Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
Dr. Gunn—
This morning (Friday) two of my children became violently ill. Kathy has a temperature of 105 and is out of her head. Please come. I am sending this note by Joe Sanchez who has a horse.
Herbert Sunbury.
Sunbury, like Dan, was a native New Englander. He had sold a florist shop in Boston, six years before, to migrate to Florida and operate a nursery. He had acquired acreage, built a house, and planted cuttings and seedlings on the Timucuan six miles upstream of the Bragg house.
Dan pushed the Model-A fast up River Road. Beyond the Bragg place the road became a series of curves, following the serpentine course of the river. Dan had delivered the last two of the Sunburys’ four children. He liked the Sunburys. They were cheerful, industrious, and thoughtful. He knew that unless the emergency was real and pressing Herb would not have dispatched the note.
It was real. It was typhoid. It was the typhoid that Dan had half-expected and completely dreaded for weeks, months. Typhoid was the unwelcome, evil sister of any disaster in which the water supply was destroyed or polluted and normal disposal of human waste difficult or impossible.
Betty Sunbury said the two older children had been headachy and feverish for several days but not until Friday morning’s early hours had they become violently ill, a rosy rash developing on their torsos.
Fortunately, Dan could do something. Aspirin and cold compresses to reduce the fever, terramycin, which came very close to being a specific for typhoid, until the disease was licked; and he had the terramycin.
He reached into his bag and brought out the bottle, hoarded for this moment. He could have used the antibiotic a score of times to cure other patients of other diseases, but he had always made do with something else, holding this single bottle as a charm against the evil sister. Now it would probably save the Sunbury children. In addition, he had enough vaccine to innoculate the elder Sunburys, the four-year-old, and the babies, and just enough left for Peyton and Ben Franklin, when he returned to the house. Correct procedure would be to innoculate the whole town Dan questioned the Sunburys closely. They had been very careful. Their drinking water came from a clear, clean spring bubbling from limestone on high ground across the road. Even so, they boiled it. All their foods, except citrus, they cooked.
Dan looked out at the river gliding smoothly by. He was sure the river was the villain. “You haven’t eaten any raw fish, or shrimp, or shellfish, have you?”
“Oh, no,” Herb said. “Of course not.”
“What about swimming? Do you swim in the river?”
Herb looked at Betty. “We don’t,” Betty said. “But Kathy and Herbert, junior, they’ve been swimming in the river since March.”
“That’s it, I guess,” Dan said. “If the germs are in the river, it only takes one gulp.”
Somewhere near the headwaters of the Timucuan, or in the great, mysterious swamps from which slender streams sluggishly moved toward the St. Johns, a typhoid-carrier had lived, undetected. A hermit, perhaps, or a respectable church woman in a small truck-farm community. When this person’s sanitary facilities failed, germ-laden feces had reach the rivers. Thus Dan reconstructed it, driving back toward town on the winding road.
Dan was so absorbed in his deductions and forebodings that he failed to see the woman sitting on the edge of the road until he was almost abreast of her.
He stepped on the brakes hard and the car jarred to a stop.
The woman wore jeans and a man’s shirt. Her right knee was drawn almost up to her chin and she held her ankle in bath hands, her body rocking as if in pain. A swatch of metallic-blond hair curtained her features. Dan’s first thought was that she had turned her ankle; his second, that she could be a decoy for an ambush. Yet highwaymen rarely operated on unfrequented and therefore unprofitable roads, and had never been reported this close to Fort Repose. The woman looked up, appealingly. He could easily have switched gears and gone on, but he was a physician, and he was Dan Gunn. He turned off the engine and got out of the car.
As soon as his feet touched the macadam he sensed, from her expression, that he had stepped into a trap. Whatever her face showed, it was not pain. When her eyes shifted, and she smiled, he knew her performance had been completed.
Behind him a man spoke:
“All right, Mac, you don’t have to go any further.”
Dan swung around. The man who had spoken was one of three, all oddly dressed and all armed.
