Alas, Babylon

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 in 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 both 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 Levi’s, 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 bad man 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.”