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I almost told her not to be afraid. Stupid.
Now that Theda Evora sat shotgun in the Martin Wasp, only slightly aware of how close she had just come to being detained, Patrick Conlin’s words failed him. The train station faded into the dust storm in their wake and Theda glanced behind only once. They weren’t being followed. Not yet, anyway.
He pressed down harder on the gas pedal, flicking on the windshield wipers which was ludicrous, like taking a fly swatter to a plague of locusts. He clicked the wipers off and silently begged the controller of the universe that there weren’t any dirt-cloaked Packard trucks lumbering toward them from the opposite direction. For now, the murky visibility had brought the daily operations to a standstill at Fort Riley.
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He spoke aloud before he even knew he was doing it.
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Conlin?” She clutched the door handle, her voice controlled politeness. One wrong move would send her reeling from the car, even if it were moving.
“It’s nothing. Just thinking out loud.”
“Where are we going?”
“We can’t go anywhere in public. A black man with a white girl? Uh-huh. There won’t be one eye that doesn’t catch us.” He pressed the gas harder. He was being propelled by a force that was rapidly taking over every part of his body with the command to GO! Just get out of here. Put the pedal to the metal and blow this town!
But he wasn’t going anywhere yet, especially with her. Instead he said, “There’s a large warehouse at the end of the base. It’s jammed with all kinds of army stuff. I hid there the other day and not a soul peeked in. We start there.”
She shifted in her seat. “Look, I know how it sounds.” It came out harsher than he intended. She would be an idiot not to be afraid. But after the last few days, his nerves were a copper wire split into a thousand strands. Politeness was an unaffordable indulgence. “You can decide what you want to do after we talk. After that, you want to get on that train, I’ll take you. Or to the house. Or to the moon. But let’s at least talk.”
“How do you know I want to talk to you?” She asked. “Perhaps I was outside waiting for someone.”
He glanced sideways. “You weren’t wandering around in flying dirt for nothing. I know when someone’s running, Miss Evora. And you weren’t standing still back there.”
She held his eyes for a beat longer, then turned her gaze to the dashboard. Conlin gripped the steering wheel, eyes flickering, hoping to not have to answer too many questions about the interior workings of the Wasp. Before he left the New York City of 1946, he had inventoried the car. The exterior is a Martin Wasp from 1921. Healey Elliott engine, fastest in the world. Dials and knobs pulled from all over. Cobbled together to make a car that no one can catch in 1918.
She pointed to the dashboard. “A wireless? In a car? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“A radio.” He clicked on the dial. A burst of cat-static from the miles of empty frequencies, just waiting for the coming years when they would be filled with stations popping up, sending their music, serials and news all over the country. “Here,” he pointed to the station dial. “Turn it.”
She reached out, turning the dial with her fingertips as if afraid to touch it. “The government took control over the airwaves. Last year they shut down all the stations.” The static spit. Music poked through the static and rose in clarity and volume.
“Maple Leaf Rag,” she said. “A music station, all the way out here?”
“Probably the military frequency.” Before Conlin could finish the sentence, the song ended and a male voice spoke.
“…the dust storm is covering our area but is expected to move out by tonight as a new front of cold air enters from western Kansas and Colorado. Possible snow. More updates on this frequency. Now, for a special announcement. All personnel of Fort Riley, Camp Funston and the surrounding area, this is an emergency…”
“An APB,” Conlin muttered.
“A what?”
“Never mind.”
“…the search for a missing doctor from the medical team of Fort Riley is under way. Dr. Harold Evora has not been located as of eleven forty-five this morning, and it’s believed that he is missing as a result of today’s extreme weather. Evora has brown hair and eyes and is dressed in civilian clothing. Upon sighting, immediately contact the military police at…”
Damn. I got her just in time. It’s happening. Her stricken expression was answer enough, but he asked, “Your daddy wasn’t missing this morning?”
She shook her head no.
The last of the barracks faded behind them and ahead the giant warehouse loomed. “You got anything to tell me?” He asked softly.
“Yes,” she croaked. “I found something last night. Something….something I don’t quite understand.”
“Do you have this something with you?”
