"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 me a grave disservice. It's got me locked up in a hospital room in Georgia with a buttermouth little pissant doctor who doesn't know shit from Shinola. Get your ass out of here and send somebody in to talk to me or send enough boys to take what you need by force. I'll fight em, you can count on that."
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 twenty -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 café 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 to change the records on the juke. He left the sweet thang that waited his table a dollar tip that was crawling with death.
On his way out, a station wagon pulled in. There was a roofrack on top, and the wagon was piled high with kids and luggage. The wagon had New York plates and the driver, who rolled down his window to ask Harry how to get to US 21 going north, had a New York accent. Harry gave the New York fellow very clear directions on how to get to Highway 21. He also served him and his entire family their death-warrants without even knowing it.
The New Yorker was Edward M. Norris, lieutenant of police, detective squad, in the Big Apple's 87th Precinct. This was his first real vacation in five years. He and his family had had a fine time. The kids had been in seventh heaven at Disney World in Orlando, and not knowing the whole family would be dead by the second of July, Norris planned to tell that sour sonofabitch Steve Carella that it was possible to take your wife and kids someplace by car and have a good time. Steve, he would say, you may be a fine detective, but a man who can't police his own family ain't worth a pisshole drilled in a snowbank.
The Norris family had a kwik-eat at Babe's, then followed Harry Trent's admirable directions to Highway 21. Ed and his wife Trish marveled over southern hospitality while the three kids colored in the back seat. Christ only knew, Ed thought, what Carella's pair of monsters would have been up to.
That night they stayed in a Eustace, Oklahoma, travel court. Ed and Trish infected the clerk. The kids, Marsha, Stanley, and Hector, infected the kids they played with on the tourist court's playground-kids bound for west Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Trish infected the two women who were washing clothes at the Laundromat two blocks away. Ed, on his way down the motel corridor to get some ice, infected a fellow he passed in the hallway. Everybody got into the act.
Trish woke Ed up in the early morning hours to tell him that Heck, the baby, was sick. He had an ugly, rasping cough and was running a fever. It sounded to her like the croup. Ed Norris groaned and told her to give the kid some aspirin. If the kid's goddam croup could only have held off another four or five days, he could have had it in his very own house and Ed would have been left with the memory of a perfect vacation (not to mention the anticipation of all that gloating he planned to do). He could hear the poor kid through the connecting door, hacking away like a hound dog.
Trish expected that Hector's symptoms would abate in the morning-croup was a lying-down sickness-but by noon of the twentieth, she admitted to herself that it wasn't happening. The aspirin wasn't controlling the fever; poor Heck was just glass-eyed with it. His cough had taken on a booming note she didn't like, and his respiration sounded labored and phlegmy. Whatever it was, Marsha seemed to be coming down with it, too, and Trish had a nasty little tickle in the back of her own throat that was making her cough, although so far it was only a light cough she could smother in a small hankie.
"We've got to get Heck to a doctor," she said finally.
Ed pulled into a service station and checked the map paperclipped to the station wagon's sun-visor. They were in Hammer Crossing, Kansas. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe we can at least find a doctor who'll give us a referral." He sighed and ran an aggravated hand through his hair. "Hammer Crossing, Kansas! Jesus! Why'd he have to get sick, enough to need a doctor at some goddam nothing place like this?"
Marsha, who was looking at the map over her father's shoulder, said: "It says Jesse James robbed the bank here, Daddy. Twice."
"Fuck Jesse James," Ed grumped. "Ed!" Trish cried. "Sorry," he said, not feeling sorry in the least. He drove on.
After six calls, during each of which Ed Norris carefully held his temper with both hands, he finally found a doctor in Polliston who would look at Hector if they could get him there by three. Polliston was off their route, twenty miles west of Hammer Crossing, but now the important thing was Hector. Ed was getting very worried about him. He'd never seen the kid with so little oomph in him.
They were waiting in the outer office of Dr. Brenden Sweeney by two in the afternoon. By then Ed was sneezing, too. Sweeney's waiting room was full; they didn't get in to see the doctor until nearly four o'clock. Trish couldn't rouse Heck to more than a sludgy semiconsciousness, and she felt feverish herself. Only Stan Norris, age nine, still felt good enough to fidget.
During their wait in Sweeney's office they communicated the sickness which would soon be known across the disintegrating country as Captain Trips to more than twenty-five people, including a matronly woman who just came in to pay her bill before going on to pass the disease to her entire bridge club.
This matronly woman was Mrs. Robert Bradford, Sarah Bradford to the bridge club, Cookie to her husband and close friends. Sarah played well that night, possibly because her partner was Angela Dupray, her best friend. They seemed to enjoy a happy kind of telepathy. They won all three rubbers resoundingly, making a grand slam during the last. For Sarah, the only fly in the ointment was that she seemed to be coming down with a slight cold. It wasn't fair, arriving so soon on the heels of the last one.