Plague by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page B

you kidding? What makes him think it isn’t going to spread around the whole
damn city?’
    Dr. Selmer
shrugged. ‘Precedent. The worst outbreak in American
history was New Orleans, in 1920, when eleven people died. Firenza doesn’t
believe that we’re going to lose more than twelve.’
    ‘Didn’t you
tell him you’d lost five already? Jesus, Anton, this thing is far worse than bubonic
plague. Doesn’t he understand that?’
    Dr. Selmer
pulled his surgical cap on again. He looked at Leonard Petrie with his pale,
worn-out eyes, and when he spoke his voice seemed hollow with tiredness.
    ‘I think he
understands that, yes. But he’s like everyone else. They watch Dr. Kildare and
Ben Casey, and they don’t believe that American medicine can ever be licked.
    They don’t
understand that we can make mistakes. Officially, we’re not allowed to.
    Officially
we’re not even permitted to be baffled.’
    Dr. Petrie
looked serious. ‘Anton,’ he said, ‘how bad is it really?’
    Before Dr.
Selmer could answer, his nurse came out of the emergency ward door and said,
‘Doctor, he’s almost gone. I think you’d better come.’
    ‘There’s a mask
and a gown spare, Leonard,’ Dr. Selmer said. ‘Come inside and you can see for
yourself how bad it really is.’
    They pushed
their way into the emergency ward. Dr. Petrie tugged on a tight surgical cap
and laced a mask over his nose and mouth. The nurse helped him put on green
rubbers and a long gown. She gave him transparent latex gloves, and he pulled
them on to his hands as he followed Selmer into the glare of the surgical
lamps.
    It was the
middle-aged man that Herb Stone and Francis Poletto had picked up in Alton
Road. His face was drawn and lividly pale, and his
eyes were rolled back into his head so that only the whites were showing.
Beside the couch, on the luminous dials of the diagnostic equipment, his
respiration, heartbeat and blood pressure were slowly subsiding.
    The nurse said,
‘His breathing is failing, Dr. Selmer. We can’t keep him much longer.’
    Dr. Selmer,
helpless, stood at the end of the couch and watched the man gradually die.
    ‘This is how
bad it really is,’ he said to Dr. Petrie, in a hushed voice. ‘This man’s wife
told us that he felt sick just after lunch. By the evening, it had gotten so
bad that he decided to go and look up his doctor. He was on his way there when
he was picked up by the cops for drunk driving. He wasn’t drunk, of course. He
was dying of plague.
    Twelve hours
from first symptoms to death.’
    Dr. Petrie saw
the pulse-rate drop and drop and drop.
    The luminous
ribbon of the cardiac counter was barely nudged by the man’s weakening heart.
‘Is his wife here?’ Dr. Petrie asked.
    Selmer nodded.
‘We’re keeping every relative and friend in the waiting-room, under
observation. The way this plague seems to develop, you show your first symptoms
three or four hours after you’ve been exposed to it. We had a young girl
brought in about three-and-a-half hours ago, and her father’s showing the first
signs. Dizziness, sickness, diahorrea, shivering. It’s
the fastest infectious disease I’ve ever seen.’
    Dr. Petrie said
nothing as the man on the couch died. Whoever he was, whatever he did, his
forty-five years of life and memory and experience dwindled to nothing at all,
and vanished on that hard, uncompromising bed.
    Dr. Selmer
motioned to the nurse and they drew a sheet over his face and disconnected the
diagnostic equipment. One of the doctors called for a porter from the mortuary.
    ‘Poor guy,’
said Dr. Petrie, ‘He never even knew what it was.’
    Dr. Selmer
turned away. Though an emergency ward doctor he was torn apart by losing his
patients. He was skilful and talented and he never lost his enthusiasm for
other people’s survival. What was happening here today was, for him, relentless
and unstoppable agony.
    ‘There’s one
consolation,’ said Dr. Selmer hoarsely. ‘It looks as though we’re not