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When they touched down, there had been four Cadillac limousines waiting for them. The Arnette folks got into three of them. Their army escort had gotten into the fourth. Stu guessed that those good old boys with no wedding rings—or close relatives, probably—were now somewhere right in this building.
The red light went on over his door. When the compressor or pump or whatever it was had stopped, a man in one of the white spacesuits stepped through. Dr. De
“Patty Greer says you gave her some trouble,” De
“No need for her to be,” Stu said easily. It was hard to sound easy, but he felt it was important to hide his fear from this man. De
“I want some answers,” Stu said.
“I’m sorry, but—”
“If you want me to cooperate, give me some answers.”
“In time you will be—”
“I can make it hard for you.”
“We know that,” De
“I guess you’ve been testing my blood. All those needles.”
“That’s right,” De
“What for?”
“Once more, Mr. Redman, I can’t tell you what I don’t know.” The peevish tone was back again, and Stu was inclined to believe him. He was nothing but a glorified technician on this job, and he didn’t like it much.
“They put my home town under quarantine.”
“I know nothing about that, either.” But De
“How come I haven’t seen anything about it?” He pointed to the TV set bolted to the wall.
“I beg your pardon?”
“When they roadblock off a town and put bobwire around it, that’s news,” Stu said.
“Mr. Redman, if you’ll only let Patty take your blood pressure—”
“No. If you want any more from me, you better send two big strong men to get it. And no matter how many you send, I’m go
He made a playful grab at De
“I guess you could feed me something in my food to knock me out, but that’d mix up your tests, wouldn’t it?”
“Mr. Redman, you’re not being reasonable!” De
“Nope,” Stu said. “Right now it looks to me like it’s my country doing me a grave disservice. It’s got me locked up in a hospital room in Georgia with a buttermouth little pissant doctor who doesn’t know shit from Shinola. Get your ass out of here and send somebody in to talk to me or send enough boys to take what you need by force. I’ll fight em, you can count on that.”
He sat perfectly still in his chair after De
He got up and turned on the TV and watched it unseeingly. His fear was big inside him, a runaway elephant. For two days he had been waiting to start sneezing, coughing, hawking black phlegm and spitting it into the commode. He wondered about the others, people he had known all his life. He wondered if any of them were as bad off as Campion had been. He thought of the dead woman and her baby in that old Chevy, and he kept seeing Lila Bruett’s face on the woman and little Cheryl Hodges’s face on the baby.
The TV squawked and crackled. His heart beat slowly in his chest. Faintly, he could hear the sound of an air purifier sighing air into the room. He felt his fear twisting and turning inside him beneath his poker face. Sometimes it was big and panicky, trampling everything: the elephant. Sometimes it was small and gnawing, ripping with sharp teeth: the rat. It was always with him.
But it was forty hours before they sent him a man who would talk…
Chapter 8
On June 18, five hours after he had talked to his cousin Bill Hapscomb, Joe Bob Brentwood pulled down a speeder on Texas Highway 40 about twenty-five miles east of Arnette. The speeder was Harry Trent of Braintree, an insurance man. He had been doing sixty-five miles per in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. Joe Bob gave him a speeding ticket. Trent accepted it humbly and then amused Joe Bob by trying to sell him insurance on his house and his life. Joe Bob felt fine; dying was the last thing on his mind. Nevertheless, he was already a sick man. He had gotten more than gas at Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco. And he gave Harry Trent more than a speeding summons.
Harry, a gregarious man who liked his job, passed the sickness to more than forty people during that day and the next. How many those forty passed it to is impossible to say—you might as well ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If you were to make a conservative estimate of five apiece, you’d have two hundred. Using the same conservative formula, one could say those two hundred went on to infect a thousand, the thousand five thousand, the five thousand twenty -five thousand.
Under the California desert and subsidized by the taxpayers’ money, someone had finally invented a chain letter that really worked. A very lethal chain letter.
On June 19, the day Larry Underwood came home to New York and the day that Fra
On his way out, a station wagon pulled in. There was a roofrack on top, and the wagon was piled high with kids and luggage. The wagon had New York plates and the driver, who rolled down his window to ask Harry how to get to US 21 going north, had a New York accent. Harry gave the New York fellow very clear directions on how to get to Highway 21. He also served him and his entire family their death-warrants without even knowing it.
The New Yorker was Edward M. Norris, lieutenant of police, detective squad, in the Big Apple’s 87th Precinct. This was his first real vacation in five years. He and his family had had a fine time. The kids had been in seventh heaven at Disney World in Orlando, and not knowing the whole family would be dead by the second of July, Norris pla