Systemic Shock

Quantrill spent the next twenty minutes telling his tale as Abby guided them toward foothills and the outskirts of Maryville, Tennessee. He did not tell her about Tom Schell: least said, soonest forgotten. She seemed to know which side roads to take and, if she was faking her knowledge of their predicament, he decided it was a damned convincing fake. 'Anyway,' he finished his account, 'if I catch anything, you'll have to give it to me.'

Abby chuckled again, saw that he had intended no double-entendre, and slapped the steering wheel as she laughed outright. 'I'll see what I can do,' she said in arch innocence. 'But seriously, I think we got out in time. If we didn't, we'll know by tomorrow, I guess. We probably shouldn't mix with other people for a day or two. The only ethical thing to do, wouldn't you say?'

'You're 'way ahead of me,' he said. 'Jeez, I don't even know where we're going.'

She told him.

'Oak Ridge? Shit-fire, I mean, uh—'

'Whatever turns you on,' she said easily.

'I mean wouldn't that be a prime target?'

'It's just a museum now, Ted; the Union Carbide people ran out of funds years ago. I work there in the summers. My best friend there is Jane Osborne; believe you me, Janie knows the tunnels as well as anybody. Most people don't even know about 'em. Not at the museum, but — well, you'll see. Uh-oh.'

Quantrill saw why she was slowing. Just ahead lay a bridge, barricaded so that only one car could pass. Four men in khaki, all with riot guns, stood guard. 'We can't fight those guys,' he muttered.

'Deputies, I'll bet. Act sleepy, I'll do the talking,' she said, and rolled down the window as she stopped.

The spokesman was middle-aged, kindly, firm. No traffic from the east, he said. 'Official cars only.'

'But I'm from Oak Ridge,' Abby said. 'I am an official.' She selected a card from her bulging wallet as she invoked the phrase with resounding dignity. ' 'The American Museum of Atomic Energy. I only came down to pick up my son here, and bring him back.'

'Back from where,' the man said, no longer so kindly, but jerking his eyes toward Quantrill as he returned the card.

'What's the name of that silly mountain we just left, hon,' she asked, looking brightly at Ted. 'Poor dear, he's been up there only one night alone and so tired he can hardly move. Teddy, answer mother.'

'Uh — Clingman's,' he said, and rubbed his eyes. 'We aren't home yet.' It was a complaint; almost a whine.

'Soon. Go back to sleep.'

A second man, silent until now, had been listening. His age and wedding ring suggested that he might have a family of his own. 'Lady, you had to be crazy to let the boy go camping alone at a time like this. How many anthrax victims has he rubbed up against since yesterday, and why didn't your husband come along?'

'The Lord took my husband, sir,' she said softly. 'And left me only the boy. I promised he could have his little adventure; and Teddy was complaining that he didn't meet anybody up there. I didn't think God would take him away from me when he's all I have — except for my official duties. I do have those; and I'm late.' Not quite a protest.

The older man, ruminatively: 'Those are Georgia plates on your car.'

Without hesitation: 'Georgia plates are cheap, and a widow has to make ends meet. Chief Lawrence in Oak Ridge knows that.'

'I reckon he does,' the younger man laughed, and turned to his companion. 'Look, Sam, they aren't really from across the Smokies — and she is an official. And they haven't had a chance to catch anything. Whaddaya say?'

The older man exhaled slowly, then stood aside. 'What was the name of your police chief again?'

Already rolling, the diesel now warming up to take its share of the load: 'Calvin Lawrence,' Abby said, 'even if I didn't vote for him.'

The man smiled, waved her on, waved again as the Chevy eased onto the bridge. She waved back, then rolled up the window and heaved a sigh of record proportions. 'We're a good team,' she said.

Quantrill: 'You're a great team all by yourself. I almost believed you myself, mom.'

'Mom your ass,' she squealed, and backhanded his shoulder lightly. 'I'm thirty-four years old, fella. In the right clothes I could pass as your hotsy.'

'I think you could pass for any damn' thing you wanted

'And why not? I didn't tell you what my profession is, nine months a year.'

Slyly: 'Does it involve lying to deputies a lot?'

'By God, but you're getting cocky! What I do, is cause the willing suspension of disbelief.'

'I believe it,' he said quickly.

'You have some good lines, inside and out,' she winked. 'Anyway, — I teach drama at a junior college.'

'You really a widow?'

'Of the grass variety. Twice. I like macho men, but I don't like to be directed, I like to direct.' She glanced at him again, laughed again. “Mom your ass,' she repeated, laughing.

When she laughed, Abby Drummond seemed more like thirty than forty. Quantrill decided the tan and the strong muscular lines had led him astray, then reflected that she could be almost any age. All that play-acting might let her be anything she liked. To anybody. Suddenly he was aware of the first stirrings of an erection. 'You and that deputy both mentioned anthrax,' he said quickly. 'Tell me about it; I thought it was a cattle disease.'

Chapter Twenty-Five

Abby Drummond had felt secure in Spartanburg until (she told Quantrill) Monday night after she snapped off her holo set and spent an hour reading De Kruif, the Britannica, and other snippets from her small library. Anthrax was one of the few diseases with an epizootic potential that included not only cattle but swine, sheep, horses, domestic pets — and the domesticator as well. Isolated by Koch in 1876 and fought with Pasteur's vaccine in 1881, anthrax in its original form was well-known.

If breathed, anthrax spores caused pulmonary infection that advanced within days to lethal hemoptysis — hemorrhagic pneumonia. Human victims might tremble and fight for breath before the convulsions and the bloody froth at the mouth, or they might just succumb quickly and quietly.

Introduced into a skin abrasion, B. anthracis produced a large carbuncle with an ugly necrotic center which soon fed ravenous microbes into the bloodstream where, without prompt treatment, septicemia led to meningitis and usually death. Ingested, the bug was just as deadly. Consumption of anthrax-killed beef was not a very popular form of suicide, but a little dab would do you.

Toxoids, proteins produced from the bacterial toxins, could provide immunity. Antibiotics might halt the progress of the disease. If there was one optimistic note to be struck in this dirge, it was that recovery from anthrax usually meant permanent immunity.

On the other hand were four murderous fingers. Anthrax was so contagious that a corpse could infect the living. Onset of the disease led to death so quickly that treatment often came too late. The bacillus reverted to spores that could lie in lethal wait for a host, sometimes for years in open fields. Finally there came the fact that, within hours after Indian craft dispersed the disease, the Surgeon General's office announced that a new, more virulent and invasive strain of the bacillus was involved.

The defunct USSR, in 1980, had succeeded too well in developing a modified B. anthracis in one of its bacteriological warfare centers near Sverdlovsk. And had failed miserably to contain it, resulting in the now-famed Sverdlovsk scare that killed scores of citizens and further curtailed the supply of local beef while Tass News Agency denied the obvious. Sverdlovsk had been lucky; the distribution of its anthrax had been meagre, accidental, and vigorously fought. Unlike the farmlands of the southeastern US in 1996.

The SinoInd delivery system took a multiplex approach to the problem of vectoring the disease. To start with, paran-thrax spores were much smaller than those of the original bacilli; a cubic centimeter of them could be dispersed fifty times more widely for the same effect, because they multiplied faster. The dispersal method was by