sub-launched Indian cruise missiles, fat capacious cargo drones that flew a leisurely mach 0.7 from the Mexican Gulf toward Virginia, voiding trails of deadly paranthrax spores as they passed over agrarian centers. Macon, High Point, and Roanoke typified the targets.
Though American epidemiologists did not yet know it, pulmonary paranthrax spread fast because still- ambulatory victims spread the microbes in their exhalations. As active bacilli or after sporulation on contact with air, the disease was literally designed to spread into the countryside.
The region west of the Appalachians had been spared immediate effects of paranthrax because the Pensacola bomb did not arrive until two flights of old Marine Sea Harriers scrambled from there, following sonar contacts to the surfaced Indian subs in the Gulf. In the brief engagement, one sub dived after launching five of its fat birds. Our Harriers shot down three of them; the other two spread death.
The second sub was caught with its panels down as it readied the first of its missiles intended for Mississippi, Tennessee,and Kentucky. Despite direct hits on its deck pods with One-eye missiles, the sub might have escaped but for the act for which Marine Captain Darryl Tunbridge won his Medal of Honor. Tunbridge, a flight instructor whose Harrier was equipped with depth charges, used the hover mode of his sturdy old Harrier as he watched tracers climb past his wing. He marveled at the valiant Indian gunner's mate who manned the quad one- cm, antiaircraft guns while his own decks were awash; did not pause to wonder at his own risk as he overtook the diving sub at fifty knots, hanging almost dead overhead, feeling the shudder of one-cm, slugs in his fuel tanks, dropping his depth charges while virtually scraping the sub's squat conning tower. The Harrier faltered as the sub's bow, impelled by two mighty blasts, rose from the water.
Captain Tunbridge's honor was posthumous, but that sub would never launch a missile from her permanent rest at 330 fathoms.
We soon realized our debt to the Pensacola Harriers. We needed more time to discover just how virulently effective were the two cruise missiles that got through. Had the disease spread from farmlands toward agrarian centers, we could have organized teams to distribute penicillin, chlortetracy-cline, erythromycin. Once those centers were fighting for their lives while evacuees fled to spread the epidemic, there was little hope for the nearby farmlands. There was not enough disinfectant on earth to cleanse ten thousand square klicks of grass.
'I think I got out of Spartanburg in time,' Abby sighed. 'First symptom is usually skin itch, followed by open sores that don't hurt much, with swelling. The fever and pains in the joints don't begin 'til later.'
'Lordy; makes me itch just to think about it.'
She lent him a vexed glance. 'Do tell,' she said, and scratched herself. 'Hand me the Clorox.'
He watched her dampen a face tissue, dab it to cuticles; imitated her; stowed the jug of bleach.' 'This all we can do?'
'Until we can get antibiotics. This may not do much good but from what I've read, it's a start. The things I couldn't find at my apartment were antibiotics and thirty-eight cartridges.'
'Oh well; six shots are more'n you need,' he said.
'You don't get it, Ted. I don't have even one.'
Long pause. 'You faced those bastards down with an empty gun?'
'
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jane Osborne's two-bedroom bungalow lay on the outskirts of Oak Ridge near the museum. She did not answer Abby's calls. They saw a neighbor peering from a shuttered window. He refused to answer their hails. They decided against going into the house until after their self-imposed quarantine. But in the detached garage was Abby's storage and, 'I've got medicine and an old TV in there,' she explained. They wrestled with musty cartons in the garage. The garage lights worked, and Abby immediately plugged the Chevy's recharger into a garage socket. Abby's penicillin was long outdated, but they shared the half-dozen tabs.
Without cable connections, they had only two available TV channels, curiously flat without holovision. They learned that Memphis and Tullahoma fallout did not yet seriously threaten the Oak Ridge area, though local background count had risen as particles drifted down from the stratospheric Jetstream. There were no pictures of gutted cities; the news was vague and optimistic. An old public service announcement illustrated how a basement room could be protected against modest fallout by taping cracks, blocking windows with books, and shoveling dirt shin-deep onto the floor above.
'Jane's house doesn't lend itself very well to that,' Abby judged, lighting a candle amid spectacular sunset reflections. “We 'll be better off in the tunnels. I 'm sure Jane can get you in with us.'
They elected to eat the canned food in the garage. It was Quantrill who realized that a sparing rinse in bleach, followed by a soaping and rinse from a garden hose, might disinfect them externally. They soaked their clothes as well, rinsing them outdoors in darkness, joking about the effects of bleach to decoy their attention from their mutual and necessary nudity.
But jokes were not equal to the dimly-outlined grace of Abby Drummond. He held the hose as she rinsed her dark shoulder-length hair and erred in thinking that her eyes were closed. He saw the gentle curve of her buttocks, the faint pendulous sway of foam-flecked teats, the effulgent gleam of water on her thighs, and turned slightly away from Abby as his desire had its usual effect. In silhouette, his erection was now a gravity-defying flag.
She wrung her hair dry, squatting, as he turned the stream of water on himself. It wasn't exactly a cold shower, but… 'I've been thinking, 'she said, and took the hose and soap from him. “We've done a lot for each other in the past twelve hours. Let's not stop now.'
She began to lather the small of his back, both of them squatting in the grass, and gradually her hand scrubbed to the back of his thighs. Quantrill held his breath until his ears popped, mesmerized by the soft huskiness of her voice and the progress of that bar of soap. “We could both be sick, or worse, in a week,' she continued. And continued. Now he was breathing quickly, a sense of warmth flooding his loins, rising up the back of his neck. For a moment, Quantrill imagined that his ears must be glowing in the dark.
'Hey; you don't know what you're doing,' he breathed.
'I know exactly what I'm doing,' she insisted, purring it. 'I'm making sure you're nice and clean. And when you're all good and soapy, you can help me clean where I can't do it alone.'
'I think you'd better not,' he said after a moment.
She paused. 'If you really and truly don't want me to,' she said.
His laugh was embarrassed, frank, sorrowful: 'God no, Abby, but in another minute I won't have anything left to, ah, soap you with.'
Again the hand, now both hands, sleekly caressing his belly as she wriggled beneath him. She manipulated him, let him feel the warm accepting cleft that pulsed at the exact tip of his body, resumed rubbing him, now cupping his buttocks. “You take your time, lover,' she said, 'and scrub me out good.'
When he felt some control return Quantrill eased downward, pressed into her carefully, felt her move to accommodate him with small sounds of pleasure. He stopped again, his control ebbing.
'Think of yourself as the rotorooter man,' she said, understanding better than he, 'doing an unpleasant job. Or just think about something else — but not for very long,' she teased. Presently her own breathing quickened and, as he gently swept strands of damp hair from her face, she moved against him in repeated sinuous thrusts.
At last she lay still, stroking his ribcage as he moved above her. 'Penny for your thoughts,' she whispered.
Gruffly: 'Wondering — if the — neighbors — can see,' he said. 'You?'
Insinuating: 'Wondering if you know I've already come.'
The heat in his loins was suddenly a fever. 'Liar.'
'Truth. Yes,' she crooned, then in vehemence, sensing his urgency, 'oh yes; absolutely, please yes,' she said, empathizing the synaptic explosions that thundered down the halls of his mind.
For perhaps a minute they lay communicating their satisfaction with grunts of pleasure, brief kisses that said more about reassurance than of lust. Then she gave his backside a playful slap. 'Now you'll have to scrub me
