In cadence with the dull hoofbeats of the Horseman, plague moved relentlessly in on Savannah. At first people responded only slowly to Jack Cheney’s public-health directives going out on the emergency Civil Defense radio and TV. For one thing, it was altogether too hot to pay attention; the scalding sun beat down every day in the longest, most merciless early September heat wave in recent memory, day after steaming day of 105-degree heat. Nobody stayed inside by the radio or TV in that kind of heat, especially in the long miles of stinking, heat-creaking frame tenements that stretched across the middle of the city, where air-conditioning was seldom to be found and then rarely, if ever, still working. There were few trees gracing those parts of the city, but the only breathable air was outdoors and the tenements themselves threw some shade, so people sat on their rickety porches, gazing at the heaps of trash and garbage in the vacant lots across the street, where the rats wended their way through their mazes of tunnels. When the afternoon thunderstorms would strike, the gutters would fill and overflow for a while and nobody would seem to notice how very many dead rats were washing down to the drainholes. And then, the storm’s momentary coolness merely tantalizing, the streets would start steaming again in the afternoon sun and the dense, humid miasma of hot heavy air would press down upon them for the rest of the night.
The earliest response to the public-health warnings came, predictably, from the city’s doctors, and they defined the problems that lay ahead. It came first from the crowded offices and free clinics in the vast tenement areas, then from the middle-class and upper-class doctor’s offices and private clinics and group practices. Suddenly doctors everywhere were seeing a sharp influx of very sick people. Many became abruptly, devastatingly ill, spiking 105-degree fevers, shaking with chills, coughing and gasping and spitting into blood-filled handkerchiefs. Others — far fewer, but still some — were breathing all right but presenting more classical symptoms: septicemic shock and prostration; great ugly, swollen purple-black lumps under their arms and in the groin; nausea and sudden uncontrollable vomiting; all the marks of the raging toxicity as the bacteria spread and grew.
They knew what they were seeing, the doctors did, and they scrambled to get the vaccinations they had neglected to get a few days earlier for themselves and their nurses and receptionists — the old vaccine first and then, finally, finally, in a dribble that was earmarked first for medical workers only, a tiny supply of the new vaccine said to provide up to sixty percent protection from the mutated bacteria. But unfortunately, just knowing what they were dealing with didn’t in itself tell the doctors what to do about it. Jack Cheney and his public health crew, aided by Carlos Quintana’s CDC team, mounted a major effort early on to reach every doctor, lay out ground rules for handling the sick, mailing them photocopied guide sheets, bulletins, updates, but still the Health Department switchboards were flooded twenty-four hours a day with thousands of calls asking for specific advice — calls for information, supplies, directions — the demand billowed in from all parts of the city. Most doctors and their nurses made some sort of attempt at establishing isolation techniques in their offices. They all worked in gloves and gowns, caps and masks, and — short of urgent emergencies — some of them turned away all the patients who didn’t have plague and sent them home in order to spare them possible exposure. Some clapped surgical masks on everybody who walked in the door. But at best, all such impromptu efforts proved terribly imperfect. What was worse, antibiotics and vaccine could not be improvised, and soon the tiny stockpiles of these vital necessities began dwindling. When more new vaccine came in, it immediately went out to the public-health workers, the police, the five-hundred member rat squad hastily mobilizing a rat-control program to hit the major concentrations of the vermin and all others trying to fight the epidemic’s ravages, including the garbage men.
Especially the garbage men.
Their humble role in the infinite scheme of things was suddenly transformed as they found themselves needed just as urgently as the doctors. The pressing problem was: what to do with an ever-increasing number of bodies? Patients who had walked into doctors’ offices were found dead on the waiting-room floor — with nobody around to claim the bodies. At first, aid cars were called to pack them off to the county morgue — but soon the morgue had bodies stacked up like cord wood, without til they could be disposed of. Every mortuary in town was overfilled with bodies; the crematoria were working to capacity and glowing cherry-red from the heat and still falling far behind. Finally, one day, a long, sad line of bulldozers were spied making their way out the old highway to the west, toward a large unimproved tract of city-owned land, where they began scooping out a vast sanitary landfill disposal site. While the mortuaries and crematoria fought to meet the needs of the paying customers, this huge city excavation was prepared to take care of the poor.
Well, a mass grave and landfill five miles outside the city limits was all well and good, but it did not solve the logistics of getting the bodies out there, and it was here that the garbage men found themselves impressed into an unaccustomed role. In the ghetto areas there was no place to put the bodies at all, so the dead would lie in state in their tenement beds until the dark hours of the night. And then the cousins, or uncles, or husky sons of the victims, their activities mercifully concealed from light of day, would perform the rites of transport to an empty lot a block away, or an alley strewn with overflowing trash cans, or a readily opened storm sewer, and the corpses would be deposited. And of course the ancient bond of silence prevailed: nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything and nobody knew who had done what.
Thus with the Coroner and the Mayor both backed to the wall, the garbage men were summarily appointed to act as a city death patrol. At first one or two garbage trucks a day, then three or four a day, departed from their usual rounds to weave up and down the streets and alleys, their motors and cranks and lifts rumbling a mournful threnody, performing their strange collection rites, then rolling on out the Old Highway through the swampy flats to the sanitary fill, soon known as Five Mile Dump, to lower the bodies to their final rest. And on days when the bulldozers did not get the day’s produce fully buried before sundown, the rats were there to help, soon expanding into the most enormous colony of sick rats in all the sovereign state of Georgia, but nobody paid attention to this for quite some time …
It was at this point that the public response to the plague began to undergo a sharp and distinctive change. With bodies to be tripped over in the streets each morning, and with more and more families bereaved of one or two or more members, people for the first time began to grasp the true nature of the disaster that was upon them, and they began to follow blind instinct in seeking safety. Ancient gut-wisdom declared that the familiar was safer than the strange, home safer than elsewhere, inside safer than outside. All over the city of Savannah people abandoned their streets and porches and fled inside, closing and barring their doors, slamming their windows and emerging only when forced to emerge. They huddled inside in the stifling heat and the smell of death and waited for something to happen, and the plague in Savannah moved on to a different, more sinister phase.