Blood Music (13 page)

She took the mop from the opposite corner, behind the refrigerator, and stepped forward with the handle pointing at the sheet. I’m being incredibly brave, she thought. She poked the sheet gently at first they drove the broom clear through it into the lath and plaster beyond. The sheet quivered but did not otherwise react. “You!” she screamed. She swung the handle back and forth over the sheet, shredding it from corner to corner. “You!”

When most of the shreds had fallen to the floor and the wall was covered with holes, she dropped the broom and fled the kitchen.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon, the ship’s clock said. She regained her breath and then went around the house, turning off the lights. The miraculous energy might last longer if she didn’t use it up immediately.

Suzy then took an address book from beneath the phone in the foyer and made a list of her supplies, and what she would need. There was at least five more hours of daylight, or light enough to see by. She put on her coat and left the snow porch door open behind her.

Down the street, lined with the same parked cars, to the corner, to the grocery, without purse or money, wearing her coat over her pajamas and sky-blue robe; out into the upside-down outside world to see what there was to see. She even felt vaguely cheerful. The wind was blowing fall-cool and a few leaves rattled along the pavement from the trees spaced every few houses. Vines crawled along the wrought-iron fencing between the steps, and flowerpots sat on ledges before the first floor windows.

Mithridates’ grocery was closed, iron bars across the front doors. She peered through the bars on the windows, wondering if there was any way to get in, and thought of the service entrance on the other side. The door there hung slightly ajar, a great heavy black metal-sheathed thing she had to heave with all her might to push open farther. She felt it catch and let it go, watching it for an instant to make sure it would stay open. In the service corridor, she stepped over another pile of clothes, topped by a grocer’s apron, and pushed through double swinging doors into the deserted grocery.

Methodically, Suzy went to the front of the store and pulled out a rickety shopping cart. A computer cash register ticket clung to the bottom of the basket with a leaf of very old lettuce. She wobbled the cart down the aisles, picking out what she hoped was a sensible array of foods. Her usual eating habits were not the best. Even so, she had a better figure than most of the health food and diet fanatics she knew—something in which she took solemn pride.

Canned hams, stew beef in tins, canned chicken, fresh vegetables and fruit (soon to be scarce, she imagined), canned fruit, as many bottles of spring or mineral water as she could fit into a liquor box and wedge into the cart’s lower rack, bread and some slightly stale breakfast rolls, two gallon jugs of milk from the still-cold dairy case. A bottle of aspirin and some shampoo, though she wondered how long the water would come out of the shower tap. Vitamins, a big jar. She tried to find something in the drug shelves which might fight off what had happened to her family—and the mailman and the grocer, and perhaps everybody else. Carefully she read and re-read bottles and instructions on boxes, but nothing seemed appropriate.

Then she pushed the cart up to the cash register, blinked at the aisle and the locked door beyond, and swung her load around. Nobody to pay. She hadn’t brought money anyway. She was halfway toward the back when another thought occurred to her, and she returned to the register.

Where rumor had said it would be, on a shelf above the bag storage bin, was a large heavy black pistol with a long barrel. She fiddled with it carefully pointing it away from her, until she found a way to roll out a cylinder. The gun was loaded with six big bullets.

Suzy didn’t like holding the gun. Her father owned guns and the few times she visited, he always warned her to stay away from them, not even touch them. But guns were for protection, not play, and she didn’t want to play with it, that was for sure. Anyway, she doubted there was anything she could shoot effectively.

“But you never know,” she said. She put the gun in a brown bag and placed it in the upper basket of the cart, then wheeled the cart down the service corridor, over the grocer’s empty clothes and onto the sidewalk.

She stored the food in the foyer and stood with the milk jugs one in each hand, trying to decide whether she wanted to put them in the refrigerator. “They won’t last long if I don’t,” she told herself, assuming a very practical tone. “Oh, God,” she said, shuddering violently. She put down the jugs and wrapped her arms around herself. When she closed her eyes, she saw every kitchen in every home in Brooklyn, filled with empty clothes or dissolving bodies. She leaned against the stair railing and dropped her head into her arms. “Suzy, Suzy,” she whispered. She took a deep breath, straightened, and picked up the jugs. “Here I go,” she said with forced brightness.

