The downtown area was spread out below him like a relief map, and it seemed totally deserted. The town clock, which had chimed off the hours of his imprisonment here, had not tolled since nine this morning, when the little tune that preceded the striking had sounded draggy and weird, like a tune played underwater by a drowned music box. There had been a fire at what looked like a roadside café or maybe a general store just outside of town. It had burned merry hell all this afternoon, black smoke etched against the blue sky, but no fire engines had come to put it out. If the building hadn't been set in the middle of an asphalt parking lot, Stu supposed that half the town might have gone up. Tonight the ruins were still smoldering in spite of an afternoon spat of rain.
Stu supposed that Elder's final orders were to kill him - why not? He would only be one more corpse, and he knew their little secret. They had been unable to find a cure or to discover how his bodily makeup varied from all those who had succumbed. The thought that there would be precious few left he could tell their secret to had probably never even entered their computations. He was a loose thread held hostage by a bunch of tight ass**les.
Stu was sure that a hero in a television program or a novel could have thought of a way to escape, hell, even some people in real life, but he wasn't one of them. In the end he had decided with a certain panicky resignation that the only thing to do would be to wait for Elder and just try to be ready.
Elder was the clearest sign that this installation had been breached by what the help sometimes called "Blue" and sometimes the "superflu." The nurses called him Dr. Elder, but he was no doctor. He was in his mid-fifties, hard-eyed and humorless. None of the doctors before Elder had felt a need to hold a gun on him. Elder scared Stu because there would be no reasoning or pleading with such a man. Elder was waiting for orders. When they came, he would carry them out. He was a spear-carrier, the army version of a Mafia button-man, and it would never occur to him to question his orders in the light of ongoing events.
Three years ago Stu had gotten a book called Watership Down to send to a nephew of his in Waco. He had gotten out a box to put the book in, and then, because he hated to wrap presents even more than he hated to read, he had thumbed to the first page, thinking he would scan a little of it to see what it was about. He read that first page, then the second... and then he was enthralled. He had stayed up all night, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and plowing steadily along, the way a man does when he's not much used to reading just for the pleasure of it. The thing turned out to be about rabbits, for Christ's sake. The stupidest, most cowardly animals of God's earth... except the guy who wrote that book made them seem different. You really cared about them. It was a pretty damn good story, and Stu, who read at a snail's pace, finished it two days later.
The thing he remembered most from that book was a phrase: "going tharn," or just "tharn." He understood it at once, because he had seen plenty of tharn animals, and run down a few on the highway. An animal which had gone tharn would crouch in the middle of the road, its ears flattened, watching as a car rushed toward it, unable to move from the certain oncoming death. A deer could be driven tharn simply by shining a flashlight in its eyes. Loud music would do it to a raccoon, and constant tapping on its cage would do it to a parrot.
Elder made Stu feel like that. He would look into Elder's flat blue eyes and feel all the will drain out of him. Elder probably wouldn't even need the pistol to dispose of him. Elder probably had had courses in karate, savate, and general dirty tricks. What could he possibly do against a man like that? Just thinking about Elder made his will to even try to want to drain away. Tharn. It was a good word for a bad state of mind.
The red light went on over the door at just past 10 P.M., and Stu felt light perspiration break on his arms and face. It was this way every time the red light went on, because one of these times Elder would be alone. He would be alone because he wouldn't want witnesses. There would be a furnace somewhere to cremate plague victims. Elder would bundle him into it. Snip. No more loose ends.
Elder stepped through the door. Alone.
Stu was sitting on his hospital bed, one hand resting on the back of his chair. At the sight of Elder he felt the familiar sickening drop in his belly. He felt the familiar urge to spill out a flood of loose, pleading words, in spite of his knowledge that such pleas would avail him nothing. There was no mercy in the face behind the white-suit's transparent visor.
Now everything seemed very clear to him, very colorful, very slow. He could almost hear his eyes rolling in their bed of lubrication as he followed Elder's progress into the room. He was a big man, stocky, and his white-suit was stretched too tight over him. The hole at the end of the pistol he held looked tunnel-size.
"How are you feeling?" Elder asked, and even through the tinny speaker Stu could hear the nasal quality of Elder's voice. Elder was sick.
"Just the same," Stu said, surprised at the evenness of his voice. "Say, when do I get out of here?"
"Very soon now," Elder said. He was pointing the gun in Stu's general direction, not precisely at him, but not precisely away, either. He uttered a muffled sneeze. "You don't talk much, do you?"
Stu shrugged.
"I like that in a man," Elder said. "Your big talkers, they're your whimperers and whiners and belly-achers. I just got the word on you about twenty minutes ago, Mr. Redman. They're not such hot orders, but I think you'll do okay."
"What orders?"