He dreamed oddly, and all he could remember upon waking was that he seemed to have been walking through endless rows of green corn, looking for something and terribly afraid of something else that seemed to be behind him.
This morning he was up early, carefully sweeping out the back of the jail and ignoring Billy Warner and Mike Childress. As he went out, Billy called after him: “Ray’s gonna be back, you know. And when he catches you, you’re gonna wish you were
Nick, his back turned, missed most of this.
Back in the office, he picked up an old copy of Time magazine and began to read. He considered putting his feet up on the desk and decided that would be a very good way to get in trouble if the sheriff came by.
By eight o’clock he was wondering uneasily if Sheriff Baker might have had a relapse in the night. Nick had expected him by now, ready to turn the three prisoners in his jail over to the county when the State Patrol came for them. Also, Nick’s stomach was rumbling uncomfortably. No one had showed up from the truck-stop down the road, and he looked at the telephone, more with disgust than with longing. He was quite fond of science fiction, picking up falling-apart paperbacks from time to time on the dusty back shelves of antique barns for a nickel or a dime, and he found himself thinking, not for the first time, that it was going to be a great day for the deaf-mutes of the world when the telephone viewscreens the science fiction novels were always predicting finally came into general use.
By quarter of nine he was acutely uneasy. He went to the door which gave on the cells and looked in.
Billy and Mike were both standing at their cell doors. Both of them had been banging on the bars with their shoes… which just went to show you that people who can’t talk only made up a small percentage of the world’s dummies. Vince Hogan was lying down. He only turned his head and stared at Nick when he came to the door. Hogan’s face was pallid except for a hectic flush on his cheeks, and there were dark patches under his eyes. Beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead. Nick met his apathetic, fevered gaze and realized that the man was sick. His uneasiness deepened.
“Hey, dummy, how about some brefus?” Mike called down to him. “An ole Vince there seems like he could use a doctor. Tattle-talein don’t agree with him, does it, Bill?”
Bill didn’t want to banter. “I’m sorry I yelled at you before, man. Vince, he’s sick, all right. He needs the doctor.”
Nick nodded and went out, trying to figure out what he should do next. He bent over the desk and wrote on the memo pad: “Sheriff Baker, or Whoever: I’ve gone to get the prisoners some breakfast and to see if I can hunt Dr. Soames up for Vincent Hogan. He appears to be really sick, not just playing possum. Nick Andros.”
He tore the sheet off the pad and left it in the middle of the desk. Then, tucking the pad into his pocket, he went out into the street.
The first thing that struck him was the still heat of the day and the smell of greenery. By afternoon it was going to be a scorcher. It was the sort of day when people like to get their chores and errands done early so they can spend the afternoon as quietly as possible, but to Nick, Shoyo’s main street looked strangely indolent this forenoon, more like a Sunday than a workday.
Most of the diagonal parking spaces in front of the stores were empty. A few cars and farm trucks were going up and down the street, but not many. The hardware store looked open, but the shades of the Mercantile Bank were still drawn, although it was past nine now.
Nick turned right, toward the truck-stop, which was five blocks down. He was on the corner of the third block when he saw Dr. Soames’s car moving slowly up the street toward him, weaving a little from side to side, as if with exhaustion. Nick waved vigorously, not sure if Soames would stop, but Soames pulled in at the curb, indifferently taking up four of the slanted parking spaces. He didn’t get out but merely sat behind the wheel. The look of the man shocked Nick. Soames had aged twenty years since he had last seen him bantering casually with the sheriff. It was partly exhaustion, but exhaustion couldn’t be the whole explanation—even Nick could see that. As if to confirm his thought, the doctor produced a wrinkled handkerchief from his breast pocket like an old magician doing a creaky trick that does not interest him much anymore, and sneezed into it repeatedly. When he was done he leaned his head back against the car’s seat, mouth half-open to draw breath. His skin looked so shiny and yellow that he reminded Nick of a dead person.
Then Soames opened his eyes and said, “Sheriff Baker’s dead. If that’s what you flagged me down for, you can forget it. He died a little after two o’clock this morning. Now Janey’s sick with it.”
Nick’s eyes widened. Sheriff Baker dead? But his wife had been in just last night and said he was feeling better. And she… she had been fine. No, it just wasn’t possible.
“Dead, all right,” Soames said, as though Nick had spoken his thought aloud. “And he’s not the only one. I’ve signed twelve death certificates in the last twelve hours. And I know of another twenty that are going to be dead by noon unless God shows mercy. But I doubt if this is God’s doing. I suspect He’ll keep right out of it as a consequence.”
Nick pulled the pad from his pocket and wrote: “What’s the matter with them?”
“I don’t know,” Soames said, crumpling the sheet slowly and tossing the ball into the gutter. “But everyone in town seems to be coming down with it, and I’m more frightened than I ever have been in my life. I have it myself, although what I’m suffering most from right now is exhaustion. I’m not a young man anymore. I can’t go these long hours without paying the price, you know.” A tired, frightened petulance had entered his voice, which Nick fortunately couldn’t hear. “And feeling sorry for myself won’t help.”
Nick, who hadn’t been aware Soames
Soames got out of his car, holding on to Nick’s arm for a minute to help himself. He had an old man’s grip, weak and a little frenzied. “Come on over to that bench, Nick. You’re good to talk to. I suppose you’ve been told that before.”
Nick pointed back toward the jail.
“They’re not going anywhere,” Soames said, “and if they’re down with it, right now they’re on the bottom of my list.”
They sat on the bench, which was painted bright green and bore an advertisement on the backrest for a local insurance company. Soames turned his face gratefully up to the warmth of the sun.
“Chills and fever,” he said. “Ever since about ten o’clock last night. Just lately it’s been the chills. Thank God there hasn’t been any diarrhea.”
“You ought to go home to bed,” Nick wrote.
“So I ought. And will. I just want to rest for a few minutes first…” His eyes slipped shut and Nick thought he had gone to sleep. He wondered if he should go on down to the truck-stop and get Billy and Mike some breakfast.
Then Dr. Soames spoke again, without opening his eyes. Nick watched his lips. “The symptoms are all very common,” he said, and began to enumerate them on his fingers until all ten were spread out in front of him like a fan. “Chills. Fever. Headache. Weakness and general debilitation. Loss of appetite. Painful urination. Swelling of the glands, progressing from minor to acute. Swelling in the armpits and in the groin. Respiratory weakness and failure.”
He looked at Nick.
“They are the symptoms of the common cold, of influenza, of pneumonia. We can cure all of those things, Nick. Unless the patient is very young or very old, or perhaps already weakened by a previous illness, antibiotics will knock them out. But not this. It comes on the patient quickly or slowly. It doesn’t seem to matter. Nothing helps. The thing escalates, backs up, escalates again; debilitation increases; the swelling gets worse; finally, death.
“Somebody made a mistake.
“And they’re trying to cover it up.”
Nick looked at him doubtfully, wondering if he had picked the words rightly from the doctor’s lips, wondering if Soames might be raving.
“It sounds slightly paranoid, doesn’t it?” Soames asked, looking at him with weary humor. “I used to be frightened of the younger generation’s paranoia, do you know that? Always afraid someone was tapping their phones… following them… running computer checks on them… and now I find out they were right and I was wrong. Life is a fine thing, Nick, but old age takes an unpleasantly high toll on one’s dearly held prejudices, I