The brown sheet had vanished, leaving only the holes in the wall. She opened the refrigerator and wedged the milk jugs into the lower shelf, then inspected what food was available for supper.

The clothes didn’t look right, just lying there. She took the broom and stirred her mother’s dress to see if anything was hidden beneath the folds; nothing was. With forefinger and thumb, she lifted the dress. Slip and panties fell out, and from the edge of the panties peeped a tampon, white and pristine. Something glinted near the collar and she bent to see. Little lumps of gray and gold metal, irregularly shaped.

The answer came to her too quickly, thought out with a panicky kind of brilliance she wasn’t used to.

Fillings. Tooth fillings and gold crowns.

She picked up the clothes and dumped them in the hamper in the service porch. So much for that, she thought. Good-bye Mother and Kenneth and Howard.

Then she swept the floor, pushing the fillings and dust (no dead cockroaches, which was unusual) into a dustpan and dropping them into the trash beside the refrigerator.

“I am the only one,” she said when she was finished. “I am the only one left in Brooklyn. I didn’t get sick.” She stood by the table with an apple in her hand, chewing thoughtfully. “Why?” she asked.

“Because,” she answered, twirling around the kitchen floor, eye going quickly to haunted corners. “Because I am so beautiful, and the devil wants me for his wife.”

In the past four days,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, “contact with most of the North American continent has been cut off. The etiology of the disease is not known precisely, but it is apparently passed through every vector known to epidemiologists, and then some. Mr. Bernard’s materials indicate that the components of the disease are themselves intelligent and capable of directed action.”

The visitors in the viewing chamber-Pharmek executives and representatives from four European countries-sat in their folding chairs, faces impassive. Paulsen-Fuchs stood with his back to the three-layer window, facing the officials from France and Denmark. He turned and indicated Bernard, who sat at the desk, tapping its surface lightly with a hand heavily marked by white ridges.

“At great risk, and some foolhardiness, Mr. Bernard has come to West Germany to provide a subject for our experiments. As you can see, our facilities here are well-equipped to keep Mr. Bernard safely isolated, and there is no need for removal to another laboratory or hospital. Such a transfer could, in fact, be very dangerous. We are quite willing to follow outside suggestions on the scientific approach, however.

“Frankly we don’t yet know what sort of experiments to conduct. Tissue samples from Mr. Bernard indicate that the disease—if we should actually call it that—is spreading rapidly throughout his body, yet in no way impairs his functions. In fact, he claims that with the exception of certain peculiar symptoms, to be discussed later, he has never felt better in his life. And it is apparent that his anatomy is being altered substantially.”

“Why hasn’t Mr. Bernard been transformed completely?” asked the representative from Denmark, a young-looking plump man in a black suit, his hair like close-cropped fur. “Our few communications with the United States show that transformation and dissolution takes place within a week of infection.”

“I don’t know,” Bernard said. “My circumstances are not the same as victims in a natural environment. Perhaps the organisms in my body are aware that it would do them no good to complete the transformation.”

The dismay on their faces showed they were still not used to the concept of noocytes. Or perhaps they simply did not believe.

Paulsen-Fuchs continued the discussion, but Bernard closed his eyes and tried to shut the visitors out. It was worse than he had imagined; in just four days, he had been subjected—politely enough, and with great concern—to fourteen such meetings, to a battery of tests conducted through the sliding panel, to questions about every aspect of his life, past, present, private and public. He was the center of a secondary shock wave spreading around the world—the wave of reaction to what had happened in North America.

He had gotten out just in time. The etiology of the plague had altered drastically and now followed several patterns, or perhaps no pattern at all; it was possible the organisms reacted to their environment and altered their methods accordingly. Thus, large cities tended to be silenced immediately, most or all of their citizens being infected and transformed within forty-eight hours. Outlying towns and rural areas, perhaps because of a lack of common sewage and water systems, were affected less rapidly. Spread of the plague to these areas appeared to proceed through animal and insect vectors as well as direct human contact

Infrared pictures taken by Landsats and spy satellites, processed and interpreted by countries like Japan and Great Britain, showed incipient changes even in the forests and waterways of North America.

