NightScape

If I Should Die before I Wake

It wasn't the first case, but it was Dr. Jonas Bingaman's first case, although he would not realize that until two days later. The patient, a boy with freckles and red hair, lay listlessly beneath the covers of his bed. Bingaman, who had been leaving his office for the evening when the boy's anxious mother telephoned, paused at the entrance to the narrow bedroom and assessed immediately that the boy had a fever. It wasn't just that Joey Carter, whom Bingaman had brought into the world ten years earlier, was red in the face. After all, the summer of 1918 had been uncommonly hot, and even now, at the end of August, the doctor was treating cases of sunburn. No, what made him conclude so quickly that Joey had a fever was that, despite the lingering heat, Joey was shivering under a sheet and two blankets.

"He's been like this since he came home just before supper," Joey's mother, Rebecca, said. A slim, plain woman of thirty-five, she entered Joey's room ahead of the doctor and gestured urgently for him to follow. "I found his wet bathing suit. He'd been swimming."

"At the creek. I warned him about that creek," Joey's father, Edward, said. Elmdale's best carpenter, the gangly man still wore his coveralls and work boots and had traces of sawdust in his thick, dark hair. "I told him to stay away from it."

"The creek?" Bingaman turned toward Edward, who waited anxiously in the hallway.

"The water's no good. Makes you sick. I know 'cause Bill Kendrick's boy got sick swimming in it last summer. Breathed wrong.

Swallowed some of the water. Threw up all night long. I warned Joey not to go near it, but he wouldn't listen."

"The creek through Larrabee's farm?"

"That's the one. The cattle mess in the water. The stuff flows downstream and into the swimming hole."

"Yes, I remember Bill Kendrick's boy getting sick from the water last summer," Bingaman said. "Has Joey been vomiting?"

"No." Rebecca's voice was strained.

"I'd better take a look."

As Bingaman went all the way into the room, he noted a baseball bat in a corner. A balsa-wood model of one of the Curtiss biplanes that the American Expeditionary Force was using against the Germans hung above the bed, attached by a cord to the ceiling.

"Not feeling well, Joey?"

It took an obvious effort for the boy to shake his head "no." His eyelids were barely open. He coughed.

"Been swimming in the creek?"

Joey had trouble nodding. "Shoulda listened to Dad," he murmured hoarsely.

"Next time you'll know the right thing to do. But for now, I want you to concentrate on getting better. I'm going to examine you, Joey. I'll try to be as gentle as I can."

Bingaman opened his black bag and leaned over Joey, feeling heat come off the boy. Joey's mother and father stepped closer, watching intently. Joey's cough deepened.

Ten minutes later, Bingaman put his stethoscope back into his bag and straightened.

"Is that what it is?" Edward asked quickly. "Bad water from Larrabee's farm?"

Bingaman hesitated. "Why don't we talk somewhere else and let Joey rest?"

Downstairs, the evening's uneaten dinner of potatoes, carrots, and pork chops cooled in pots and a frying pan on the stove.

"But what do you think it is?" Rebecca asked the moment they were seated at the kitchen table.

"How serious is this?" Edward demanded.

"His temperature's a hundred and two. His glands are swollen. He has congestion in his lungs."

"My God, you don't think he has diphtheria from the water." Rebecca's anxiety was nearing a quiet panic.

Edward stared at the floor and shook his head. "I was afraid of this."

"No, I don't think it's diphtheria," Bingaman said.

Joey's father peered up, hoping.

"Some of the symptoms are those of diphtheria. But diphtheria presents bluish-white lesions that have the consistency of leather. The lesions are surrounded by inflammation and are visible near the tonsils and in the nostrils."

"But Joey-"

"Doesn't have the lesions," Bingaman said. "I think he may have bronchitis."

"Bronchitis?"

"I'll know more when I examine him again tomorrow. In the meantime, let's treat his symptoms. Give him one-half an adult dose of aspirin every six hours. Give him a sponge bath with rubbing alcohol. Both will help to keep down his fever. When his pajamas and bedding get sweaty, change them. Keep his window open. The fresh air will help chase the germs from his chest."

"And?" Joey's father asked.

Bingaman didn't understand.

"That's all? That's the most you can do?"

"That and tell you to make certain he drinks plenty of water."

"If he can keep it down. It's water that got him into this trouble."

"Possibly. Did Joey tell you if any other boys went swimming with him?"

"Yes. Pete Williams. Ben Slocum."

Bingaman nodded. He not only knew them; he had delivered them, just as he had delivered Joey." Take Joey's temperature every couple of hours. Telephone me if it gets higher or if other symptoms appear."

"Mrs. Williams, this is Dr. Bingaman calling. This might sound strange, but I was wondering – is your son, Pete, feeling all right? No fever? No swollen glands? No congestion?"

He made another call.

"Nothing like that at all, Mrs. Slocum? Your son's as fit as can be? Good. Thank you. Give my regards to your husband. Why did I telephone to ask? Just a random survey. You know how I like to make sure Elmdale's students are all in good health before they go back to school. Good night. Thanks again."

Bingaman set the long-stemmed ear piece onto the wooden wall phone in the front corridor of his home. Troubled, he shut off the overhead light and leaned against the wall, peering out his front-door window. Twilight was dimming. In the yard, fireflies began to twinkle. A Model T rattled past. On a porch across the street, illuminated by a glow of light from the living-room window over there, Harry Webster sat in his rocking chair, smoking his pipe.

"Jonas, what's wrong?"

Bingaman turned to his wife, Marion, whose broad-shouldered outline approached him in the shadows of the hallway. The daughter of a German immigrant, an ancestry that she avoided mentioning given the war in Europe, Marion had been raised on a farm in upstate New York before she received her nurse's training, and her robust appearance had been one of the reasons that Bingaman was initially attracted to her. Twenty-five years ago. Now, at the age of fifty-two, she was as robust as ever, and he loved her more than ever. True, the honey-colored hair that he enjoyed stroking had acquired streaks of silver. But then his own hair had not only turned silvery but had thinned until he was almost bald. Marion called it "distinguished."

"Wrong?" Bingaman echoed. "I'm not sure anything's wrong."

"You've been pensive since you came home for dinner after visiting Joey Carter."

"It's a problem I've been mulling over. Joey seems to have bronchitis. His father thinks he got it from swimming in infected water this afternoon. But bronchitis takes several days to develop, and none of the boys Joey went swimming with is sick."

"What are you thinking?"

"Whatever it is, Joey must have gotten it somewhere else. But usually I don't see just one case of bronchitis. It spreads around. So where did he catch it if no one else in town has it?"

Rebecca Carter fidgeted at the open screen door, impatient for Bingaman to climb the front steps and enter the house. "I was afraid I wouldn't be able to reach you."

"Actually, when you telephoned, I was just about to drive over. Joey's the first patient on my list this morning."

Feeling burdened by the weight he had put on recently, Bingaman started up the stairs to the second level, then paused, frowning when he heard labored coughing from the bedroom directly at the top." Has Joey been coughing like that all night?"

"Not as bad." Rebecca's face was haggard from lack of sleep. "This started just before dawn. I've been giving him aspirin and sponge baths like you told me, but they don't seem to do any good."

The doctor hurried up the stairs, alarmed by what he saw when he entered the bedroom. Joey looked smaller under the covers. His face was much redder, but he also had a dark blue color around his lips. His chest heaved, as if he was coughing even when he wasn't.

Bingaman went urgently to work, removing instruments from his bag, noting that Joey's temperature had risen to a hundred and four, that his lungs sounded more congested, that the inside of his throat was inflamed, that his glands were more swollen, and that the boy didn't have the energy to respond to questions. The day before, Joey's pulse and respiration rate had been 85 and 20. Now they were 100 and 25.

"I'm sorry to tell you this, Mrs. Carter."

"What's wrong with him?"

"It might be pneumonia."

Rebecca Carter gasped.

"I know you'd prefer to keep him at home," Bingaman said, "but what's best for Joey right now is to admit him to the hospital."

Rebecca looked as if she doubted her sanity, as if she couldn't possibly be hearing what the doctor had just told her. "No. I can take care of him."

"I'm sure you can, but Joey needs special treatment that isn't available here."

Rebecca looked more frightened. "Like what?"

"I'll explain after I telephone the hospital and make the arrangements." Hoping that he had distracted her, Bingaman hurried downstairs to the wall phone near the front door. What he didn't want to tell her was that the dark blue color around Joey's mouth was an indication of cyanosis. The congestion in the boy's lungs was preventing him from getting enough oxygen. If Joey wasn't hooked up to an oxygen tank at the hospital, he might asphyxiate from the fluid in his lungs.

"It certainly has the symptoms of pneumonia," the Elmdale hospital's chief of staff told Bingaman. His name was Brian Powell, and his wiry frame contrasted with Bingaman's portly girth. The two physicians had been friends for years, and Powell, who happened to be in the emergency ward when Joey Carter was admitted, had invited Bingaman to his office for a cup of coffee afterward. In his mind, Bingaman kept hearing Mrs. Carter sob.

