“You need to put on a mask,” Steve Coyle said.
The corporal nodded several times and produced a surgical mask from his back pocket. He also saluted twice. Ethan Gray, Steve Coyle, and Danny returned the first one.
“How many aboard?” Gray asked.
The corporal half-saluted, then dropped his hand. “Just me, a doc, and the pilot.”
Danny pulled his mask up from his throat and covered his mouth. He wished he hadn’t just smoked that cigarette. The smell of it bounced off the mask and filled his nostrils, permeated his lips and chin.
They met up with the doctor in the main cabin as the launch pulled away from the dock. The doctor was an old man, gone bald halfway up his scalp with a thick bush of white that stood up like a hedge. He didn’t wear a mask and he waved at theirs.
“You can take them off. None of us have it.”
“How do you know?” Danny said.
The old man shrugged. “Faith?”
It seemed silly to be standing there in their uniforms and masks while still trying to find their sea legs as the launch bounced through the chop. Ridiculous, really. Danny and Steve removed their masks. Gray followed suit. Gray’s partner, though, kept his on, looking at the other three cops like they were insane.
“Peter,” Gray said, “really.”
Peter shook his head at the floor and kept that mask on.
Danny, Steve, and Gray sat across from the doctor at a small table.
“What are your orders?” the doctor said.
Danny told him.
The doctor pinched his nose where his glasses had indented. “So I assumed. Would your superiors object to us moving the sick by way of army ground transport?”
“Move them where?” Danny said.
“Camp Devens.”
Danny looked over at Gray.
Gray smiled. “Once they leave the harbor, they are no longer under my purview.”
Steve Coyle said to the doctor, “Our superiors would like to know what we’re dealing with here.”
“We’re not exactly sure. Could be similar to an influenza strain we saw in Europe. Could be something else.”
“If it is the grippe,” Danny said, “how bad was it in Europe?”
“Bad,” the doctor said quietly, his eyes clear. “We believe that strain may have been related to one that first appeared at Fort Riley, Kansas, about eight months ago.”
“And if I may ask,” Gray said, “how serious was that strain, Doctor?”
“Within two weeks it killed eighty percent of the soldiers who’d contracted it.”
Steve whistled. “Fairly serious, then.”
“And after?” Danny asked.
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“It killed the soldiers. Then what did it do?”
The doctor gave them a wry smile and a soft snap of his fingers. “It disappeared.”
“Came back, though,” Steve Coyle said.
“Possibly,” the doctor said. He pinched his nose again. “Men are getting sick on that ship. Packed together like they are? It’s the worst possible environment for preventing transmission. Five will die tonight if we can’t move them.”
“Five?” Ethan Gray said. “We’d been told three.”
The doctor shook his head and held up five fingers.
On the McKinley, they met a group of doctors and majors at the fantail. It had grown overcast. The clouds looked muscular and stone gray, like sculptures of limbs, as they moved slowly over the water and back toward the city and its red brick and glass.
A Major Gideon said, “Why would they send patrolmen?” He pointed at Danny and Steve. “You have no authority to make public health decisions.”
Danny and Steve said nothing.
Gideon repeated himself. “Why send patrolmen?”
“No captains volunteered for the job,” Danny said.
“You find amusement in this?” Gideon said. “My men are sick. They fought a war you couldn’t be bothered to fight, and now they’re dying.”
“I wasn’t making a joke.” Danny gestured at Steve Coyle, at Ethan Gray, at the burn-scarred Peter. “This was a volunteer assignment, Major. No one wanted to come here except us. And we do, by the way, have the authority. We have been given clear orders as to what is acceptable and unacceptable action in this situation.”
“And what is acceptable?” one of the doctors asked.
“As to the harbor,” Ethan Gray said, “you are allowed to transport your men by launch and launch only to Commonwealth Pier. After that, it’s BPD jurisdiction.”
They looked at Danny and Steve.
Danny said, “It’s in the best interest of the governor, the mayor, and every police department in the state that we not have a general panic. So, under cover of night, you are to have military transport trucks meet you at Commonwealth Pier. You can unload the sick there and take them directly to Devens. You can’t stop along that journey. A police car will escort you with its sirens off.” Danny met Major Gideon’s glare. “Fair?”
Gideon eventually nodded.
“The State Guard’s been notified,” Steve Coyle said. “They’ll set up an outpost at Camp Devens and work with your MPs to keep anyone from leaving base until this is contained. That’s by order of the governor.”
Ethan Gray directed a question to the doctors. “How long will it take to contain?”
One of them, a tall, flaxen-haired man, said, “We have no idea. It kills who it kills and then it snuffs itself out. Could be over in a week, could take nine months.”
Danny said, “As long as it’s kept from spreading to the civilian population, our bosses can live with the arrangement.”
The flaxen-haired man chuckled. “The war is winding down. Men have been rotating back in large numbers for the last several weeks. This is a contagion, gentlemen, and a resilient one. Have you considered the possibility that a carrier has already reached your city?” He stared at them. “That it’s too late, gentlemen? Far, far too late?”
Danny watched those muscular clouds slough their way inland. The rest of the sky had cleared. The sun had returned, high and sharp. A beautiful day, the kind you dreamed about during a long winter.
The five gravely ill soldiers rode back on the launch with them even though dusk was still a long way off. Danny, Steve, Ethan Gray, Peter, and two doctors stayed in the main cabin while the sick soldiers lay on the port deck with two other doctors attending. Danny had seen the men get lowered to the launch by line and pulley. With their pinched skulls and caved-in cheeks, their sweat-drenched hair and vomit-encrusted lips, they’d looked dead already. Three of the five bore a blue tint to their flesh, mouths peeled back, eyes wide and glaring. Their breaths came in huffs.
The four police officers stayed down in the cabin. Their jobs had taught them that many dangers could be explained away — if you didn’t want to got shot or stabbed, don’t befriend people who played with guns and knives; you didn’t want to get mugged, don’t leave saloons drunk beyond seeing; didn’t want to lose, don’t gamble.
But this was something else entirely. Could happen to any of them. Could happen to all of them.
Back at the station house, Danny and Steve gave their report to Sergeant Strivakis and separated. Steve went to find his brother’s widow and Danny went to find a drink. A year from now, Steve might still be finding his way to the Widow Coyle, but Danny could have a much harder time finding a drink. While the East Coast and West Coast had been concerned with recession and war, telephones and baseball, anarchists and their bombs, the Progressives and their ole-time-religion allies had risen out of the South and the Midwest. Danny didn’t know a soul who had taken the Prohibition bills seriously, even when they’d made it to the floor of the House. It seemed impossible, with all the other shifts going on in the country’s fabric, that these prim, self-righteous “don’t dos” had a chance. But one morning the whole country woke up to realize that not only did the idiots have a chance, they had a foothold. Gained while everyone else paid attention to what had seemed more important. Now the right of every adult to imbibe hung in the balance of one state: Nebraska. Whichever way it voted on the Volstead ratification in two months would decide whether an entire booze-loving country climbed on the wagon.