He switched out the light and stood there in the semi-darkness, wondering what to do next. Get dressed and get out of here, he decided. That first of all.
He crept back into the bedroom, but stepped on a loose floorboard, and the woman awoke with a start, sat up, and stared at him, an expression not unlike that on the face in the mirror’s on her own features.
“Who—who are you?” she asked timidly, a bit fearfully.
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “Who are you?”
Her mouth was open, and she shook her head slowly from side to side. “I don’t know,” she said wonderingly. “I can’t remember.”
The sound gonged at her from beyond her subconscious, beating in, like a lot of little hammers. It seemed to be demanding entrance. She struggled against it, but it kept on, insistent, and slowly turned from a series of poundings into an insistent ringing.
Dr. Sandra O’Connell awoke. Like a contortionist, she was twisted and bent in the chair, and she’d obviously slept hard for quite some time. Her right arm and upper calf were both asleep, and she could hardly move them. She tried shifting, and pain shot through her.
Cursing, using sheer willpower, she managed to get both feet on the floor and somehow grab the ringing telephone, bringing the receiver to her.
“Hello?” she answered groggily, still half asleep. There was no reply, and it took a few seconds before she realized she had the thing upside down. Turning it right, eyes still only half-open, brain only partially there, she tried again.
“Dr. O’Connell,” she mumbled.
“Sandy? This is Mark.” It was the voice of Dr. Spiegelman. “Better wake up in a hurry. Another town’s been hit.”
This brought her mentally awake immediately, although the rest of her body didn’t seem to want to cooperate.
“What? So soon? Where?”
“Little town on the Eastern Shore, not seventy miles from here,” he told her. “We’re getting a team up from here and Dietrick now. Want to come along?”
Her mind raced. “Give me a moment,” she pleaded. “My god! How are you getting there?”
“Choppers. One’s here now. Two more due any minute. Get yourself together, grab your kit, and get up to the roof. I’ll bring you some coffee in the helicopter.”
“I’ll be right there,” she said, wondering if she could really do it.
She managed to get up, almost falling on the tingling leg, but worked it out as best she could. The wall clock in the outer office said 9:10; the light coming in from the windows said it was in the morning.
Four hours, she thought, resigned. At least I got four hours’ worth of sleep.
Four out of forty.
It would have to do.
She knew she looked a mess, but whatever repairs could be made in the helicopter would be all that would be done. She got her purse, reached inside for some keys, and unlocked the right double drawer of her desk, removing a doctor’s bag. Her smaller purse fitted into it on clips, and she hoisted the whole thing and put the strap over her shoulder.
She was almost to the hall before she realized that she was going barefoot. With the carelessness of someone in a hurry she knocked over a couple of things getting back, unlocking, getting in, getting the shoes, and leaving again. She put them on while waiting for the elevator, which seemed to take forever to come.
Speigelman was waiting for her on the roof, along with a number of technicians, lab men, and some other department heads. A “hit” this close to home was irresistible to them.
She had little time to get any details before the second helicopter swung into view and came over the roof, blowing dirt, dust, hair and everything else around it as it settled gently onto the large painted cross.
They lost no time in piling in; it was a large craft, but it already carried a number of people from Dietrick and a lot of technical gear. She scrunched into a hard seat next to her fellow NDCC doctor and had barely fastened the seat belt when they were off.
It was tremendously noisy, and she strained to be heard over the whomp! whomp! whomp! of the over-head rotors and the whine of the twin jets to either side.
“What have we got?” she screamed at Spiegelman.
He shook his head. “McKay, little town on the Chesapeake Bay in Talbot County. Just about everybody seems to have woke up this morning with total amnesia.”
She frowned. “How big’s the town?” she yelled.
“Twenty-three hundred,” he told her. “Pretty much like the others. First reports said it wasn’t a hundred percent, either, as usual. Bet we find out most of the exceptions weren’t in town during some period about three days ago.”
“You think it’s the same thing, then?”
He nodded. “Remember our talk last night? A catalyst that struck a particular and very limited part of the brain, creating an odd sort of stroke. You know most total amnesia victims have some kind of clotting cutting them off.”
She nodded. It wasn’t her specialty, and she had been more administrator than doctor anyway these past few years, but she’d heard of rare cases. It made sense. It matched with the others.
Which meant it didn’t match at all.
The agent, whatever it was, was pretty consistent, though. She wouldn’t take Spiegelman up on his bet. But what sort of agent could appear in such widely separated communities, rear its ugly head for only a brief period, then vanish without a trace?
Suburban Washington vanished quickly beneath them, replaced by the sandy soil and dense forests of southern Maryland, a place curiously little changed from its earliest beginnings, geographically or culturally.
As she checked herself out in a mirror and tried to become as presentable as possible they crossed the ancient Patuxent River and the fossil-strewn cliffs of Calvert with its incongruous nuclear reactors and LNG docks stuck somehow in the middle of wilderness, and out over the broad, blue bay.
Within twenty minutes they were angling for a landing. The town was a pretty one, almost a picture-book type. The families here were old and deep-rooted, mostly involved in the shellfish trade as their ancestors had been for centuries; the town was neat, almost manicured, with a strong eighteenth century look to it.
But now there were helicopters landing, and swarms of vehicles on the ground, while Maryland State Police on land and sea blocked access to the curious.
They touched down with a slight jar, then quickly unloaded personnel and gear.
“Joe Bede got here ahead of everybody and he’s coordinating,” Mark Spiegelman told her, their ears just starting to readjust to the lack of steady noise.
Sandra nodded approval. “Joe’s a good man. But how did he get here ahead of us?”
Spiegelman chuckled. “He was on vacation, on that boat of his, just up at St. Michaels The call came over for any and all doctors, he smelled what it was, and got somebody to drive him down. I’d say he was here inside of thirty minutes from the first reports.”
That was good, she thought. A trained NDCC doctor on the scene almost from the start. In a way she almost pitied poor Joe; he was not only going to lose the rest of his vacation, but stood the awful chance of being debriefed almost to death in the next few days.
They had the people out in the town square; somebody had set up folding chairs procured from various restaurants, the church basement, and who knew where else? It was a shock to see them; they just sort of sat there, seemingly at a loss to do or say anything. But their expressions weren’t blank; there was tremendous fear and tension there, so thick you could smell it.
Several men and women had set up tables and were interviewing the townspeople one by one. After the interviews, they were taken gently off by troopers to waiting busses. A few would be flown out to Bethesda and Walter Reed; the rest would be placed temporarily in every local hospital from Norfolk to Wilmington, and probably a lot more, too.