They had materialized from behind scrub palmettos at the side of the road. The leader was squat, and wore a checked gold cap and Bermuda shorts. His arms were abnormally long and hands huge. He carried a submachine gun and handled it like a toy. His belly bulged over his waistband. He ate well. Dan said, “Look, I’m a doctor. I’m the doctor of Fort Repose. I don’t have anything you want.”
The second man advanced on Dan. He was hatless, dressed in a striped sport shirt, and he gripped a baseball bat with both hands. “Get that, Mick?” he said “He don’t have nothing we want! Ain’t that rich?”
The third man was not a man at all but a boy with fuzz on his chin. The boy wore levis, a wide-brimmed hat, high-heeled boots, and twin holster belts slung low. He stood apart from the others, legs spread, hefting a long-barreled revolver in each hand. He looked like an immature imitation of a Western badman holding up the Wells Fargo stage, but he seemed overly excited and Dan guessed him the most volatile and dangerous of the three.
The woman, grinning, got in the car, wrestled the back seat to the floor, and found the two bottles of bourbon Dan kept hidden there. “Just like you heard, Buster,” she said. “The Doc keeps a traveling bar.”
“That’s my anesthetic,” Dan said.
Without looking at the woman, the leader said, “‘Just leave the liquor in the car, Rumdum. We’ll take everything as is. Start walking, Doc.”
Dan said, “At least let me have my bag. All the instruments and medicines I’ve got are in there.”
The boy giggled. “How about lettin’ me put him out of his misery, Mick? He’s too ignorant to live.”
The man with the machine gun took two steps to the side. Dan knew why. The car’s gas tank was in his line of fire.
The machine gun moved. “Get goin’, Doc.”
Dan thought of everything that was in his bag, including the typhoid shots for Peyton and Ben Franklin. He took a step toward the car. He saw the baseball bat swinging and tried to close with the man, knowing he was foolish, knowing that he was awkward and clumsy. The bat grazed his face and he tripped and fell. As he tried to rise he saw the boy’s high-heeled boot coming at his eyes and the man with the bat danced to the side, ready to swing again. His head seemed to explode. In a final split-second of consciousness he thought, I am dead.
He awoke dazed, almost totally blind, and unable to determine whether he had been shot as well as slugged and beaten. He waited to die and wanted to die. When he didn’t die he sat for a long time trying to decide which way was home. It required great effort to concentrate on the simplest matter. He would have preferred to stay where he was and complete his dying. But the sight of ants wheeling excitedly around the drying blood on the road made him uneasy. If he died there the ants would be all over him and in him by the time he was found. It would be better to die at home, cleanly. The sun was setting. The Sunbury house was east of Fort Repose. Therefore, he must go west. With the orange sun as his beacon, he began to crawl. When darkness came he rested, bathed his face in ditch water and drank it, too, and tried walking. He could walk perhaps a hundred yards before the road spun up to meet him. Then he would crawl. Thus, walking and crawling, he had finally reached the Bragg steps.
When Dan finished, Randy said, “It had to come, of course. The highwaymen killed off travel on the main highways and so now they’ve started on the little towns and the secondary roads. But in this case, Dan, it sounds like they were laying for you personally. I think they knew you were a doctor, and you’d be going way out River Road to the Sunburys’, and certa
“All they had to do,” Dan said, “was hang around Marines Park, look at the notices on the bandstand, and ask questions. I didn’t know any of them, but I think I’ve seen one before, the youngest. I used to see him hanging around Hockstatler’s drugstore before The Day.”
“They didn’t have a car?”
“No.”
“I guess what they wanted most was transportation.”
“They won’t get much. We had only two or three galIons of gas left.” He added, apologetically, “I’m sorry, Randy. I was careless. I shouldn’t have stopped. I’ve lost our transport, our medicines, and my tools.”
Leaning over the bed, Randy’s fingers interlocked. He unconsciously squeezed until the tendons on his forearm stood out like taut wires. He said, “Don’t worry about it.”
“Worst of all,” Dan said, “I’ve lost my glasses. I guess they smashed when that goon slugged me with the bat. I won’t be much good without glasses.”
