Inevitably, as the gray fall rolled into bitter winter, chaos deepened in Ted Bettendorf’s Atlanta office. As the fire storm raged across the land, the urgent demands on the tall, gray-haired man climbed exponentially as the effective options for action plummeted. From one of the few vantage points from which the whole picture could be viewed at once, Ted himself saw the ever-expanding disaster through a wide-angle lens, and with each passing day he saw progressively less that could be done to stop it.
As might have been expected, the blossoming plague struck the major cities earliest and hardest, and one by one Ted saw them stagger and fall. The factors of inevitability were all in place, waiting: the huge numbers of people packed into small areas, impossible to isolate; the staggering insistent demands for vaccine and medication, undersupplied; social and health institutions, never too efficient at best in their gangling, rambling bureaucracies, ultimately impossible to keep functioning; the government, at all levels, already so acutely overdrawn in the huge cities, becoming impossible to maintain; law enforcement and police protection already staggering under their normal loads, becoming impossible to provide — the slow death of the cities was as inevitable and predictable during that terrible fall and winter as the ultimate burning of Savannah had been during the late summer. Ted Bettendorf knew that, as he fielded the increasingly urgent and impossible telephone calls from his headquarters in Atlanta or traveled out for on-site inspections and consultations in the failing cities, but by sheer force of will he refused to think about it or acknowledge it. If he had acknowledged it even for a moment, he might have been forced, in the cold light of inevitability and helplessness, to say, “Sorry, but we’ve written off all of the major cities and the hundred and fifty million people living there, so don’t call back,” and turned his attention to the ones that were left — but of course he could not have said such a monstrous thing, nor even thought about saying it, so instead he ignored the inevitable. Others in authority in the dying cities ignored it or confronted it as their individual natures inclined them, and one by one the major cities met the plague in their own distinctive ways.
As Ted observed it, it came to New York like the slow, crushing grip of angina, a deep-seated painful pressure, first irritating, then acute, then unbearable, relentlessly spreading and spreading and spreading. When it first appeared in the teeming ghetto rooms of Harlem and the decaying tenement towers of the Lower East Side and the grubby flats of the Village and the sprawling slum ruins of Brooklyn, it was only dimly recognized. That fall was cold and rainy in New York and everybody stayed indoors, fearful of a hungry, frigid winter to come. Health Department bulletins of warning, of precautions to be taken, of signs to watch for, of things to do, as always in New York, fell on hundreds of thousands of deaf ears. Interests were too narrow. Misery was already too deep. TV bulletins were ignored, snapped off in midstream in favor of the soap operas and the game shows and the oblivion of primetime entertainments. These were people who didn’t know what Savannah was, or where, people who didn’t listen, couldn’t or wouldn’t comprehend. Many couldn’t even understand the language — and how could they respond?
Soon plague was spreading through the crowded, steaming subways, packed with coughing, spitting people feverish to reach home. People left work and never were seen again. In a sudden wave, within a single week, everybody seemed to be sick with something, and plague was there for certain, finally and reluctantly identified by the labs, as the health establishment struggled helplessly to fight it. Official cries went out for the vaccine, and for city-wide supplies of Sealey 3147 — but not until demand had far outstripped supply. The city needed a river of vaccine and received a trickle as the CDC tried to juggle consignments and batch after batch was sucked away to a thousand other places. When a planeload finally did arrive at JFK in the dark of a cold, rainy night, already too late to stem the raging epidemic, it was hijacked into a semi trailer waiting at the loading dock and vanished into the Northeast somewhere — it certainly never reached the warehouse in downtown Manhattan prepared to receive and distribute it.
The crushing pain turned to agony with the first winter storm to strike the city, first a mass of cold, wet air sweeping up from the Gulf and dropping fourteen inches of snow on Manhattan in twelve hours, then an icy blast from the Arctic, rolling down from Montreal, dropping temperatures to -15° F, in New York, ten degrees colder in Westchester and Jersey. Supplies into the city, already hamstrung by truck drivers too sick to drive and others afraid to come anywhere near the plague spot, now slowed to critical. Fuel supplies began sagging, rationing pleas were ignored. Snow removal faltered — no one could get anywhere, and even those who did couldn’t find what they wanted when they got there. A sad little emergency team tried valiantly for forty-eight hours to enforce a city ordinance to hold home and office thermostats down to fifty degrees, but panic and a very real fear of freezing to death met them at every hand, and the enforcement team gave up.