“No.” She inhaled sharply, her voice cracking. He pitied her but if she fell apart, moving forward was going to be impossible. Conlin turned the car onto the bumpy utility road at the very edge of the base, now deserted, that was dotted by buildings from the time of General Custer’s station at Fort Riley that were now left to crumble in the new century. Conlin maneuvered the Wasp in-between what looked like it was once an apartment building and a smaller warehouse. It wouldn’t be seen from the road. Conlin reached into the backseat and grabbed his 1946 overcoat and handed it to her.
“Take a deep breath and put this over your head and get ready to move fast. Stick close to me. Let’s get into that warehouse before the dust eats us alive.”
An hour later, the two sat side by side in a dank corner of the warehouse. Conlin had been right. Mountains of crates formed dark caverns that created winding paths throughout the musty-damp-wool-smelling space and high above, wisps of dirty gusts flew past the vertical windows and left debris in crusted layers on the glass. Closer to the wall were piles of old clothing: tunics with shredded arms other parts destroyed, a pile of old boots and leggings that were muddied and balled up and in another a heap of soiled hats.
Between them was one of Conlin’s clean handkerchiefs with a line of saltine crackers down the middle and a battered thermos with tepid water that tasted of metal. A picnic for hobos. Her stomach churned with the tasteless crackers but he had insisted she eat, but swallowing the dry meal was almost impossible. All she could see was her mother’s face, arguing with Billy Rankin. I need to find my mother. Father is gone. And she doesn’t know.
Pain gripper her abdomen and it was all she could do not to moan and sprawl onto the filthy floor with a green army blanket thrown over her head, but she kept talking, describing the photographs and letter to the best of her memory. Conlin listened, occasionally plucking another cracker and quietly chewing.
“He burned them,” she ended and sipped the hard water. “There’s nothing left.”
Conlin leaned against a stack of crates as the shadows shifted above and far away, a siren wooo wooo woo’ed. He folded his long fingers under his chin and rested his elbows on his knees. “Must have known those boys in the photographs,” Conlin said.
She shook her head. “No. He didn’t even look at them.”
“Then why burn ‘em?” When she didn’t answer he said, “he knew that doctor, though, right? The one who took off. Supposedly took off. Knew of him, anyway. Funny that the last trace of that guy just went up in smoke. Tells you something, though, doesn’t it?”
“He very well could’ve run off,” she snapped.
“You really believe that? Or do you just don’t want to believe that your high-class, highly-educated, famous doctor daddy knows things that a guy like him shouldn’t know?”
“My father has nothing to do with whatever is going on at that building,” she said with finality, but a note of unease took the bite off of the words. He glanced at her sideways because he heard it, too. She tried again. “Nothing to do with it. If you knew him, you’d say the same thing.” He nodded his head which enraged her. She hated many things but the thing she hated most of all was to be dismissed like she didn’t know what she was talking about.
“What’s the date today?” he asked suddenly.
“March the fifth. What does it matter?” she said, annoyed. Then she remembered. “Oh, yes, that’s right. According to your expert papers, this flu is going to appear on March the 7th. I almost forgot all about your fantasy story. Silly me.” She shrugged and part of her hated herself for acting like a child who was caught stealing candy.
“We’ll talk about that later. I want to talk about those boys in the photographs. What do you think they had?”
“I don’t know,” she leaned back next to him. Her back hurt from sitting on the hard floor and her feet ached in her high-heeled traveling boots. “Those marks on their faces were odd, and they were all the same type of mark, which doesn’t make much sense. It reminded me…” she stopped, not wanting to tell him too much. He was still a stranger, and for the first time that word held its true meaning. A strange person.
“Of what?”
She hesitated. “Of an account in one of my father’s old medical books. He collected them. Some were hundreds of years old and we’d look through them and discuss how far the medical field had come, but how there were still threads of truth that had lasted for hundreds of years for a reason. Truth always lasts, he used to say. It was a story of a family where the children all got small pox, but they didn’t get it all at once, but they got it one after another. Four children.” She shook the thermos. The water was getting low, and she put it back down, although her mouth was dry. “They kept the sick child quarantined at one end of the house, and kept the other kids away, but one by one they all went down with it. Those men in the photographs, they were all in the same bed. I’m sure of it. Like they got whatever it was right after each other.”
“So when one died, they just moved him out and there was another sick man right after him?”
“Yes.”
