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  A War of Shadows

  Jack L. Chalker

  In California, the victims are blind. In Maine, severely retarded. Small towns across America are being systematically “wiped out” by terrorists and their campaign of germ warfare waged against the U.S. The President’s only option seems to be an equally deadly counterattack.

  A War of Shadows

  by Jack L. Chalker

  This book is for Eva C. Whitley, so loving a completist that she not only has all my writings, but she married me, too.

  ONE

  The shadow of death passed through Cornwall, Nebraska, but it was such a nice day that nobody noticed.

  The sign off Interstate 80 simply read “Cornwall, next left,” and left it at that. If you took it you were immediately taken onto a smaller and rougher road that looked as if it had last been maintained in the days of the Coolidge administration. Avoiding the potholes and hoping that your own vehicle wasn’t too wide to pass the one coming toward you, you finally passed a small steak house and bar and were told by a smaller sign that you were in Cornwall, Nebraska, Town of the Pioneers, population 1160, together with the news that not only did they have Lions and Rotary, but when they met as well.

  The town itself was little more than a main street composed of a few shops and stores, an old church, the inevitable prairie museum, and a motel which had never seen better days, as much maintained by pride as by business.

  There wasn’t very much business in Cornwall; like thousands of others throughout the great plains states the town existed as a center for the farmers to get supplies and feed, and to order whatever else they needed from the local Montgomery Ward’s or Sears catalog store.

  It was stifling hot on this mid-July afternoon. The ancestors of these people had settled in inhospitable Nebraska because they had lost hope of Oregon; trapped with all their worldly possessions, they had made the land here work—but they had never tamed it.

  Three blocks down a side street, a woman gave a terrified shriek and ran from her front door out onto the sidewalk, down toward the stores as fast as she could. Rounding the corner, she ran into the small five-and-ten and screamed at a man checking stock on one of the shelves.

  “Harry! Come quick! There’s somethin’ wrong with the baby!” She was almost hysterical.

  He ran to her quickly, concern on his face. “Just hold on and calm down!” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s Jennie!” she gasped, out of breath. “She just lies there! Won’t move, won’t stir, nothin’!”

  He thought frantically. “All right, now, you get Jeb Ferman—he’s got some lifesavin’ trainin’. Did you call the doctor?”

  She nodded. “But he’ll be fifteen, twenty minutes coming from Snyder! Harry—please come!”

  He kissed her, told her to get Ferman and join him at the house. Jeb had once been a medic in the Army, and was head of the local volunteer fire department.

  In a few minutes, they were all at the house.

  It wasn’t that the child was quiet; in many circumstances parents would consider that a blessing. Nor was she asleep—her eyes were open, and seemed to follow Jeb Ferman’s finger.

  She just didn’t move otherwise. No twitching, no turning, not even of the head. Nothing. It was as if the tiny girl, no more than ten weeks old, was totally paralyzed.

  Jeb shook his head in confusion. “I just don’t understand this at all,” he muttered.

  By the time the doctor arrived from two towns over, Jennie was no better, and her eyes seemed glazed.

  While they all clustered around as the man checked everything he could, the concerned mother suddenly felt dizzy and swooned almost into her husband’s arms. They got her onto the sofa.

  “It’s just been too much for me today,” she said weakly. “I’ll be all right in a minute. I’ve just got this damned dizziness.” Her head went back against a small embroidered pillow. “God! My head is killing me!”

  The doctor was concerned. “I’ll give her a mild sedative,” he told her husband. “As for Jennie—well, I think I’d better get her into a hospital as quickly as possible. It’s probably nothing, but at this age almost anything could happen. I’d rather take no chances.”

  Harry, feeling frantic and helpless now with two sick family members on his hands, could only nod. He was beginning to feel pretty rotten himself.

  It would take a good forty minutes to get an ambulance, and the patient was very small, so the doctor opted for a police car. He and the father got in the back, carefully cradling the young and still motionless infant, and the car roared off, a deputy at the wheel, siren blaring and lights flashing.

