Hap had been sitting next to Stu on the flight, and he was pretty well sloshed. The plane was army too, strictly functional, but the booze and the food had been first-class airline stuff. Of course, instead of being served by a pretty stewardess, a plank-faced sergeant took your order, but if you could overlook that, you could get along pretty well. Even Lila Bruett had calmed down with a couple of grasshoppers in her.
Hap leaned close, bathing Stu in a warm mist of Scotch fumes. “This is a pretty funny bunch of ole boys, Stuart. Ain’t one of em under fifty, nor one with a weddin ring. Career boys, low rank.”
About half an hour before they touched down, Norm Bruett had some kind of a fainting spell and Lila began to scream. Two of the hard-faced stewards bundled Norm into a blanket and brought him around in fairly short order. Lila, no longer calm, continued to scream. After a while she threw up her grasshoppers and the chicken salad sandwich she had eaten. Two of the good ole boys went expressionlessly about the job of cleaning it up.
“What is all this?” Lila screamed. “What’s wrong with my man? Are we going to die? Are my babies going to die?” She had one “baby” in a headlock under each arm, their heads digging into her plentiful breasts. Luke and Bobby looked frightened and uncomfortable and rather embarrassed at the fuss she was making. “Why won’t somebody answer me? Isn’t this America?”
“Can’t somebody shut her up?” Chris Ortega had grumbled from the back of the plane. “Christly woman’s worse’n a jukebox with a broken record inside it.”
One of the army men had forced a glass of milk on her and Lila
When they touched down, there had been four Cadillac limousines waiting for them. The Arnette folks got into three of them. Their army escort had gotten into the fourth. Stu guessed that those good old boys with no wedding rings—or close relatives, probably—were now somewhere right in this building.
The red light went on over his door. When the compressor or pump or whatever it was had stopped, a man in one of the white spacesuits stepped through. Dr. Denninger. He was young. He had black hair, olive skin, sharp features, and a mealy mouth.
“Patty Greer says you gave her some trouble,” Denninger’s chest-speaker said as he clopped over to Stu. “She’s quite upset.”
“No need for her to be,” Stu said easily. It was hard to sound easy, but he felt it was important to hide his fear from this man. Denninger looked and acted like the kind of man who would ride his help and bullyrag them around but lick up to his superiors like an egg-suck dog. That kind of man could be pushed a ways if he thought you held the whip hand. But if he smelled fear on you, he would hand you the same old cake: a thin icing of “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more” on top and a lot of contempt for stupid civilians who wanted to know more than what was good for them underneath.
“I want some answers,” Stu said.
“I’m sorry, but—”
“If you want me to cooperate, give me some answers.”
“In time you will be—”
“I can make it hard for you.”
“We know that,” Denninger said peevishly. “I simply don’t have the authority to tell you anything, Mr. Redman. I know very little myself.”
“I guess you’ve been testing my blood. All those needles.”
“That’s right,” Denninger said warily.
“What for?”
“Once more, Mr. Redman, I can’t tell you what I don’t know.” The peevish tone was back again, and Stu was inclined to believe him. He was nothing but a glorified technician on this job, and he didn’t like it much.
“They put my home town under quarantine.”
“I know nothing about that, either.” But Denninger cut his eyes away from Stu’s and this time Stu thought he was lying.
“How come I haven’t seen anything about it?” He pointed to the TV set bolted to the wall.
“I beg your pardon?”
“When they roadblock off a town and put bobwire around it, that’s news,” Stu said.
“Mr. Redman, if you’ll only let Patty take your blood pressure—”
“No. If you want any more from me, you better send two big strong men to get it. And no matter how many you send, I’m gonna try to rip some holes in those germ-suits. They don’t look all that strong, you know it?”
He made a playful grab at Denninger’s suit, and Denninger skipped backward and nearly fell over. The speaker of his intercom emitted a terrified squawk and there was a stir behind the double glass.
“I guess you could feed me something in my food to knock me out, but that’d mix up your tests, wouldn’t it?”
“Mr. Redman, you’re not being reasonable!” Denninger was keeping a prudent distance away. “Your lack of cooperation may do your country a grave disservice. Do you understand me?”
“Nope,” Stu said. “Right now it looks to me like it’s my country doing
He sat perfectly still in his chair after Denninger left. The nurse didn’t come back. Two strong orderlies did not appear to take his blood pressure by force. Now that he thought about it, he supposed that even such a small thing as a blood-pressure reading wouldn’t be much good if obtained under duress. For the time being they were leaving him to simmer in his own juices.
He got up and turned on the TV and watched it unseeingly. His fear was big inside him, a runaway elephant. For two days he had been waiting to start sneezing, coughing, hawking black phlegm and spitting it into the commode. He wondered about the others, people he had known all his life. He wondered if any of them were as bad off as Campion had been. He thought of the dead woman and her baby in that old Chevy, and he kept seeing Lila Bruett’s face on the woman and little Cheryl Hodges’s face on the baby.
The TV squawked and crackled. His heart beat slowly in his chest. Faintly, he could hear the sound of an air purifier sighing air into the room. He felt his fear twisting and turning inside him beneath his poker face. Sometimes it was big and panicky, trampling everything: the elephant. Sometimes it was small and gnawing, ripping with sharp teeth: the rat. It was always with him.
But it was forty hours before they sent him a man who would talk…
Chapter 8
On June 18, five hours after he had talked to his cousin Bill Hapscomb, Joe Bob Brentwood pulled down a speeder on Texas Highway 40 about twenty-five miles east of Arnette. The speeder was Harry Trent of Braintree, an insurance man. He had been doing sixty-five miles per in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. Joe Bob gave him a speeding ticket. Trent accepted it humbly and then amused Joe Bob by trying to sell him insurance on his house and his life. Joe Bob felt fine; dying was the last thing on his mind. Nevertheless, he was already a sick man. He had gotten more than gas at Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco. And he gave Harry Trent more than a speeding summons.
Harry, a gregarious man who liked his job, passed the sickness to more than forty people during that day and the next. How many those forty passed it to is impossible to say—you might as well ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If you were to make a conservative estimate of five apiece, you’d have two hundred. Using the same conservative formula, one could say those two hundred went on to infect a thousand, the thousand five thousand, the five thousand
Under the California desert and subsidized by the taxpayers’ money, someone had finally invented a chain letter that really worked. A very lethal chain letter.
On June 19, the day Larry Underwood came home to New York and the day that Frannie Goldsmith told her father about her impending Little Stranger, Harry Trent stopped at an East Texas cafe called Babe’s Kwik-Eat for lunch. He had the cheeseburger platter and a piece of Babe’s delicious strawberry pie for dessert. He had a slight cold, an allergy cold, maybe, and he kept sneezing and having to spit. In the course of the meal he infected Babe, the dishwasher, two truckers in a corner booth, the man who came in to deliver bread, and the man who came in