Already, he felt like Michael Bernard no longer existed. He had been swallowed up in something larger and far more impressive, and now he was on display in a museum, tagged and curiously enough, able to talk back. Ex-neurosurgeon, male, once well-known and wealthy, not very active of late, caught in social whirl and with scads of money to spend from lecture tours, book royalties, appearances in motion pictures…

It seemed quite possible that Michael Bernard hadn’t existed for six years, having vanished sometime after he last applied scalpel to flesh, drill to skull.

He opened his eyes and saw the men and one woman in the chambers.

“Dr. Bernard.” The woman was trying to attract his attention, apparently for the third or fourth time.

“Yes?”

“Is it true that you are at least in part to blame for this disaster?”

“No, not directly.”

“Indirectly?”

“There was no way I could have foreseen the consequences of other peoples’ actions. I am not psychic.”

The woman’s face was visibly flushed, even behind the three layers of glass. “I have—or had—a daughter and a sister in the United States. I am from France, yes, but I was born in California. What has happened to them? Do you know?”

“No, Madame, I do not.”

The woman shrugged Paulsen-Fuchs’ hands away and shouted, “Will it never end? Disaster and death, scientists—responsible, you are all responsible! Will it—” And she was hustled from the viewing chamber. Paulsen-Fuchs raised his hands and shook his head. The two chambers quickly emptied and he was left alone.

And since he was nothing, nobody, that meant that when he was alone, there was nothing there at all.

Nothing but the microbes, the noocytes, with their incredible potential, biding their time…unrealized.

Waiting to make him more than he had ever been.

The lights went out on the fourth day-in the morning, just after she awoke. She put on her designer jeans (from the Salvation Army thrift store) and her best bra and a sweater, took out her windbreaker from the closet behind the stairs, and stepped out into the daylight. No longer blessed, she thought. No longer desirable to the devil or anybody. “My luck’s running out,” she said aloud.

But she had food, and the water was still running. She considered her situation for a moment and decided she wasn’t that badly off. “Sorry, God,” she said, squinting at the sky.

Across the street the houses were completely draped with mottled brown and white sheets that glistened like skin or leather in the sun. The trees and iron railings were hung with tatters of the same stuff. The houses on her side were starting to be overgrown, too.

It was time to move on. She wouldn’t be spared for long.

She packed food into boxes and stacked the boxes in the basket. The gas was still on; she cooked herself a fine breakfast with the last of the eggs and bacon, toasted bread over the fire as her mother had once taught her, spread it with the last of the butter and slathered it with jam. She finished four slices and went upstairs to pack a small overnight bag. Travel light, she thought. Heavy winter jacket and clothes, gun, boots. Wool socks from her brothers’ drawers. Gloves. Frontier time, pioneer time.

“I might be the last woman on Earth,” she mused. “I’ll have to be practical.”

The last thing into the cart, waiting at the foot of the stairs on the sidewalk, was the radio. She only played it a few minutes each night, and she had scrounged a boxful of batteries from Mithridates’. It should be useful for some time.

From the radio, she had learned that people were very worried, not just about Brooklyn, but about the entire United States, all the way to the borders, and Mexico and Canada beyond. Short wave news broadcasts from England talked about the silence, the “plague,” about air travelers being quarantined, and submarines and aircraft patrolling up and down the coast. No aircraft had as yet penetrated to the interior of North America, a very distinguished-sounding British commentator said, but secret satellite photographs, it was rumored, showed a nation paralyzed, perhaps dead.

Not me, Suzy thought. Paralyzed meant not moving. “I’ll move. Come look at me with your submarines and planes. I’ll be moving and I’ll be wherever I am.”

It was late afternoon as Suzy pushed the cart along Adams. Fog obscured the distant towers of Manhattan, allowing only pale silhouettes of the World Trade Center to rise above gray and white opacity. She had never seen fog so dense on the river.