  Not far out of town the car started weaving a little, and the deputy cursed himself. “Sorry, folks,”—he yelled back apologetically. “I don’t know what happened. Just felt sorta dizzy-like.”

  He got them to the hospital, pulling up to the emergency entrance with an abandon reserved for police, and stepped out.

  And fell over onto the concrete.

  The doctor jumped out to examine him, and a curious intern, seeing the collapse, rushed to help.

  “Hey! Harry! Get Jennie inside!” the doctor snapped. “I got to take care of Eddie, here!”

  The intern took immediate charge, and the two men turned the deputy over and looked at him. There were few scrapes and bruises from the fall, and he was breathing hard and sweating profusely.

  “I’ll get a stretcher,” the intern said. He turned and looked back at the police car, seeing Harry still sitting in it, holding the baby.

  “Harry!” he yelled. “I told you to get Jennie inside!”

  There was no reply, no sign that he had been heard at all. The doctor jumped up swiftly and leaned back into the car.

  Harry sat there stiff as a board, only his panicked eyes betraying the fact that he was alive.

  The doctor ran inside the emergency room entrance.

  “We got us some kind of nasty disease!” he snapped. “Be careful! Isolation for all of them, full quarantine for the staff. Admit me, too—I’ll assist from inside, since I’ve been in contact with them. And get another ambulance over to Cornwall fast! I think we got a young woman there with the same thing!”

  Tom Scott and Gordon Martin had driven ambulances over half the roads of Nebraska in the six years since they’d started, and were hardened, prepared for almost anything—but never for driving into Cornwall that late July afternoon.

  There were bodies all over. A couple of cars had crashed, but that was only part of it. People lay all over the place, in odd positions. Inside the cafe, hamburgers were frying to a crisp while customers sat motionless in the booths; the cook, fallen onto the grill still clutching a spatula, was frying too. Down at the service station a stream of gasoline trickled into the street as an attendant, leaning against a car as unmoving as the driver behind the wheel, continued to pump gas into a tank that had obviously been full a long time.

  “Jesus God!” Scott reached for the radio. “This is Unit Six to dispatch,” he said, trying to sound calm and businesslike.

  “Dispatch, go ahead Six.” A woman’s cool, professional tones came back at him.

  “We—I—I don’t know how to tell you. Get everybody you can over to Cornwall, full protective gear, epidemic precautions. Everybody in this whole damned town’s paralyzed or dead!”

  “Say again?” The tone was not disbelieving; it was the sound of someone who was sure she’d misunderstood.

  “I said the whole town’s frozen stiff, damn it!” he almost screamed, feeling the fear rise within him. “We got some kind of disease or poison gas or something here—and I’m right in the middle of it!”

  Within minutes four doctors were airlifted to Cornwall by State Police helico
pters; troopers blocked the entrances and exits to the town except for emergency vehicles. It was a totally unprecedented thing, and there were no contingency plans for it, but they acted swiftly and effectively, as competent professionals. Nearby National Guard vehicles were pressed into service as well, and a frantic hospital tried to figure out where and how to deal with the huge number of patients. It was a 150-bed hospital; they already had forty-six patients. Appeals went out to hospitals and doctors as far away as Lincoln, and the CAP was asked to provide additional airlift capability.

  The state Health Department was notified almost immediately. Again, there was initial shock and disbelief, but they moved. The Governor mobilized appropriate Guard trucks and facilities, not just to aid in handling the patients but also to cordon off the entire area around the town.

  Less than fifteen minutes after the network newsmen had it, a report went in to the National Disease Control Center in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside Washington. Field representatives were dispatched from Omaha and the University of Nebraska within the hour.

  In a small but comfortable apartment in the city of Fairfax, a phone rang.

  Dr. Sandra O’Connell had just walked in and hadn’t even had time to take off her shoes when the ringing began. She picked up the phone.

