As the battle was joined, those first few days, there were far more troubles than triumphs for Carlos and his crew of workers. Four new cases were spotted in Canon City the first two days; three of them were dead of pneumonic plague within forty-eight hours despite swift and vigorous antibiotic treatment, while the fourth lingered on in a coma, with spiking fever and chills. (“A brain abscess, maybe? Those sputum plates and blood cultures are clean.”) Out of the blue, two cases were reported in Gunnison, 120 miles to the west, no identifiable contact with Canon City, EIS people raking over reports item by item and finding nothing, and then another case down in Walsenburg, a town located between a north and south segment of the San Isabel National Forest, again with no identifiable contacts. “Brush fires,” Carlos said, shaking his head and staring at the reports. “Brush fires, all over. Where are they coming from?” and teams were dispatched to both places in hopes of stopping the spread. City fathers in Pueblo were vocally alarmed, Colorado Springs officials next to irrational, the State Attorney General’s office in Denver very, very quietly investigating the possible legal ramifications of imposing selective roadblocks on certain state, county and local highways without precisely declaring a state of emergency and scaring everybody in Colorado to death …
Then, late in the week, JTLM-TV News Denver laid its little egg, and the fat was really in the fire. Under the able guidance of announcer Marge Callum and a team of cameramen and reporters, and despite all CDC efforts to maintain a news brownout, JTLM-TV News preempted Thursday-night primetime to air their own thirty-minute special, engagingly entitled “Plague in Colorado” and done with all the stops pulled out. They had everything possible in it and much, much more. There were shots and stills of the Enchantment Lakes Plateau in the Washington Cascades and shots of a Forest Service chopper in the air, ostensibly hauling Pam Tate’s body out. Somehow or other they had gotten footage of the interior of the Harborview Hospital morgue in Seattle, with four early victims on view on their slabs, the shots made all the more grisly due to the graininess and bad quality of the black-and-white film — it looked like the ovens at Buchenwald. Next they focused on the Rampart Valley Community Hospital, still closed up tight, featuring a hair-raising through-the-window interview with the young doctor there, apparently filmed after he was good and sick but somewhat before he died. And then, homing in on Canon City, there were interviews with parents and friends of victims, with vivid descriptions of how the infection struck and killed. For wrap-up, a scathing attack on the “do-nothing attitude” of the Centers for Disease Control, a rousing “citizens’ call” for action, a demand that Canon City be isolated completely “to see that this horror does not move beyond its boundaries …”
The show had impact, all right. The town councilmen of Canon City howled exploitation, while the ACLU screamed foul at the very suggestion of isolating a community — ”This is not medieval Italy” — and the CDC people in Canon City gritted their teeth and very carefully refrained from responding at all, much as they might have liked to, on orders from Carlos Quintana, who held the fatalistic conviction, reinforced by long and bitter experience, that howling at JTLM-TV News Denver would be considerably less fruitful than howling at the moon — and a great deal more dangerous to their mission.
In Atlanta, Ted Bettendorf fielded the howls officially and — unlike Carlos — decided that action was demanded. Within an hour of the broadcast he had a senior PR man on a plane for Denver with three legal men in tow, their major mission to abort any reruns of the show that might be planned. Then, after a half-hour phone conference with the Secretary HHS in Washington, Ted got an assistant commissioner of the FCC on the line. “Damon, for God’s sake! This kind of broadcast has got to stop, this is absolutely intolerable. We can’t work with this kind of light in our faces.”
“Ted, I can certainly sympathize, I guess the show was a little raw, but I don’t know what we can do about it. We can’t precensor those producers, you know.”
“Maybe not,” Bettendorf said, “but you can knock them across the room later, can’t you? This is a clear and present public danger, what they’re doing. They didn’t bother to check one single fact. They’ve taken a few cases of infection in one isolated region and blown it up into a raging epidemic.”
The FCC man was vastly apologetic. “I’ll do anything that’s legal, Ted, you know we want to cooperate with you guys, but the laws are pretty tight.”
“Well, you can keep the damned thing off the air elsewhere, can’t you? It’s not prior censorship once it’s been shown.”
“We can’t block it unless the station voluntarily pulls it, Ted. The freedom-of-speech people are watching us like hawks these days, and believe me, you’re going to have more press, not less, if you try to get rough. Why don’t you have your man out there just pat the producer’s ass and see if he can’t talk him into cooperating?”
