen minutes from now. If they're in bed, kick em out."

  "Yes, sir."

  "And Len ..."

  "Yes?"

  "I'm glad you were the one who told me."

  "Yes, sir."

  Creighton left. Starkey glanced at his watch, then walked over to the monitors set into the wall. He turned on 2, put his hands behind his back, and stared thoughtfully into Project Blue's silent cafeteria.

  CHAPTER 5

  Larry Underwood pulled around the corner and found a parking space big enough for the Datsun Z between a fire hydrant and somebody's trash can that had fallen into the gutter. There was something unpleasant in the trash can and Larry tried to tell himself that he really hadn't seen the stiffening dead cat and the rat gnawing at its white-furred belly. The rat was gone so fast from the sweep of his headlights that it really might not have been there. The cat, however, was fixed in stasis. And, he supposed, killing the Z's engine, if you believed in one you had to believe in the other. Didn't they say that Paris had the biggest rat population in the world? All those old sewers. But New York did well, too. And if he remembered his misspent youth well enough, not all the rats in New York City went on four legs. And what the hell was he doing parked in front of this decaying brownstone, thinking about rats anyway?

  Five days ago, on June 14, he had been in sunny Southern California, home of hopheads, freak religions, the only c/w nightclubs in the world with gogo dancers, and Disneyland. This morning at quarter of four he had arrived on the shore of the other ocean, payi
ng his toll to go across the Triborough Bridge. A sullen drizzle had been falling. Only in New York can an early summer drizzle seem so unrepentantly sullen. Larry could see the drops accreting on the Z's windshield now, as intimations of dawn began to creep into the eastern sky.

  Dear New York: I've come home.

  Maybe the Yankees were in town. That might make the trip worthwhile. Take the subway up to the Stadium, drink beer, eat hotdogs, and watch the Yankees wallop the piss out of Cleveland or Boston ...

  His thoughts drifted off and when he wandered back to them he saw that the light had gotten much stronger. The dashboard clock read 6:05. He had been dozing. The rat had been real, he saw. The rat was back. The rat had dug himself quite a hole in the dead cat's guts. Larry's empty stomach did a slow forward roll. He considered beeping the horn to scare it away for good, but the sleeping brownstones with their empty garbage cans standing sentinel duty daunted him.

  He slouched lower in the bucket seat so he wouldn't have to watch the rat eating breakfast. Just a bite, my good man, and then back to the subway system. Going out to Yankee Stadium this evening? Perhaps I'll see you, old chum. Although I really doubt that you'll see me.

  The front of the building had been defaced with spray can slogans, cryptic and ominous: CHICO 116, ZORRO 93, LITTLE ABIE #1! When he had been a boy, before his father died, this had been a good neighborhood. Two stone dogs had guarded the steps leading up to the double doors. A year before he took off for the coast, vandals had demolished the one on the right from the forepaws up. Now they were both entirely gone, except for one rear paw of the left dog. The body it had been called into creation to support had entirely vanished, perhaps decorating some Puerto Rican junkie's crash-pad. Maybe ZORRO 93 or LITTLE ABIE #1! had taken it. Maybe the rats had carried it away to some deserted subway tunnel one dark night. For all he knew, maybe they had taken his mother along, too. He supposed he should at least climb the steps and make sure her name was still there under the Apartment 15 mailbox, but he was too tired.

  No, he would just sit here and nod off, trusting to the last residue of reds in his system to wake him up around seven. Then he would go see if his mother still lived here. Maybe it would be best if she was gone. Maybe then he wouldn't even bother with the Yankees. Maybe he would just check into the Biltmore, sleep for three days, and then head back into the golden West. In this light, in this drizzle, with his legs and head still throbbing from the bringdown, New York had all the charm of a dead whore.