“Count your blessings. Did you hear Eichorn’s dead?”
“No. How?”
“Burned to death in his house in Houston. Nobody used the story, but his daughter was a brain-eater victim. Went crazy and attacked the family with a hatchet. Then she set fire to the place. They think Eichorn was dead before the flames got to him.”
“Jesus,” Corey swore softly.
“Porter Uhlander, now, he’s gone fishing.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. He loaded his gear along with a case of Tums and a lifetime supply of Valium into his camper and took off for that cabin he kept up on Pelican Lake. He plans to ride out the emergency right there.”
“That’s the silliest thing I ever heard.”
“I don’t know. It makes as much sense as what a lot of other people are doing.”
“Are you going into the pool headquarters?” Corey asked. “I’d like to see the operation.”
“Nah, they don’t need me there.”
“Then what do you say we find a bottle somewhere and get drunk? I’m locked up with a bunch of white-wine drinkers at Biotron.”
“I’m going to pass, Corey. I just don’t feel like doing a damn thing. You go on down to the pool. You might find some laughs.”
Corey looked at the older reporter curiously but said nothing. He got up and started for the door. “I’ll give you a call before I leave town.”
“Sure. You do that.” Doc Ingersoll made no move to get off the bed.
Corey left the apartment and closed the door softly behind him. He walked down the steps feeling depressed. Behind one of the doors on the first floor a woman sobbed.
The headquarters of the media pool had been set up in the Civic Auditorium. As he drove carefully across town, Corey wondered about Doc’s deteriorating state of mind. It was especially unlike him to turn down a drink. Corey resolved to call him again before leaving town, but now he needed his full attention on his driving.
Desks and portable partitions had turned the auditorium into a haphazard maze. There was much activity, with people rushing back and forth, but Corey got the impression that little was being accomplished. He searched out newspaper people he knew and from them got a little clearer picture of the national situation.
Cures were the current rage. Quacks of all kinds were trumpeting that they had discovered the one and only cure for the brain eaters. The cures ranged from simple electric shock and exotic herbs to various mystical foolery. Although they were not even reported by the pool, these self-proclaimed healers were doing a booming business on word-of-mouth. The Food and Drug Administration had too many other problems to worry about shutting them down.
There was a one-paragraph story on the UPI wire about a delegation of Russian agricultural experts who had changed their plans to fly home from San Francisco and were delaying their departure for unstated reasons. The item caught Corey’s eye only because of Kitzmiller’s charge that these same Russians were somehow to blame for loosing the brain eaters. He tucked it away for future consideration.
Corey soon tired of the pointless bustle at the pool headquarters. He understood now Doc Ingersoll’s reluctance to come down. On his way out he got on a telephone and dialed Doc’s number.
He heard the burr of the phone ringing on the other end, but there was no answer. After ten rings Corey hung up and left the building feeling vaguely uneasy. Maybe the phone wasn’t working properly. He decided to drive over and see if he could change Doc’s mind about tying one on.
The ringing of the telephone was like a red-hot knife blade stabbing through Doc’s head. He clapped both hands over his ears and stood hunched over the bathroom sink, whimpering until the ringing finally stopped. The pain continued. He looked up at his reflection in the streaked mirror.
Corey had been right. He didn’t look good. It had taken immense effort not to show the terrible pain of his headache while Corey was there. He had swallowed a full bottle of a hundred aspirin tablets since that morning, but they had done no good. Nothing was going to do any good.
Doc had not let himself admit what he had until there was no longer the faintest hope he was wrong. Now he fancied he could hear the ugly little creatures chewing their way through his brain tissue, popping the blood vessels as they went, creating the unbearable pressure under his skull. He knew he could stand it no longer than a few more minutes; then he would go screaming into madness, lashing out at everything and everyone around him. His face would erupt in those festering boils and spew the seed of the diabolical parasite into the air.
He walked back to the bed and pulled open the drawer of the nightstand. Lying on top of a John D. MacDonald novel was a Smith & Wesson.38-caliber revolver. It was well oiled and loaded. Doc picked up the gun, jammed the muzzle against the roof of his mouth, gagging at the oily taste. He pulled the trigger.
Chapter 26
All the way back through the littered streets to the Dorchester Apartments, Corey had a sense of foreboding, like a cold, moist hand clamped on the back of his neck. He repeatedly told himself to snap out of it, that there could be any number of reasons why Doc had not answered his telephone. But the cold grip would not loosen.
He left the Cutlass out in front of the building in a no-parking zone. Interesting, he thought, how insignificant our minor laws become in a time of mortal danger. He would have given a lot to know he would come back and find a cop ticketing his car, just as though it still mattered where anybody parked. He irritably pushed the thought away. The cops had other worries, and so did he.
The woman somewhere on the first floor was still sobbing. She seemed to have been frozen in her lament since the beginning of time.
As Corey topped the second flight of stairs, he detected another smell mixed with the stale cooking odor. It was the old Fourth of July smell of exploded gunpowder.
He quickened his step down the hallway and knocked at the door to Doc’s apartment. There was no response. In his heart Corey had not expected there would be one. He tried the door. It was unlocked. Somehow he had expected that, too.
Corey stepped inside. The gunpowder smell was sharpest in there, cutting through the memory of a thousand cigarettes. A layer of blue haze hung in the room at eye level.
Doc lay with the lower part of his body on the bed, the upper sprawled down to the floor. Beneath his head the rug was soaked with dark, drying blood.
Corey knelt beside his friend. He saw the revolver still gripped in Doc’s hand. He saw the beginning of the red welts on the old reporter’s sallow face. Welts that would now not erupt to blow out the eggs of the brain eaters.
He stood up quickly and walked into the bathroom. There he braced his hands on the edges of the porcelain sink and leaned his head over it while his stomach lurched. In a few seconds the churning in his gut eased, and Corey looked up into the mirror over the sink. What did Doc see in this glass, he wondered, before he ate the bullet? Corey looked into his own eyes and did not much like what he saw there.
“This is it, hotshot. The Big Story,” he told his warped reflection. “The one you’ve been waiting for. Now that you’ve got it, how do you like it?”
He turned away from the unanswering image in the glass and went back into the living room — bedroom. He walked over and eased Doc’s feet down off the bed and arranged them so he was lying on the floor. Making the corpse more comfortable. Doc would have laughed at that.
He spread a blanket over his friend and walked to the refrigerator. He popped the top of a can of Heileman’s and raised it in the direction of the body.