Systemic Shock (10 page)

The defunct USSR, in 1980, had succeeded too well in developing a modified
B. anthracis
in one of its bacteriological warfare centers near Sverdlovsk. And had failed miserably to contain it, resulting in the now-famed Sverdlovsk scare that killed scores of citizens and further curtailed the supply of local beef while Tass News Agency denied the obvious. Sverdlovsk had been lucky; the distribution of its anthrax had been meagre, accidental, and vigorously fought. Unlike the farmlands of the southeastern US in 1996.

The SinoInd delivery system took a multiplex approach to the problem of vectoring the disease. To start with, paran-thrax spores were much smaller than those of the original bacilli; a cubic centimeter of them could be dispersed fifty times more widely for the same effect, because they multiplied faster. The dispersal method was by sub-launched Indian cruise missiles, fat capacious cargo drones that flew a leisurely mach 0.7 from the Mexican Gulf toward Virginia, voiding trails of deadly paranthrax spores as they passed over agrarian centers. Macon, High Point, and Roanoke typified the targets.

Though American epidemiologists did not yet know it, pulmonary paranthrax spread fast because still-ambulatory victims spread the microbes in their exhalations. As active bacilli or after sporulation on contact with air, the disease was literally designed to spread into the countryside.

The region west of the Appalachians had been spared immediate effects of paranthrax because the Pensacola bomb did not arrive until two flights of old Marine Sea Harriers scrambled from there, following sonar contacts to the surfaced Indian subs in the Gulf. In the brief engagement, one sub dived after launching five of its fat birds. Our Harriers shot down three of them; the other two spread death.

The second sub was caught with its panels down as it readied the first of its missiles intended for Mississippi, Tennessee,and Kentucky. Despite direct hits on its deck pods with One-eye missiles, the sub might have escaped but for the act for which Marine Captain Darryl Tunbridge won his Medal of Honor. Tunbridge, a flight instructor whose Harrier was equipped with depth charges, used the hover mode of his sturdy old Harrier as he watched tracers climb past his wing. He marveled at the valiant Indian gunner's mate who manned the quad one-cm, antiaircraft guns while his own decks were awash; did not pause to wonder at his own risk as he overtook the diving sub at fifty knots, hanging almost dead overhead, feeling the shudder of one-cm, slugs in his fuel tanks, dropping his depth charges while virtually scraping the sub's squat conning tower. The Harrier faltered as the sub's bow, impelled by two mighty blasts, rose from the water.

Captain Tunbridge's honor was posthumous, but that sub would never launch a missile from her permanent rest at 330 fathoms.

We soon realized our debt to the Pensacola Harriers. We needed more time to discover just how virulently effective were the two cruise missiles that got through. Had the disease spread from farmlands toward agrarian centers, we could have organized teams to distribute penicillin, chlortetracy-cline, erythromycin. Once those centers were fighting for their lives while evacuees fled to spread the epidemic, there was little hope for the nearby farmlands. There was not enough disinfectant on earth to cleanse ten thousand square klicks of grass.

"I think I got out of Spartanburg in time," Abby sighed. "First symptom is usually skin itch, followed by open sores that don't hurt much, with swelling. The fever and pains in the joints don't begin 'til later."

"Lordy; makes me itch just to think about it."

She lent him a vexed glance. "Do tell," she said, and scratched herself. "Hand me the Clorox."

He watched her dampen a face tissue, dab it to cuticles; imitated her; stowed the jug of bleach.' "This all we can do?"

"Until we can get antibiotics. This may not do much good but from what I've read, it's a start. The things I couldn't find at my apartment were antibiotics and thirty-eight cartridges."

"Oh well; six shots are more'n you need," he said.

"You don't get it, Ted. I don't have even one."

Long pause. "You faced those bastards down with an empty gun?"

"
Now
you got it," she smiled; winked.

Jane Osborne's two-bedroom bungalow lay on the outskirts of Oak Ridge near the museum. She did not answer Abby's calls. They saw a neighbor peering from a shuttered window. He refused to answer their hails. They decided against going into the house until after their self-imposed quarantine. But in the detached garage was Abby's storage and, "I've got medicine and an old TV in there," she explained. They wrestled with musty cartons in the garage. The garage lights worked, and Abby immediately plugged the Chevy's recharger into a garage socket. Abby's penicillin was long outdated, but they shared the half-dozen tabs.

