NightScape Part 19

" It might if we knew what we were fighting." Bingaman ma.s.saged 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 k.n.o.bs, 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 pa.s.sed 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 "h.e.l.lo" 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 k.n.o.bs 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 subst.i.tute. 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 a.s.sembled 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 a.s.sociated 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 s.p.a.ces. 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 a.s.sume 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 unb.u.t.ton 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 G.o.d, 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 h.o.a.rding," 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.