Siddie Harper’s turf was unpromising land for heroism. Through the endless, broken slum streets of Chicago’s South Side the Horseman had taken his hideous toll with the sureness of a surgeon’s blade in the face of little or no opposition at all. Unlike so many other major-city slums, there had been no rioting there to speak of, little violence, little looting, little response that could be characterized precisely as panic. It seemed, in many ways, that the scourge had sliced its way through tens of thousands there like a knife through softened butter. Partly, of course, it was the long, long tradition of submission to utter grinding poverty so characteristic there, basically unrelieved in the slightest by the welfare checks or the child-support money or the food stamps nobody could buy or the huge, ineffective-health-care institutions nobody would trust or the vast, towering, barren, strife-torn urban renewal projects erected there to rot or the endless preachings of the endless Jesse Jacksons. The yawning gulf of poverty there, entirely comparable to the barrios of Rio or the drought-starved Sahel, sucked them all in and gulped them down without the faintest residual trace that they had ever come and gone, despite all the publicity and the political posturings, leaving tens and tens of thousands no better off and probably worse, with little will or human spirit left to fight anything with anything.
Even more, there was the very swiftness with which the fire storm had struck south-side Chicago, a devastating blow that had moved through the tenements and sewers and alleyways like a demon, numbing all facilities at once, offering no chance for recovery, too vast and relentless for anyone even to imagine where or how to start fighting. And the early, bitter winter that struck the northern-tier states merely contributed a little bit more than usual to the agony, with icy Canadian winds slicing down off Lake Michigan and snow at two-foot depth by early October. Rat-borne plagues of the past had always been slowed in winter, but not this man-borne plague. Inevitably the power outages and fuel-delivery failures and street blockings and commercial stoppages that plagued all of Chicago came first and worst on the South Side and were repaired last, which meant not repaired for weeks at a time as the death count mounted and the people there, for the most part, bowed their heads with almost inaudible wailing and waited with folded hands for any delivery at all.
Sidonia Harper was never one to have much use for folded hands, but then, one might have thought that Siddie had little choice in the matter. Sidonia had sat helplessly and watched her mother die in their little second-floor cold-water tenement flat during the first tidal wave of plague that hit Chicago. There was nothing she could do but sit and watch as her mother, already sick and dispirited, crippled with arthritis, abandoned by her only serious consort four years before in the wake of Sidonia’s accident, losing her four boys to drugs or prison or the rolling mills in Gary, barely able to keep Siddie and her younger sister alive, became suddenly and violently ill one night, and abruptly ceased breathing three days later. Her mother had been unwilling, or unable, even to try to travel to the nearest hospital facility twenty blocks away (not that it would have done her any good) and Sidonia was certainly not in a position to drag her. Siddie had nursed her as best she could, understanding all too well exactly what was going on in that tenement block where everyone, everyone, suddenly seemed to be getting sick at the same time. Siddie understood, all right; she had a very good mind and a TV set for a teacher. She had done all the right things for her mother the best that she could do them from her wheelchair, and — maybe fortunately for Siddie — it made her postpone thinking or paying attention to anything else, for a while. It was not until her mother was finally breathing no more and the truck had finally, finally come to take her away, that Sidonia had realized in a wave of absolute horror that the tenements on her block had become for the most part empty, and that death and her eight-year-old sister were the only companions she had left.
They waited for days for something to happen, with Siddie’s sister in abject terror, unwilling to go out on the street to try to get food until Siddie had soothed and assured and calmed her for hours, and then returning more terrified than before she had gone out; and Siddie, of course, could not go out at all. She had not been out of that second-story flat except rarely at any time during the four years since the terrible hot summer night when a wild-eyed boy she had known and teased at school had broken in the door of the place and brushed her mother aside and backed the fourteen-year-old girl out onto the fire escape to rape her and was stripping her clothes off her when the fire-escape railing gave and Siddie plunged two stories down to the concrete alleyway below and broke her back in three places. After the short hospital visit to make sure she was going to live at all, she had returned home to endless months in traction in the tenement flat as an ill-nourished body slowly, slowly allowed broken bones to heal — but the torn spinal cord would not heal.
Time had ceased to exist for Siddie Harper for part of that four years as her broken body matured and her mind changed. For a while girl friends came by, but they were aliens to Siddie, talking about their “men” and their pushers and their johns, and presently they stopped coming by. Broken bodies made them feel uneasy and so did Siddie’s head — she seemed far too old and thought about far too many weird things that didn’t really fit anything the others knew. They were lonely years, but something happened in Siddie’s mind to make the loneliness not too bad; of all people on the block she was the only one who waited for the bookmobile week after week, who wondered about things outside the block, who read and who taught herself to do many little things no one else knew that she could do when there was so much she couldn’t. She had lived on a timeless island, served and maintained and changing until the sudden, terrible fire storm struck and her mother was gone and Tessie, her sister, was terrified.
She helped Tessie, then, showed her how to do things, instructed her where to go to get what was needed in spite of her fear and the terrible things happening outside as the fire storm raged. Siddie was by no means helpless; she could get around well enough in the old beat-up wheelchair the state had provided (the state had actually paid for a brand-new chair with all the special features, but the one that had finally arrived at the second-story flat was an old, used, decrepit model with sharp angles and rusty swivels and the stuffing hanging out of the seat). Things would have been much easier for Siddie if her mother could have found — and paid for — a first-floor flat, as the visiting nurse had urged on one of her three visits, but the hard work of searching for a ground-floor place, and the ever-climbing rentals quoted for such flats whenever anybody heard about the wheelchair and smelled welfare money defeated that; so Siddie seldom got downstairs. But she managed just the same. Though her legs had withered, her arms and shoulders and pectorals and wrists and hands had become powerful from constantly manipulating her chair, as was the case with so many paraplegics, and she became very capable in many ways. So it was, after Mamma died, that she had been able to show her little sister what to do, and used her strong arms to comfort her, and wheeled herself around the flat to manage the cleaning and the simple cooking that sustained them. As long as they were well, they managed — but then the inevitable day had come when Siddie realized that Tessie was suddenly ill, gray and coughing and shivering violently in the cold flat, and that she herself had suddenly become feverish too, with angry, painful swellings appearing under her arms, and a vicious cough that would not stop.