Then the garbage collectors struck, a wildcat affair; their contract was not up for another eight months but the opportunity was too good to miss. They couldn’t move their trucks until snow removal had cleared the streets, they said. There were too many dead bodies turning up in the garbage, they said, and they were sanitation engineers, not morticians. A third of them were too sick or terrified to come to work anyway, which put more of a load on the dwindling number that were still able and willing, and you couldn’t expect them to work like that without more money, lots more money, now, not eight months later. Day followed week of futile talks, threats, name-calling and sympathy strikes, as the garbage piled up on the sidewalks, steaming from its own fermentation in the frigid air, and the rats, knowing a good thing when they saw it, came up out of the sewers in regular battalions. There came a day when the chief Sanitation Workers’ Union negotiator met with the Mayor and other city officials around a long table in a downtown building, the union man’s eyes bright with fever, coughing blood into his handkerchief and chilling violently in his seat, explaining desperately that the men weren’t going back to work without more money (more coughing, more blood), there was no way anyone could make them go back to work, a whole lot of them weren’t going back to work at all, money or no money, anywhere, period, because they were sick and dying, and so was their negotiator, and there you were, boys, that was the whole picture …
Little by little, New York City suffocated, strangling from its own size and complexity and the gradual day-by-day breakdown of supply and service and maintenance in an ever-expanding chain reaction more grisly and deadly and stultifying than any uranium fission bomb. Contrary to early predictions, New York City did not explode, as Savannah had. Instead, it slowly, slowly imploded, gradually collapsing under the weight of its own offal until one day it was no longer a functioning city on any level at all, merely a vast, hopeless quagmire of dying people.
The Kansas Cities of Missouri and Kansas faced the crisis with more style, if with even less wisdom. Those unequal cities standing like Great Claus and Little Claus at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers were blessed by a long, warm Indian summer that extended into late November. The million-odd people in their combined metropolitan areas were far more homogeneous than those in New York — at least they all spoke roughly the same language. More important, the plague came more insidiously there than in the eastern cities, nibbling at the edges of each social group like hors d’oeuvres before the devouring feast began. It took a while for the people there to fully realize how terribly dreadful the crisis was going to be.
In fact, given reasonable leadership from the respective city fathers and guidance from the local Public Health Services and the Centers for Disease Control, the Kansas City metropolis on both sides of the state line might actually have had a fighting chance to withstand the onslaught when it came, had it not been for a sequence of the most astoundingly obtuse political decisions ever taken in the long, spotty political history of the region. As it happened, Kansas City, Missouri, actually had a fairly adequate supply of the new vaccine, as well as a reasonable stockpile of Sealey 3147, on hand in the city at the time the first bite of the plague was really felt there. The shipments had come in late September as part of a nationwide pro rata distribution of then-existing supplies of vaccine and antibiotic to the major cities, undertaken as part of a presidential executive order at the persistent urging of Ted Bettendorf, and had been completed before other mutually exclusive executive orders began curtailing the air traffic that made such rapid shipments possible. What was more, the Kansas City public-health authorities, in cooperation with CDC field workers, had actually developed workable blueprints for a rudimentary emergency action plan to swing into effect whenever it became clear that plague was indeed hitting that metropolis: traffic and police control plans, hospital utilization plans, medication distribution plans, block-by-block isolation plans, sane quarantine regulations — in total, one of the best-conceived and earliest-developed citywide defense programs to be worked out in any major city in the country since the burning of Savannah. Indeed, the whole Kansas City complex might conceivably have weathered the storm for a while — except that the whole action plan fell apart before it ever got instituted.
What happened was horrible in its very simplicity. When the vaccine and antibiotic shipments arrived, with distribution jointly entrusted to the governing authorities of the two major metropolitan segments of the city — the Missouri city and the city across the state line in Kansas — disagreements between the two governing bodies immediately appeared. Those two governments had seldom — if ever — agreed on anything whatever in the past, and the imminent crisis did not make them any better bedfellows. In fact, the two communities reached real agreement on one single point alone: that distribution of supplies to the other community should take place only after prudent and ample provision had been made for the protection of the entire governmental and health preservation organization of the first community — and since possession was indeed nine-tenths of the law, the “first community” was defined by its governing body as the community which managed to obtain actual physical possession of the whole metropolitan shipment of vaccine and antibiotic. And an early, frantic and very secret cashing in of political credits speedily greased the shipping skids so that the entire consignment arrived by air on the Missouri side of the line.