"But if it is pneumonia, how did he get it?" Bingaman ignored the steaming cup of coffee on the desk in front of him. "Do you have any patients who present these symptoms?"

Powell shook his head. "During the winter, the symptoms wouldn't be unusual. Colds and secondary infections leading to pneumonia. But in summer? I'd certainly remember."

" It just doesn't make any sense." Bingaman sweated under his suit coat. "Why is Joey the only one?"

"No." Rebecca Carter waited outside Joey's hospital room in the hopes that she'd be allowed to enter. Her eyes were red from tears. "Nothing different. It was just an ordinary summer. We did what we always do."

"And what would that be?" Bingaman asked.

Rebecca dabbed a handkerchief against her eyes. "Picnics. Joey likes to play baseball. We go to the park, and Edward teaches him how to pitch. And the movies. Sometimes we go to the movies. Joey likes Charlie Chaplin."

"That's it? That's all?"

"Just an ordinary summer. I have my sewing club. We don't often get a chance to do things as a family because Edward works late, taking advantage of the good weather. Why do you ask? Didn't Joey get sick from the water in the creek?"

"Can you think of anything else that Joey did this summer? Anything even the slightest bit unusual?"

"No. I'm sorry. I-"

She was interrupted by her husband hurrying along the hospital corridor. "Rebecca." Edward Carter's lean face glistened with sweat. "I decided to come home for lunch and check on Joey. Mrs. Wade next door said you and he had gone to…My God, Doctor, what's wrong with Joey?"

"We're still trying to find that out. It might be pneumonia."

"Pneumonia?"

The door to Joey's room opened. For a moment, the group had a brief glimpse of Joey covered by sheets in a metal bed, an oxygen mask over his face. Then a nurse came out and shut the door.

"How is he?" Joey's mother asked.

"Light-headed," the nurse answered. "He keeps talking about feeling as if he's on a Ferris wheel."

"Ferris wheel?" Bingaman asked.

"He's probably remembering the midway," Joey's father said.

"Midway?"

" In Riverton. Last week, I had to drive over there to get some special lumber for a job I'm working on. Joey went with me. We spent an hour at the midway. He really loved the Ferris wheel."

"Yes, patients with fever, swollen glands/ and congestion," Bingaman explained, using the telephone in Dr. Powell's office.

"A possible diagnosis of pneumonia." He was speaking to the chief of staff at Riverton's hospital, fifty miles away. "Nothing? Not one case? Why am I…? I'm trying to understand how one of my patients came down with these symptoms. He was in Riverton last week. I thought perhaps the midway you had there…If you remember anything, would you please call me? Thank you."

Bingaman hooked the ear piece onto the telephone and rubbed the back of his neck.

Throughout the conversation, Powell had remained seated behind his desk, studying him. "Take it easy. Pneumonia can be like pollen in the wind. You'll probably never know where the boy caught the disease."

Bingaman stared out a window toward a robin in an elm tree. "Pollen in the wind?" He exhaled. "You know what I'm like. I'm compulsive. I think too much. I can't leave well enough alone, and in this case, my patient isn't doing well at all."

Marion watched him stare at his plate. "You don't like the pot roast?"

"What?" Bingaman looked up. "Oh…I'm sorry. I guess I'm not much company tonight."

"You're still bothered?"

Bingaman raised some mashed potatoes on his fork. "I don't like feeling helpless."

"You're not helpless. This afternoon, you did a lot of good for the patients who came to your office."

Without tasting the potatoes, Bingaman set down the fork. "Because their problems were easy to correct. I can stitch shut a gash in an arm. I can prescribe bicarbonate of soda for an upset stomach. I can recommend a salve that reduces the itch of poison ivy and stops the rash from spreading. But aside from fighting the symptoms, there is absolutely nothing I can do to fight pneumonia. We try to reduce Joey's fever, keep him hydrated, and give him oxygen. After that, it's all a question of whether the boy is strong enough to fight the infection. It's out of my hands. It's in God's hands. And sometimes God can be cruel."

"The war certainly shows that," Marion said. She was American, stoutly loyal, but her German ancestry made her terribly aware that good men were dying on both sides of the Hindenberg line.

"All those needless deaths from infected wounds." Bingaman tapped his fork against his plate. "In a way, it's like Joey's infection. Lord, how I wish I were young again. In medical school again. I keep up with the journals, but I can't help feeling I'm using outmoded techniques. I wish I'd gone into research. Microbiology. I'd give anything to be able to attack an infection at its source. Maybe some day someone will invent a drug that tracks down infectious microbes and kills them."

" It would certainly make your job easier. But in the meantime…"

Bingaman nodded solemnly. "We do what we can."

"You've been putting in long hours. Why don't you do something for yourself? Go up to your study. Try out the wireless radio you bought."

"I'd almost forgotten about that."

"You certainly were determined when you spent that Sunday afternoon installing the antenna on the roof."

"And you were certainly determined to warn me I was going to fall off the roof and break my neck." Bingaman chuckled. "That radio seemed like an exciting thing when I bought it. A wonder of the twentieth century."

"It still is."

"The ability to talk to someone in another state. In another country. Without wires. To listen to a ship at sea. Or a report from a battlefield." Bingaman sobered. "Well, that part isn't wonderful. The rest of it, though…Yes, I believe I will do something for myself tonight."

But the telephone rang as he walked down the hallway to go upstairs. Wearily, he unhooked the ear piece and leaned toward the microphone.

"Hello." He listened. "Oh." His voice dropped. "Oh." His tone became somber. "I'm on my way."

"An emergency?" Marion asked.

Bingaman felt pressure in his chest. "Joey Carter is dead."

Marion turned pale. "Dear Lord."

"With oxygen, I thought he had a chance to…How terrible." He felt paralyzed and struggled to rouse himself. "I'd better go see the parents."

But after Bingaman put on his suit coat and reached for his black bag, the telephone rang again. He answered, listened, and when he replaced the ear piece, he felt older and more tired.

"What is it?" Marion touched his arm.

"That was the hospital again. Joey's father just collapsed with a hundred-and-two fever. He's coughing. His glands are swollen. The two boys Joey went swimming with now have Joey's symptoms, also. Their parents just brought them into the emergency ward."

"If it was only Joey's two friends, I'd say, yes, they might all have gotten sick from swimming in Larrabee's creek," Bingaman told Dr.

Powell, who had returned to the hospital in response to Bingaman's urgent summons. It was midnight. They sat across from each other in Powell's office, a pale desk lamp making their faces look sallow. "The trouble is, Joey's father didn't go anywhere near that creek, and he's got the infection, too."

"You're still thinking of River ton."

"It's the only answer that makes sense. Joey probably got infected at the midway. Maybe a worker sneezed on him. Maybe it was a passenger on the Ferris wheel. However it happened, he then passed the infection on to his father and his two friends. They showed symptoms a day after he did because they'd been infected later than Joey was."

"Infected by Joey. It's logical except for one thing." "What's that?"

" Why hasn't Joey's mother -? "

Someone knocked on the door. Without waiting for an answer, a nurse rushed in. "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I was certain you'd want to know. Mrs. Carter just collapsed with the same symptoms as her son and husband."

Both doctors sprang to their feet.

"We'll have to implement quarantine precautions." Bingaman rushed from the office.

"Yes." Powell hurried next to him. "No visitors. Mandatory gauze masks for medical personnel, anybody who goes into those rooms. The emergency ward should be disinfected."

"Good idea." Bingaman moved faster. "And the room where Joey died. The nurses who treated him had better scrub down. They'd better put on clean uniforms in case they've been contaminated."

"But we still don't know how to treat this, aside from what we've already tried."

"And that didn't work." Bingaman's chest felt hollow. "If you're right about how the infection started, why haven't there been cases in Riverton?" Powell sounded out of breath.

"I don't know. In fact, there's almost nothing I do know. When do we get the results from Joey Carter's autopsy?"

The stoop-shouldered man peeled off his rubber gloves, dropped them into a medical waste bin, then took off his gauze mask, and leaned against a locker. His name was Peter Talbot. A surgeon, he also functioned as Elmdale's medical examiner. He glanced from Bingaman to Powell and said, "The lungs were completely filled with fluid. It would have been impossible for the boy to breathe."

Bingaman stepped closer. "Could the fluid have accumulated subsequent to his death?"

"What are you suggesting?"

"Another cause of death. Did you examine the brain?"

"Of course."

"Was there any sign of – "

"What exactly are you looking for?"

"Could the cause of death have been something as highly contagious as meningitis?"

"No. No sign of meningitis. What killed this boy attacked his lungs."

"Pneumonia," Powell said. "There's no reason to discount the initial diagnosis."