Without cable connections, they had only two available TV channels, curiously flat without holovision. They learned that Memphis and Tullahoma fallout did not yet seriously threaten the Oak Ridge area, though local background count had risen as particles drifted down from the stratospheric Jetstream. There were no pictures of gutted cities; the news was vague and optimistic. An old public service announcement illustrated how a basement room could be protected against modest fallout by taping cracks, blocking windows with books, and shoveling dirt shin-deep onto the floor above.

"Jane's house doesn't lend itself very well to that," Abby judged, lighting a candle amid spectacular sunset reflections. “We 'll be better off in the tunnels. I 'm sure Jane can get you in with us."

They elected to eat the canned food in the garage. It was Quantrill who realized that a sparing rinse in bleach, followed by a soaping and rinse from a garden hose, might disinfect them externally. They soaked their clothes as well, rinsing them outdoors in darkness, joking about the effects of bleach to decoy their attention from their mutual and necessary nudity.

But jokes were not equal to the dimly-outlined grace of Abby Drummond. He held the hose as she rinsed her dark shoulder-length hair and erred in thinking that her eyes were closed. He saw the gentle curve of her buttocks, the faint pendulous sway of foam-flecked teats, the effulgent gleam of water on her thighs, and turned slightly away from Abby as his desire had its usual effect. In silhouette, his erection was now a gravity-defying flag.

She wrung her hair dry, squatting, as he turned the stream of water on himself. It wasn't exactly a cold shower, but… "I've been thinking, "she said, and took the hose and soap from him. “We've done a lot for each other in the past twelve hours. Let's not stop now."

She began to lather the small of his back, both of them squatting in the grass, and gradually her hand scrubbed to the back of his thighs. Quantrill held his breath until his ears popped, mesmerized by the soft huskiness of her voice and the progress of that bar of soap. “We could both be sick, or worse, in a week," she continued. And continued. Now he was breathing quickly, a sense of warmth flooding his loins, rising up the back of his neck. For a moment, Quantrill imagined that his ears must be glowing in the dark.
At least
his ears.

"Hey; you don't know what you're doing," he breathed.

"I know exactly what I'm doing," she insisted, purring it. "I'm making sure you're nice and clean. And when you're all good and soapy, you can help me clean where I can't do it alone."

"I think you'd better not," he said after a moment.

She paused. "If you really and truly don't want me to," she said.

His laugh was embarrassed, frank, sorrowful: "God no, Abby, but in another minute I won't have anything left to, ah, soap you with."

Again the hand, now both hands, sleekly caressing his belly as she wriggled beneath him. She manipulated him, let him feel the warm accepting cleft that pulsed at the exact tip of his body, resumed rubbing him, now cupping his buttocks. “You take your time, lover," she said, "and scrub me out good."

When he felt some control return Quantrill eased downward, pressed into her carefully, felt her move to accommodate him with small sounds of pleasure. He stopped again, his control ebbing.

"Think of yourself as the rotorooter man," she said, understanding better than he, "doing an unpleasant job. Or just think about something else—but not for very long," she teased. Presently her own breathing quickened and, as he gently swept strands of damp hair from her face, she moved against him in repeated sinuous thrusts.

At last she lay still, stroking his ribcage as he moved above her. "Penny for your thoughts," she whispered.

Gruffly: "Wondering—if the—neighbors—can see," he said. "You?"

Insinuating: "Wondering if you know I've already come."

The heat in his loins was suddenly a fever. "Liar."

"Truth. Yes," she crooned, then in vehemence, sensing his urgency, "oh yes; absolutely, please yes," she said, empathizing the synaptic explosions that thundered down the halls of his mind.

For perhaps a minute they lay communicating their satisfaction with grunts of pleasure, brief kisses that said more about reassurance than of lust. Then she gave his backside a playful slap. "Now you'll have to scrub me outside," she said. "There are chiggers in this damn' grass."

