The Butterfly Plague Read Online Free Page B

seeking immediate and personal escape.
    Ruth dragged open a window and seized the strings of a passing balloon. At the other end of the string a child roared disapproval and rage.
    “What has happened?” said Ruth. “For God’s sake, tell me what has happened to us all?”
    The child wailed. It wanted to see the body. It tugged at its balloon and ran away.
    Ruth went out into the corridor. Bedlam.
    “What is it? What has happened?” she asked. But no one paid the least attention.
    “Get off the train!” a conductor yelled. “Get off before she fires!”
    “Fires?”
    “Fire!”
    Fire. Fire. Fire.
    “Get off the train!” cried all the mothers of children on board.
    “Get off the train!” cried all the children themselves.
    “Get the hell out of my way!” cried several other people, childless and alone.
    “But what is happening?” said Ruth.
    She approached the conductor. “Are we really on fire?”
    “Of course not,” said the conductor. “But I’ve got to clear this train. We have a schedule to meet.”
    Ruth got back to her compartment somehow and managed to struggle out with her bags.
    Slowly—more slowly, it seemed, than anyone else—Ruth was moved along the corridor.
    “Please! Please move faster,” Ruth said and was alarmed to find she had not even said it aloud. The blond man was close behind her.
    “It will happen now,” Ruth thought.
    “What will, lady?” said the man in front of her, who was covered inexplicably with talcum powder.
    “Nothing,” said Ruth. “Nothing. Excuse me.”
    At last they had reached the exits, and Ruth was helped down by a Brazilian Boy Scout.
    She thanked him and started along the platform. Adolphus was nowhere in sight, nor Myra (whom Ruth could only hope to recognize from her films). All around her, bodies collided.
    As she arrived near the head of the train Ruth became part of a crowd that had managed to get near the pieces of Bully’s corpse. These were being tenderly gathered and arranged by station attendants and Red Cross volunteers. There was nothing to see except a grisly array of bloody blankets and sheets. But the crowd leaned forward—then it fell back.
    Someone was coming.
    “Who’s that?” they whispered.
    It was the woman in veils.
    She approached, drawn up to her full tiny height, followed by the immense bulk of her servant. She had been joined by two men of indiscriminate age and appearance, both dressed exactly alike in leather overcoats. She was escorted by these men to the edge of the platform.
    Silently and without lifting her veils, the mysterious lady stared down with remarkable poise into the cinders where still lay the head of Bullford Moxon. She seemed to view it as some gigantic and momentous ruin—and in her stance and quiet stare could be felt the power and intensity of a conqueror. She had put him there. Ruth knew it. But she didn’t know how or why.
    Now, amidst the murmurs and mutters of the crowd, the veiled and queenlike figure, at once revered and feared, strode away toward a waiting automobile. No one voiced it. No one dared. They too, like Ruth, remembered that walk. They remembered its portent.
    They were shaken.
    If Bullford “Bully” Moxon was dead by his own intent, then why had the Little Virgin willed it?
    And why was she back, America?

    2:45 p.m

    Dolly lay on the floor of the station. He was extremely angry because no one seemed to realize he was lying there in danger of death. But there was nothing he could do about it.
    At first he lay absolutely still, paralyzed with the fear of being stepped on. He yelled, “Look out, you damn fool!” several times at people who ran too close. But no one heard him. And no one got him.
    Eventually, when it became clear to Dolly he was not the central attraction, his curiosity got the better of him and he rolled to safety under the bench upon which Myra still stood crying “No, no, no,” as she had when Bully first danced under the train. Dolly pulled his feet up