The Andromeda Strain (12 page)

“How’s your gas?” Burton said.

There was a pause, and Stone swore loudly. Burton smiled, and crawled out of the back. Together they walked up the street to the gas station, found a bucket, and filled it with gas from the pump after spending several moments trying to decide how it worked. When they had the gas, they returned to the van, filled the tank, and Stone tried again.

The engine caught and held. Stone grinned. “Let’s go.”

Burton scrambled into the back, turned on the electronic equipment, and started the antenna rotating. He heard the faint beeping of the satellite.

“The signal’s weak, but still there. Sounds over to the left somewhere.”

Stone put the van in gear. They rumbled off, swerving around the bodies in the street. The beeping grew louder. They continued down the main street, past the gas station and the general store. The beeping suddenly grew faint.

“We’ve gone too far. Turn around.”

It took a while for Stone to find reverse on the gearshift, and then they doubled back, tracing the intensity of the sound. It was another fifteen minutes before they were able to locate the origin of the beeps to the north, on the outskirts of the town.

Finally, they pulled up before a plain single-story woodframe house. A sign creaked in the wind: Dr. Alan Benedict.

“Might have known,” Stone said. “They’d take it to the doctor.”

The two men climbed out of the van and went up to the house. The front door was open, banging in the breeze. They entered the living room and found it empty. Turning right, they came to the doctor’s office.

Benedict was there, a pudgy, white-haired man. He was seated before his desk, with several textbooks laid open. Along one wall were bottles, syringes, pictures of his family and several others showing men in combat uniforms. One showed a group of grinning soldiers; the scrawled words: “For Benny, from the boys of 87, Anzio.”

Benedict himself was staring blankly toward a corner of the room, his eyes wide, his face peaceful.

“Well,” Burton said, “Benedict certainly didn’t make it outside—”

And then they saw the satellite.

It was upright, a sleek polished cone three feet high, and its edges had been cracked and seared from the heat of reentry. It had been opened crudely, apparently with the help of a pair of pliers and chisel that lay on the floor next to the capsule.

“The bastard opened it,” Stone said. “Stupid son of a bitch.”

“How was he to know?”

“He might have asked somebody,” Stone said. He sighed. “Anyway, he knows now. And so do forty-nine other people.” He bent over the satellite and closed the gaping, triangular hatch. “You have the container?”

Burton produced the folded plastic bag and opened it out. Together they slipped it over the satellite, then sealed it shut.

“I hope to hell there’s something left,” Burton said.

“In a way,” Stone said softly, “I hope there isn’t.”

They turned their attention to Benedict. Stone went over to him and shook him. The man fell rigidly from his chair onto the floor.

Burton noticed the elbows, and suddenly became excited. He leaned over the body. “Come on,” he said to Stone. “Help me.”

“Do what?”

“Strip him down.”

“Why?”

“I want to check the lividity.”

“But why?”

“Just wait,” Burton said. He began unbuttoning Benedict’s shirt and loosening his trousers. The two men worked silently for some moments, until the doctor’s body was naked on the floor.

“There,” Burton said, standing back.

“I’ll be damned,” Stone said.

There was no dependent lividity. Normally, after a person died, blood seeped to the lowest points, drawn down by gravity. A person who died in bed had a purple back from accumulated blood. But Benedict, who had died sitting up, had no blood in the tissue of his buttocks or thighs.

Or in his elbows, which had rested on the arms of the chair.

“Quite a peculiar finding,” Burton said. He glanced around the room and found a small autoclave for sterilizing instruments. Opening it, he removed a scalpel. He fitted it with a blade—carefully, so as not to puncture his airtight suit—and then turned back to the body.

“We’ll take the most superficial major artery and vein,” he said.

“Which is?”

“The radial. At the wrist.”

Holding the scalpel carefully, Burton drew the blade along the skin of the inner wrist, just behind the thumb. The skin pulled back from the wound, which was completely bloodless. He exposed fat and subcutaneous tissue. There was no bleeding.

“Amazing.”

