The general nodded sympathetically. “No one wants this thing to spread. You must see that.”
“Don’t tell me what I must do! You people have wanted to kill us ever since you tried to blow up Point Hope.”
The place erupted with shouting.
“Why can’t I use my cell phone!”
“You’re working for the oil companies!”
Homza, by the fifth question, was drowned out. What would he do? He was used to people following his orders. I saw him pause, unrattled. His eyes calmly found me, third row up, right side. He’d known I was there all along, I realized. His head flicked. It was a summons.
“I’m going to have someone who many of you know up here,” he said. “Many of you remember Colonel Rush, who was here once before, when he stopped another outbreak.”
He waited for me like a master calls a dog. A dog told to “shut up” one minute and to “speak” the next. A dog threatened with a cell if he disobeyed. He shook my hand when I reached the stage, so the crowd would see friendship; I felt the hard grip, saw the challenge in his eye. He said, “You know what to do. You know these people.”
He meant, Are you one of us? Prove I can trust you.
I looked down from the stage, beyond the guards, at a handful of supportive faces; Merlin, shrewd, Karen, nodding as if to say, You’ll do the right thing, then turning to scan the crowd with a fierce, protective attitude that sent a bolt of love into my heart. That’s my man up there! I’ll kill anyone who harms him! I saw a flash of red hair and a beautiful face: Tilda Swann taking phone videos. She couldn’t broadcast them yet but she was making a record.
Mostly I saw lots of strangers, ready to erupt.
“Some of you know me. I’m Colonel Joseph Rush. I’ll answer your questions. But, please, one at a time.”
“What kind of doctor are you anyway?” demanded a professor from the community college.
“I work in a toxics and disease unit. Public safety.”
“What experiments have you done on rabies?” asked a part-time worker at the oil field at Prudhoe Bay.
“None, ma’am. My partner and I have been up here all summer, studying microbes. Standard study.”
Tilda Swann pushed her way to the front row, and held up her phone. Mikael Grandy in back, filmed also, looked excited. Happy. What a great story! He panned the crowd. He pushed his way down the aisle, lens on Karen, as the night manager at the elders home screamed at me, “You gave people this disease!”
“Sir, that isn’t true.”
At the mike stood a huge Samoan, the high school football coach, shirt hanging loose, rolls on his chin; I knew him vaguely from Saturday morning basketball… skins against shirts… scientists teamed with locals. His family of five boys stood beside him as he barked: “I heard that you soldiers got vaccinated but there’s no serum for our kids?”
I was ordered to take it. Essential personnel need it, they said. If you get sick, no one can do the work.
I explained, calmly, “Anyone who came in contact with victims will receive preventative inoculations. That includes nurses and families of detectives working the case.” Locals, not just outsiders. I saw sporadic nodding in the audience. I said, “Also Dr. Bruce Friday, who was sprayed with saliva while rushing a man to the hospital.”
The coach insisted, “Why can’t we all get it?”
Because there’s not enough to go around.
“We’ll be flying up additional serum,” I said, hating being the one to explain the too-late policy. “If you have been in contact with a sick person, if you have exchanged fluids with them, saliva, liquids, you are top priority for the next round.”
But if more symptoms appear, or if the disease is fast spreading, it will be too late for you.
The next questioner was one of the younger whaling captains, maybe thirty-nine years old. He said, “I heard that Longhorn North flew medicine in for their people. They get special treatment! They’re not essential personnel!”
“That just is not true, sir.”
What is true, though, is that they’re going to fly in vaccine. A private supply, that the company bought. How the hell did people here find that out already? The Longhorn people will receive standard inoculations for people who may have already been infected; one rabies shot on the first day, plus a dose of immune-globulin, then three more shots scheduled on the third, seventh and fourteenth days, a painful process guaranteed to stop rabies… unless this is a resistant strain.
A middle-aged woman — lawyer, for the borough — took the mike. “I heard there are three thousand doses stored at the airport, and you refuse to release them!”
“Ma’am, that rumor is just not true.”
I saw Karen straighten up, turn, and begin pushing her way up the aisle, toward the exit.
Is she leaving? Why would she—
Karen suddenly stopped and doubled over, coughing.
Oh no. Nononononono!!!
I’d missed a question. The speaker was the clerk at the liquor shack by the airport, a spare, serious young man with dark-framed glasses and a wisp of scraggly beard. “Why can’t you use all the vaccine you have on kids and elders!”
Karen straightened, caught her breath, went out.
People nodded at the question. But the answer — if I voiced it — would trigger an explosion. It’s worse than you think. There aren’t enough doses for all of you in the whole country. The best we could do was to fly in a lousy one hundred and twelve doses. We’re scrounging for more.
God help us if an inoculated person comes down with it.
Merlin suddenly stood beside me. He put his meaty arm over my shoulder, claiming friendship, which was no small thing. He reminded the town that Eddie and I helped save everyone here a year ago, when we stopped an outbreak on a ship offshore. He said that “his friend” Colonel Rush had cooperated with the police from the beginning, that I was the one who had identified the disease in the first place. He told them that without my input, the disease might not have been identified at all.
The screaming subsided to a low, angry rumble. Merlin and I moved offstage, surrendering the limelight back to Wayne Homza. The general squeezed my shoulder and nodded at me as we passed, playing to the crowd. His crisp uniform smelled of pipe tobacco, and close up, his eyes were neutral, light gray, and intelligent. “Stay here till the meeting is over. Research center. One hour.”
The audience had calmed a trifle, but that trifle made a difference. Homza began answering questions again.
“I saved your ass there, Joe,” Merlin said.
“I know.” Where’s Karen?
“Tell me now, Joe. Push comes to shove, can I depend on you? If I can’t, I don’t want you near me. I don’t want you fucking my investigation. You’re in the middle. I get it. But don’t lie to me again.”
In the pause before I replied, I flashed to the prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, where Eddie and I had once interviewed a U.S. Army private — Horace L. Scruggs — disgruntled kid from Tampa — a pimply beanpole with a low IQ, sentenced to forty years for sending anthrax through the mail to the vice president. I saw the kid’s cramped cell, his moist, concrete world. I heard the echoing bootfalls outside, a drum that never stopped. I smelled steamed beef and Lysol and a rank, perpetual chill, alive as memory. In Leavenworth, time is geology. The institution is a steel casket for people who remain alive.