“How long since this started?” Mildred asked, moving to check some of the patients. There were sixteen in the shack, and two of them were victims of fights from which they’d come off worse, nursing broken bones and lacerations. But the other fourteen…
“Only a couple of weeks since the first signs.” Hector sighed, joining Mildred at the bedside of a young girl. “She was the first, and she looks to be the most advanced. It follows a pattern that you’d expect.”
“Which is?” Krysty questioned from the far side of the building, where she had been casting an eye over some of the other victims of the disease.
Hector looked across to her. “Starts like they’ve got some kind of cough, so you give them the usual. But it doesn’t clear up. Then they have a day or so of shitting, and that goes. Eyes run. For the first couple of days that’s all. Then they get the spots—kinda like when you see that old chickenpox. Don’t get that often, but it’s kinda like that. They get the fever, too.”
“But the spots don’t clear, obviously,” Doc murmured, examining a sleeping man who was covered in the small blisters, red at the puckered edges of the liquid filled sacs. The old man was a doctor of philosophy rather than medicine, but he was a man from another age, and he had a creeping feeling that he knew what was happening. He wondered if Mildred had reached a similar conclusion.
Unaware of this train of thought, Hector continued.
“No, they don’t. They start to open and weep, then form a crust around the edge. I try to keep them clean within reason, but I can’t risk infecting the already open—”
“You’re doing right to leave them,” Mildred interrupted. “There’s not much you can do about them once they start. Tell me, have you lost any yet?”
There was silence. Mildred looked round questioningly, and her eyes met Hector’s.
“You mean I’m going to?” he asked, but with a suggestion that he already knew the answer.
Mildred paused before answering. She couldn’t be sure, and didn’t want to commit herself before she’d had a chance to… To what? What else could she do here but observe?
“Guess that answers my question,” Hector said softly. “You know what this is, then?”
“Not exactly,” Mildred answered.
“Then I wish you’d share some ideas,” Krysty interjected, joining Mildred, “because I’ve never seen anything quite like this before.”
“I think I may have,” Doc said quietly. “I think we should talk outside.”
Hector agreed, and led them to his living quarters. It was a single-room shack, untidy and speaking of someone who spent little time there other than to sleep. He offered them seating, and all sat except Doc, who stayed upright—almost, it seemed, as an expression of his agitation.
“Ideas, Doc,” Mildred said simply.
“I cannot be sure,” the old man began, pausing before continuing. “I saw something like it once, but I was given to understand that it had been eradicated by the whitecoats before the nukecaust.”
“You’re thinking on similar lines, then,” Mildred confirmed.
Doc raised an astonished eyebrow. “It was during my youth that it was finally killed off around the world. Trouble is, they kept some strains to experiment on—”
“Typical whitecoat arrogance,” Doc thundered.
“I’ll agree with that,” Mildred muttered. “Problem is, it looks like a variant strain. And we don’t have a vaccine, or the time and facilities to search for one.”
“Then we have no paddle, and are against the fecal tide, as it were,” Tanner said.
” ‘Scuse me,” Hector interrupted, “but you people should remember that I don’t have the faintest idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Me, neither,” Krysty added sardonically.
For a moment, Mildred and Doc just stared at them, then Mildred said, “Of course, you’d have no idea. It was way before your time.”
“What do you mean?” Hector was now beginning to get agitated by what seemed to be nothing more than riddles.
“No time to explain,” Mildred said simply. “You’ll just have to believe us.”
Hector shrugged. “I’ve little choice, have I? I’ve got no idea what that is—” he gestured to the med building “—and you have.”