  “Sandra O’Connell,” she said into it.

  “Dr. O’Connell? This is Mack Rotovich. We got another one, Red Code, same pattern.”

  Oh, my God! she said to herself. “Where?” “Small town in western Nebraska, Cornwall I think it is.”

  “Symptoms?”

  “Catatonia, looks like,” Rotovich informed her. “’Things are still more than a little sketchy. It just broke a few hours ago.”

  She dreaded the next question the most. “How many?” she asked.

  “Six hundred forty or so to this point,” Rotovich told her. “Maybe more now. Hard to say. Got a few elsewhere, seemed to hit about the same time, and there’s a lot of people out in the fields yet. We’re sending the Guard in on a roundup.”

  She nodded to herself. “Have you sent the Action Team in?”

  “Of course. That’s the first thing I did. Blood and tissue samples should be coming within the next two, three hours. Want to be down here when they come in?”

  She was tired; bone-weary, her father used to call it. It had been a long day and a long week and she needed sleep so bad she could taste it.

  “I’ll be down in an hour,” she said resignedly and hung up the phone. She stood there for half a minute, trying to collect herself, then picked the phone up again. Carefully, she punched out a full twenty-two digits on the pushbuttons, including the * and # twice. There was an almost unbelievably long series of clicks and relays, then an electronic buzz which was immediately answered.

  “This is Dr. O’Connell, NDCC,” she said into the phone. “We have another Red Town. An Action Team is en route. Please notify the President.”

  TWO

  Mary Eastwicke had thought that being press officer for the National Disease Control Center would be a fairly nice, easy job. Nobody was very interested in NDCC, most of the time, except for an occasional science reporter doing a Sunday feature, and the pay was top bracket for civil service. But now, as the trim, tiny businesslike woman walked into the small briefing room bulging with reporters, IN lights and cameras, and into the heat generated by it all, she wondered why she hadn’t quit long ago. With the air of someone about to enter a bullring for the first time, she stepped up to the cluster of micro-phones.

  “First, I’ll read a complete statement for you,” she said in a. smooth, accentless soprano. “After, I will take your questions.” She paused a moment, apparently arranging her papers but actually giving them time to get ready for the official stuff that would grace the news within the hour.

  “At approximately 3:10 this afternoon, Eastern Daylight Time, the town of Cornwall, Nebraska, first began showing symptoms of an as-yet unknown agent, said agent causing most of. the town to come down with varying degrees of paralysis. The symptoms showed first in the young, then quickly spread to upper age groups. We have been as yet unable to fully question any victims, but there appears from hospital and doctor records of the past few weeks to have been no forewarning of any sort, although the malady struck every victim within a period of under three hours.” She paused to let the print journalists catch up and check their little shoulder recorders, then continued.

  “So far there are fourteen confirmed fatalities—seven infants, two persons in vehicles which crashed, and the others elderly. Another forty-six are considered in critical condition. Federal, state, and local authorities are currently on the scene, and NDCC is at this moment running tests on samples from several victims, as well as two bodies of the dead. At the moment this is all we know. I’ll take questions.”

  There was a sudden tumult, and she waited patiently for the mob scene to calm down.

  “Please raise your hands,” she said professionally when she thought she could be heard over the din. “I’ll call on you.” That settled them, and she pointed to a well-known network science editor.

  “Have there been any signs of this affliction spreading to other localities?” he asked in his famous cool manner. “We have some reports of it hitting in other areas.”

  “So far we have had a number of cases outside the area,” she said. “Twenty-six, to be exact. All but three are known to have been in Cornwall within the last few days. Except for four people in a truck stop on I-80 and two truckers in West Virginia who passed through there three days ago, no other victims. And, no, we can find no sign of any spreading of the affliction by these people to others with whom they’ve come in contact, except perhaps at the truck stop.”

  Another question. Did the disease affect animals in the town, and did it spare any people?