He cut deeper. There was still no bleeding from the incision. Suddenly, abruptly, he struck a vessel. Crumbling red-black material fell out onto the floor.

“I’ll be damned,” Stone said again.

“Clotted solid,” Burton said.

“No wonder the people didn’t bleed.”

Burton said, “Help me turn him over.” Together, they got the corpse onto its back, and Burton made a deep incision into the medial thigh, cutting down to the femoral artery and vein. Again there was no bleeding, and when they reached the artery, as thick as a man’s finger, it was clotted into a firm, reddish mass.

“Incredible.”

He began another incision, this time into the chest. He exposed the ribs, then searched Dr. Benedict’s office for a very sharp knife. He wanted an osteotome, but could find none. He settled for the chisel that had been used to open the capsule. Using this he broke away several ribs to expose the lungs and the heart. Again there was no bleeding.

Burton took a deep breath, then cut open the heart, slicing into the left ventricle.

The interior was filled with red, spongy material. There was no liquid blood at all.

“Clotted solid,” he said. “No question.”

“Any idea what can clot people this way?”

“The whole vascular system? Five quarts of blood? No.” Burton sat heavily in the doctor’s chair and stared at the body he had just cut open. “I’ve never heard of anything like it. There’s a thing called disseminated intravascular coagulation, but it’s rare and requires all sorts of special circumstances to initiate it.”

“Could a single toxin initiate it?”

“In theory, I suppose. But in fact, there isn’t a toxin in the world—”

He stopped.

“Yes,” Stone said. “I suppose that’s right.”

He picked up the satellite designated Scoop VII and carried it outside to the van. When he came back, he said, “We’d better search the houses.”

“Beginning here?”

“Might as well,” Stone said.

It was Burton who found Mrs. Benedict. She was a pleasant-looking middle-aged lady sitting in a chair with a book on her lap; she seemed about to turn the page. Burton examined her briefly, then heard Stone call to him.

He walked to the other end of the house. Stone was in a small bedroom, bent over the body of a young teen-age boy on the bed. It was obviously his room: psychedelic posters on the walls, model airplanes on a shelf to one side.

The boy lay on his back in bed, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. His mouth was open. In one hand, an empty tube of model-airplane cement was tightly clenched; all over the bed were empty bottles of airplane dope, paint thinner, turps.

Stone stepped back. “Have a look.”

Burton looked in the mouth, reached a finger in, touched the now-hardened mass. “Good God,” he said.

Stone was frowning. “This took time,” he said. “Regardless of what made him do it, it took time. We’ve obviously been oversimplifying events here. Everyone did not die instantaneously. Some people died in their homes; some got out into the street. And this kid here …”

He shook his head. “Let’s check the other houses.”

On the way out, Burton returned to the doctor’s office, stepping around the body of the physician. It gave him a strange feeling to see the wrist and leg sliced open, the chest exposed—but no bleeding. There was something wild and inhuman about that. As if bleeding were a sign of humanity. Well, he thought, perhaps it is. Perhaps the fact that we bleed to death makes us human.

For Stone, Piedmont was a puzzle challenging him to crack its secret. He was convinced that the town could tell him everything about the nature of the disease, its course and effects. It was only a matter of putting together the data in the proper way.

But he had to admit, as they continued their search, that the data were confusing:

A house that contained a man, his wife, and their young daughter, all sitting around the dinner table. They had apparently been relaxed and happy, and none of them had had time to push back their chairs from the table. They remained frozen in attitudes of congeniality, smiling at each other across the plates of now-rotting food, and flies. Stone noticed the flies, which buzzed softly in the room. He would, he thought, have to remember the flies.

An old woman, her hair white, her face creased. She was smiling gently as she swung from a noose tied to a ceiling rafter. The rope creaked as it rubbed against the wood of the rafter.

At her feet was an envelope. In a careful, neat, unhurried hand: “To whom it may concern.”

Stone opened the letter and read it. “The day of judgment is at hand. The earth and the waters shall open up and mankind shall be consumed. May God have mercy on my soul and upon those who have shown mercy to me. To hell with the others. Amen.”