Looking back over her shoulder, she saw great kitelike sails of brown and tan loft up in the wind over Cadman Plaza. Williamsburgh Savings Bank was sheathed along its 500-foot height with brown, no white this time, like a skyscraper wrapped for mailing. She turned down Tillary, heading for Flatbush and access to the bridge, when she thought how much she looked like a bag lady.

She had always been afraid of becoming a bag lady. She knew sometimes people with problems like hers couldn’t find places to live, so they lived on the streets.

She wasn’t afraid of that now. Everything was different. And the thought tickled her sense of humor. A bag lady in a city covered with brown paper bags. It was very funny but she was too tired to laugh.

Any kind of company would have been welcome—bag lady, cat, bird. But nothing moved except the brown sheets.

She pushed the cart up Flatbush, stopping to sit on a bus bench and rest getting up and moving on. She took Kenneth’s heavy jacket from the cart and slipped it over her shoulders; evening was dosing and the air was becoming quite chilly. “I’m going to sing now,” she told herself. Her head was full of lots of rhythms and rock beats, but she couldn’t find a tune. Pulling the cart up the steps to the bridge walkway, one step at a time, the cart lurching and the undercarriage scraping, a tune finally popped into her head, and she began humming the Beatles’ “Michelle,” recorded before she was born. “Michelle, ma belle,” was the only part of the lyric she remembered, and she sang that out between pulls and gasps.

Fog enveloped the East River and spilled across the expressway. The bridge rose above the fog, a highway over the clouds. Alone, Suzy pushed her cart along the middle walkway, hearing the wind and a weird, low humming sound she realized must be the bridge cables vibrating.

With no traffic on the bridge, she heard all kinds of noises she never would have heard before; great metallic moans, low and subdued but very impressive; the distant singing of the river; the deep silence beyond. No horns, no cars, no subway rumbles. No people talking, jostling. She might as well have been in the middle of a wilderness.

“A pioneer,” she reminded herself. Darkness lay everywhere but over New Jersey, where the sun made its final testimony with a ribbon of yellow-green light. The walkway was pitch black. She stopped pushing the cart and huddled next to it, wrapping her coat tighter, then getting up to put on boots and wool socks. For several hours she sat in a stupor beside the cart, one foot wedged against a wheel to keep it from rolling.

Below the bridge, the sound of the river changed. Her neck hair stood on end though she had no real reason to be spooked. Still, she could feel something going on, something different. Overhead, the stars gleamed still and clear, and the Milky Way blazed unobscured by city lights and dirty air.

She stood and stretched, yawning, feeling scared and lonely and exalted all at once. She climbed up and over the walkway railing, onto the southbound lanes of the bridge, and walked to the edge. Gripping the railing with gloved, cold-numbed fingers, she looked across the East River, toward South Street, then swept her gaze over the no-longer-dark to the outlines of the ferry terminals.

It was still a long rime to dawn, but wherever the river touched there was light, and wherever the river flowed there was a green and blue brilliance. The water was filled with eyes and pinwheels and Ferris wheels and slow, stately bursts like fireworks, all speckled against a steady cobalt glow. She might have been looking down on a million cities at night, twisted and spun around each other.

The river was alive, from shore to shore and past Governors Island, where the Upper Bay became a Milky Way in reverse. The river glowed and moved and every part of it had a purpose; Suzy knew this.

She knew that she was like an ant on the street of a big city now. She was the uncomprehending, the limited, the transient and fragile. The river was even more complex and beautiful than the early evening skyline of Manhattan.

“I’m never going to understand this,” she said. She shook her head and looked up at the dark skyscrapers.

One of them was not completely dark. In the top floors of the south tower of the World Trade Center, a greenish light flickered. “Hey,” she said, marveling more at that light than everything else.

She pushed away from the railing and returned to her cart on the walkway. All very pretty, she told herself, but the important thing was to keep from freezing, and then to move when the dawn was bright enough to see by. She huddled next to the cart

“I’ll go see what’s in the building,” she said. “Maybe it’s somebody like me, somebody smarter who knows about electricity. Tomorrow morning I’ll go see.”

Asleep or awake, shivering or still, she fancied she could hear something beyond hearing: the sound of the change, the plague and the river and the drifting sheets, like a big church choir with all its members’ mouths wide open, singing silence.