The plague brought out the worst in men. From hucksters pitching expensive miracle cures, to television prophets who damned their contemporaries in terms of the Book of Revelations before demanding money to intercede with God on the viewers' behalf, from street criminals who thought nothing of breaking into the homes of the sick to steal and to murder the already dying, to doctors who refused to treat RD victims, men learned the measure of each other and of themselves. In the backcountry posses took to sealing off the houses of victims with an armed ring of men, then burning the structure to the ground along with all of its inhabitants, living or dead. In better-organized areas, schools and National Guard armories were converted into hospitals — but there was little that could be done beyond the intravenous replacement of lost fluids and simply waiting for the victims to live or die on their own. Then the sterile solutions began to run out, as the demand skyrocketed and the production facilities closed and the distribution network collapsed. Black-market fluid packs killed as many as they saved. Ambulance attendants were gunned down and their vehicles torched as rumors spread that they were a major source of contagion. Among those who recovered, some found that their families or lovers, landlords or neighbors, would not accept them back into the fold, and hobo camps of scarred survivors developed into semipermanent settlements beside the interstate and rail lines, while renegade colonies sprang up in the national parks, where the residents were somewhat less likely to be massacred in a midnight vigilante raid.
Yet, the will to civilization never disappeared entirely. There were always volunteers, men and women who against all common sense and personal instinct went to work manning the ambulances or lugging the mass-produced chemically lined body bags. Men whose lives had been spent behind desks and computers strained to load the mountains of accumulated garbage in the streets, while others served as police auxiliaries or truck drivers. When the state governors called out the National Guard, the Guard came — not every man or woman who had sworn the oath, but enough to deliver the essential food, to dig the burial pits, to patrol the most lawless of the city streets and country roads. There seemed to be no way to predict who would cower and try to flee, or who would risk his life to serve the common good. Neither religion nor race, nor age or income served to indicate the man or woman of courage. But they were always there, never quite as many as might be wanted, but always more than the logic of self-preservation alone would have allowed.
The plague hit hardest in the great coastal cities of California. In the boundless sprawl of Los Angeles, the haphazard infrastructure quickly went to pieces, and the desperate efforts of surviving officials and volunteers could not begin to put the situation back together. The gangs permanently embedded in East Los Angeles and in other enclaves of the underclass, whose grip had developed greater strength with each passing year, ruled their territories completely now, even deciding who would have access to the sparse supplies of food. And the plague brought opportunity. The gangs soon reached out, first rampaging through the more prosperous districts of Los Angeles, then embarking on expeditions to ravage small towns, settlements, or individual homes as far away as Utah. Along with their increase in membership and wealth over the decades, the gangs had also learned increasingly sophisticated methods of presenting themselves to the world. At a time when food suppliers were afraid to enter gang-controlled areas, aware that their loads would be pirated and their drivers beaten or killed — if the plague spared them — gang representatives appeared on public-access radio and television to accuse the government of purposefully spreading Runciman's disease in the ghettos and barrios, and of attempting to starve minority survivors. Even the commercial media made time for the gang stories, anxious to offer something other than reruns and official announcements. The gang members were colorful, provocative… entertaining.
An attempt to move the California National Guard into Los Angeles resulted in the deployment of understrength units with little or no training for such a mission. Assailed whenever they drove or marched down a street, whether to unload canned goods or to pick up the garbage, it was inevitable that the guardsmen would eventually open fire. This time, the media stories focused on the Guard's brutality and on their victims. The reporting proved so inflammatory that violence erupted in other cities across the nation, where the situation previously had been brought under control.
In Los Angeles, the power system failed and water service became erratic, with the available water contaminated. Bodies lay in the streets. Unable to enter vast areas of Los Angeles County, the thinned ranks of the police and the Guard struggled to protect those neighborhoods where the gangs did not have roots, leading to even more strident charges of racism, both from the now unprotected poor and from reporters who did all of their investigations by telephone, afraid to risk their lives on streets that the plague and the gangs had divided between them. Increasingly, the media relied on gang-supplied video material.
The Kingman massacre, in which a desert town was largely destroyed as its residents fought it out with far-better-armed gang members, forced the issue onto the President's desk. Against the advice of the most politically adept members of his cabinet, he declared a national state of emergency and ordered the United States Army into Los Angeles County.
The Army took only volunteers. Many of the men who stepped forward were victims of the disease who had survived and thus had nothing to fear from at least one of the enemies ravaging Los Angeles. As a result, the first units deployed often had the grimmest look of any the United States Army had ever fielded. But there were other volunteers as well, men who were willing to risk everything at the call of duty. Unit commanders were not always certain whether they should be ashamed of how many men refused to go or proud of the majority who quietly signed the release forms and earned their pay. It was an Army whose morale had been shattered by the African debacle— but which still discovered the strength within itself to face a mission that promised to be even more thankless.
Lieutenant Meredith found himself cradled in a relatively safe job at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, working on computer analysis models that attempted to explain the African debacle, and mourning the dreams of his parents. The worst of the plague seemed to have passed by the local area, and Meredith was slowly overcoming the nightmare of death and disfigurement that had followed him from Kinshasa to the Azores, intensifying even as the regularity of horror numbed the conscious mind. He had always been vain about his looks. Yet he put in the paperwork to join the special task force on duty in California. Terrified whenever he paused to think, he could not explain to his bewildered commander or to himself why he would choose so foolish a course of action. There was no logic in it, no sense. They could not even offer him an intelligence position of the sort for which he had been trained. There were, however, plenty of openings for substitute cavalry and infantry platoon leaders, who seemed to die as soon as they breathed the East Los Angeles air.
He found himself in charge of a ground cavalry platoon on escort duty east of the Interstate 710–210 line. He received no special training. There was no time. The platoon itself was operating at an average strength of sixty percent, and the troop commander under whom Meredith found himself looked as though he were barely up from his own sickbed, his face and hands gruesomely scarred by Runciman's disease. Although the man was rumored to be one of the few genuine heroes to emerge from the mess in Zaire, it took all of Meredith's selfcontrol to reach out and accept the hand his superior offered in welcome.