“And there was another part,” she swallowed and grabbed for the water anyway and took just enough to replace the bitter taste in her mouth with steel. “The children…they got worse as each one took ill. The smallpox, it killed them faster, until the last one died within one day of falling ill. It was as if the last one had skipped over the initial stages of the disease, because it was stronger by the last child. My father said he didn’t really believe it, and that older accounts were still mixed with magic and wives tales, but he said that a disease that jumped from one to another could change. Mutate he said.” She played with the thermos. “That story came to mind, that’s all. It’s probably nothing. Only…”
“What?”
“There’s something else.” And she told him about Caleb Van Horn in the infirmary, and meeting his father. When she was through, Conlin stood. He swatted the dust from the seat of his army pants and paced to another tower of crates.
“You think they killed that Van Horn?” He said, his back to her. “Same way they did those boys in the photographs?”
“I don’t know,” she gripped her knees and pulled them closer. “He wasn’t sick when I saw him in the Infirmary. Not with anything respiratory. I would’ve heard it in his breathing if he were as sick as Dr. Harris said he was. His breathing was clear. He didn’t have anything that would kill him in a little over a day. No. What I think, though…” She paused. The gun underneath her jacket dug painfully into her ribs. She looked at Conlin. “I think Van Horn is in that building. Still alive. The white feathers. His boots were covered with them. I saw the same white feathers stuck to a doorframe in the kitchens. He’s inside the General Building.”
Conlin stood, arms crossed, his back still to her. She tried not to allow her mind to wander to the places it went on its own. Her father had been at Fort Riley for months, in that very building. Working. What was it he had told them? Gas. Yes, that was it. On the day last year when Major Whittaker turned up at their home in Philadelphia it was to ask her father, Dr. Harold Evora, known for his brilliance in diagnosing disease and known even more for his kindness in treating even the lowest of the people of the city, to come and develop a remedy to be used on the front for gas attacks. This…this other can’t be him. Of course it’s not! There are other doctors. Many. The building’s enormous. He’s working on one side. The side developing a respiratory aid for the boys who were gassed. Not anything else. Nothing else.
“Dr. Andersen wanted one thing: for me to kill Thrax. Nothing else. Anything else would upset time.”
She shook her head slowly. A grunted “please,” was all she could mutter.
“There’s no time for it now, anyway,” he turned his head toward her. “That building is tight with security during the day. But at night it’s quiet. I watched it. If we can get to that Van Horn, he’ll tell us who Thrax is.”
“Why would he know?”
Conlin turned hard eyes on her that looked even more vacant in the shadows. “Because you wouldn’t mind showing your face to someone who wasn’t going to live to tell anyone about it, would you? But there’s one problem.”
“There is more than one problem, Mr. Conlin.”
“If the first man reports to the Infirmary on March the seventh, that man will at least get the flu tomorrow. We have to get Van Horn now. Tonight.”
The realization of it dawned on her. The news article Conlin showed her flashed before her mind’s eye. One-hundred million dead worldwide. And it starts here. But why? She said the next part out loud. “What if these men were made sick on purpose?”
“That’s what Andersen was afraid of,” Conlin walked in a circle.
The next part she kept inside. What if they’re being used to keep an illness growing, one that gains strength with the next host? She shook her head to clear it. That was impossible. These were doctors. Men who swore to heal people, not harm them.
“Right now we have to figure out how we’re going to get into that building,” she tried to focus on Conlin. “How fast can you run?” He eyed her shoes.
She rose and walked over to the pile of old boots that smelled of leather oil. When she lifted one from the pile, its mate came with it, tied together by the laces.
“What are you doing?”
“I can’t run in these boots. But I can’t fit into any of these, either. Help me dig. Look for a smaller size.”
They pulled the pile of boots apart for a few more minutes when Conlin said, “How ‘bout these? Guess the feathers weren’t enough. Someone was an artist.” He handed them to her.
They were black combat boots, which was odd since most of the men wore brown boots. These boots had a few tufts of white feathers glued on the laces, but Conlin was right. Apparently that wasn’t enough to call the man who wore these a coward so someone had painted daisies on the toes and heels. The size was smaller and would have to do. She sat on the ground like a kid, grateful that she wore trousers, and began to untie the laces. Inside were initials in scrawling blue ink.
H.V.S.
Henry Van Sickle.
“Mr. Conlin,” the old rage began to bubble up like lava, “we’d better inventory our assets. I have five bullets. How many do you have?”
Oh those boots, girl they were the coolest
“There won’t be one eye that doesn’t catch us.”
Lovely phrasing.