"Except that pneumonia doesn't normally spread this fast."

"Spread this fast?" Talbot straightened. "You have other cases?"

"Four since the boy died."

"Good Lord."

"I know. This sounds like the start of an epidemic."

"But caused by what?" Bingaman rubbed his forehead.

"I'll try to find out." Talbot pointed toward a table. "I have tissue samples ready to be cultured. I'll do my best to identify the microorganism responsible. What else can we – "

Bingaman started toward the door. "I think it's time to make another telephone call to the Riverton hospital."

Blood drained from Bingaman's face as he listened to the doctor in charge of the emergency room at the Riverton hospital.

"But I asked your chief of staff to get in touch with me if any cases were reported." Damn him, Bingaman thought. "Too busy? No time? Yes. And I'm very much afraid we're all going to get a lot busier."

As he turned from the telephone, he couldn't help noticing the apprehension on Powell's face.

"How many cases do they have?"

"Twelve," Bingaman answered.

"Twelve?"

"They were all admitted within the past few hours. Two of the patients have died."

He parked his Model T in his driveway and extinguished the headlights. The time was after three a.m., and he had hoped that the chug-chug, rattle-rattle of the automobile would not waken his wife, but he saw a pale yellow glow appear in the window of the master bedroom, and he shook his head, discouraged, wishing he still owned a horse and buggy. The air had a foul odor from the car's exhaust fumes. Too many inventions. Too many complications. Even so, he thought, there's one invention you do wish for-a drug that eliminates infectious microbes.

Exhausted, he got out of the car. Marion had the front door open, waiting for him, as he climbed the steps onto the porch.

"You look awful." She took his bag and put an arm around him, guiding him into the house.

"It's been that kind of night." Bingaman explained what was happening at the hospital, the new patients he'd examined and the treatment he'd prescribed. "In addition to aspirin, we're using quinine to control the fever. We're rubbing camphor oil on the patients' chests and having them breathe through strips of cloth soaked in it, to try to keep their bronchial passages open."

"Is that working?"

"We don't know yet. I'm so tired I can hardly think straight."

"Let me put you to bed."

"Marion…"

"What?"

"I'm not sure how to say this."

"Just go ahead and say it."

"If this disease is as contagious as it appears to be…"

"Say it."

"I've been exposed to the infection. Maybe you ought to keep a distance from me. Maybe we shouldn't sleep in the same bed."

"After twenty-five years? I don't intend to stop sleeping with you now."

"I love you."

The patient, Robert Wilson, was a forty-two-year-old, blue-eyed carpenter who worked with Edward Carter. The man had swollen glands and congested lungs. He complained of a headache and soreness in his muscles. His temperature was a hundred and one.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to send you to the hospital," Bingaman said.

"Hospital?" Wilson coughed.

Bingaman stepped back.

"But I can't afford the time off work," the heavyset carpenter said. "Can't you just give me a pill or something?"

Don't I wish, Bingaman thought, saying, "Not in this case."

Wilson raised a hand to his mouth and coughed again. His blue eyes were glassy. "But what do I have?"

"I'll need to do more tests on you at the hospital," Bingaman said, his professional tone cloaking the truth. What do you have? he thought. Whatever killed Joey Carter.

And killed Joey's father, Bingaman learned after he finished with his morning's patients and arrived at the hospital. Joey's mother and the boy's two friends weren't doing well, either, struggling to breathe despite the oxygen they were being given. And eight more cases had been admitted.

"We're still acting on the assumption that this is pneumonia," Powell said as they put on gauze masks and prepared to enter the quarantined ward.

"Are the quinine and camphor oil having any effect?"

"Marginally. Some of the patients feel better for a time. Their temperatures go down briefly. For example, Rebecca Carter's dropped from one hundred and four to one hundred and two. I thought we were making progress. But then her temperature shot up again. Some of these patients would have died without oxygen, but I don't know how long our supply will last. I've sent for more, but our medical distributor in Albany is having a shortage."

Conscious of the tight mask on his face, Bingaman surveyed the quarantined ward, seeing understaffed, overworked nurses doing their best to make their patients comfortable, hearing the hiss of oxygen tanks and the rack of coughing. In a corner, a curtain had been pulled around a bed.

"Some of the patients are coughing up blood," Powell said.

"What did you just say?"

"Blood. They're-"

"Before that. Your medical distributor in Albany is having a shortage of oxygen?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Their telegram didn't say."

"Could it be that too many other places need it?"

"What are you talking about?"

"The midway had to have come from somewhere to reach Riverton. After Riverton, it had to have gone somewhere."

"Jonas, you're not suggesting – "

"Do you suppose this whole section of the state is infected?"

"I'm sorry," the operator said. "I can't get through to the switchboard in Albany. All the lines are busy."

"All of them?"

"It's the state capital. So much business gets done there. If everybody's trying to call the operator at once – "

"Try Riverton. Try the hospital there."

"Just a moment… I'm sorry, sir. I can't get through to the operator there, either. The lines are busy."

Bingaman gave the operator the names of three other major towns in the area.

The operator couldn't reach her counterparts in those districts. All the lines were in use.

"They're not the state capital," Bingaman said. "What's going on that so many calls are being made at the same time?"

"I really have no idea, sir."

"Well, can't you interrupt and listen in?"

"Only locally. As I explained, I don't have access to the other operators' switchboards. Besides, I'm not supposed to eavesdrop unless it's an emergency."

"That's what this is."

"An emergency?" The operator coughed. "What sort of emergency?"

Bingaman managed to stop himself from telling her. If I'm not careful, he thought, I'll cause a panic.

"I'll try again later."

He hung up the telephone's ear piece. His head started aching.

"No luck?" Powell asked.

"This is so damned frustrating."

"But even if we do find out that this section of the state is affected, that still won't help us to fight what we've got here."

" It might if we knew what we were fighting." Bingaman massaged his throbbing temples. "If only we had a way to get in touch with…" A tingle rushed through him. "I do have a way."

The wireless radio sat on a desk in Bingaman's study. It was black, two feet wide, a foot and a half tall and deep. There were several dials and knobs, a Morse-code key, and a microphone. From the day Marconi had transmitted the first transatlantic wireless message in 1901, Bingaman had been fascinated by the phenomenon. With each new dramatic development in radio communications, his interest had increased until finally, curious about whether he'd be able to hear radio transmissions from the war in Europe, he had celebrated his fifty-second birthday in March by purchasing the unit before him. He had studied for and successfully passed the required government examination to become an amateur radio operator. Then, having achieved his goal, he had found that the demands of his practice, not to mention middle age, left him little energy to stay up late and talk to amateur radio operators around the country.

Now, however, he felt greater energy than he could remember having felt in several years. Marion, who was astonished to see her husband come home in the middle of the afternoon and hurry upstairs with barely a "hello" to her, watched him remove his suit coat, sit before the radio, and turn it on. When she asked him why he had come home so early, he asked her to please be quiet. He said he had work to do.

"Be quiet? Work to do? Jonas, I know you've been under a lot of strain, but that's no excuse for – "

"Please."

Marion watched with greater astonishment as Bingaman turned knobs and spoke forcefully into the microphone, identifying himself by name and the operator number that the government had given to him, repeatedly trying to find someone to answer him. Static crackled. Sometimes Marion heard an electronic whine. She stepped closer, feeling her husband's tension. In surprise, she heard a voice from the radio.

With relief, Bingaman responded. "Yes, Harrisburg, I read you." He had hoped to raise an operator in Albany or somewhere else in New York State, but the capital city of neighboring Pennsylvania was near enough, an acceptable substitute. He explained the reason he was calling, the situation in which Elmdale found itself, the information he needed, and he couldn't repress a groan when he received an unthinkable answer, far worse than anything he'd been dreading. "Forty thousand? No. I can't be receiving you correctly, Harrisburg. Please repeat. Over."

But when the operator in Harrisburg repeated what he had said, Bingaman still couldn't believe it. "Forty thousand?"

Marion gasped when, for only the third time in their marriage, she heard him blaspheme.

"Dear sweet Jesus, help us."

"Spanish influenza." Bingaman's tone was bleak, the words a death sentence.

Powell looked startled.

Talbot leaned tensely forward. "You're quite certain?"

"I confirmed it from two other sources on the wireless."

The hastily assembled group, which also consisted of Elmdale's other physician, Douglas Bennett, and the hospital's six-member nursing staff, looked devastated. They were in the largest nonpublic room in the hospital, the nurses' rest area, which was barely adequate to accomodate everyone, the combined body heat causing a film of perspiration to appear on brows.

"Spanish influenza," Powell murmured, as if testing the ominous words, trying to convince himself that he'd actually heard them.

"Spanish… I'd have to check my medical books," Bennett said, "but as I recall, the last outbreak of influenza was in – "

"Eighteen eighty-nine," Bingaman said. "I did some quick research before I came back to the hospital."

