There was an echoing silence. Shark beckoned Edgar to shift himself across the front seat, and pulled him out through the passenger door. Then he gripped the back of Edgar's shirt-collar with one hand, and pressed the.38 against his skull with the other.
'Don't anyone move!' he yelled. 'One move and this 'guy gets it!'
Then he snapped at Tammy, 'Come on, ma'am. Get your butt out of that car and stand here.'
Tammy opened her door. It was never recorded what the New York police thought she was going to do, or whether they had any reason to believe she might be armed. But there was a sudden echoing crackle of shots, and the rear windows of the Mercury were smashed into milk and blood. Edgar yelped, and tried to reach the car, but McManus fiercely tugged him away, and kept the gun pressed to his head.
'Don't shoot!' screamed McManus. 'One more shot and I kill him!'
The police held their fire. Awkward, crab-like, holding Edgar tight against him, Shark McManus shuffled towards them. One of the cops raised his gun, but the lieutenant in charge waved him back.
There was silence as Shark McManus and Edgar Paston made their way slowly up the Lincoln Tunnel towards daylight. They were covered every foot of the way, but the police had not yet been given instructions to fire on potential plague carriers, and they let them pass.
'Have them followed,' said the lieutenant impatiently. 'They can't walk around like Siamese twins for the rest of their lives. The minute that kid drops his guard, I want him hit.'
He turned back to the Mercury wagon. A young paramedic was opening the doors, and easing Tammy and the children out. There was blood everywhere. Tammy had been hit in the left breast and left shoulder. Chrissie had been hit in the ear, and Marvin had been hit twice in the chest. They were all still alive, but the doctor was shaking his head and looking pessimistic.
'Do I have to take them back to Jersey?' he asked the lieutenant. 'Those few extra minutes are going to make all the difference.'
The lieutenant shrugged. 'It's the rules, Jack. Nobody gets into Manhattan, alive or dead. I'm sorry.'
'Christ,' said the doctor. 'You shot 'em.'
The lieutenant grunted. 'Sure. But I didn't infect 'em.'
The doctor nodded towards the slowly-disappearing figures of Shark McManus and Edgar. 'What about those two?'
'We'll get 'em. Just stick to what you're good at. Band-Aids and lint.'
Long after Shark McManus and his hostage had disappeared from sight, the police could hear Edgar weeping, his sobs echoing and distorted down the empty tunnel, like the cries of a lonesome seal.
One of the four people who had died of plague on the main street of Elizabeth, New Jersey, on Friday night, was a 52-year-old insurance salesman from Hoboken named Henry Casarotto. The pain of his dying had been so intense that he had bitten his own left hand, and his infected sputum had dribbled on to his fingers and his red signet ring. His signet ring, New Jersey police discovered, had been removed by a looter sometime after his death.
They had no way of knowing that it was now on the right hand of Shark McManus, and so they had no way of warning the detectives and patrolmen who followed McManus along West 39th Street on Saturday morning that their only possible hope of survival was to shoot first, and worry about police procedure later.
It was six minutes after six o'clock, and the plague had arrived in Manhattan.
Three
On Sunday afternoon, it began to rain. The temperature dropped six or seven degrees, and there was a heavy, cloudy wind from the sea. Dr. Petrie drove northwards up the Atlantic Coast of New Jersey with Adelaide fast asleep beside him, and Prickles singing softly to herself in the back.
The plague had stricken New Jersey swiftly and relentlessly, as if the living breath had been stolen from the whole seven thousand square miles of it in one night. Bodies lay prone on the rain-slicked roads, just where they had fallen. Cars and trucks were abandoned in the middle of the highway, with their drivers sitting like pallid waxworks behind the wheel. They passed a few other cars, driving aimlessly through the wet afternoon, but almost every town they came to was deserted, silent and strewn with bodies.
Leonard Petrie drove through Perth Amboy at five-forty-five, and calculated on reaching Manhattan before it grew too dark. The rain lashed against the windshield, and the tires made a sizzling noise on the concrete highway. He sucked peppermint, and watched the wipers flopping backwards and forwards — trying to think of diseases and diagnoses he should have remembered from medical school, just to keep himself from closing his eyes and dropping off to sleep. Prickles sang, 'There was an old woman tossed up in a blanket… Seventeen times as high as the moon… '
The radio, strangely, was silent — except for whoops and squeaks and whistles and the occasional burst of Morse. He had picked up regular broadcasts from New York stations until about lunchtime, when they had suddenly faded. He had had no news of the plague now for almost six hours, and no idea if Manhattan Island had been sealed off, or if it was still possible for refugees to cross the Hudson and seek-sanctuary.
He felt as if the whole world had died around them — as if they were consigned to drive for the rest of their lives down dull, rainy streets of empty cities, searching for an America that had gone forever, and could never be found again.
Every now and then, he saw helicopters beating across the windy sky, and he tried flashing his headlights at them. One of them had seen him, and had circled noisily overhead for a few minutes, but then it had heeled away and headed westwards like all of the others. The plague had made people even more suspicious and violent and remote than ever before.
Whenever he had visited New York before, Dr. Petrie had always flown into La Guardia. He remembered the glittering spires of the Empire State and the Chrysler Building, and the sparkle of traffic along Roosevelt Drive and the Triboro Bridge approaches. But now, as the World Trade Towers loomed out of the murky dusk, and the skyline of Wall Street and downtown Manhattan emerged from the rain behind them, he realized with a sensation of eerie apprehension that the city was in darkness. As far as he could see across the choppy black waters of the Hudson, Manhattan Island was a sinister castle in the sea, with buildings that stood like pale and ancient ramparts, gleaming dimly through the low clouds and the teeming rain. Not a light winked anywhere.
He pulled the car to the side of the street and switched off the engine. The sound of rain pattering on the vinyl roof was the only sound there was in the whole world. Dr. Petrie rubbed grit from his eyes and leaned his head forward in exhausted resignation. For the first time in days, he didn't know what to do, or which way to turn. Adelaide stirred, and opened her eyes. 'Leonard?' she said. 'What is it? Why have you stopped?'
Dr. Petrie looked up. Then he nodded towards the distant skyline. Adelaide blinked her eyes and peered into the gloom.
'Leonard… ' she said. 'That's New York! Leonard, we've made it!'
She reached over happily and kissed him. But he gently pushed her away, and pointed out into the dusk.
'Look again.'
She frowned. 'What's happened?' she said. 'Where are the lights?'
He shook his head. 'They could have had a power failure. It's happened before.'
Adelaide stared at him. There was an uncomfortable silence between them that was prolonged by their mutual refusal to acknowledge what had happened. Finally Adelaide said, 'It's the plague, isn't it? They've caught it here.'
Dr. Petrie nodded. 'Yes,' he said huskily. 'I expect they have.'
'What are we going to do?' she asked. 'Oh God, Leonard, we can't go on running away forever. The plague seems to spread faster than we can move.'