  “Yes to both,” she said. “That is, many people seem to have had such a mild case there appears to be no question that they’ll recover with no serious effects. As to the animals, some pigs were affected, but not cows, horses, chickens, or other animals. Some dogs seem to exhibit slight signs, but there are no totally paralyzed ones that we’ve found.”

  “Is there any connection yet between this disease and those that struck Boland, California, Hartley, North Dakota, and Berwick, Maine, in the past few weeks?” That was the Post man.

  She shrugged. “Of course, they are all small towns, and in each case the mystery ailment struck suddenly and with no prior warning. However, the symptoms were far different in those other cases, even from each other. If you remember, Boland’s population went blind, Hartley’s became severely palsied, and Berwick…” She let it hang and they didn’t pursue it. Everyone in Berwick, to one degree or another, had become rather severely mentally retarded.

  “It’s almost like somebody’s trying to kill off small-town America,” a reporter muttered. Then he asked, “All of these maladies are related to attacks on various centers of the brain and central nervous system, aren’t they? Isn’t that a connection?”

  She nodded. “It’s the only connection, really. We are still running a series of tests on the earlier victims, you know. Our teams are working around the clock on it. If, in fact, it’s a disease of the central nervous system and/or brain, though, how is it transmitted? There is no apparent link between the afflicted areas. And why hasn’t it shown up elsewhere? Unless someone else is prepared to answer those questions, we must assume we are dealing with different diseases here.”

  “Or a new kind of disease,” a voice said loudly.

  It went on for quite a while, with even the crazies having their turn. Any flying saucers reported near these places? No. Is the Army back into biological warfare experimentation? No, not the military. Somebody who’d just seen The Andromeda Strain on the Late Show asked about meteors, space probes, and the like, but again the answer was no, none that had been found.

  They left with lots of scare headlines and nasty suppositions, but nothing more. Page one again, to s
care the hell out of the population, but the truth was that nobody really knew what was going on.

  Mary Eastwicke made her way wearily back to her office feeling as if she’d worked ten hours in the last seventy minutes. Several staffers were looking over papers, telexes, and the like. She sank into her chair.

  “I need a drink,” she said. “Anything new?”

  A young assistant shook his head. “Nothing more. The toll’s 864 now, with eighty-six deaths. In a couple hundred cases they’d be better off dead, though. A hundred percent paralyzed. Stiff, too. You can bend ’em in any position and they’ll stay that way. Most of the rest are nasty partials. That town was wiped out as surely as if you dropped a bomb on it.”

  Mary sighed, and decided she was going to get that drink no matter what. It was going to be a long night; no going home for them or anyone else this time.

  She prayed that the folks upstairs would come up with something solid on this one. She thought of that comment from that reporter to the effect that it was as if somebody was wiping out the small towns of America.

  She wondered how the tests were going.

  Dr. Mark Spiegelman was about fifty, and usually looked forty, but by 5:00 A.M. looked seventy instead. He sank wearily down in Sandra O’Connell’s office and gulped his thirty-sixth cup of strong black coffee as she read the reports and looked at the photos.

  “Did you ever dream of a nice little VA hospital job someplace?” he asked her. “You know, the kind where they give you some patients with known ailments and ask you to do your best to help them? I do. Lord! I’d settle for a nice bubonic plague someplace. But this!”

  She nodded. “Same sort of thing as the others. These motor areas of the brain were burned, actually burned! It’s as if some nice, normal cells just suddenly decided to stop producing the nice normal acids they need and suddenly devoted their time to producing sulfuric acid or something. How’s it possible, Mark? How’s it possible for just a few cells in a particularly critical spot, all in a group, to suddenly produce a destructive series of chemicals for a period, do their damage, then let the surviving ones return to normal? Even cancer, once it starts, keeps doing what it’s doing. This was triggered only in a few centers of the brain, critical centers, within a couple of hours in just about everybody in that town, then stopped. How is that possible, Mark?”