"Almost thirty years." Talbot shook his head. "Long enough to have hoped that the disease wouldn't be coming back."

"The outbreak before that was in the winter of 1847-48," Bingaman said.

"In that case, forty years apart."

"Resilient."

"Spanish influenza?" a pale nurse asked. "Why are they calling it… Did this outbreak come from Spain?"

"They don't know where it came from," Bingaman said. "But they're comparing it to an outbreak in 1647 that did come from Spain."

"Wherever it came from doesn't matter," Powell said, standing. "The question is, what are we going to do about it? Forty thousand?" Bewildered, he turned toward Bingaman. "The wireless operator you spoke to confirmed that? Forty thousand patients with influenza in Pennsylvania?"

"No, that isn't correct. You misunderstood me."

Powell relaxed. "I hoped so. That figure is almost impossible to believe."

"It's much worse than that."

"Worse?"

"Not forty thousand patients with influenza. Forty thousand deaths."

Someone inhaled sharply. The room became very still.

"Deaths," a nurse whispered.

"That's only in Pennsylvania. The figures for New York City aren't complete, but it's estimated that they're getting two thousand new cases a day. Of those, a hundred patients are dying."

"Per day?"

"A conservative estimate. As many as fifteen thousand patients may have died there by now."

"In New York State."

"No, in New York City."

"But this is beyond imagination!" Talbot said.

"And there's more." Bingaman felt the group staring at him. "The wireless operators I spoke to have been in touch with other parts of the country. Spanish influenza has also broken out in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and – "

"A full-fledged epidemic," Kramer said.

"Why haven't we heard about it until now?" a nurse demanded.

"Exactly. Why weren't we warned?" Powell's cheeks were flushed. "Albany should have warned us! They left us alone out here, without protection! If we'd been alerted, we could have taken precautions. We could have stockpiled medical supplies. We could have…could have…" His words seemed to choke him.

"You want to know why we haven't heard about it until now?" Bingaman said. "Because the telephone and the telegraph aren't efficient. How many people in Elmdale have telephones? A third of the population. How many of those make long-distance calls? Very few, because of the expense. And who would they call? Most of their relatives live right here in town. Our newspaper isn't linked to Associated Press, so the news we get is local. Until there's a national radio network and news can travel instantly across the country, each city's more isolated than we like to think. But as for why the authorities in Albany didn't warn communities like Elmdale about the epidemic, well, the wireless operators I spoke to have a theory that the authorities didn't want to warn anyone about the disease."

"Didn't…?"

"To avoid panic. There weren't any public announcements. The newspapers printed almost nothing about the possibility of an influenza outbreak."

"But that's totally irresponsible."

"The idea seems to have been to stop everyone from losing control and fleeing into the countryside. Each day, the authorities evidently hoped that the number of new cases would dwindle, that the worst would be over. When things got back to normal, order would have been maintained."

" But things haven't gone back to normal, have they?" Talbot said. "Not at all."

Talbot's comment echoed ominously in Bingaman's mind as the meeting concluded and the doctors and nurses went out to the public part of the hospital. What the medical personnel faced as they went to their various duties was the beginning of Elmdale's own chaos. During the half hour of the meeting, twenty new patients had shown up with what the staff now recognized as the symptoms of influenza – high fever, aching muscles, severe headache, sensitive vision, dizziness, difficulty in breathing. The litany of coughing made Bingaman terribly self conscious about the air he breathed. He hurriedly reached for his gauze mask. He had a mental vision of germs, thousands and thousands of them, spewing across the emergency room. The mental image was so powerful that Bingaman feared he was hallucinating.

"Mrs. Brady," he told one of the untrained volunteer nurses who'd been watching the emergency room while the meeting was in progress. "Your mask. You forgot to put on your mask. And all these new patients need masks, also. We can't have them coughing over each other."

And over us, Bingaman thought in alarm.

The end of normalcy, the chaos that had burst upon them, wasn't signaled only by the welter of unaccustomed activity or by the dramatic increase in new patients. What gave Bingaman the sense of the potential scope of the unfolding nightmare was that Elmdale's hospital, which was intended to serve the medical needs of the entire county, now had more patients than its thirty-bed capacity.

"What are we going to do?" Powell asked urgently. "We can put patients on mattresses and cots in the corridors, but at this rate, we'll soon use up those spaces. The same applies to my office and the nurses' rest area."

The head nurse, Virginia Keel, a strawberry blonde with a notoriously humorless personality, turned from administering to a patient. "This won't do. We need to establish an emergency facility, a place big enough to accomodate so many patients."

"The high-school gymnasium," Bingaman said.

The head nurse and the chief of staff looked at him as if he'd lost his mind.

"With school about to start, you want to turn the gymnasium into a pest house?" Powell asked in amazement.

"Who said anything about school starting?"

Powell looked shocked, beginning to understand.

"A third of our patients are children," Bingaman said. "At the moment, I don't see any reason not to assume that we'll soon be receiving even more patients, and a great many of them will be children. It would be criminal to allow school to start. That would only spread infection faster. We need to speak to the school board. We need to ask them to postpone school for several weeks until we realize the scope of what we're dealing with. Maybe the epidemic will abate."

"The look on your face tells me you don't think so," Powell said.

"Postpone the start of school?" Mayor Halloway, who was also the head of the county's board of education, blinked. "That's preposterous. School is scheduled to start four days from now. Can you imagine the response I'd have to suffer from angry parents? The ones who had telephones wouldn't stop calling me. The ones who didn't would form a mob outside my office. Those parents want their lives to get back to normal. They've had enough of their children lollygagging around town all summer. They want them in front of a blackboard again, learning something."

"A week from now, if this epidemic keeps growing at the present rate, those parents will be begging you to close the schools," Bingaman said.

"Then that'll be the time to close them," Halloway said, blinking again. "When the people who elected me tell me what they want."

"You're not listening to me." Bingaman put both hands on the mayor's desk. "People are dying. You need to take the initiative on this."

Halloway stopped blinking. "I'm not prepared to make a hasty decision."

"Well, make some kind of decision. Will you allow the high-school gymnasium to be turned into another hospital?"

"I'll have to consult with the other members of the school board."

"That's fine," Bingaman said angrily. "While you're consulting, I'll be setting up beds in the gym."

"This is really as serious as you say it is?"

"Serious enough that you're going to have to think about closing any places where people form crowds -the restaurants, the movie theater, the stores, the saloons, the – "

"Close the business district?" Halloway jerked his head back so sharply that his spectacles almost fell off his nose. "Close the…? Maybe the saloons. I've been getting more and more complaints from church groups about what goes on in them. This prohibition movement is becoming awfully powerful. But the restaurants and the stores? All the uproar from the owners because of the business they would lose." Mayor Halloway guffawed. "You might as well ask me to close the churches."

"It might come to that."

Mayor Halloway suddenly wasn't laughing any longer.

He's worried about the epidemic's effect on business? Bingaman thought in dismay as he drove his Model T along Elmdale's deceptively sleepy streets toward the hospital. Well, there's one business whose prosperity the mayor won't have to worry about: the undertaker's.

This premonition was confirmed when Bingaman reached the hospital's gravel parking area, alarmed to find it crammed with vehicles and buggies, evidence of new patients. He was further alarmed by Powell's distraught look when they met at the entrance to the noisy, crowded emergency room.

"Eighteen more cases," Powell said. "Three more deaths, including Joey Carter's mother."

For a moment, Bingaman couldn't catch his breath. His headache, which had persisted from yesterday, had also worsened. The emergency room felt unbearably hot, sweat making his heavily starched shirt stick to him under his suit coat. He wanted to unbutton his strangling shirt collar but knew that his position of authority prohibited such public informality.

"Has anybody warned Ballard and Standish?" he managed to ask. He referred to Elmdale's two morticians.

Powell nodded, guiding Bingaman into a corner, away from the commotion in the emergency room. His manner indicated that he didn't want to be overheard. "They didn't need to be told," he whispered. "Each has been here several times. I'm still adjusting to what Ballard said to me."

"What was that?"

Powell dropped his voice even lower. "He said, 'My God, where am I going to get enough gravediggers? Where am I going to find enough coffins?'"

"We're out of oxygen." Elizabeth Keel, the head nurse, stopped next to them. "We're extremely low on aspirin, quinine, and camphor oil."

"We'll have to get everything we can from the pharmacists downtown," Powell said.

"Before the townsfolk panic and start hoarding," Bingaman said.

"But without medical supplies – "

"Try to get fluids into them," Bingaman told the nurse. "Do your best to keep them nourished. Soups. Custard. Anything bland and easy to digest."

"But we don't have anyone to cook for the patients."

"The Women's League," Powell said. "We'll ask them to do the cooking."

"And to help my nurses," Keel said. "Even with the volunteers who arrived this morning, I'm hopelessly understaffed."

