Graham Masterton: Plague

'Professor Glantz?' said Dr. Petrie.

Ivor Glantz said, 'Give me a rifle.'

Dr. Petrie held back. 'I'm sorry, Professor.'

Glantz reached out and twisted the automatic weapon out of Dr. Petrie's grasp. His eyes were bright and feverish, and he almost seemed to be snuffling in rage.

'Professor Glantz — you can't do that! Professor Glantz!'

Dr. Petrie tried to snatch Ivor Glantz's sleeve, but Glantz pulled away, and he waved the rifle towards him.

'Get away!' he said harshly. 'Just get away!'

He turned back towards the window, and raised the rifle in his hands. The people who were pressed against the glass could see what he was going to do, but there was such a crush of people behind them that they couldn't escape. They simply opened their mouths in fear and screamed soundless screams. Sergei Forward appeared to be paralyzed with terror, and he could only stand there and watch, his hands pressed against the glass, as Ivor Glantz aimed at his face from only two or three inches away.

'Christ!' bellowed Garunisch. 'Stop him! Someone stop him!'

Jack the super made a half-hearted attempt at a football tackle, but Glantz stepped back and smacked him away. Before anyone else could move, he had lifted the rifle again and fired into the glass.

The whole door collapsed outwards in huge slices. Nearly quarter of a ton of reinforced glass sheared into hands, faces, upraised arms, and broke on the ground outside with a horrific flat ringing sound.

The shrieking of the crowd filled the lobby with hideous noise — cries of pain and terror, and cries of frustrated fury. They flooded into the reception area trampling over dead and dying bodies, and Ivor Glantz was swept away like a man carried out to sea.

'Back to the stairs!' bellowed Kenneth Garunisch. 'Back to the stairs!'

Dr. Petrie seized Adelaide and Esmeralda by the hand, and pulled them towards the emergency stairs. Kenneth Garunisch pushed them hurriedly through, and Herbert Gaines, whimpering in fright, followed after. Nicholas was hitting at a bloody-faced vagrant with his baseball bat, and just managed to push him away and duck through the door to the stairs before a mob of screaming men reached him, waving clubs and knives. Kenneth Garunisch slammed the door, locked it, and dropped the bolt across it. They heard the crowd bang up against the other side like an avalanche.

'Pappa!' cried Esmeralda. 'Where's Pappa?'

Kenneth Garunisch reached out and held her arm. 'Miss Baxter, it was no good. I couldn't keep the door open any longer.'

'You mean he's still — '

'He wouldn't have felt very much, believe me.'

'He's still out there? You mean he's still out there?'

'Miss Baxter, it was his own fault! If he hadn't fired that shot!'

'They'll kill him!' screamed Esmeralda, in an almost unbearably high-pitched voice. 'They'll kill him!'

Kenneth Garunisch said to Adelaide, 'Please — take her upstairs will you? We have to get out of here and lock all these fire doors.'

'You have to let me through!' said Esmeralda. 'I have to get him out of there!'

Garunisch stood firm. 'Miss Baxter, it's impossible.'

'I demand that you let me through!' insisted Esmeralda, suddenly haughty.

Kenneth Garunisch shook his head. 'Come on, Miss Baxter, let's just get out of here.'

Esmeralda glared furiously for a moment, but then her face softened and collapsed with anguish.

'Oh, God!' she sobbed. 'It's my fault! Oh God, it's all my fault! He was so good, you don't even understand!'

'We understand,' said Herbert Gaines, consolingly.

'You don't!' shrieked Esmeralda, off-key and hysterical. 'He was my lover!'

They locked and bolted every fire exit up to the ninth floor, and when they were there they took the added precaution of levering open the elevator doors and wedging them with a long gilt settee. The elevators had been switched off by now, but they just wanted to make sure that the furious mob downstairs didn't get them working again.

'Listen to that,' said Kenneth Garunisch, leaning over the open elevator shaft.

Dr. Petrie listened. From the first floor, there was a sound like strange trolls at the bottom of an echoing drain — screams and hoots and cries.

'Did you ever see The Third Man?' said Garunisch. 'You remember the scene at the top of the Ferris Wheel? When they looked down at the people below, like dots, and Harry Lime says something like — 'would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving for ever?' Well, what would you say if one of those animals down there stopped screaming? Maybe Gaines was right. When it comes down to it, just show me one American who gives a fuck about any other American.'

Dr. Petrie said, 'I'm a doctor, Mr. Garunisch. I try to give at least half a fuck.'

Kenneth Garunisch looked at Dr. Petrie narrowly. 'You think I'm wrong, don't you? For the strike, and all that?'

'Does it matter?'

Garunisch looked down into the depths of the elevator shaft. The distorted screams and groans continued.

'It matters to me, Dr. Petrie. I stood up for a principle I believe in. If the whole of America has to die for that principle, then I still believe it's worth it.'

'Even if the principle kills the very people it's supposed to protect?'

Kenneth Garunisch turned away. 'Principles are everything, Dr. Petrie. Without principles, we cease to be living beings.'

Herbert Gaines came up. His yellow safari suit was smudged with dust, and his leonine hair was sticking up like fuse wire.

'I'm sorry to interrupt this debating society, but I think we ought to start barricading our apartments. Maybe we ought to see what food we have available, too, and share it out.'

Esmeralda, who was calmer now, almost uncannily calm, was sitting at the opposite end of the ninth-floor landing smoking a cigarette.

'We have a whole freezer full,' she said. 'Lamb, beef, hamburger, chickens, turkeys, vegetables. I guess we can hold out for months.'

'So have we,' nodded Garunisch. 'How about you, Mr. Gaines?'

Nicholas spoke for him. 'Oh, we're fine, too, aren't we, Herbert? I think our supplies lean a little heavily on ready-made goulasch, but I suppose my digestion can just about stand it. Herbert had one of his cooking jags last month, and goulasch is the only damned thing he can do.'

Herbert Gaines turned around angrily: 'What's the matter with my sole veronique? Or my cous-cous?'

Nicholas sighed. 'Oh, Herbert, they're lovely. Can't you ever take a goddamned joke?'

Dr. Petrie took Adelaide by the hand. 'I suggest we all stay in one apartment. You can lock all your valuables up in your own apartments, but if we all stay in separate places, we've lost any means of communication. Supposing the mob gets up here and breaks open your door, Mr. Gaines, or yours, Mr. Garunisch, and you've got no way of calling out for help from the rest of us?'

'I think Dr. Petrie has a point,' said Kenneth Garunisch. 'We can move beds and food into one condo, and defend it together.'

Esmeralda stood up. She was white-faced and her eyes were smudges of shadow. She looked like Ophelia, drowning in the weeds.

'If we're going to do that' she said, 'we'd better use my place. We have a closed-circuit TV on the door — and apart from that, the settee in the den turns into a double-bed.'

'Is that agreed then?' said Garunisch.

'What about Mr. and Mrs. Blaufoot?' asked Herbert Gaines. 'Don't you think we ought to have a word with them?'

While the rest of the survivors shifted beds into Esmeralda's apartment, and carried in food and belongings, Kenneth Garunisch went up to Mr. and Mrs. Blaufoot's door and rang the bell.

There was a long pause. Then Mr. Blaufoot said, 'Who is it?'

'It's me, Mr. Bloofer. Mr. Garunisch from downstairs. Can you open the door?'