Burton listened as the letter was read. “Crazy old lady,” he said. “Senile dementia. She saw everyone around her dying, and she went nuts.”

“And killed herself?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Pretty bizarre way to kill herself, don’t you think?”

“That kid also chose a bizarre way,” Burton said.

Stone nodded.

Roy O. Thompson, who lived alone. From his greasy coveralls they assumed he ran the town gas station. Roy had apparently filled his bathtub with water, then knelt down, stuck his head in, and held it there until he died. When they found him his body was rigid, holding himself under the surface of the water; there was no one else around, and no sign of struggle.

“Impossible,” Stone said. “No one can commit suicide that way.”

Lydia Everett, a seamstress in the town who had quietly gone out to the back yard, sat in a chair, poured gasoline over herself, and struck a match. Next to the remains of her body they found the scorched gasoline can.

William Arnold, a man of sixty sitting stiffly in a chair in the living room, wearing his World War I uniform. He had been a captain in that war, and he had become a captain again, briefly, before he shot himself through the right temple with a Colt .45. There was no blood in the room when they found him; he appeared almost ludicrous, sitting there with a clean, dry hole in his head.

A tape recorder stood alongside him, his left hand resting on the case. Burton looked at Stone questioningly, then turned it on.

A quavering, irritable voice spoke to them.

“You took your sweet time coming, didn’t you? Still I am glad you have arrived at last. We are in need of reinforcements. I tell you, it’s been one hell of a battle against the Hun. Lost 40 per cent last night, going over the top, and two of our officers are out with the rot. Not going well, not at all. If only Gary Cooper was here. We need men like that, the men who made America strong. I can’t tell you how much it means to me, with those giants out there in the flying saucers. Now they’re burning us down, and the gas is coming. You can see them die and we don’t have gas masks. None at all. But I won’t wait for it. I am going to do the proper thing now. I regret that I have but one life to kill for my country.”

The tape ran on, but it was silent.

Burton turned it off. “Crazy,” he said. “Stark raving mad.”

Stone nodded.

“Some of them died instantly, and the others … went quietly nuts.”

“But we seem to come back to the same basic question. Why? What was the difference?”

“Perhaps there’s a graded immunity to this bug,” Burton said. “Some people are more susceptible than others. Some people are protected, at least for a time.”

“You know,” Stone said, “there was that report from the flybys, and those films of a man alive down here. One man in white robes.”

“You think he’s still alive?”

“Well, I wonder,” Stone said. “Because if some people survived longer than others—long enough to dictate a taped speech, or to arrange a hanging—then you have to ask yourself if someone maybe didn’t survive for a very long time. You have to ask yourself if there isn’t someone in this town who is
still
alive.”

It was then that they heard the sound of crying.

At first it seemed like the sound of the wind, it was so high and thin and reedy, but they listened, feeling puzzled at first, and then astonished. The crying persisted, interrupted by little hacking coughs.

They ran outside.

It was faint, and difficult to localize. They ran up the street, and it seemed to grow louder; this spurred them on.

And then, abruptly, the sound stopped.

The two men came to a halt, gasping for breath, chests heaving. They stood in the middle of the hot, deserted street and looked at each other.

“Have we lost our minds?” Burton said.

“No,” Stone said. “We heard it, all right.”

They waited. It was absolutely quiet for several minutes. Burton looked down the street, at the houses, and the jeep van parked at the other end, in front of Dr. Benedict’s house.

The crying began again, very loud now, a frustrated howl.

The two men ran.

It was not far, two houses up on the right side. A man and a woman lay outside, on the sidewalk, fallen and clutching their chests. They ran past them and into the house. The crying was still louder; it filled the empty rooms.

They hurried upstairs, clambering up, and came to the bedroom. A large double bed, unmade. A dresser, a mirror, a closet.

And a small crib.

They leaned over, pulling back the blankets from a small, very red-faced, very unhappy infant. The baby immediately stopped crying long enough to survey their faces, enclosed in the plastic suits.

Then it began to howl again.

“Scared hell out of it,” Burton said. “Poor thing.”