"Who else can we ask to help us?" Bingaman tried desperately to think. "Has anyone spoken to the police department? What about the volunteer fire department? And the ministers? They can spread the word among their congregations."

It was almost two a.m. before Bingaman managed to get home. Again he extinguished the headlights of his Model T. Again a pale yellow light appeared in the bedroom window. Despite his weariness, he managed to smile as Marion met him at the door.

"You can't keep going like this," she said.

"No choice."

"Have you eaten?"

"A sandwich on the go. A cup of coffee here and there."

"Well, you're going to sit at the kitchen table. I'll heat up the chicken and dumplings I made for supper."

"Not hungry."

"You're not listening to what I said. You're going to sit at the kitchen table."

Bingaman laughed. "If you insist."

"And tomorrow I'm going with you. I should have done it today."

He suddenly became alert. "Marion, I'm not sure – "

"Well, I am. I'm a trained nurse, and I'm needed."

"But this is different from what you think it is. This is – "

"What?"

"One of our nurses collapsed today. She has all the symptoms."

"And the other nurses?"

"They're exhausted, but so far, they haven't gotten sick, thank God."

"Then the odds are in my favor."

"No. I don't want to lose you, Marion."

"I can't stay barricaded in this house. And what about you? Look at the risk you're taking. I don't want to lose you, either. But if you can take the risk, so can /."

Bingaman almost continued to argue with her, but he knew she was right. The townsfolk needed help, and neither of them would be able to bear the shame if they didn't fulfill their moral obligation. He'd seen amazing things today, people whom he had counted on to volunteer telling him that he was crazy if he thought they would risk their lives to help patients with the disease, others who never went to church or participated in community functions showing up to help without needing to be asked. The idea had occurred to him that the epidemic was God's way of testing those who didn't die, of determining who was worthy to be redeemed.

The idea grew stronger after he ate the chicken and dumplings that Marion warmed up for him, his favorite meal, although he barely tasted it. He went upstairs, but instead of proceeding into the bedroom, he entered his study, sat wearily at his desk, and turned on the wireless radio.

"Jonas?"

"In a moment."

Hearing crackles and whines, he turned knobs and watched dials. Periodically, he spoke into the microphone, identifying himself.

Finally he contacted another operator, this one in Boston, but as the operator described what was happening there – the three thousand new cases per day in Boston, a death toll so fierce that the city's 291 hearses were kept constantly busy – Bingaman brooded again about God. According to the radio operator in Boston, there wasn't a community in the United States that hadn't been hit. From Minneapolis to New Orleans, from Seattle to Miami, from north to south and west to east and everywhere in between, people were dying at a sanity-threatening rate. In Canada and Mexico, in Argentina and Brazil, England and France, Germany and Russia, China and Japan…Not an epidemic. A pandemic. It wasn't just in the United States. It was everywhere. Horrified, Bingaman thought about the bubonic plague known as the Black Death that had ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages, but what he was hearing about now was far more widespread than the Black Death had been, and if the mortality figures being given to him were accurate, the present scourge had the potential to be far more lethal. Lord, the cold weather hadn't arrived yet. What would happen when the worst of winter aggravated the symptoms of the disease? Bingaman had a nightmarish image of millions of frozen corpses strewn around the world with no one to bury them. Yes, the Spanish influenza was God's way of testing humanity, of judging how the survivors reacted, he thought. Then a further dismaying thought occurred to him, making him shiver. Or could it possibly be the end of the world?

"It appears to have started in Kansas," Bingaman told the medical team. They had agreed to meet every morning at eight in the nurses' rest area at the hospital to relay information and subdue rumors. After the meeting, they would disperse to inform volunteers about what had been discussed.

"Kansas?" Powell furrowed his brow in confusion. "I assumed it would have started somewhere more exotic."

"At Fort Riley," Bingaman continued. He had gotten only two hours' sleep the night before and was fighting to muster energy. His head throbbed. "That Army facility is one of the main training areas for the Allied Expeditionary Force. In March, it had a dust storm of unusual force."

" Dust," Talbot said." I've been formulating a theory that dust is the principal means by which the disease is carried over distances." He turned to the nurses. "We have to take extra precautions. Close every window. Eliminate the slightest dust."

" In this heat?" Elizabeth Keel said. As head nurse, she never failed to speak her mind, even to a doctor. "And with the patients' high temperatures? They won't be able to bear it."

Talbot's eyes flashed with annoyance that he'd been contradicted.

Before angry words could be exchanged, Bingaman distracted them. "There might be another agent responsible for the initial transmission. I spoke to a wireless operator in Kansas early this morning, and he told me the theory at the camp is that the dust storm, which turned the day into night for three hours, left not only several inches of dust over everything in the camp but also ashes from piles of burned manure."

Bennett's nostrils twitched. "Burned manure?"

Bingaman nodded. "I realize that it's an indelicate subject. My apologies to the ladies. But we can't stand on niceties during the present emergency. There's a considerable cavalry detachment at Fort Riley. Thousands of mules and horses. It's estimated that those animals deposit nine thousand tons of manure a month in the camp, an obvious hygiene problem that the fort's commander attempted to alleviate by ordering his men to burn the droppings. The smoke from the fires and then the ashes blown by the dust storm apparently spread infectious microbes throughout the entire camp. Subsequent to the storm, so many soldiers came down with influenza symptoms that the surgeon general for the fort was afraid they'd take up all three thousand beds in the fort's hospital. Fortunately, the outbreak abated after five weeks."

"And then?" Powell frowned. He seemed to have a premonition about what was coming.

"Two divisions were sent from the fort to join the rest of our expeditionary forces in Europe. Influenza broke out on the troop ships. When the soldiers arrived in France, they spread it to our units and the British and the French. Presumably also to the Germans. At last count, the Royal Navy alone has over ten thousand cases of influenza. Of course, the civilian population has been affected, too. After that, the disease spread from Europe throughout Asia and Africa and everywhere else, including of course back to America. An alternate theory about the pandemic's origin is that it started among farm animals in China and was introduced into France by Chinese coolies whom the Allies used to dig trenches. Perhaps the true origin will never be known."

"But what about the death rate?" a nurse asked, obviously afraid of the answer.

"In three months, the flu has killed more people in Europe, soldiers and civilians, than have died in military operations on both sides during the entire four years of the war."

For several moments, the group was speechless.

"But you're talking about millions of deaths," Elizabeth Keel said.

"And many more millions who continue to suffer from the disease."

"Then…"

"Yes?" Bingaman turned to a visibly troubled nurse.

"There's no hope."

Bingaman shook his throbbing head." If we believe that, then there truly won't be any. We must hope."

The nurse raised a hand to her mouth and coughed. Everyone else in the room tensed and leaned away from her.

Bingaman helped finish admitting twenty-five new patients to the gymnasium that had been converted into a hospital. As he and Dr. Bennett left the spacious building – which was rapidly being filled with occupied beds -they squinted from the brilliant September sunlight and noticed corpses being loaded onto horse-drawn wagons.

"How many died last night?"

"Fifteen."

"It keeps getting worse."

Bingaman faltered.

"What's the matter?" Kramer asked. "Aren't you feeling well?"

Bingaman didn't reply but instead took labored steps toward one of the wagons. The corpse of a woman in a nurse's uniform was being lifted aboard.

"But I saw her only yesterday. How could this have happened so quickly?"

" I've been hearing reports that the symptoms are taking less time to develop," Bennett said behind him. "From the slightest hint of having been infected, a person might suddenly have a full-blown case within twenty-four hours. I heard a story this morning about a man, apparently healthy, who left his home to go to work. He wasn't coughing. None of his family noticed a fever. He died on the street a block from the factory where he worked. I heard another story."

"Yes?"

"Four women were playing bridge last night. The game ended at eleven. None of them was alive in the morning."

Bingaman's chest felt heavy. His shoulders ached. His eyes hurt – from lack of sleep, he tried to assure himself. He removed his gauze mask from his pocket, having taken it off when he left the hospital. "From now on, I think we're going to have to wear our masks all the time, even when we're not with patients. Day or night. At home or on duty. Everywhere."

"At home? Isn't that a little extreme?" Kramer asked.

"Is it?" Bingaman gave the dead nurse, in her twenties with long brown hair, a final look as the wagon clattered away. So young, so much to live for, he thought." None of us is immune. The disease is all around us. There's no telling who might give it to us." He glanced at Kramer. "I keep remembering she was the nurse who coughed in the room with us yesterday."

"Don't touch me! Get away!"

The outburst made Bingaman look up from the patient he was examining. He was in the middle of a row of beds in the gymnasium, surrounded by determined activity as nurses and volunteers moved from patient to patient, giving them water, or soup if they were capable of eating, then rubbing their feverish brows with ice wrapped in towels. Another team of volunteers took care of the unsavory, hazardous problem of what to do with the bodily wastes from so many helpless people. A stench of excrement, sweat, and death filled the now hopelessly small area. Contrary to Dr. Talbot's theories about dust and closed windows, Bingaman had ordered that all the windows in the gymnasium be opened. Nonetheless, the foul odor inside the building made him nauseous.

