The Andromeda Strain - Crichton Michael. Страница 13

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 if 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."

He picked it up gingerly and rocked it. The baby continued to scream. Its toothless mouth was wide open, its cheeks purple, and the veins stood out on its forehead.

"Probably hungry," Burton said.

Stone was frowning. "It's not very old. Can't be more than a couple of months. Is it a he or a she?"

Burton unwrapped the blankets and checked the diapers. "He. And he needs to be changed. And fed." He looked around the room. "There's probably a formula in the kitchen…"

"No," Stone said. "We don't feed it."

"Why not?"

"We don't do anything to that child until we get it out of this town. Maybe feeding is part of the disease process; maybe the people who weren't hit so hard or so fast were the ones who hadn't eaten recently. Maybe there's something protective about this baby's diet. Maybe…" He stopped. "But whatever it is, we can't take a chance. We've got to wait and get him into a controlled situation."

Burton sighed. He knew that Stone was right, but he also knew that the baby hadn't been fed for at least twelve hours. No wonder the kid was crying.

Stone said, "This is a very important development. It's a major break for us, and we've got to protect it. I think we should go back immediately."

"We haven't finished our head count."

Stone shook his head. "Doesn't matter. We have something much more valuable than anything we could hope to find. We have a survivor."

The baby stopped crying for a moment, stuck its finger in its mouth, and looked questioningly up at Burton. Then, when he was certain no food was forthcoming, he began to howl again.

"Too bad," Burton said, "he can't tell us what happened."

"I'm hoping he can," Stone said.

They parked the van in the center of the main street, beneath the hovering helicopter, and signaled for it to descend with the ladder. Burton held the infant, and Stone held the Scoop satellite- strange trophies, Stone thought, from a very strange town. The baby was quiet now; he had finally tired of crying and was sleeping fitfully, awakening at intervals to whimper, then sleep again.

The helicopter descended, spinning up swirls of dust. Burton wrapped the blankets about the baby's face to protect him. The ladder came down and he climbed up, with difficulty.

Stone waited on the ground, standing with the capsule in the wind and dust and thumpy noise from the helicopter.

And, suddenly, he realized that he was not alone on the street. He turned, and saw a man behind him.

He was an old man, with thin gray hair and a wrinkled, worn face. He wore a long nightgown that was smudged with dirt and yellowed with dust, and his feet were bare. He stumbled and tottered toward Stone. His chest was heaving with exertion beneath the nightgown.

"Who are you?" Stone said. But he knew: the man in the pictures. The one who had been photographed by the airplane.

"You…" the man said.

"Who are you?"

"You… did it…"

"What is your name?"

"Don't hurt me… I'm not like the others…"

He was shaking with fear as he stared at Stone in his plastic suit. Stone thought, We must look strange to him. Like men from Mars, men from another world.

"Don't hurt me…"

"We won't hurt you," Stone said. "What is your name?"

"Jackson. Peter Jackson. Sir. Please don't hurt me."

He waved to the bodies in the street. "I'm not like the others…"

"We won't hurt you," Stone said again.

"You hurt the others.

"No. We didn't."

"They're dead."

"We had nothing-"

"You're lying," he shouted, his eyes wide. "You're lying to me. You're not human. You're only pretending. You know I'm a sick man. You know you can pretend with me. I'm a sick man. I'm bleeding, I know. I've had this… this… this…"

He faltered, and then doubled over, clutching his stomach and wincing in pain.

"Are you all right?"

The man fell to the ground. He was breathing heavily, his skin pale. There was sweat on his face.

"My stomach," he gasped. "It's my stomach."

And then he vomited. It came up heavy, deep-red, rich with blood.

"Mr. Jackson-"

But the man was not awake. His eyes were closed and he was lying on his back. For a moment, Stone thought he was dead, but then he saw the chest moving, slowly, very slowly, but moving.

Burton came back down.

"Who is he?"

"Our wandering man. Help me get him up."

"Is he alive?"

"So far."

"I'll be damned," Burton said.

They used the power winch to hoist up the unconscious body of Peter Jackson, and then lowered it again to raise the capsule. Then, slowly, Burton and Stone climbed the r into the belly of the helicopter.

They did not remove their suits, but instead clipped on a second bottle of oxygen to give them another two hours of breathing time. That would be sufficient to carry them to the Wildfire installation.

The pilot established a radio connection to Vandenberg so that Stone could talk with Major Manchek.

"What have you found?" Manchek said.

"The town is dead. We have good evidence for an unusual process at work."