Free Zuni Stew: A Novel by Kent Jacobs Page A

transfixed by her appearance. “Well?”
    “Well what?”
    “Come on, where is Jack?”
    “Lady, this is the military. Do you understand?” He paused, watching her fixed expression. “Need-to-know basis.”
    Lori leaned forward, placed both hands on his desk. Knew his eyes were on her cleavage. She didn’t dare tell him she was FBI. Not yet. She stepped back, looking at his face, not eyes, and said, “I’m pregnant.”
    “Pregnant?”
    “Yes. He doesn’t know.”
    Suddenly, they both felt a tremor. A pencil rolled across Bill’s desk. He caught it.
    “What was that?” asked Lori.
    “Lots of seismic activity around here.” And slipping plates, he thought, especially along the Continental Divide. He tapped the pencil on the desk, picturing flight maps in his head. A fault—north/south fracture just east of Dulce. Christ, Jack needs to know. He felt her gaze shift from his face to his eyes. And from his eyes to a place inside him that she understood. “Okay. He’s in Apache country, PHS clinic in Dulce. Up north, right on...”
    “The Colorado border,” said Lori.
    She left the hospital thankful Dr. Bill was a sensitive guy. On a hunch, she drove toward the pueblo.
    
    Jack was met with a traffic jam. Trucks, mainly Ford pick-ups, parked all around the clinic. “What the hell?” Patients were standing in line, trailing out the door. “What’s going on?”
    “High fevers, red throats. Like yesterday, white-ish yellow puss on the back of the throat,” answered Gloria.
    “Sounds like strep throat,” he said, shrugging on a lab coat. His first patient was a five-year-old boy. “I’m going to swab some of the exudate on the tonsillar pillars. Make a smear with one, and plate the other on blood agar.” Gloria nodded.
    He took one look at the slide. Myriads of strands and couplets of spherical organisms—all stained gram positive. “His temp?”
    “One-hundred-and-three.”
    “It’ll take twenty-four hours for the agar culture, but this is strep, no doubt. I’ll use penicillin, unless the antibiotic sensitivities say otherwise when we get them in a couple of days.”
    It didn’t take long for him to find out what the clinic had in stock. Five vials of procaine penicillin. Enough to treat a third of the patients already at the clinic. God knows how many more to come.
    He called the PHS hospital in Albuquerque. The consequences of inadequate or non-treatment of Type-2 strep could be disastrous. The next epidemic would be rheumatic fever. Associated heart problems. Renal disease. He could expect deaths in the very young and very old. Albuquerque promised to fly in supplies by the next morning.
    By the end of the day, he had seen more than a hundred patients. He had antibiotics for twenty-five or thirty. They sterilized the clinic as best they could. He didn’t think some would return.
    Dinner. Exhaustion. He plied open a can of tomato soup with a bottle opener, heated it in a cast-iron skillet, and retreated to the porch. A black night.
    Suddenly the night sound of living things stopped—no crickets, no barking dogs. Only silence.
    He stood dead still. When he stepped inside the house, the power went off. A monstrous cracking sound ricocheted. He was lifted off his feet and sent crashing to the floor. The walls of the living room separated at one corner. Walls shuddered, the floor reverberated. With a deafening bang, the walls slammed together again.
    He crawled for the dining table and spread himself flat. Shaking continued for more than a minute. Then came stability, and with it, silence.
    “Earthquake,” Jack said aloud. “What a godforsaken dump. Filled with goddamn superstitious, stone-faced, burro-headed Indians. And now this.”
    A knock at the door stopped his tirade. The door was jammed and he had to give it several kicks and a violent jerk to get it open. Gloria was standing there, composed as though nothing had happened.
    All she said was, “Happened before, mountain gods