"I told you, damn it, get your filthy hands off me!"

The objectionable language attracted Bingaman's attention as much as the sense of outrage. The man responsible coughed hoarsely. There, Bingaman saw. To the right. Three rows over. Nurses, volunteers, and those few patients with a modicum of strength looked in that direction also.

"You bitch, if you touch me again – " The man's raspy voice disintegrated into a paroxysm of coughing.

Such language could absolutely not be tolerated. Bingaman left the patient he'd been examining, veered between beds, reached another row, and veered between other beds, approaching the commotion. Three men had evidently carried in a fourth, who was sprawled on a cot, resisting the attentions of a nurse. Bingaman's indignation intensified at the thought of a nurse being called such things, but what he heard next was even more appalling. His emotions made it difficult for him to breathe.

"You goddamn German!"

Marion. The nurse the patient shouted at was Bingaman's wife. The three men who had carried in the patient were pushing her away.

Outraged, Bingaman reached the commotion. "Don't you touch her! What's going on here?"

The patient's face reddened from the fury with which he coughed. Spittle flew. Bingaman stepped back reflexively, making sure that he stayed protectively in front of Marion.

"Put these masks on. No one comes in here without one. What's the matter with you?"

"She's what's the matter," one man said. His voice was slurred. He was tall, wore work clothes, and had obviously been drinking." Lousy German."

"Watch what you're saying."

"Hun! Kraut!" a second man said, more beefy than the first." Yer not foolin' anybody." He, too, was obviously drunk. "Yer the one who did it! Made my friend sick! Gave everybody the influenza!"

"What kind of nonsense…"

"Spanish nothing." The man on the bed coughed again. He was losing strength. Despite his feverish cheeks, he had alarming black circles around his eyes. "It's the German influenza."

The first man took a tottering step toward Marion. "How much did the Kaiser pay you, Kraut?"

"Pay her?" the second man said. "Didn't need to pay the bitch. She's a German, ain't she? Germans love killing Americans."

"I've heard enough." Bingaman shook with rage. "Get out of this hospital. Now. I swear I'll send for a policeman."

"And leave her?" The third man pointed drunkenly past Bingaman toward Marion. "Leave her to kill more Americans? She's the one brought the influenza here. The German influenza. This is how the Kaiser thinks he's gonna win the war. Damned murderous Kraut."

"I won't tell you again! Leave this instant or I'll – "

Bingaman stepped toward the men, urging them toward the door. The first man braced himself, muttered, "The Huns killed my son in France, you goddamn Kraut-lover," and struck the doctor's face.

Time seemed to stop. At once, it began again. Hearing exclamations around him, Bingaman lurched back, distantly aware of blood spewing from his lips beneath his mask. Then something struck his nose, and he saw double. Blood spurted from his nostrils. He lost control of his legs. He seemed to float. When he struck the floor, he heard faraway screaming.

Then everything was a blur. He had a vague sense of being lifted, carried. He heard distant, urgent voices. His mind reeled as he was set on something.

A cot. In a shadowy supply room at the rear of the gymnasium.

"Jonas, are you all right? Jonas?"

He recognized Marion's voice. Each anxious word sounded closer, as if she was leaning down.

"Jonas?"

"Yes. I think I'm all right."

"Let me get your mask off so you can breathe."

"No. Can't risk contamination. Leave it on."

She was wiping blood from his face. "I'll give you a clean one."

"Jonas?" A man's voice. Worried. Powell.

"I'm only dazed," Bingaman answered slowly. "Caught me by surprise." His words seemed to echo. "I'll be all right in a moment." He tried to sit up, but he felt as if he had ball bearings in his skull and they all rolled backward, forcing his head down. "Those men. Are they…"

"Gone."

"A policeman. Did you send for one?"

"What would be the point? When they closed the schools, the restaurants, and the stores, they also emptied the jail. There isn't any place to put those men."

"Can't understand what got into them. Accusing Marion. Outrageous," Bingaman said.

He managed to open his eyes and focus his aching vision. He saw Marion's worried face. And Powell's, which had a reluctant expression.

"What is it? What aren't you telling me?" Bingaman asked.

"This isn't the first time."

"I don't understand."

"People are frightened," Powell said. "They can't accept that it's random and meaningless. They want easy explanations. Something specific."

"I still don't understand."

"Someone to blame. The Germans. Marion."

"But that's preposterous. How could they be so foolish as to think that Marion would…"

The discomfited look on Marion's face made Bingaman frown. "You've been aware of this?"

"Yes."

"How long has this been going on?"

"Several days."

"And yet you still volunteered to come down here and help? I'm amazed." But then Bingaman thought about it, and he wasn't amazed. Marion always did what was right, even when it was difficult.

"Don't get the wrong impression," Powell said. "It's not like everyone feels that way. Only a minority. A small minority. But they've certainly made their opinions known."

"I'm going to have to stay home," Marion said.

"No," Powell said. "You can't let them bully you."

"It isn't because of them. I have a more important job. Feeljonas's forehead. Touch the glands in his throat. Put your hand on his chest. You don't need a stethoscope. You can feel the congestion. He has it."

The jolt of wheels into potholes and the noxious fumes of the Model T aggravated Bingaman's excruciating headache, making him nauseous as Marion drove him home. His injuries seemed to have broken the resolve with which he'd subdued the symptoms that he'd attributed only to fatigue. Now, as delirium took control of him, his last lucid thought was an echo of what he'd said to Dr. Bennett after seeing the nurse's corpse: How could this have happened so quickly? By the time Marion brought him home, the pain in his swollen lips and nostrils was insignificant compared to the soul-deep aching of his joints and limbs. He was so light-headed that he felt disassociated from himself, seeming to hover, watching Marion struggle to get him out of the car and up the steps into the house.

He did his best to cough away from her, grateful that he'd insisted she put a new mask on him. But the moment she eased him onto the bed, exhaling with effort, she loosened his shirt collar and took off the mask, which had become blood-soaked on the ride home.

"No," he murmured.

"Don't argue with me, Jonas. I have to get you cleaned up."

"Should have left me in the hospital."

"Not when you have a trained nurse to give you constant care at home."

She took off his shoes, his socks, his pants, his bloody suit coat and vest and shirt. She stripped off his underwear. Shivering, naked on the bed, clutching his arms across his chest, teeth chattering, he watched the ceiling ripple as Marion bathed him from head to toe. She used warm water and soap, dried him thoroughly, then made him sit up and slipped his nightshirt over his head, pulling it down to his knees. She tugged long woolen socks over his feet. She covered him with a sheet and three blankets. When that still wasn't enough and his shivering worsened, she brought him a hot-water bottle and put on the down-filled comforter.

Bingaman coughed and murmured about a face mask.

"It interferes with your breathing," Marion said.

" Might contaminate…"

"I don't think it does any good. Besides, I've already been exposed to it." Working, Marion breathed harder.

Minutes, perhaps hours later, she was spooning hot tea into him, and when the chills suddenly turned into alarming amounts of sweat oozing from him, she tore off the covers, stripped him again, bathed him with rubbing alcohol, ignored his coughing, and eased him out of bed onto the floor. He had lost control of his bowels and fouled the bed. She had to change the sheets, then clean him and change his nightshirt, then tug him up onto the bed, and pull blankets over him again because the chills had returned. She covered his brow with a steaming washcloth and spooned more hot tea into him, trying to make him swallow pieces of warm bread soaked in the tea.

He lost all external impressions and floated away into darkness. His mind was like a boat on an increasingly choppy sea. A night sea. Storm-tossed. Spinning.

He had no idea how long he was away, but gradually the spinning stopped, the weather calmed, and when he came back, slowly, dimly, he didn't think that his throat had ever felt so dry or that he had ever been so weak. His eyes hurt as if they had sunk into his skull. His skin was tight from dehydration, greasy from repeated sweating frenzies. At the same time, it seemed loose, as if he had lost weight.

These sensations came to him gradually. He lay passively, watching a beam of sunlight enter the bedroom window on his left. Then it went away, and eventually the sunbeam entered through the window on his right, and he realized that he'd been in a semi-stupor while the sun passed from east to west. But he wasn't so stupefied that he failed to realize that nothing in the room had changed, that his nightshirt and covers were the same as in the morning, that no one had been in the room, that Marion hadn't been in the room.

He tried to call to her, but his lungs were too weak, his throat too dry, and nothing came out. He tried again and managed to produce only an animallike whimper.

Marion! he thought desperately. His fear was not for himself, not that he had been left alone, helpless. His terror was for Marion. If she wasn't taking care of him, that meant she wasn't able to, and that meant…

The effort to move made him cough. Congestion rattled in his chest. Breath wheezed past his swollen bronchial passages and up his raw throat. But despite his pain and lethargy, he had the sense that he was better, not as feverish. His headache didn't threaten to cause his skull to explode. His muscles ached, but not as if he were being stretched on a rack.

