Borrowed Time Read Free Page B

me we don’t have a vaccine for it. Why not?”
    “The Spanish Influenza vanished after the epidemic. Attempts to analyze the disease from fragmentary samples in partially preserved victims were undertaken in the early twenty-first century, but were inconclusive.”
    “Jeannie, diseases don’t just vanish. They may be driven to extinction by proper medical actions, like small-pox was, or go underground for a while like bubonic plague before they pop up again, but even I know diseases don’t simply vanish without a trace and never resurface.”
    “The Spanish Influenza has never resurfaced.”
    Every new thing I learned about the disease made it a greater anomaly. “Is there anything else unusual about it?”
    “Clarify?”
    “Anything else that made the Spanish Influenza different from other outbreaks of influenza?”
    “Yes. Influenza viruses normally posed the greatest mortality risk to humans who were very young or very old.”
    “The weakest, in other words.”
    “Correct. However, the vast majority of those killed by the Spanish Influenza were in the age range of fifteen to forty chronological years.”
    “Adults? Were they predisposed somehow?”
    “Insufficient data. The only conclusions medical researchers have been able to affirm are that those who should’ve had the strongest immune systems were those who were most likely to be killed by the illness.”
    I leaned on the rail of the ship, looking out across bright blue waves capped by spurts of white foam. Clouds of sooty ash from the ship’s smokestacks drifted slowly down into the water astern of us, disappearing without apparent trace. Little wonder now-humanity still believed the ocean was a limitless sink for pollution. “I guess in this case strong immune systems were a bad thi -.”
    Jeannie waited a moment. “Clarify?”
    “Jeannie. Auto-immune diseases. Like that Smith guy has. Those were caused by immune systems attacking their own bodies, right?”
    “That is essentially correct.”
    “So, asthma and arthritis and wheat allergies, they’re all signs of an, uh . . . ”
    “Overactive immune system.”
    “But the Spanish Influenza wasn’t an auto-immune disease?”
    “The Spanish Influenza was very definitely a type of influenza.”
    A type of influenza that seemed to have uncharacteristically targeted the strongest human immune systems. I had a lot of pieces, but none of them fit into a reasonable picture. I needed Smith. And the next time I had him cornered I’d wrap my hands around his scrawny neck to keep him from jumping away from me again.
    I prowled Freetown for a good week after arriving, spreading around more bribes and descriptions of ‘John Smith,’ with promises of bigger pay-offs for anyone who found him for me. Eventually, somebody did.
    I waited until I knew he was in the room he’d taken at a transients’ boarding house, then broke the door open and had one hand on his neck before he could move. “Hi. We have a conversation we need to finish.”
    Smith stole a glance toward the valise he had no chance of reaching, then glared at me, his eyes very wide in that very pale face. “You have no idea what’s at stake.”
    “So tell me.”
    “What if I don’t?”
    “Maybe I’ll break your neck, then take that bag of yours and drop it into the hottest boiler I can find so that anything inside it is totally incinerated.” Smith’s eyes widened even more and he trembled. Then his eyes swung all the way to one side and stuck there, while his body went limp except for his hands, which twitched over and over again.
    “He is suffering a seizure,” Jeannie advised me.
    “I figured that out.” I kept my hand on his neck. “Could he be faking?”
    “It cannot be ruled out, but a seizure disorder such as he apparently suffers from can result in seizures being triggered by stress.”
    Stress like someone breaking into his room and threatening to break his neck. I sighed, made sure Smith’s seizure didn’t seem life