Pestilence (31 page)

“The County has a problem,” replied Jamieson. “They stopped admitting an hour ago and requested that we take their emergencies.”

Saracen could hardly believe his ears. “What kind of a problem?” he demanded.

“I understand that Dr Moss and several others have been taken ill,” said Jamieson.

Saracen froze in his tracks. Never had the words sounded so ominous. “Taken ill,” he repeated softly. “Jesus Christ.”

“Mr Updale is in here,” said Jamieson to break Saracen’s trance.

Saracen found the man conscious but in severe distress as he pulled back the covers to begin his examination. He made reassuring sounds to the patient but in truth he was conducting the examination on autopilot. This went on until alarm bells started to ring inside Saracen’s head. He was not finding what he expected to find. “This isn’t glandular fever,” he whispered to Jamieson.

“That’s what I thought. That’s why I called you over. I remembered what you said about taking nothing at face value…”

Saracen’s pulse quickened. “But he’s not like the others, there’s no pulmonary malfunction, he’s…” Saracen examined the man’s groin and found what he had been dreading. He showed what he had found to Jamieson and said, “Do you know what that is?”

Jamieson looked and said, “I saw it earlier but I haven’t come across anything like it before. What is it?”

“It’s the primary bubo,” said Saracen. “This man doesn’t have pneumonic plague, he has the bubonic form.” Jamieson’s questions were lost on Saracen as his mind flirted with a new nightmare.

“You’ve got a patient with what?” exclaimed MacQuillan when Saracen called him. “Are you absolutely sure?”

Saracen said that he was.

“And he was admitted to the clean area at the General?”

“No one realised what the symptoms were. He is different from the other cases.”

“What a mess,” muttered MacQuillan. “How the hell did he get bubonic plague?”

“I was hoping you were going to tell us that,” said Saracen.

There was a long silence before MacQuillan said, “The disease can be transmitted by human fleas as well as rat ones. If this chap has been living rough…”

“He’s a clean living heating engineer who lives with his wife and daughter in a nice area and has never been in contact with anyone who has since contracted the disease.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“Frustration was beginning to gnaw at the edges of Saracen’s temper but he refrained from pointing out that there seemed to be an awful lot that the experts failed to understand about the Skelmore outbreak. Instead he asked, “How are things at the County?”

“You’ve heard then?”

“That’s why we got the patient.”

“Five of the staff have gone down.”

“Moss?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Saracen put down the phone and repeated the same expletive over and over again in a whisper. He pulled himself together and returned to the treatment room to arrange with Jamieson that Updale be admitted to Ward Twenty.

“Will you have a word with his wife?” asked Jamieson. Saracen said that he would.

“Could your husband have worked beside anyone who has since gone down with the disease Mrs Updale?”

“Frank works for himself. He has his own business.”

“Did he do any work on the Maxton estate?”

“No, he has the contract for an installation in a hotel in Beverley Road; he’s been working there since before all this business started.”

“Nowhere else?”

“No.”

Saracen shrugged his shoulders in failure and sighed.

“Wait; there was one day when Frank took on another job. A man called him at home, ‘said he’d got Frank’s name from Yellow Pages, ‘wanted him to have a look at his heating. Frank said that he was sorry but the man insisted that he would make it worth his while so, in the end, Frank took the day off to do the job.”

“Where about was this job?”

Mary Updale shook her head. “I didn’t think to ask and I don’t think Frank ever said. Is it important?”

“Probably not,” said Saracen. “But if you should happen to remember let me know.”

Tremaine came on duty at four and was apologetic about his earlier behaviour. Saracen assured him that there was no need and said that he was going to stay on at the hospital until MacQuillan had heard from Porton. In the event Saracen joined Tremaine in plague reception a few minutes later on hearing that two military ambulances were on their way with two entire families on board.

“I’m not sure about the boy,” said Tremaine as he and Saracen examined the latest admissions. “Would you have a look at him?”

Saracen finished with the patient he was dealing with and went over to join Tremaine at his table. “I don’t understand it,” whispered Tremaine, “His mother, his father and his eight year old sister are all text book cases but he is completely atypical.”

“Saracen examined the twelve-year-old boy who was only semi- conscious and in great distress. He knew within seconds what the problem was. “He’s the second,” he said almost inaudibly as his throat tightened.

“The second what?” asked Tremaine.

“He’s the second case of bubonic plague I’ve seen today.”

Saracen phoned MacQuillan as soon as the patients were confirmed and waiting transfer to the school for hospitalisation. The twelve year old boy who was too ill to be moved would remain at the General.

MacQuillan sounded as if he would rather not have been told when Saracen broke the news. “No ideas at all?” asked Saracen.

“I suppose you could argue that the boy contracted the bubonic form and then gave his family pneumonic plague but as to how he himself became infected I simply don’t know.”

“But if we don’t find out we could lose the whole town,” hissed Saracen, afraid of being overheard.

“Yes,” said MacQuillan.

Saracen was taken aback at MacQuillan’s apparent complacency. He also thought that MacQuillan sounded a bit strange. “Are you all right?” he asked.

MacQuillan answered the question with a snort.

“Have you heard from Porton?”

“You had better come over.” The phone went dead.

“James!” came Tremaine’s cry from the reception area and Saracen hurried back to see what the matter was. He found that one of the women patients had gone into a coughing spasm. Bloody sputum frothed up from her lungs like lava from a volcano and her back arched in agony making it difficult for Tremaine to keep her steady on the trolley. Saracen did what he could to help but the spasm continued until the woman’s body suddenly went rigid, her eyes opened wide as if in disbelief and her head finally fell back in death. The soldiers took her away.