When he squirmed to the side of the bed and tried to stand, his legs wobbled. He slumped to the floor. Marion! he kept thinking. He crawled. The hand-over-hand movement reminded him of the fear and determination he had felt when learning to swim. A pitcher on a table attracted his attention, and he grasped a chair beside the table, struggling to raise himself, to tilt the pitcher toward his lips. Water trickled into his mouth, over his scabbed cracked parched lips, down his chin, onto his nightshirt. He clumsily set the pitcher back down, apprehensive about dropping it, the water tasting too precious for him to risk wasting it. But as precious as it tasted, it was also tepid, stale, with a slight grit of dust. It had obviously been there a while, and with his premonition mounting, filling him with terror, he tried to call Marion's name, shuddered at the weak sound of his croaky voice, and crawled again.

He found her downstairs on the floor in the kitchen. His immediate panicked thought was that she was dead. But when he moaned, he thought he heard an echo, only to realize that the second moan had come from her, weak, faint, a moan nonetheless, and he fought to increase the effort with which he crawled to her. He touched her brow and felt the terrible heat coming off it. Yes! Alive! But the depth of her cough and the sluggishness of her response when he tried to rouse her filled him with dread, and he knew that his first priority was to get fluid into her. He gripped the top of a kitchen counter, pulled himself up, and sweated while he worked the pump handle in the sink, filling a bowl with water from the house's well. He almost spilled the bowl and barely remembered to bring a spoon, but at last he sat exhausted next to Marion on the kitchen floor, cradled her head, and spooned water between her dry, swollen lips. The heat coming off her was overwhelming. He struggled to the icebox, used an ice pick, and clumsily chipped off chunks from the half-melted block in the upper compartment. With the chunks of ice wrapped in a dish towel, he slumped yet again beside Marion and wiped the cool cloth over her beet-red face. He set the cloth on her forehead, spooned more water into her mouth, then gave in to his own thirst and drank from the bowl, only to have it slip from his grasp and topple onto the floor, soaking Marion and himself. He moaned, felt dizzy again, and lowered his head to the floor.

Time blurred. When he regained consciousness, he found himself on a chair in the parlor. Marion was on the couch across from him, a throw rug over her. Her chest rose and fell. She coughed. A plate of stale bread and a pitcher of water were on a side table. Someone found us, Bingaman thought, coughing. Someone came in and helped. But during the next few effort-filled hours, he was forced to realize that he was mistaken, that no one had come, that somehow he had shifted Marion into the parlor, that he had brought the bread and the pitcher of water.

The bread was so old and hard that he had to soak it in the water before he could gently insert it into Marion's mouth and encourage her to eat. He breathed a prayer of thanks when she swallowed. When she coughed, he feared that she would expel the food, but it stayed down, and then he, too, was eating, rinsing a crust of bread down with the unbelievably delicious water.

Again time blurred. It wasn't bread but strawberry jam and a spoon that he now found on the table beside the couch. He remembered having seen the jam in the ice box. Marion was coughing. He was rubbing her fiery brow with a towel that held the last of the ice. He was spooning the jam into her mouth. He was raising a glass to her lips. He was drinking from another glass, feeling his parched mouth and throat seeming to absorb the water.

Darkness. Light.

Darkness again. The cellar. Stumbling. Opening the door to the root cellar. Despite the coolness, sweating. Groping for two jars of Marion's preserves on a shelf. Coughing. Swaying. Stumbling up the cellar steps, reaching the kitchen, squinting from the painful brilliance of blazing sunset, discovering that the preserves he had expended so much effort to get were dill pickles.

Darkness. Light.

Darkness. Light.

Light again. Marion was no longer coughing. Bingaman later concluded that what saved her life was her robust constitution, although when she was alert enough she insisted that he had been the reason she stayed alive. Because of his ministrations, she called them. She told him not to be so modest.

"Hush," he told her lovingly. "Don't waste your strength."

In the reverse, however, he had no doubt that Marion's own ministrations in the initial stage of his illness had been what saved him. The ruthless disease could be attacked only on the basis of its symptoms. After that, the patient would live or die strictly on the basis of his or her own resources, and now that Bingaman had endured the intimate experience of the influenza's devastating power, he marveled that anyone had the strength to resist it.

Perhaps strength was not the determining factor. Perhaps it was luck. Or Fate. Or God's will. But if the latter was indeed the case, God certainly must have turned against a great many people. To a Presbyterian such as Bingaman, who believed in a contract that linked hard work and prosperity with salvation, the notion that the influenza might be God's display of worldwide disapproval was disquieting. Surely, even taking the war into account, the world couldn't be that bad a place. Or was the so-called world war, with its machine guns and tear gas, chlorine gas, phosgene gas, mustard gas, the mounting horrors, the millions of needless casualties, in fact the problem?

But in that case, did it make sense for God in turn to inflict millions of other casualties?

"Dr. Bingaman." The nurse stepped back in fear, her face suddenly drained of color, almost as white as her uniform. "It can't be!"

"What on earth?"

"I was told you were dead!"

"Dead?" Bingaman took another step toward the nurse in the hospital corridor.

She almost backed away. "After Dr. Powell died and Dr. Talbot, I-"

"Wait a second. Dr. Powell is dead?"

"Yes, and Dr. Talbot and – "

"Dead." Shock overwhelmed him. Dizzy, he feared that he was having a relapse and placed a hand against the wall to steady himself. He took a deep breath, repressed a cough, and studied her. "What made you think I was dead?"

"That's what I was told!"

"Who told you?"

"A lot of people. I don't know. I don't remember. It's been so terrible. So many people have gotten sick. So many people have died. I can't remember who's alive and who isn't. I can't remember when I slept last or when.

Bingaman's fatigue and his preoccupation when he entered the hospital had prevented him from realizing how exhausted the nurse looked. "Sit down," he said, realizing something else – the reason no one had come to his house to find out if he needed help. Why would anyone have bothered if everyone thought I was dead? And there must be a lot of people who have died.

"You need to go home," Bingaman said. "Get some food. Rest."

"I can't. So many patients. I can't keep the living straight from the dying. They keep going out and others come in. There's so much to do. I…"

"It's all right. I'm giving you permission. Go home. I'll speak to Elizabeth." He referred to the head of the nursing staff. "I'm sure she'll agree."

"You can't."

"What?"

"Speak to her."

"I don't understand."

"Elizabeth's dead."

He found himself speechless, staring at her, horrified by the thought of being told that whoever else he referred to would also be dead. So much had happened so quickly. Stretcher bearers passed him, carrying the corpse of Mayor Halloway.

A further horrifying thought occurred to him. "How long?" he managed to ask.

The weary nurse shook her head in confusion.

"What I mean is…" His brow felt warm again. "What day is it?"

Confused, she answered, "Wednesday."

He rubbed his forehead. "What I'm trying to ask is – the date."

"October ninth." The nurse frowned in bewilderment.

"October ninth?" He felt as he had when he'd been struck in the face. He lurched backward.

"Dr. Bingaman, do you feel all right?"

"A month."

"I don't understand."

"The last thing I recall it was early September."

"I still don't-"

"I've lost the rest of September and…A month. I've lost a whole month." Frightened, he tried to explain, to give the nurse a sense of what it was like to spend so many weeks fighting to breathe through congested lungs, all the while enduring a storm-tossed black sea of delirium. He strained to describe the unbelievable thirst, the torture of aching limbs, the suffocating heaviness on his chest.

The disturbed way the nurse looked at him gave him the sense that he was babbling. He didn't care. Because all the time he struggled to account for how he'd lost a month of his life, he realized that if it had happened to him, it must have happened to others. Dear God, he thought, how many others are trapped inside their houses, too weak to answer their phone if they have one, or to respond to someone knocking on their door? When he'd left his house an hour earlier, he'd knocked on the doors of his neighbors to his right and left. No one had answered. He had been troubled by how deserted his elm-lined street looked, a cool breeze blowing leaves that had turned from green to autumnal yellow with amazing rapidity in just a few days – except that he now realized it had been a month. And those neighbors hadn't gone away somewhere. He had a heart-pounding, dreadful certainty that they were inside, helpless or dead.

"Jonas, you look terrible. You've got to rest," Dr. Bennett said. "Go home. Take care of Marion."

"She's doing fine. Others are worse. She insisted I help take care of them."

"But-"

"You and I are the only physicians left in town! People are dying! I can't go home! I'm needed!"

Every church in town had been converted into a hospital. All of them were full. The cemeteries no longer had room for all the corpses. Gravediggers could not keep up the labor of shoveling dirt from fresh pits. Corpses lay in rows in a pasture at the edge of town. Armed sentries were posted to stop animals from eating them, each man wearing a gauze mask and praying that he wouldn't catch the disease from the corpses. Funerals were limited to family members wearing masks, ministers rushing as fast as dignity would allow while they read the prayers for the dead.