Randy knew that Dan’s vision was poor. Dan was forced to wear bifocals. He was very nearsighted.
“Don’t you have another pair?” he asked.
“Yes—in the bag. I always kept my spare glasses in the bag because I was afraid I might lose or break the pair I was wearing, on a call.” He sat up straight in bed, his face twisted. “Randy, I may never be able to get another pair of glasses.”
Randy stood up. “I’ve got to start working on this, Dan.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Find them and kill them.” He said this in a matter-of-fact manner, as if announcing that he was going downtown to have his tires checked, in the time before The Day.
Dan said, “I’m afraid you’re going at this wrong, Randy. Killing highwaymen is secondary. The important thing is the typhoid in the river. If you think things are bad now, wait until we have typhoid in Fort Repose. And it’s not only Fort Repose. It goes from the Timucuan into the St. Johns and downriver to Sanford, Palatka, and the other towns. If they are still there.”
“All I can do about typhoid is warn people, which you have done already and which I will do again. I can’t shoot a germ. I’m concerned with the highwaymen right now, this minute. Next, they’ll start raiding the houses. It’s as inevitable as the fact that they left the main highways and ambushed you on River Road. Typhoid is bad. So is murder and robbery and rape. I am an officer in the Reserve. I have been legally designated to keep order when normal authority breaks down. Which it certainly has here. And the first thing I must do to keep order is execute the highwaymen. That’s perfectly plain. See you later, Dan.”
Randy turned to Helen. “Take care of him. Feed him up,” he said, a command.
Walking beside him toward the Admiral’s house, Lib found it difficult to keep pace. She had never seen Randy look and speak and act like this before. She held his arm, and yet she felt he had moved away from her. He did not seem anxious to talk, confide in her, or ask her opinion, as he usually did. He had moved into man’s august world of battle and violence, from which she was barred. She held tighter to his arm. She was afraid.
The admiral, freshly shaven and pink-faced, was in his den, touching whale oil to the recoil mechanism of an automatic shotgun. “I was wondering,” he said to Randy, “whether you would be around here or I should come to you. How’s Dan?”
“He’ll be all right. We lost the car and the medicines and the last of the bourbon but we didn’t lose our doctor. The most important thing we lost were his glasses. He’s very nearsighted.”
“You forgot something,” the Admiral said, hardly looking up from his work. “We not only have lost transport but communications. We no longer have a way to recharge batteries. This battery I have now—” he nodded at the radio—“is good for perhaps another eight to ten hours. After that—” he looked up—“nothing. Silence. What do you plan to do?”
“I plan to kill them. But I don’t know how to find them. I came to talk to you about it.”
Lib said, “May I interrupt? Don’t look at me that way, Randy. I’m not trying to interfere in your business. I just wanted to say I brought the Admiral’s coffee. While you’re talking, I thought I’d boil water and make a cup for him.”
The Admiral said, absently, “Kettle’s in the fireplace.”
She went into the living room. It was silly, but sometimes the Admiral irritated her. The Admiral made her feel like a messboy.
Sam Hazzard laid the automatic sixteen gently on the desk. “Ever since I heard about it, I’ve been thinking,” he said “You have to go get them. They won’t come to you. Not only that, they may be a hundred miles from here by now.”
“I think they’re right around here,” Randy said. “One of the gang was a local drugstore cowboy, now toting two real guns. And they don’t have enough gas to get far. I think they’ll try to score a few more times before they move on. Even when they’re gone, others will come. We have the problem whether it’s this particular gang or another gang. I’m going to try to form a provisional company.”
“Vigilantes?”
“No. A company under martial law. So far as I know I’m the only active Army Reserve officer in town so I guess it’s up to me.”
“Then what do you do?”
Lib came in and set a cup beside each of them. She found a clear space at the far end of the room-length desk, boosted herself up, and attempted to appear inconspicuous.
“Suppose I organized a patrol on foot? Set up roadblocks?” Randy suggested.