Like Mamma before her, Tessie also had died, though not quite so quickly. Some person from some clinic, spurred perhaps by some quixotic urge to help the handicapped, had come by with a small bottle of capsules for the girls to use if they got too sick, and Tessie ate the capsules and they seemed to help somewhat, she seemed to improve for a little, but Siddie just got sicker, doing her best to help the child until one evening her sister’s breathing stopped and she knew she was comforting the dead and she herself was so sick she could barely ease the body to the floor and move it into the bedroom alcove; then she just sat there, watching over her dead sister, totally alone, waiting for her own time to come, if it was going to.
By some miracle of justice Sidonia Harper did not die. She was terribly ill, with draining sores and pain that was unbearable, and no one coming, delirium that wiped out days and made the nights endless; but she did not die, and then one morning — who could say how much later? — she had opened her eyes and her head was clear, and she was aware that her clothing stank until she got it stripped off, wheeling her chair around to hide from the icy blast from a window that had somehow gotten broken, and bathed herself from the washbowl, aware suddenly that she was desperately, unspeakably hungry. Cupboards were bare, milk rotting in the refrigerator, a handful of oatmeal and nothing else. Somewhere nearby a child was crying endlessly, somewhere else in the building, but when she tried a hoarse cry out the window herself, there was no response, and when she looked down at the alleyway and the street beyond she saw no people, no traffic.
No food. Nobody to help her. It was then that she knew with utter clarity that somehow she had to get downstairs.
She thought about it for a full day and night, trying to think out ways to make the unthinkable possible. For the past four years her major terror had been a fear of heights and falling; she had nightmares about falling, and woke up screaming. But now, alone, fear of falling or not, there was no other choice but to get herself down those stairs.
It took her most of another day to work up the nerve to actually try it. First she wheeled herself down the dark hall from the door of the flat to the top of the stairs, a yawning gulf stretching down and down to a landing and a wall, then farther on down the other way to the first-floor hallway. For a moment she panicked at the very sight of that gaping chasm; she pounded on the floor with the heavy cane she used to hook things to her, screamed out for help again and again, but no answer came. The place seemed empty, deserted. She considered trying to do it by brute strength alone, clinging to the banister with one arm and scratching at the wall with the other hand as she eased the chair down, but she knew she didn’t dare. She was far too weak for that; she knew the agony of overtaxed muscles too well. She wheeled herself back into the flat, found an old piece of clothesline rope under the sink. Back at the top of the stairs she turned the chair, disengaged the left arm of it, tossed it down with a clatter, then seized the banister and slid herself off the chair onto the floor. She could ease herself down the stairs all right, that was no problem, but without the chair at the bottom she couldn’t do anything once she was down there; the chair had to go first.
She tied the clothesline securely to the banister at the top, tied the other end around the axle of the chair. Seizing the banister with her left arm, she clutched the rope in her right hand, gently pushed the chair to the stairtop and over. It started down, bump, bump, bump, faster, the rope sizzling through her hand until she howled from the burn and let it go. The chair leaped downward, banging on each third step, came to the end of the rope in midair halfway down, snapped the rope and crashed down into the wall at the landing.
Siddie eased herself down, step by step. Eased down, rested. The strength she was used to wasn’t there, and she wasn’t thinking clearly; she was a third of the way down before she realized she had left the upper half of the rope tied to the banister above, and painfully had to work her way back up to retrieve it. Finally down at the landing, she tied the broken rope back together, then dragged her legs along to the chair, finding only that its back was bent from its upside-down collision with the wall.
This time she was more careful. She wound three turns of rope around the cane and wedged the cane into a banister spoke to control the rope’s slide as the chair went down. She rested for an hour, dozing part of the time, before she dared try it, but it went smoothly, especially because at the last minute she wrapped her hand in her T-shirt tail before clutching the rope. Halfway down, the chair stopped and she followed, reached it, tore the tail off her T-shirt to tie the wheel to the banister before climbing back up to untie the rope. Long minutes later she had repeated the process, and the chair came to rest on the first-floor hallway.
The outside door hung open on one hinge — and that left seven steps to go, down the outside stoop onto the street. She was exhausted now, tired beyond words, no longer able to face the ordeal of hitching herself up and down stairs to get ropes. The seven stairs didn’t look too steep, and suddenly something in her mind said To hell with it all, I’ve got to get down there NOW, and she acted on it. She grabbed the iron rail and hoisted herself into the chair, replaced the left arm, then clutched the railing and started easing the chair down. She controlled it for three steps before the strength of her arm gave and she and the chair plunged down to the street, lurched to the right as a wheel gave and bent when they hit the bottom, banged down the curb into the street, across to the other side, struck the other curb and threw Sidonia off, skidding on her face on the sidewalk as the chair turned over twenty feet away, the unbent wheel spinning and spinning in the air like a crazy thing.
Five minutes later she opened her eyes, realizing she was still alive and miraculously unhurt except for scrapes and bruises. She tested the limbs she could move. Only then did she become aware of the perfectly enormous human figure towering over her.