James Rouch - Plague Bomb

‘Oh dear me no, oh now now, oh please not now, I have so much still to do.’

‘What’s the pee stained old fool on about?’ Crowding in, Gross didn’t bother to look at his elderly companions on the rear seat, but when Venables spoke he became aware of the priest’s blanched face and shallow rasping breaths. ‘You caught yourself in your trouser zip?’

Struggling, and exerting himself to do so, Father Venables managed to slur five more words, ‘Dear God, I forgive them,’ then locked his grip on his rosary as paralysis raced through his body to rob him of the ability to say or do more. He could no longer move, not even to cross himself.

‘Is he having a stroke?’ Sherry Kane turned to look into the back and couldn’t believe it when she saw the other two not helping, but actually trying to distance themselves from the old priest. ‘Say what kind of creeps are you, at least loosen his collar, he ain’t hardly breathing.’ She reached out to do it herself, but Gross lunged to grab her wrists before she could.

‘Don’t touch him. That isn’t the battery in his pacemaker going on the blink, he must have picked up something when he went off on his own.’

‘What can we do?’ The handkerchief Edwards wadded over his mouth as he squeezed himself into an extreme corner not caring that his actions clearly indicated to all that his concern was more with avoiding whatever might be affecting Venables, than helping to apply some remedy. ‘Can he pass it to us?’

‘I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not going to give him the fucking chance. Stop the car.’ Even before the Rover came to a halt Gross had the door open and was jumping out. From the side of the road he picked up a moss covered bough and using it as a giant prod, began to push the dying man from the vehicle.

Giving a frightened yelp as he realized that Venables was being shoved toward him, Edwards made a hasty exit from the far door and got clear just in time as the priest toppled out onto the road.

Unable to resist, Venables had to suffer the pain of the rough wood rammed fiercely into his side and could do nothing to prevent arrest or soften his fall when the seat was no longer beneath him. Without being able to even put out a hand, he struck the road face first, hard, doing a flopping half roll before coming to rest against the shallow grass bank at the roadside. His glasses had broken and blood poured from cuts about his eyes and from his burst nose.

But pain, even that of the shard that had pierced his right eyeball, was fast becoming a distant thing. What vision he had left was dimming, and his thoughts were blurred, running together and losing their meaning like the images and colours of a painting dissolving in the rain. The last sight he had before it went altogether was of Professor Edwards splashing large quantities of disinfectant over the seat before jumping aboard the already moving vehicle.

The feeble beating of his heart and the sound of shallow breaths whistling past the broken dentures lodged in his throat were the only sensations he was aware of, and his oxygen starved brain never registered the instant when they ceased.

Only Webb did not join in the exchange of accusation, excuse and argument. His only feeling over the event was contempt for them all. It was a mark of how little regard any of them had for each other that the discussion centred not on the fact that a dying man had been jettisoned to a suffering lonely death, but around the moral issues involved.

He listened as the passion and anger flowed back and forth. Gross and the woman made the most noise, but the union-leader’s prime concern was justifying his actions, while Kane’s contribution, though equally loud, was an intellectually lightweight mishmash of half remembered and less understood quotes from schoolroom Marxist pamphlets.

When Gross made an occasional interjection it was usually drowned by the shouting, or interrupted repeatedly, and then he would scowl and his wrinkled face would gain another set of creases and his sharp eyes would narrow and project his hatred and frustration.

A point was reached where it appeared likely that blows would soon be struck. Kane’s voice was so shrill she seemed at times to go off the audible scale and Gross was purple, with his every word accompanied by a shower of spittle. Of the trio the professor alone seemed to have retained a degree of self control, but he sat with tight lipped bridled silence that had all the menace of a volcano on the verge of violent eruption.

Reluctantly Webb framed a comment to take the heat from the situation, but he never needed to utter it. Circumstances intervened.

On the road ahead was a small crowd of a dozen or so civilians. When they saw the Range Rover coming they made no move to step aside, instead they fanned out across both lanes and linked arms to form a human barrier.

Absorbed in the violent discussion, Sherry didn’t see the group until she turned back to the front to discover why they were slowing. They looked strange, she blinked and looked again, still she couldn’t make sense of what she saw, it was like she was seeing images in a grotesquely distorting mirror.

The people rushed forward to crowd about the vehicle, and it was as they tried to reach in through the open window, as they came so close that Sherry could feel their breath on her cheek, that her brain could no longer block the truth of what she could see.

She saw the bare flesh of their hands and arms and faces, those terrible, terrible faces, and started to scream; and went on screaming as with balled fists pressed savagely hard into her eyes she tried to hide from a sight she wished she had never seen.

‘He was still alive when they left him.’ Sergeant Hyde made his inspection of the body from a safe distance. ‘Look at the state of him. He must have lost the best part of a pint of blood from those facial injuries, but there’s no sign of a dressing, nothing.

‘They dumped the poor old devil.’

‘Could have fallen out I suppose, it might have been an accident.’ By his feet Thorne had noticed smears of blood and fragments of glass.

‘They’d only just pulled past that tree, they couldn’t have been doing any speed, certainly not enough to kill him. And if that were the case, why go off and leave him. No, judging by the marks on his face I’d say he was thrown out, probably because he suddenly developed symptoms that scared the living daylights out of them.’

‘So that kinda proves this place is still pretty lethal.’ With a long stick that lay nearby, Ripper gave the corpse an exploratory prod. ‘How come back in the US we were told all that chemical crap only lasted a mite longer than a month at most, and then it weren’t dangerous no more. There ain’t been no action in these parts for better than half a year, so it ought to be safe hereabouts, or was that just bullshit they gave us at boot camp?’

There were no indications of vomiting or diarrhoea on the body, and Revell could see no signs of burning or blistering either, but he knew that some chemical agent had to be the cause of death. Even with the enhanced incubation periods possessed by many of the latest strains of biological weapons, no virus or bacteria could possibly have acted so fast. ‘They told you right, but it’s been found that some toxins can be absorbed by certain plants, and give off again later, a lot later. The old fellow must have gone off for a pee and found that out for himself.’

‘Oh that’s great.’ Dooley moved his foot from a nettle rooted in the cracked road surface. ‘Ain’t enough we’ve got to watch for boards warning of minefields. Now we got to keep an eye open for ‘keep off the grass’ signs.’

They were re-boarding when they saw the refugees coming. The group moved slowly, and four of them held the handles of a roughly made litter. Hesitating when they saw the armoured personnel carrier, after a hurried whispered consultation among themselves they came on, very slowly.