Adelaide picked.
Dr. Petrie held out the last straw to Esmeralda. She didn't look at him — simply took it, and held it up.
Esmeralda's straw was fractionally longer than Adelaide's.
'There you go, then,' said Kenneth Garunisch loudly. 'That settles that!'
Esmeralda stood up. She kept her eyes downcast, and she said simply, 'I'll get my things together.'
Adelaide shrieked out, 'You won't!'
Dr. Petrie held Adelaide's shoulder. 'Darling, it was a fair draw. I can't do anything about it. We had to decide somehow.'
'I'm left behind while you're going,' said Adelaide. There were angry tears running down her cheeks. 'You didn't have to pick a stupid straw!'
'Come on, now,' put in Kenneth Garunisch, 'I thought we'd decided all that!'
'Well, decide again,' snapped Adelaide, the tension of all she had been through giving her a note of desperation. 'Leonard is my fiancé and that's all there is to it. Would you go without your wife?'
'Adelaide, you'll be safer here.'
'I don't care! I want to go with you!' she shrieked.
Dr. Petrie turned around angrily, and was about to rebuke her, but he checked his tongue.
Esmeralda said, in a quiet voice, 'It's all right. Let her go. I'd rather stay here anyway.'
Dr. Petrie said, 'Esmeralda — ' But she shook her head and wouldn't look at him.
'Take her,' she said. 'Go on.'
Adelaide was mopping her eyes with a handkerchief. Dr. Petrie felt irritated at her outburst, but at the same time he was almost relieved. Leaving Adelaide behind would have given him the familiar tangles of guilt that he had felt about Margaret.
The trouble with being a doctor, he thought, is that even your lovers become your patients. How can I cause Adelaide the same kind of anguish for which other women come to me to be treated? I'm supposed to cure diseases, not spread them.
Dr. Petrie sighed. 'All right, then,' he said, almost inaudibly. 'If that's what you want.'
It took them almost two hours to get themselves ready, and by the time they'd finished, they looked like fat and scruffy astronauts, all wrapped up in quilts and blankets, and tied up with strings and cords.
Dr. Petrie had bagged Prickles up completely in a duvet, and he was going to carry her on his back. He and Adelaide were both padded all over, with their thick blanket leggings tucked into three pairs of Ivor Glantz's walking socks, and their hands wrapped in gloves and bandages. They had made themselves hoods out of their quilts, covering their faces up completely except for their eyes, which were protected with pieces of nylon mesh cut from a vegetable strainer and safety-pinned into place.
Dr. Petrie had Kenneth Garunisch's automatic pistol tucked into his belt in case of emergencies, and he carried the precious car keys inside his glove.
'I'm going to lose pounds,' he said, in a muffled voice. 'It's like a goddamned Turkish bath in this outfit.'
Kenneth Garunisch handed him the Glantz statistics, securely buckled up in a canvas map case, and shook him by the hand.
'Don't forget to send back the choppers,' he said with a grin. 'I wouldn't like to think I was going to spend the rest of my life in this dump.'
Dr. Petrie nodded his quilted head. He was already sweating like a mule inside the blankets, and he wanted to get their escape over as quickly as possible.
He said goodbye to Nicholas, and to Mrs. Garunisch, and then he padded over to Esmeralda's room.
She was sitting by the window, looking out over the gray light of later afternoon. Through his mesh facemask, she took on a new softness, and he hardly knew what to say to her.
She turned, and gave a small smile. 'You look as if you're off to the North Pole,' she said. She came over and took his hand.
'As soon as I get to someplace safe, I'll have a helicopter back here straight away,' he said.
Esmeralda put her hands to her face and looked at him gently.
'Don't worry about me,' she said. 'You have other things to think about. You know, I believe you could do something really great, Leonard, if you ever gave yourself half a chance.'
He nodded. 'That's what Margaret used to say.'
'Margaret?'
'My ex-wife. She's dead now. She died in the plague.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Well — I think the only reason she wanted me to realize my potential was so that she could bask in reflected glory.'
Esmeralda smiled. He couldn't be sure, because his vision was so blurred, but she might have been crying.
'There's only one sort of glory that counts, Leonard,' she said. 'And that's the glory of survival. You'd better go now. They're waiting for you.'
He held out his huge swaddled arms, and held her close, then he turned around and padded back into the sitting-room. Adelaide was waiting for him, all wrapped up, and Prickles was nothing more than a big blue bundle on the settee.
'All right, everybody,' said Dr. Petrie. 'This is it!'
Kenneth Garunisch and Nicholas helped him to get Prickles on his back. She clung around his shoulders, and they tied her firmly in position with a long leather belt from an old suitcase.
Nicholas prepared to open the door to let them out. Garunisch and his wife held broom-handles in case the rats rushed in.
'Are you ready?' said Nicholas. Dr. Petrie nodded.
'Okay then — now!'
The front door was flung open. The rats scrambled at them like a tide of filthy water, squealing with ravenous hunger. As Dr. Petrie stumbled forward with Prickles on his back, urgently pushing Adelaide in front of him, he could see nothing through his facemask but a torrential swarm of furry bodies, filling the hallway and writhing on the stairs.
They made the first flight down to the fifteenth floor with rats suspended from their quilted shins and hanging from their shoulders. Dr. Petrie kicked the rats around his legs with every other step, and tried to smash them against the walls, but even when they were dead they clung on, until their bodies were pulled away and devoured by more clamoring rats.
Adelaide, her arms heavy with the rodents, tripped and fell against the stairs. Dr. Petrie, with Prickles on his back, could do nothing more than nudge her. She managed to struggle up to her feet again, turning and twisting herself to try and shake some of the rats off, but all they did was sway on her arms like over-heavy tassels from a curtain.
They made it down to the twelfth floor with rats all over them, gnawing and tearing at their quilts and blankets, and turning them into shambling man-sized beasts of wriggling brown fur. Adelaide fell again, and Dr. Petrie had to tear rats away from her back to try and reduce their disgusting weight. He was now so overwhelmed by the creatures that he was literally tearing them in half to pull them off.
It took them a further ten minutes to reach the ninth floor. Dr. Petrie was smothered in sweat, and panting for breath in the foul air. The building's air-conditioning had stopped with the power failure, and the corridors were so soaked in the acrid urine of rats that his eyes smarted and he could hardly make his lungs work. Prickles, clinging to his back, was a muscle-tearing load that he could barely even think about.
He waded knee-deep through squirming rats towards the fire door to the next flight of stairs. The door was locked — and jammed. Beating rats away from his quilted hood, he forced his way over to Adelaide and shouted, 'It's stuck! I can't get it open!'
Adelaide stumbled against him. 'You have to!' she screamed. 'I can't take any more! You have to!'
Dr. Petrie peered around the hallway through his face-mask. The gilt settee was still wedged in the open elevator doors, and he grabbed Adelaide's shoulder and pointed towards the shaft.
'Can you climb?' he yelled. 'Can you slide down the wires?'
She shook her rat-decorated head, making their tails swing. 'Leonard — it's nine storeys! I can't!'