Adelaide said nothing. Dr. Petrie swore as the car behind them, a big bronze Mercury, nudged their Delta 88 in the rear bumper for the twentieth time.
Prickles, who had been dozing on the back seat, opened her eyes sleepily and said, 'Is it time for Batman?'
Dr. Petrie shook his head. 'No Batman tonight, honey. We're still stuck in all these cars.'
Prickles stared out of the window, disappointed. 'Can't we go home now?' she asked him.
Dr. Petrie reached over and took her hand. 'We can't go home for a long time, darling. But what we're going to do is find ourselves a new home. You and me and Adelaide. Isn't that right, Adelaide?'
Adelaide turned and looked at him listlessly. 'Whatever you say, Leonard.'
Prickles was satisfied by that answer, but Dr. Petrie wasn't. As Adelaide turned away again, he said, 'Adelaide, love, that's not like you. Not like you at all.'
She kept her face away. Outside, the afternoon shadows were beginning to lengthen.
'What's not like me?' she said, as if her mind were on something else altogether.
'Agreeing with me, just like that. You normally refuse to do what I want, on principle.'
She stared at the floor of the car. 'Well,' she whispered. 'Things change, don't they?'
'Like what?'
'Sometimes you find that refusing doesn't make any real difference.'
He didn't try to touch her. That would come later. Right now, he was intent on getting her to say what had happened. Just explaining it would start the long painful process of exorcism.
'How did it happen?' he asked her, so softly that his words were scarcely louder than breathing.
She raised her head.
'Was it back at the restaurant? At MacDonald's?'
Slowly, she turned to stare at him. Here eyes were glistening with tears.
'You know,' she said, shaking her head. 'How did you know?'
'I am a doctor, Adelaide; and more important I'm a man who loves you, and knows you well.'
The tears rolled freely down her cheeks now. She couldn't say any more, and right now she didn't need to. She leaned her head forward and rested it against Dr. Petrie's shoulder, and cried.
Prickles looked at her with some interest, and said, 'Why is Adelaide crying, Daddy? Does she feel sick?'
Dr. Petrie smiled. 'No, darling, she doesn't. She doesn't feel sick. I hope she's feeling better.'
They saw the huge smudge of black smoke hanging over Atlanta before they saw the city itself. The evening was warm and still, and the smoke was suspended above in spectral stillness. Eventually, as the painful traffic jam edged nearer, they could make out the sparkle of fires in the city's downtown buildings, and they knew that Atlanta was destroyed.
Dr. Petrie turned the radio dial to see if he could pick up any stray news bulletins, but all he could get was howling and static.
'Maybe we could get off the main highway here and try the back roads,' suggested Adelaide. 'This is getting insane.'
Dr. Petrie said, 'I'll try. It looks like there's a turnoff just up there on the left.'
Forcing their way across two solid lanes of blocked-solid traffic was the worst part. It meant holding up other cars, and after a day of inching forward in heat and fumes and sickness, there weren't many drivers who had the patience or the inclination to let them past. Dr. Petrie rolled down his window and made a hand signal, and then just turned the wheel left and crunched into the car beside his.
The driver, a fat redneck with a fat family to match, mouthed obscenities at him. The man didn't open his window, though. He was too frightened of catching the plague.
The redneck gunned his engine and tried to force Dr. Petrie back into his own lane. There was a grinding of wheel-hubs and fenders.
'Let us through!' screamed Adelaide. 'We only want to get through!'
The man wouldn't budge. He sat stolidly in the driving seat, refusing to look in their direction. For five minutes, the two cars crawled along side by side, their fenders scraping and screeching.
After a while, Dr. Petrie sighed impatiently and reached over for his automatic weapon. He lifted it up, and took a bead through his open window at the redneck's head. Then he waited. The man, who was making a point of ignoring him, didn't see what was happening at first. Then his podgy wife nudged him, and he turned and saw the rifle's muzzle fixed on his cranium. He jammed on his brakes so quickly that the car behind shunted into the back of him.
Dr. Petrie, steering-wheel in one hand and rifle in the other, crossed the two lanes of traffic in a couple of minutes. Then he sped the Delta 88 up alongside the main highway in a cloud of white dust, and took the small rutted turnoff to the left. The car bounced and banged on its suspension, but soon they were clear of the traffic jam and driving up the side of a gradual incline, into trees and scattered housing plots and fields.
Below them, they now saw in the reddish light of the seven o'clock sun, clouded in fumes and smoke, the endless glittering chain of the congested highway, and in the distance, five or six miles to the north-west, the immense shadow that drifted over Atlanta. They opened the car windows, and there was a rubbery smell of burning mingled with the fresher smell of the evening woods.
Dr. Petrie didn't know if the dirt-track they were following led anywhere, but he was prepared to drive across fields and streams if he had to. The most urgent need was to head west, and outstrip the plague. As far as he could make out, they were still well inside the infected area, and until they escaped it, they were still at high risk from National Guardsmen, looters, panicking drivers, and the bacillus itself.
It wasn't long before he had to switch on the car's headlights. The sky was darkening into rich blue through the treetops, and moths were tapping softly against the car's windshield. Prickles wag fast asleep in the back, covered with a plaid blanket, and Adelaide was beginning to settle down to doze.
'Leonard,' she said. 'I was just wondering.'
'Hmm?'
'It's about the plague. I was just wondering why you didn't catch it yourself.'
He shook his head. 'I've been wondering that myself. I was exposed to so many plague patients down at the hospital, and I've been tired and vulnerable, too. But I still haven't caught it. And neither have you.'
'Oh, with me, I think it's just luck,' said Adelaide. 'But you, I don't understand. Dr. Selmer didn't catch it either, did he? Least, not as far as we know. I mean, you both touched that boy who had it, didn't you? That boy you treated on Monday morning? Surely you would have caught it from him.'
Dr. Petrie shifted in his seat. The track was getting narrower now, and he was beginning to suspect it would turn out to be a dead end. Tree branches were scraping and flickering against the sides of the car, and he was having trouble making out which was track and which wasn't.
'I've thought about it over and over.' he said. 'First of all, I wondered if the boy had a mild strain of plague that acted as an antidote to the main strain. But then why did he die? And why did his parents die? And what about all the other people that Anton and I were looking after? Why didn't we pick up plague from them? The only possibility that seems to make any sense is that Anton and I both did something that immunized us. Some part of our work, something to do with hospital or medical treatment, made us safe. But don't ask me what it was, because I couldn't guess.'
Adelaide said, 'I couldn't guess, either. But whatever it was, or is, thank God for it.'
She reached over and touched his thigh. 'Leonard.' she said. 'I do love you, you know.' He didn't answer. 'I know it doesn't seem like it sometimes, but I do.'
He turned briefly and smiled at her. 'It does seem like it, always. Now why don't you get yourself some rest?' She kissed his cheek, and then released the switch on her reclining seat and lay back to sleep. Dr. Petrie decided to drive on as far as he reasonably could, and then snatch a couple of hours himself. The track was still just about visible, and he wanted to put as many miles between the plague and them as possible.