Later, when Quantrill offered to open ajar of mint jelly for her, Abby made the first reference to their earlier delights on the grass outside. “I can cope," she snapped, wrenching the lid loose. "Why do southern men still think sex makes a weakling of a woman?"

"Never thought about it," he shrugged, watching the TV.

"Think about it," she growled, tasting the jelly, watching the set of his jaw as he refused a taste. "Oh, hell, you were just trying to help, Ted. I'm on edge." She laid a hand on his shoulder as she asked softly, "Was I your first, urn, experience? Wait; forgive me, don't answer that."

"First one that was like they say it's supposed to be," he said, "and don't tell me whether to answer you, and don't forget it was your idea! And even if I was klutzy I'm not one damn' bit sorry. You want me to go now?"

He stared toward the ancient TV, which was running a plea for voluntary induction. In its wisdom the Department of Defense trusted in the blonde charms of wide-eyed Eve Simpson, the child star whose cleavage was no longer childish, whose buxom bogus innocence permitted just enough jiggle to enslave the daydreams of youthful—and many not so youthful—males. Little Evie moistened her lips to croon her fascination with 'our boys in uniform'.

Abby Drummond realized that young Quantrill might soon be wearing a uniform. She stepped toward the TV, paused. "May I?"

Quantrill nodded. She snapped off the set, sat on a box facing him, placed the jelly between her thighs in subtle symbolism, asked permission again as she took his hands.

At first he glanced over her shoulder, then into the dark; anywhere but into her face as she said, "I take too much for granted. And I'm a shitty dancer because I like to lead, and I'm sensitive as hell about the big-strong-man syndrome. So I've sent you some rejection signals I didn't mean.

"You may have tears in your eyes, and you may not have a lot of experience, but the best men start that way, lover. At everything. You're being forced to become a man faster than anybody should, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Have you ever seen anyone die?"

After a moment he met her eyes. "No," he lied.

"Neither have I, but we will. Lots of them, maybe. I'm having a hard time dealing with you because I see you as needing an older person's advice,
and
as being a man who usually does things right the first time. So I act as though there were two of you. I'll work on that. If you don't want any of teacher's advice, tell me now and I'll do my God-damnedest to quit. But don't ask me to forget you're a man, mister. You are altogether too good at making love to a woman."

"Why the hell," he sighed with the faintest of smiles, “is that last thing so important to me?"

"I don't know, Ted. Maybe advertising has given it more importance than it deserves. But with the bod you have, and the tenderness you show me,—well, don't you worry about it, luv. Hell, I'm giving advice again!"

His smile now more confident: "Don't stop, Abby. Things're going too fast for me and I don't have anybody else to trust. In fact, I wonder if I should trust anybody's advice a hundred per cent."

"You're a natural," she grinned back at him. “Trust your instinct a lot, because it's dead-center. For example, it told you not to trust anything too much. It was right. I saw how you willed yourself to be a child today at that road-block, on the spur of the instant. I think you're a born actor; not all great actors are long on brains but they have great timing and they have terrific instincts. Come to think of it, the smartest actors know how to hide half their brains so they don't scare other people off. If I have any advice on how you'll survive best, it's just to act like a kid and hide half your brains."

"From everybody?"

She saw the direction of his inquiry. “Not quite; you'd die of loneliness. Your instinct will tell you who you can open up to." She placed a middle finger in the mint jelly, placed a tiny smear of it on her lower lip, licked the finger clean, smiling all the while. "No, not quite everybody. Now you take
me
," she said, leaned forward, transferred the sticky smudge to his own lips.

Quantrill did not have to be told twice.

Wednesday morning, Quantrill was awakened by roving hands for the first time in his life and learned that there was something better than merely breakfast in bed. He fluffed out their bedrolls later while Abby opened canned fruit, and wondered aloud whether Jane Osborne was coming home. "It'd be nice to take a shower in the house," he said.

"I'm going to take a chance on us," she said, and after using bleach on her hands she went into the house. She returned while Quantrill watched the TV. "Recorded message at the museum," she said. "It's now a crisis relocation center and it's full. Taking no messages at the, har, har, moment—maybe a year-long moment. That's not like Ellis; something tells me the museum directorship is in new hands," she went on, more to herself than to him.