“The highwaymen are mobile, you’re not,” the Admiral said. “If they see an armed patrol, or a roadblock, they’ll simply keep out of your way.”
Randy said, “Well, we can’t just sit here and wait for them.”
“All this I’ve been thinking,” The Admiral said. “Also I was thinking of the Q-ships we used in the first World War.”
Lib started to speak but decided it would be unwise. It was Randy who said, “I remember, vaguely, reading about Q-ships but I don’t remember much about it. Enlighten me, Sam.”
“Q-ships were usually auxiliary schooners or worn-out tramps, targets on which a German submarine captain wouldn’t be likely to waste a torpedo but would prefer to sink with gunfire. Concealed a pretty hefty battery behind screens that looked like deck loads. Drill was to prowl submarine alley unescorted and helpless—looking. The sub sees her and surfaces. Sometimes the Q-ship had a panic party that took to the boats. Best part of the act. Soon as the sub opened fire with its deck gun the Q-ship ran up the flag and unmasked the battery. Blammy! It was quite effective.”
“Very ingenious. But what has it got to do with highwaymen?”
“Nothing at all, unless you can put a four-wheeled Q-ship on the roads around Fort Repose.”
Randy shrugged. “We’re not mobile. Plenty of cars we could use—for instance, yours, Sam—but gasoline is practically nonexistent. We might have to cruise around for days before they tackled us. I might be able to requisition a gallon or two here and there but then the word would get around and they’d be watching for us.”
Lib had to speak. “Could I make a suggestion? I think Rita Hernandez and her brother must have gasoline. They’re the big traders in town, aren’t they?”
Randy had tried to wipe Rita out of his mind. They were even, they were quits. He wanted. nothing from Rita any more. He said, “It’s true that if anybody’s holding gas, it’s Rita.”
“Not only that,” Lib said, “but they have that grocery truck. Can you imagine anything more enticing to highwaymen than a grocery truck? They won’t really think it’s filled with groceries, of course, but psychologically it would be irresistible.”
Sam Hazzard smiled with his eyes, as if light from within penetrated the opaque gray. “There you have it, Randy! Nice staff work, my girl!”
“Also,” she said, “I think it would be a good idea if I drove. They’d be sure to think it was easy pickings with a woman driving.??
“You will like the devil drive!” Randy said. “You will stay at home and guard the house, you and Ben Franklin.” And the two men went on talking and planning, as if they already possessed the truck with full tank, and she was left out of it again. At least, she thought, if it really worked, she had contributed something.
The Admiral emphasized that whatever was done must be done quietly. Randy decided he could not go to the Hernandez house until after dark. It was not impossible that the highwaymen were holed up in Pistolville, or had contacts there. If Pistolville saw him drive off in Rita’s truck, the news would be all over town within a few hours. Finally, the Admiral asked the crucial question—would Rita cooperate? Was she discreet?
“Rita wants to hold what she has,” Randy said. “Rita wants to live. She is realistic.”
There was one more thing he must do before he left the Admiral. He sat at the typewriter and pecked out the orders.
ORDER NO. 1—TOWN OF FORT REPOSE
1. In accordance with the proclamation of Mrs. Josephine Vanbruuker-Brown, Acting President of the United States, and the declaration of Martial Law, I am assuming command of the Town of Fort Repose and its environs.
2. All Army, Navy, and Air Force reservists and all members of the National Guard, together with any others with military experience who will volunteer, will meet at the bandstand at 1200 hours, Wednesday, 20 April. I propose to form a composite company to protect this town.
ORDER NO. 2
1. Two cases of typhoid have been diagnosed in the Sunbury family, upper River Road. It must be assumed that both the Timucuan and St. Johns are polluted.
2. All water will be boiled before drinking. Do not eat fruits or greens that have been washed in unboiled water.
ORDER NO. 3
1. Dr. Daniel Gunn, our only physician, has been beaten and robbed by highwaymen.
2. The penalty for robbery or pillage, or for harboring highwaymen, or for failure to make known information concerning their whereabouts or movements, is death by hanging.