Saracen and Tremaine cleaned the mess off the front of their suits before returning to the boy patient to find him delirious and clutching at something round his neck. Saracen thought at first that it was a door key but it turned out to be some kind of medallion. He removed it and looked at it briefly before handing it to Tremaine while he dealt with the boy. It was rectangular, about five centimetres in length and had a simple design on it woven round the letter ‘S’.

Tremaine was surprised at how heavy it was. “This is very old,” he said.

“Is it,” said Saracen without much interest.

“In fact, I’ve seen this motif somewhere recently. Now where was

it …”

Saracen had ensured that the boy was more comfortable before calling ward twenty with a request that the boy be admitted there rather than be taken on to the school. He took the opportunity to ask about Lindeman.

“She’s very low, it can’t be long.”

“It was on Claire’s desk!” said Tremaine.

Saracen, who was washing his hands, could not think for a moment what Tremaine was talking about. “What was?” he asked.

Tremaine continued to look at the medallion in his hand and said, “There was a picture in one of her books on Skelmoris of this motif.”

“I think you must be mistaken,” said Saracen.

“No, I’m sure of it.”

“Right now we have two cases of bubonic plague to concern us. I’ve got a feeling they hold the key to this nightmare.”

“But this might be important,” Tremaine insisted. “One of these cases had this round his neck. It might be some kind of a lead. Why don’t you drop it off at Claire’s place on your way home and see what she says?

“All right.” conceded Saracen. He had no wish to see Claire but was too tired to argue. “But first I’m going to see MacQuillan.”

Tremaine dropped the medallion into disinfectant and swirled it around for a while before rinsing it under the tap and handing it to Saracen who slipped it into his pocket.

MacQuillan had his back to Saracen when he came into the room. Saracen coughed and he turned slowly to reveal the fact that he had a glass in his hand and, by the look in his eyes, had had quite a bit to drink already. Saracen looked at him quizzically.

“Drink?” said MacQuillan with a humourless smile. Saracen shook his head. “What did Porton Down say?” he asked.

MacQuillan looked at him for a long moment before saying, “The antiserum we’ve all been waiting for … it’s not coming.” He drank deeply from his glass.

“What the hell do you mean it’s not coming?” demanded Saracen in a hoarse whisper.

MacQuillan smiled bitterly and said. “There is no antiserum; there will be no antiserum. They say that the Skelmore strain is so poorly antigenic that it’s no use at all in antibody production. They can’t make an antiserum; they can’t make a vaccine. Finito.”

Saracen sank slowly into a chair. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

“In my experience he’s usually busy when you need him,” said MacQuillan.

Saracen ignored the comment. Drunken cynicism he could do without. “We’ll just have to ride the storm until it burns out then,” he said.

“It’s not going to ‘burn out’,” said MacQuillan quietly. “That bastard bug has won just as it always did.”

“If we get help from outside and keep our nerve we can still beat it,” said Saracen. “We can’t just give up hope.”

MacQuillan shook his head as if listening to a child tell him that the earth was flat. “There is no hope,” he said. “It’s over.”

Saracen sensed that there was more than cynicism behind MacQuillan’s last comment. “What do you mean?” he whispered.

MacQuillan drained his glass and refilled it. He said, “There will be no help from outside because none will be requested. The bug is immune to everything that medicine can offer. Its epidemiology is all wrong and we are helpless. Beasdale knows this so there will be a reversion to traditional methods.”

“What ‘traditional’ methods?” asked Saracen aggressively but the aggression was born of fear.

“Fire,” replied MacQuillan.

Saracen’s head reeled as he realised what MacQuillan was inferring. “You must be mad!” he accused. “Do you know what you are suggesting?”

“Beasdale will have his orders to carry out if things get out of control and that is now the case.”

“But you cannot seriously believe that he will destroy the town. Christ! This is England in 1990.”

MacQuillan’s silence told Saracen that he did not retract anything. He started to pace up and down the room, occasionally shaking his head in unwillingness to believe what he had heard. “It’s obscene!” he protested. “It’s immoral! It’s…”

“Practical,” said MacQuillan.

“But how can they just wipe out a whole town?”

“I told you. Fire.”

“Fire?”

“Oh I don’t mean soldiers running around putting torches to houses. I mean modern fire, scientific fire, liquid fire, all consuming chemical fire.”

“How do you know this?” demanded Saracen.

MacQuillan’s Scots accent had become more pronounced in drink. “Might I remind you, laddie, that I don’t work at Woolworths.”

“So you work at Porton Down, the defence establishment.”

“Defence! That’s a laugh. Have you noticed? Everyone is defending. No one ever offends so if no one is offending what the hell is all this defence for?” MacQuillan found his own philosophy hilarious.

“How do you know?” insisted Saracen.

“Contingency plans. There are contingency plans for this sort of situation. The strategy is to contain and destroy.”

“Contain and destroy,” repeated Saracen softly. “A whole town?”

“The principle stands.”

“Just how does a government explain the destruction of a whole town to the general public?”

“A tragic accident, some awful consequence of the emergency, a factory explosion, maybe even the gasworks going up through lack of proper maintenance.”

“They’d never believe it.”

“They’ll believe it if they want to,” said MacQuillan.

“What does that mean?”

“Any day now, mark my words, the authorities will start leaking the truth about the situation here in Skelmore. Stories of an incurable plague on his doorstep should put Joe Public in the right frame of mind to accept whatever happens next.”