Mithridates’ grocery was closed, iron bars across the front doors. She peered through the bars on the windows, wondering if there was any way to get in, and thought of the service entrance on the other side. The door there hung slightly ajar, a great heavy black metal-sheathed thing she had to heave with all her might to push open farther. She felt it catch and let it go, watching it for an instant to make sure it would stay open. In the service corridor, she stepped over another pile of clothes, topped by a grocer’s apron, and pushed through double swinging doors into the deserted grocery.
Methodically, Suzy went to the front of the store and pulled out a rickety shopping cart. A computer cash register ticket clung to the bottom of the basket with a leaf of very old lettuce. She wobbled the cart down the aisles, picking out what she hoped was a sensible array of foods. Her usual eating habits were not the best. Even so, she had a better figure than most of the health food and diet fanatics she knew—something in which she took solemn pride.
Canned hams, stew beef in tins, canned chicken, fresh vegetables and fruit (soon to be scarce, she imagined), canned fruit, as many bottles of spring or mineral water as she could fit into a liquor box and wedge into the cart’s lower rack, bread and some slightly stale breakfast rolls, two gallon jugs of milk from the still-cold dairy case. A bottle of aspirin and some shampoo, though she wondered how long the water would come out of the shower tap. Vitamins, a big jar. She tried to find something in the drug shelves which might fight off what had happened to her family—and the mailman and the grocer, and perhaps everybody else. Carefully she read and re- read bottles and instructions on boxes, but nothing seemed appropriate.
Then she pushed the cart up to the cash register, blinked at the aisle and the locked door beyond, and swung her load around. Nobody to pay. She hadn’t brought money anyway. She was halfway toward the back when another thought occurred to her, and she returned to the register.
Where rumor had said it would be, on a shelf above the bag storage bin, was a large heavy black pistol with a long barrel. She fiddled with it carefully pointing it away from her, until she found a way to roll out a cylinder. The gun was loaded with six big bullets.
Suzy didn’t like holding the gun. Her father owned guns and the few times she visited, he always warned her to stay away from them, not even touch them. But guns were for protection, not play, and she didn’t want to play with it, that was for sure. Anyway, she doubted there was anything she could shoot effectively.
“But you never know,” she said. She put the gun in a brown bag and placed it in the upper basket of the cart, then wheeled the cart down the service corridor, over the grocer’s empty clothes and onto the sidewalk.
She stored the food in the foyer and stood with the milk jugs one in each hand, trying to decide whether she wanted to put them in the refrigerator. “They won’t last long if I don’t,” she told herself, assuming a very practical tone. “Oh, God,” she said, shuddering violently. She put down the jugs and wrapped her arms around herself. When she closed her eyes, she saw every kitchen in every home in Brooklyn, filled with empty clothes or dissolving bodies. She leaned against the stair railing and dropped her head into her arms. “Suzy, Suzy,” she whispered. She took a deep breath, straightened, and picked up the jugs. “Here I go,” she said with forced brightness.
The brown sheet had vanished, leaving only the holes in the wall. She opened the refrigerator and wedged the milk jugs into the lower shelf, then inspected what food was available for supper.
The clothes didn’t look right, just lying there. She took the broom and stirred her mother’s dress to see if anything was hidden beneath the folds; nothing was. With forefinger and thumb, she lifted the dress. Slip and panties fell out, and from the edge of the panties peeped a tampon, white and pristine. Something glinted near the collar and she bent to see. Little lumps of gray and gold metal, irregularly shaped.
The answer came to her too quickly, thought out with a panicky kind of brilliance she wasn’t used to.
Fillings. Tooth fillings and gold crowns.
She picked up the clothes and dumped them in the hamper in the service porch. So much for that, she thought. Good-bye Mother and Kenneth and Howard.
Then she swept the floor, pushing the fillings and dust (no dead cockroaches, which was unusual) into a dustpan and dropping them into the trash beside the refrigerator.
“I am the only one,” she said when she was finished. “I am the only one left in Brooklyn. I didn’t get sick.” She stood by the table with an apple in her hand, chewing thoughtfully. “Why?” she asked.
“Because,” she answered, twirling around the kitchen floor, eye going quickly to haunted corners. “Because I am so beautiful, and the devil wants me for his wife.”
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
In the past four days,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, “contact with most of the North American continent has been cut off. The etiology of the disease is not known precisely, but it is apparently passed through every vector known to epidemiologists, and then some. Mr. Bernard’s materials indicate that the components of the disease are themselves intelligent and capable of directed action.”
The visitors in the viewing chamber-Pharmek executives and representatives from four European countries- sat in their folding chairs, faces impassive. Paulsen-Fuchs stood with his back to the three-layer window, facing the officials from France and Denmark. He turned and indicated Bernard, who sat at the desk, tapping its surface lightly with a hand heavily marked by white ridges.
“At great risk, and some foolhardiness, Mr. Bernard has come to West Germany to provide a subject for our experiments. As you can see, our facilities here are well-equipped to keep Mr. Bernard safely isolated, and there is no need for removal to another laboratory or hospital. Such a transfer could, in fact, be very dangerous. We are quite willing to follow outside suggestions on the scientific approach, however.
“Frankly we don’t yet know what sort of experiments to conduct. Tissue samples from Mr. Bernard indicate that the disease—if we should actually call it that—is spreading rapidly throughout his body, yet in no way impairs his functions. In fact, he claims that with the exception of certain peculiar symptoms, to be discussed later, he has never felt better in his life. And it is apparent that his anatomy is being altered substantially.”
“Why hasn’t Mr. Bernard been transformed completely?” asked the representative from Denmark, a young- looking plump man in a black suit, his hair like close-cropped fur. “Our few communications with the United States show that transformation and dissolution takes place within a week of infection.”
“I don’t know,” Bernard said. “My circumstances are not the same as victims in a natural environment. Perhaps the organisms in my body are aware that it would do them no good to complete the transformation.”
The dismay on their faces showed they were still not used to the concept of noocytes. Or perhaps they simply did not believe.
Paulsen-Fuchs continued the discussion, but Bernard closed his eyes and tried to shut the visitors out. It was worse than he had imagined; in just four days, he had been subjected—politely enough, and with great concern—to fourteen such meetings, to a battery of tests conducted through the sliding panel, to questions about every aspect of his life, past, present, private and public. He was the center of a secondary shock wave spreading around the world—the wave of reaction to what had happened in North America.
He had gotten out just in time. The etiology of the plague had altered drastically and now followed several patterns, or perhaps no pattern at all; it was possible the organisms reacted to their environment and altered their methods accordingly. Thus, large cities tended to be silenced immediately, most or all of their citizens being infected and transformed within forty-eight hours. Outlying towns and rural areas, perhaps because of a lack of common sewage and water systems, were affected less rapidly. Spread of the plague to these areas appeared to proceed through animal and insect vectors as well as direct human contact
Infrared pictures taken by Landsats and spy satellites, processed and interpreted by countries like Japan and Great Britain, showed incipient changes even in the forests and waterways of North America.
Already, he felt like Michael Bernard no longer existed. He had been swallowed up in something larger and far more impressive, and now he was on display in a museum, tagged and curiously enough, able to talk back. Ex- neurosurgeon, male, once well-known and wealthy, not very active of late, caught in social whirl and with scads of money to spend from lecture tours, book royalties, appearances in motion pictures…
It seemed quite possible that Michael Bernard hadn’t existed for six years, having vanished sometime after he last applied scalpel to flesh, drill to skull.
He opened his eyes and saw the men and one woman in the chambers.