The PR man didn’t do any ass-patting when he arrived in Denver. The show’s producer and the station manager of JTLM-TV were both intransigent. They weren’t the public conscience; they didn’t care if the special was less than precisely accurate in fact or implication; and they scoffed at the notion that false or distorted data in a TV show might threaten human lives. Let the CDC worry about that, that was what they were paid for. JTLM-TV had sponsors to worry about, and they happened to have some great footage, the script was a real heart-tugger, great TV, viewed by twenty-four percent of the audience on the Boulder-Denver-Colorado Springs-Pueblo axis, and they already had it scheduled for rerun on primetime Saturday night. Biggest hit they’d ever produced, and the networks were interested … The PR man and his lawyers walked out of there in mid-tirade, heading across town to the federal courthouse, but knowing already that the chance of getting a restraining order or injunction was practically zero on the kind of evidence they were authorized to supply, and there were reporters to face at the courthouse too …
The effect on the people in Canon City was immediate — and ominous. Before the broadcast, in this mountain-foothills town of twelve thousand souls, people had realized there was a medical problem and that some people had died, but life had gone on much as usual just the same. There was a lot of local gossip going around; people had commiserated with the families who had been hit, and pursed their lips at the idea that the State of Washington would export this sort of thing; they had watched the teams of CDC people coming and going, and cooperated with them in their investigation; there was an almost touching esprit de corps about it all — nothing this big had happened in Canon City, Colorado, since the train had derailed over the Royal Gorge thirty years ago — and when the town officials passed the word that anyone who had had any contact with any sick person should report to the Fremont County Health Department to be interviewed and receive preventive medicine to take, they queued up dutifully, congratulating themselves and everybody else that Something Was Being Done. For most of them, it was an excitement that was around them but not quite touching them.
JTLM-TV changed all that.
The broadcast brought the horror home to the very people who were, they actually heard for the first time, living at the center of the horror. Pneumonia was pneumonia, but the Black Plague, proclaimed baldly on the television like those horrible medieval epidemics, was something else. Within a day of the broadcast, Canon City, Colorado, took on the aspect of a ghost town. The Mayor and the local police, succumbing to panic, spread notices urging everyone to stay home, to stay in, to go nowhere except in an emergency. The Shoeleather Boys now had to pursue their contacts; they met with locked and bolted doors and had to conduct interviews through cracked-open windows. Business doors slammed shut as the local radio station — the only one many Canon City radios would pick up — repeated feckless and largely useless advice, over and over and over, every hour on the hour. One supermarket remained opened to sell “emergency supplies,” but few customers were bold enough to go shopping; they lived from their pantry shelves instead. Streets were deserted except for an occasional rattletrap pickup truck going by. Only the small local hospital and doctors’ clinic remained busy, crowded with people suddenly terrified of every ache and pain.
Meanwhile, plague continued to surfaces-two new cases here, three there — all too often appearing among contacts of earlier victims who had been seen by EIS workers and were already taking full doses of prophylactic antibiotics. Carlos Quintana was slightly cheered that a few of these people were only developing the bubonic form of the disease, with raging fevers and circulatory collapse and swollen, painful, draining glands but none of the devastating respiratory symptoms — ”But not many of them,” he reported to Ted Bettendorf, “not nearly enough. The balance is all wrong.” People wore face masks, supplied for free at the Public Library in Canon City, when they went out; others wore bandanas over their faces like western-movie bandits. Nobody knew if either did any good.
On the third night after the broadcast, at 2:30 A.M., the manager of the local bank and one of Canon City’s social and business pillars packed his wife and two children and dog and stereo set into the back end of his van and took off down the highway for parts unknown, leaving the house lights on and the doors banging and all of their furniture right where it was. The protective antibiotic they all had been taking was left on a bathroom shelf, an unfortunate oversight. By morning the whole town knew they were gone. Rumor had it that they had headed down toward Texas, but despite this, and very suddenly, Getting Out Of There seemed to be an idea whose time had come. By noon an alarming assortment of cars, vans, trucks, pickups, Jeeps and even tractors began moving out of town in all directions, first a few, then a steady stream, by nightfall a deluge. Carlos and his people pleaded, the local radio station pleaded, the town councilmen pleaded — the ones who hadn’t left — but people kept on moving. The State Patrol set up hasty roadblocks to try to screen the outflow, in the midst of one of the torrential summer thunderstorms that swept in from the plains that afternoon; the roadblocks obstructed things somewhat but did not stop the movement because even the State patrol was not sure that they could legally block traffic indefinitely, and in the face of outraged challenges didn’t quite dare stop someone from going through in a legally licensed vehicle. In the midst of one roadblock, in a narrow gap between the sandstone hills west of Canon City on the road toward the Royal Gorge, a superannuated farm truck piled high with household goods overturned across both lanes of the highway, effectively blocking traffic from both directions and trapping a whole caravan of rubberneckers who had been coming from the west to have a look (from behind closed car windows) firsthand at the “Plague City.” The net result could not have been a greater mess if a chunk of road had been blocked by a mudslide; there were cars in ditches, cars backed into each other, trucks driven halfway up hillsides and turned over, people screaming at each other from car windows, patrol cars with blue flashers blinking, helplessly entrapped in the middle of the mess, patrolmen wandering past each other in opposite directions waving their arms and shouting bullhorn orders that nobody whosoever paid any attention to, children and dogs and a few chickens running wild underfoot … Carlos Quintana got a survey look at it all from a Forest Service chopper that made a couple of low sweeps over the scene of carnage, and nodded his head glumly. “It figures,” he said, “it’s all part of the pattern. And it hasn’t even started yet. Get me back to town, okay? I’ve got work to do.”