The city fathers there lost no time making prudent and entirely ample provision for the protection of themselves, their wives, their children, their nephews, their closest and most profitable business friends, their most reliable supporters in the second echelon of government, their most reliable supporters in the third, fourth and fifth echelons of government, including all their wives, children, nephews and close and profitable business friends, and so on into the night. All this was accomplished with positively breathtaking efficiency, amid a succession of highly secret and totally illegal meetings, and with the quiet collusion of certain highly placed commissioners and subcommissioners of public health on the Missouri side of the river, within hours of the time the consignment of medicináis touched ground, and a full week before CDC personnel and the actual working crew of the Missouri-side Public Health Department even knew the consignment had been shipped. During that time not a single carton of vaccine nor case of antibiotic crossed the state line into Kansas.
When at last a by-then-much-depleted supply of medicináis was finally released for distribution to public-health and CDC authorities on the Kansas side, virtually none of it actually reached its target. Distressed as they were at Missouri’s rape of the shipment, the city fathers in Kansas said nothing; their police simply appropriated every bit of the consignment that crossed the river, quietly and efficiently, the moment it hit high ground and delivered it to City Hall. Of this supply, officials and subofficials on the Kansas side made prudent and extremely ample provision for their own protection in the same pattern as had occurred in Missouri. Thus, like wheat shipments to India since time immemorial, seven-tenths of the entire consignment vanished from the docks before anyone knew it had arrived, and only three-tenths ultimately sifted down to the hands of the public-health and CDC workers and finally, to the doctors and other health workers designated by the blueprint action plan to distribute it. Many of those people, angered in their turn by the city fathers’ actions and panicking at the sudden appearance of the disease itself on all sides of them, used the materials available quite arbitrarily to protect themselves, their families, their office workers, their receptionists, their administrative personnel, their switchboard operators and billing clerks, selected business friends and finally, certain favored patients and their families. What little of the material sifted through that enormous sieve fell, for the most part, into the gentle hands of the most powerful Mafia family between Chicago and Houston and became available, as the city fell into increasingly extreme straits of illness, not for the free distribution intended, but for sale to the highest bidders …
It was an example of greed and unenlightened self-interest of staggering proportions. It all happened fast and in secret, before Kansas City’s most wide-eyed news hawks tumbled onto it — and when they did, suppression of news was ready and waiting on either side of the river. The Kansas City Star broke the first story on the Rape of the Shipment, with screamer headlines and promises of details to follow — but details did not follow, because the Commissioner of Public Utilities, on his own recognizance, cut off the power to the newspaper’s press with one flip of an enormous switch and then posted armed guards around the switch to see that it stayed flipped. TV news reporters, never famed for their follow-up capacity under the best of circumstances, emitted a single loud scream in concert and then were drowned out by endless hours of solemn denials by trusted city officials.
Of course, such a story could not long stay hidden. Very soon the people of both cities became acutely aware of increasing disease and death in their midst, at precisely the same time they became aware that virtually all of their public-health protection had been betrayed by their community leaders in the course of a single week. Public outrage began as a murmur, blossomed into a rumble and then a roar. One morning a crowd of eighty thousand people converged on City Hall on the Missouri side, many of them armed and all of them howling for blood and heads on stakes; denied and turned away by an embattled police force, they dispersed through the downtown area, smashing departmentstore windows, looting shelves, raging into office suites and rending and tearing everything in sight. It took police two days to clear mobs out of the downtown shambles, with eight hundred dead, fully half of them police — but the looting spread and continued in widespread outlying areas of the city. Cars were dumped on their sides to blockade streets, windows were shattered, bombs exploded, small fires raged.
Ted Bettendorf believed every word of the accounts that came to him from CDC field workers: Kansas City was a city gone mad, enraged at betrayal in a place long familiar with the finer points of political betrayal. Governmental controls collapsed altogether as the angry mobs grew and officials were searched out and besieged in their houses, defending their doorsteps from pillagers and watching their families dragged away before their eyes. Utilities fell apart, electricity and communications were virtually obliterated. For days the city convulsed with a rage of street fighting. Functioning automobiles for escape came suddenly into demand, and street thieves came into their own, stealing first hubcaps, then tires, then wheels, and then whole engines out of cars that anyone was foolish enough to leave parked and unguarded for more than half an hour at a time. And then, as the real depth of the plague began to rack the city, now totally helpless and defenseless, protective fiefdoms sprang up from block to block to guard what was left to be guarded. Cellars were converted into hospices for the dying, barricades blocked two-thirds of the city streets, nine-tenths of the stores and most of the richer homes were looted and ransacked, the dead were burned on street corners in ever-increasing numbers and finally the ice-cold winter came as a frigid blessing because it kept down the stench. In a different way and much faster than New York, Kansas City also died.
