‘Oh God,’ said Adelaide hoarsely. ‘What are we going to do?’
Dr. Petrie stretched his aching back, and shrugged. ‘There’s nothing we can do. Maybe there’s a turnoff someplace up ahead, and we can try to make it across country.’
The jam was made even more hideous as drivers died from plague at the wheels of their cars. Dr. Petrie saw wives and children mouthing frantic appeals for help through the windows of their cars, but the vehicles were now locked so solidly together that no one could open a car door. Anyway, every family was keeping itself strictly quarantined inside its own cell, and no one would risk infecting himself by going to assist anyone else.
It was the ultimate experience in American hostility, but perhaps it was also the ultimate experience in American togetherness, too, for the drivers and families who died inside their cars were not left behind or abandoned, but irresistibly pushed forward by the crushing metallic weight of the living refugees behind them.
Adelaide slept for two hours, and when she woke up she looked a little better. As they bumped and rolled gradually northwards, she made them a lunch of franks and canned mixed vegetables, and they drank Coke and orange juice. Police helicopters flackered noisily overhead, warning drivers who felt unwell to try and pull off the highway. There was no way they were going to be able to halt the exodus of plague survivors, and they didn’t even try.
Inside the chilled confines of their air-conditioned car, Dr. Petrie and Adelaide and Prickles were shunted northwards in a curious dream. Trees and road signs went past so slowly and gradually that they grew tired of looking at them, tired of reading them. As far as they could see ahead, there was nothing but a wide river of car rooftops, wavering in the afternoon heat. Behind them, the same endless press.
The convoy’s progress was further hampered by cars that had broken down or run out of gas, and had no way of filling up again. Only the slow-boiling fear of plague kept the immense and agonized jam inching forward. Dr. Petrie saw an old Buick that had immovably seized up being deliberately shunted off the highway by the cars around it. It overturned and rolled down a dusty embankment, with its family trapped inside it. And there was nothing anyone could do to help.
They began to pick up radio broadcasts. They were faint and crackly at first, and it was plain they were coming from a long distance. Adelaide identified them first. They were news programs from Washington D.C., distorted and faded by the intervening peaks of the Appalachians.
Eventually, though, they began to gain altitude, and as they did so the radio bulletins became clearer.
‘… so far, there have been no reported outbreaks of disease any further north than Wildwood, on Cape May, New Jersey, but more than seventy miles of beaches on Long Island’s south shore were closed just before noon this morning because of sewage that has been washing ashore for the past week. Bathing has been prohibited from Long Beach, practically next door to the Rockaways in Queens, all the way east to the western edge of the Hamptons in Suffolk County.
‘Inland, two cases of plague have been reported in Baltimore, and further south the disease has taken a serious grip on Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and parts of Maryland. The President is remaining in Washington against the advice of his aides, but it is understood that he is strictly quarantined, and that a helicopter waits on the White House lawn for possible evacuation measures…
‘The Special Epidemic Commission set up yesterday by the President at a moment’s notice has declared New York City a primary quarantine zone, on account of the density of its population and the seriousness of a possible outbreak of plague there… Accordingly, all access to Manhattan Island will be filtered and controlled by paramedic teams, and if necessary the entire island will be sealed off from outside contact…’
Dr. Petrie switched off. He wiggled his fingers to ease the cramp in them, and said, ‘It looks bad. Maybe we ought to head west. Once we’re through Atlanta, we could head for Birmingham or Chattanooga.’
Adelaide said nothing. Dr. Petrie swore as the car behind them, a big bronze Mercury, nudged their Delta 88 in the rear bumper for the twentieth time.
Prickles, who had been dozing on the back seat, opened her eyes sleepily and said, ‘Is it time for Batman?’
Dr. Petrie shook his head. ‘No Batman tonight, honey. We’re still stuck in all these cars.’
Prickles stared out of the window, disappointed. ‘Can’t we go home now?’ she asked him.
Dr. Petrie reached over and took her hand. ‘We can’t go home for a long time, darling. But what we’re going to do is find ourselves a new home. You and me and Adelaide. Isn’t that right, Adelaide?’
Adelaide turned and looked at him listlessly. ‘Whatever you say, Leonard.’
Prickles was satisfied by that answer, but Dr. Petrie wasn’t. As Adelaide turned away again, he said, ‘Adelaide, love, that’s not like you. Not like you at all.’
She kept her face away. Outside, the afternoon shadows were beginning to lengthen.
‘What’s not like me?’ she said, as if her mind were on something else altogether.
‘Agreeing with me, just like that. You normally refuse to do what I want, on principle.’
She stared at the floor of the car. ‘Well,’ she whispered. ‘Things change, don’t they?’
‘Like what?’
‘Sometimes
