people who had been holding conversations in his mind. One of the figures, a man in doctor’s whites, was gesturing urgently to someone outside Vic’s field of vision, but Vic was already over his scare. He was too weak to stay scared long. But the sudden fright that had come with the silent bloom of light and this vision of staring faces (like a jury of ghosts in their hospital whites) had cleared away some of the blockage in his mind and he knew where he was. Atlanta. Atlanta, Georgia. They had come and taken him away—him and Hap and Norm and Norm’s wife and Norm’s kids. They had taken Hank Carmichael. Stu Redman. God alone knew how many others. Vic had been scared and indignant. Sure, he had the snuffles and sneezes, but he surely wasn’t coming down with cholera or whatever it was that poor man Campion and his family had had. He’d been running a low-grade fever, too, and he remembered that Norm Bruett had stumbled and needed help getting up the steps to the plane. His wife had been scared, crying, and little Bobby Bruett had been crying too—crying and coughing. A raspy, croupy cough. The plane had been at the small landing strip outside of Braintree, but to get beyond the Arnette town limits they had had to pass a roadblock on US 93, and men had been stringing bobwire… stringing bobwire right out into the desert…
A red light flashed on over the strange door. There was a hissing sound, then a sound like a pump running. When it kicked off, the door opened. The man who came in was dressed in a huge white pressure suit with a transparent faceplate. Behind the faceplate, the man’s head bobbed like a balloon enclosed in a capsule. There were pressure tanks on his back, and when he spoke, his voice was metallic and clipped, devoid of all human quality. It might have been a voice coming from one of those video games, like the one that said “Try again, Space Cadet” when you fucked up your last go.
It rasped: “How are you feeling, Mr. Palfrey?”
But Vic couldn’t answer. Vic had gone back down into the green depths. It was his mamma he saw behind the faceplate of the white-suit. Mamma had been dressed in white when Poppa took him and George to see her for the last time in the sanny-tarium. She had to go to the sanny-tarium so everybody else in the fambly wouldn’t catch what she had. TB was catching. You could die.
He talked to his mamma… said he would be good and put in the horse… told her George had taken the funnies… asked her if she felt better… asked her if she thought she would be home soon… and the man in the white-suit gave him a shot and he sank deeper and his words became incoherent. The man in the white-suit glanced back at the faces behind the glass wall and shook his head.
He clicked an intercom switch inside his helmet with his chin and said, “If this one doesn’t work, we’ll lose him by midnight.”
For Vic Palfrey, magic hour was over.
“Just roll up your sleeve, Mr. Redman,” the pretty nurse with the dark hair said. “This won’t take a minute.” She was holding the blood pressure cuff in two gloved hands. Behind the plastic mask she was smiling as if they shared an amusing secret.
“No,” Stu said.
The smile faltered a little. “It’s only your blood pressure. It won’t take a minute.”
“No.”
“Doctor’s orders,” she said, becoming businesslike. “Please.”
“If it’s doctor’s orders, let me talk to the doctor.”
“I’m afraid he’s busy right now. If you’ll just—”
“I’ll wait,” Stu said equably, making no move to unbutton the cuff of his shirtsleeve.
“This is only my job. You don’t want me to get in trouble, do you?” This time she gave him a charming-waif smile. “If you’ll only let me—”
“I won’t,” Stu said. “Go back and tell them. They’ll send somebody.”
Looking troubled, the nurse went across to the steel door and turned a square key in a lockplate. The pump kicked on, the door shooshed open, and she stepped through. As it closed, she gave Stu a final reproachful look. Stu gazed back blandly.
When the door was closed, he got up and went restlessly to the window—double-paned glass and barred on the outside—but it was full dark now and there was nothing to see. He went back and sat down. He was wearing faded jeans and a checked shirt and his brown boots with the stitching beginning to bulge up the sides. He ran a hand up the side of his face and winced disapprovingly at the prickle. They wouldn’t let him shave, and he haired up fast.
He had no objection to the tests themselves. What he objected to was being kept in the dark, kept scared. He wasn’t sick, at least not yet, but scared plenty. There was some sort of snow job going on here, and he wasn’t going to be a party to it anymore until somebody told him something about what had happened in Arnette and what that fellow Campion had to do with it. At least then he could base his fears on something solid.
They had expected him to ask before now, he could read it in their eyes. They had certain ways of keeping things from you in hospitals. Four years ago his wife had died of cancer at the age of twenty-seven, it had started in her womb and then just raced up through her like wildfire, and Stu had observed the way they got around her questions, either by changing the subject or giving her information in large, technical lumps. So he simply hadn’t asked, and he could see it had worried them. Now it was time to ask, and he would get some answers. In words of one syllable.
He could fill in some of the blank spots on his own. Campion and his wife and child had something pretty bad. It hit you like the flu or a summer cold, only it kept on getting worse, presumably until you choked to death on your own snot or until the fever burned you down. It was highly contagious.
They had come and got him on the afternoon of the seventeenth, two days ago. Four army men and a doctor. Polite but firm. There was no question of declining; all four of the army men had been wearing sidearms. That was when Stu Redman started being seriously scared.
There had been a regular caravan going out of Arnette and over to the airstrip in Braintree. Stu had been riding with Vic Palfrey, Hap, the Bruetts, Hank Carmichael and his wife, and two army non-coins. They were all crammed into an army station wagon, and the army guys wouldn’t say aye, nay, or maybe no matter how hysterical Lila Bruett got.
The other wagons were crammed, too. Stu hadn’t seen all the people in them, but he had seen all five of the Hodges family, and Chris Ortega, brother of Carlos, the volunteer ambulance driver. Chris was the bartender down at the Indian Head. He had seen Parker Nason and his wife, the elderly people from the trailer park near Stu’s house. Stu guessed that they had netted up everyone who had been in the gas station and everyone that the people from the gas station said they’d talked to since Campion crashed into the pumps.
At the town limits there had been two olive-green trucks blocking the road. Stu guessed the other roads going into Arnette were most likely blocked off, too. They were stringing barbed wire, and when they had the town fenced off they would probably post sentries.
So it was serious. Deadly serious.
He sat patiently in the chair by the hospital bed he hadn’t had to use, waiting for the nurse to bring someone. The first someone would most likely be no one. Maybe by morning they would finally send in a someone who would have enough authority to tell him the things he needed to know. He could wait. Patience had always been Stuart Redman’s strong suit.
For something to do, he began to tick over the conditions of the people who had ridden to the airstrip with him. Norm had been the only obvious sick one. Coughing, bringing up phlegm, feverish. The rest seemed to be suffering to a greater or lesser degree from the common cold. Luke Bruett was sneezing. Lila Bruett and Vic Palfrey had mild coughs. Hap had the sniffles and kept blowing his nose. They hadn’t sounded much different from the first– and second-grade classes Stu remembered attending as a little boy, when at least two thirds of the kids present seemed to have some kind of a bug.
But the thing that scared him most of all—and maybe it was only coincidence—was what had happened just as they were turning onto the airstrip. The army driver had let out three sudden bellowing sneezes. Probably just coincidence. June was a bad time in east-central Texas for people with allergies. Or maybe the driver was just coming down with a common, garden-variety cold instead of the weird shit the rest of them had. Stu wanted to believe that. Because something that could jump from one person to another that quickly…
Their army escort had boarded the plane with them. They rode stolidly, refusing to answer any questions except as to their destination. They were going to Atlanta. They would be told more there (a bald-faced lie). Beyond that, the army men refused to say.