"We have to keep searching!" Bingaman organized teams. "Who knows how many people need our help? Even if they're dead, we have to find them. There's too great a risk of cholera. Pestilence. The decomposing bodies will cause a secondary plague."

Leading his own group, Bingaman marched along streets and banged on doors. Sometimes, a trembling hand let them in, a bony sunken-eyed face assuring Bingaman that everyone inside was over the worst, obviously not aware that Bingaman had reached them barely soon enough to try to save them. Other times, receiving no answer, Bingaman's team broke in. Weak coughing led them to a few survivors. Too often, the odor of sickness and decay made everyone gag. Whole families had been dead for quite a while.

7 had a little bird. Its name was Enza. I opened the window Andin-flu-Enza.

The rhyme, which Bingaman happened to hear a gaunt-cheeked little girl sing hypnotically, almost insanely, as her parents were carted dead from her house, festered in his mind. He couldn't get rid of it, couldn't still it, couldn't smother it. I opened the window and in-flu-Enza. The rhythm was insidious – like the disease. It repeated itself in his thoughts until it made him dizzy and he feared that he would have another bout with Enza. Opened the window. Yes. The disease was everywhere. All around. In the sky. In the air. In every breath. Bingaman knew that after his ordeal he ought to follow Kramer's advice and rest, but no matter how dizzy he felt…in-flu-Enza…he persisted, as Marion urged him to do, struggling from home to home, performing the corporal works of mercy for the suffering and the dead. In-flu-Enza. He persisted because he had come to the firm conclusion that if this disease was God's punishment, it was also an opportunity that God was offering to make the world a better place, to eradicate evil and work for salvation.

Bingaman's team rammed the door open and searched through musty shadows, first floor, second floor, cellar, and attic. His apprehension had been needless. There was no one, alive or dead.

Grateful to return outside, scuffling their shoes through dead leaves, the team followed Bingaman along the wooden sidewalk.

"We haven't looked in this house."

"No need," Bingaman said.

"Why not?"

"It's mine."

"But what's that smell?"

"I don't know what you mean."

" It's coming from-"

"The house farther down," Bingaman said.

"No, this house. Your house."

"Nonsense. I don't smell anything."

"I think we'd better take a look."

"Stop."

"The door's locked."

"Stay away."

"The smell's worse here on the porch. Give us the key."

"Get off my property!"

"The drapes are closed. I can't see through the windows."

"I'm telling you to leave!"

"That smell is…Somebody help me break in the door."

Amid Bingaman's screaming protest, they crashed in, and the stench that made several men vomit came unmistakably from the parlor. Bingaman's wife had been dead for six weeks. Her gray-skinned, gas-bloated corpse was smeared with strawberry jam and camphor oil. Quinine and aspirin pills had been stuffed inside her mouth until her cheeks bulged and her teeth were parted. A dill pickle also protruded from her mouth. Her exposed back resembled a pin cushion, except that the pins were large hypodermics which the doctor had pressed between her ribs and inserted into her lungs, desperately trying to extract the fluid that had drowned her. Several pails contained foul-smelling, yellow liquid.

"Marion." Bingaman stroked her hair. "I'm sorry. I tried to keep them away. I know how much you like your naps. Why don't you try to go back to sleep?"

The pandemic's peak coincided with the armistice in Europe, the declaration of peace, November 11, 1918. Thereafter, as armies disbanded and exhausted soldiers began their long journey home, the flu did not return with them to reinforce the infectious microbes that were already in place. To the contrary, against all logic, the disease began to lose its strength, and by the end of 1919, during the dead of winter, when the symptoms of the flu – exacerbated by cold weather – should have been at their worst, the pandemic approached its end. A few remote areas – Pacific islands and jungle outposts – remained to suffer the onslaught. Otherwise, having scoured the entire world, making no distinction between Eskimo villages and European metropolises, the Spanish influenza came to an end.

Bingaman, whose face would never regain its former ruddy cheerfulness and whose already thinning, silvery hair had fallen completely out because of his intense fever, rested, as did his fellow survivors. Of Elmdale's population of twelve thousand, eight thousand had collapsed with symptoms. Of those, two thousand had died. The remaining four thousand had worked nonstop to care for the sick and to bury the dead. Some, of course, had refused to help under any circumstances, for fear of being infected. They would have to make their peace with God.

Humanity had been tested. During the major outbreaks of the Black Death in Europe during the Middle Ages, it was estimated that twenty-five million had died. The number of soldiers estimated to have been killed during the five years of the Great War was eight and one-half million. The latter figure Bingaman learned from his increasingly long nights communicating with radio operators in America and Europe. But the estimated number of worldwide deaths caused by the influenza was perhaps as much as fifty million. Even more astonishing, the total number of those presumed to have been infected by the disease was two-hundred million, one twentieth of the world's population. If the pandemic had continued at its exponential, devastating rate, the human race might have been exterminated by the spring of 1920. Listening to his fellow radio operators around the country and around the globe, Bingaman shared their sense of helplessness and loss. But he also sympathized with a latent hope in some of their comments. Yes, the cream of American and European youth had been eradicated in the war. What the war had failed to accomplish, the flu had taken care of among the other age groups. Society had been gutted.

But what if… and this idea was almost unthinkable, and yet a few had given it voice, based on their reading of Charles Darwin…what if the pandemic had been a means of natural selection and now that the strong had survived, humanity would be better for it, able to improve itself genetically? Such a materialistic way of thinking was repugnant to Bingaman. He had heard enough about Darwinism to know that it was based on a theory of random events, that at bottom it was atheistic and worshipped accident. For Bingaman, there was no such thing as randomness and accident. Everything was part of a cosmic plan and had an ultimate purpose, and any theory that did not include God was unacceptable. But another theory was acceptable, and it was this that gave him hope -that this plague, one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, had been God's way of demanding humanity's attention, of warning the survivors about their sins, and of granting them an opportunity to learn from their transgressions, to make a fresh start.

"Like the war," Bingaman said to Marion, who had walked into his study three weeks after her funeral. He had looked up from his tears and smiled. He'd been talking to her ever since. "The flu was God's warning that there must never be another war like this one. Isn't that what they've been calling it? The War To End All Wars? I'm convinced this is an opportunity to look ahead."

Marion didn't respond.

"Also, I've been reading about the movement to make prohibition an amendment to the Constitution," Bingaman said. "When the saloons were closed to help keep the flu from spreading, it was obvious how much better society was without them. People have seen the error of their ways. The saloons will stay closed."

Still, Marion didn't respond.

"And something else," Bingaman said. "You know I always try to be optimistic. I'm convinced that society will benefit in other ways from the flu's devastation. We came so close to dying, all of us, the world. So now we'll all learn to cherish life more, to respect it, to be better. This decade's ending. A new one's about to start. A fresh beginning. It's going to be fascinating to see how we recover from so much death."

Marion continued to remain silent.

"One thing troubles me, though," Bingaman said. "On the wireless last night, I heard about a medical researcher in New York City who discovered that influenza isn't caused by a bacteria but by a virus. In theory, that information ought to make it easier to develop a cure. Normally." He frowned. "All things being equal, we should be able to develop a vaccine. But not in this case. Because the researcher also discovered that the influenza virus is constantly mutating. Any vaccine would be effective only for a limited time. Meanwhile the ever-changing virus could come back in an even more deadly form. Or a different and worse virus might come along."

For the first time, Marion spoke. "God help us." She coughed. Blood-tinted saliva beaded her bluish-black lips.

Bingaman shuddered, afraid that he was going to lose her a second time, that the horror would be repeated, again and again. "Yes, that's what it comes down to. An act of faith. God help us. Remember how fervently we tried to have children, how deeply disappointed we were to find that we couldn't? We told ourselves that it wasn't meant to be, that God had given us a burden to test our faith. Perhaps it was for the best." He sobbed as Marion's image faded. "I couldn't bear to lose anyone else."

Outside the study window, snow had begun to fall. A chill wind swept through the skeletal elms, burying the last of their fungus-wilted yellow leaves.

This mini-novel was written For another Al Sarrantonio anthology: 999, NewStories of Horror and Suspense(1999). I enjoy doing Fiction that's intimately connected to the location in which it occurs. when I lived in lowa City, I Europe a number of tales about the haunting expanse of the Midwest. When I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I became interested in the Fictional possibilities of what locals call the Land of Enchantment and the City Different. "Rio Grande Gothic" begins a couple of blocks From where I live and involves a phenomenon that I started noticing about ten years ago-shoes lying in the middle of the road, different ones each day. I later discovered that this isn't only a Santa Fe curiosity. Throughout the U.S. other communities started noticing the same thing. Conspiracy theorists take note.