In Chicago the plague itself struck more swiftly and widely than perhaps anywhere else in the country. In early October, multiple mini-epidemics sprang up simultaneously in various areas of the city, most of them ultimately traced to air travelers from the West and South, until all possible track of them was inevitably lost. Multiple nameless prediagnosis contacts, including a dozen-odd black families that had evacuated, already ill, from Savannah to Chicago, vanished into the fastnesses of the city slums, never to be heard from again except through outbreaks of the infection they carried. On-hand supplies of vaccine and Sealey 3147 were quickly exhausted protecting essential hospital and public-health personnel, while urgent appeals for more took their place at the bottom of the growing stack on Ted Bettendorf’s desk in Atlanta. With incredible swiftness the infection spread, with first hundreds and then thousands of new cases appearing daily. In the deep urban tenements the Horseman could almost have been seen galloping from block to block, had any alert epidemiologist had the time or facilities to tabulate the wildfire spread; in the middle-class tracts and wealthy suburbs the firestorm burned less flagrantly, perhaps, but no less fast. In the endless flatlands of Chicago, of all places, the ground had been prepared for uncontrolled spread of pneumonic plague by an immediately prior epidemic of A/Montreal influenza which had struck the city unseasonably and hard in late September and left 400,000 people near prostration from a three-week illness before the plague appeared.
In Chicago, the spreading illness produced a confrontation between citizens and authority of a different order of magnitude than was witnessed elsewhere that early in the fire storm — a confrontation between huge masses of people determined to go elsewhere and a military authority empaneled and determined to keep them where they were. As the total inability of health authorities either to treat the infection or control its spread became increasingly evident, vast squadrons of people, both the quick and the dying, began a mass exodus to the south and west of the city in a hapless, hopeless search for open country, help, food, warmth and succor of some sort. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands began flooding the major expressways, open, pulsating arteries hemorrhaging people into the countryside, people with small possessions on their backs, dull eyes, coughs and high fevers, all afoot or on bicycles, since auto traffic was quickly and totally choked off by the sheer mass of moving bodies. In a matter of days those tens of thousands became hundreds of thousands, leaving their dead where they dropped, moving as relentlessly and mindlessly as a staggering army of human ants down the freeways and across the countryside …
Local authorities quickly made the bold decision that these masses must not be allowed to leave the city — they faced certain chaos and slaughter to the south and west in a countryside that did not want them. But stopping them and turning them back was something else altogether. A National Guard militia composed of a few hundred exceedingly green, inept and combat-innocent farm boys flown in from southern parts of the state to barricade the expressways found themselves immediately stripped of clothing, shoes, arms, supplies and even underwear almost the instant that they took up their positions. As swiftly as possible, which was not quite swiftly enough, federal authorities then declared martial law for all of metropolitan Chicago and surrounding areas, and army and marine units moved in, complete with tanks, field artillery and quite a considerable air force of transports and helicopters with orders to stop the outflow. Yet not even the leaders of these units, much less the troops themselves, had any stomach for mass slaughter of helpless people. Rubber bullets and riot-squad attacks merely pushed masses of people from Point A temporarily over to Point B and then back to Point A again; tear gas produced instant chaos wherever it was used, effectively halting all motion whatever and reducing an advancing mass of people to a blinded, weeping milling mass of people — but a mass of people who were not going back where they had come from and couldn’t even if they had wanted to because of the further masses of people piling in behind them. Tank commanders refused to send their tanks rolling north through masses of people moving south, and those foolish enough to try soon found the masses of people separating around them like buffalo and then engulfing them in a sea of bodies — and what tank commander wanted his troops in that close contact with that infected sea of bodies? The intent was sound enough, but the task was impossible; a solid line of D8 bulldozers forming an unbroken arc 150 miles long might have stopped those people from moving forward, perhaps even moved them back a few hundred yards, but presently the people would simply have climbed over the bulldozers. In the end, the total net effect of this military adventure in confronting people and stopping them from going where they wanted to go (or thought they did) was hopelessly perverse: a containing arc of militia and machinery and vehicles and helicopters all slowly retreating to the south and west in the face of the oncoming horde, with no alternative to retreat other than chopping the horde down like wheat on the prairie, with lots more wheat where that came from.
As it was in New York and Kansas City and Chicago, so it was in the other cities, minor variations from one to another but the same major theme. As the fire storm raged on, government institutions and public-health facilities grew steadily less able to cope with, much less contain, the holocaust. In fairness, of course, the day-by-day disintegration of the government and authority could not be blamed solely on the ineptitude or venality or incapacity of national or local leaders. The President proved no better nor worse a crisis leader than any other President in recent history would have been; he was not stupid, nor blind, nor even overly concerned with the political implications of what he did. If anything, he rose far above his capacity in facing the fire storm and did as much as any other human being in his position might have done. Behind and about him, tens of thousands of others in high places in government worked valiantly and did the very best they knew how to do to preserve the reins of control. In the final tally there were far more heroes than cowards in those ranks.
The problem was, very simply, that the best those leaders knew how to do fell far short of what needed to be done, and the tools that were needed were not there. No government in modern history had ever faced a disaster of the magnitude and suddenness of this one, whether economic, medical or military. The great, crushing depression of the 1930s had taken years to mature to its most dismal depths. Later, in the midst of the most terrible war in all history, it had taken six full months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor before the country was fully mobilized to fight back, despite three full years of advance warning; by then the enemy had achieved their empire, and it took four long, bloody years to wrench it back — but the first six months did not see the total disintegration of the nation. It merely made the fight longer and harder and more costly.
But even that disastrous war was of a different nature entirely from the present fire storm. In this case there wasn’t any six months in which to mobilize. Within a couple of months or so after Savannah the major cities were buried in corpses, and the wherewithal to fight simply didn’t exist. A year before the storm began, a total of twenty-three cases of plague had been reported in the entire year, confined to eight western states, all but six cases bubonic and flea-borne in nature. In all common sense, there had been nothing to be prepared and mobilized for until Pamela Tate was carried down the mountain, and within days all rational efforts at mobilization were already running frantically merely to catch up with a disaster far out of control. What was worse, for mobilization to be possible at all, the gears of national commerce, health controls and communications would all have had to mesh perfectly — but as the storm spread, the gears failed to mesh in too many areas at once, and quickly ground themselves to powder. Nothing of any significance could be accomplished because nothing really continued working enough of the time in enough places at once. Highway shipping could not accomplish anything when cross-country truckers fell sick at the wheel halfway to their destinations, or refused to drive their trucks into plague-stricken cities or simply walked away, leaving their vehicles planted on the highways. Without effective medications the medical establishment was reduced to the prayers, promises and post-mortems of a bygone age. Locally operated public utilities worked valiantly to keep such basics as heat, light and electricity going part of the time in most places, shoring up areas that broke down as best they could, but all too soon generating capacities began to crumble from lack of coal and oil immediately at hand to power the generators.
Telephone communications worked better than most things, at first, with at least the main trunk lines functioning to most areas part of the time and with overloaded satellite facilities pressed to the utmost — yet in counterpoint to this, the postal system ceased to work at all except on the most local, hand-delivery levels — and who wanted to do the hand-delivering? Checks that were mailed never arrived; heaps and mountains of mail piled up in central dispatching offices and overflowed into the streets; orders for goods and cash were never confirmed if they were ever received; nobody got paid. Normal commercial air traffic ground to a halt, amid a massive confusion of counterdirections, impaled on the horns of dilemma — the acute, agonizing need for fast transport of people, and knowhow and materiel on the one hand, and the acute, agonizing knowledge that airplanes were spreading the disease worldwide on the other hand, so that the Horseman had leaped cities and countrysides and borders and oceans long before he was even recognized …
And so it was, Ted Bettendorf reflected, that hell followed after Him Who Rode. Paralysis spread hand in hand with plague; first the cities and then the towns and villages and hamlets were stricken in the ever-growing fire storm, and the nation headed into a dreadful winter without food or fuel or medicine or leadership enough to go on for six more weeks, and no idea on God’s green earth where any of those things were going to come from …