1635:The Dreeson Incident

Chapter 46

"There are twenty-five or so men gathered in the parking lot at Leahy Medical Center," Gary Lambert said calmly to the police dispatcher, "with another group about the same size by the emergency entrance." The business manager was reluctant to sound alarmist. "They arrived about nine o'clock this morning and have been there for approximately three-quarters of an hour now, yelling anti-vaccination slogans and waving signs. Thus far, they have not interfered with traffic into and out of the building."

"If they have been there that long, why did you decide to call us now?"

"Because other people are joining them. The original group came together, had a leader, divided quietly, and appeared to be a disciplined protest. We don't enjoy that sort of thing, but we really have to put up with it. The regular police patrols swung by, took a look at the ones in the parking lot, and moved on. I assumed that this meant they shared my feeling that there was no immediate cause for alarm."

"What has changed?"

"Quite a few additional demonstrators are coming now. Not in a single group, but in smaller ones, three or four together. They are not waving prepared signs. They already outnumber the original party and they are still arriving. Instead of clustering in one or two places, in the parking lot and by the emergency entrance, they are scattering out here and there around the exterior of the building. A half dozen by the main entrance; eight by the pathway from the laundry to the service entrance; about the same number by the pathway from the bakery to the service entrance."

"I'll send a couple of cars that way."

"Warn the cars that something is starting to happen. Several of the smaller groups that were still out on Highway 250 are coming together now, behind the original demonstrators in the parking lot. They are reaching under their cloaks and bringing out signs that protest the practice of doing autopsies as a part of medical education. The slogans they are beginning to shout include 'sacrilege,' of course, and predictions that as a result of these, at the time of the Last Judgment, people will be rising from the dead maimed and incomplete, denied the glorified bodies promised in the resurrection."

The police dispatcher squawked.

"This isn't something caused by Grantville. It was a controversy that existed between the medical schools and the yahoos down-time, before we ever arrived. That's why so many autopsies were done on condemned criminals. And why medical students were practicing grave robbing two centuries after the 1630s. It's an emotional thing. Emotionally very highly charged."

Gary paused. "Very bad theology, of course, but very highly charged."

"What's the estimated total number of demonstrators at the moment?"

"Let me check." He looked up from the phone. "What's the count, Maria? All sides of the building?" Then he spoke into the headphone. "Forty-three more within the last ten minutes. With others still coming along the highway. They are attempting to block the first patrol car you dispatched from entering the parking lot. The total is over a hundred and fifty now, including the original fifty or so, but they are moving around enough that it's hard for our people to get an accurate count."

"I'll notify Chief Richards right away. We'll get a full unit out to you as soon as possible."

"I think you should indicate that this may become urgent. I now have reports that a few of the newest arrivals are apparently preparing to take signs out from under their cloaks."

Jacques-Pierre Dumais was seriously worried. This was to have been an orderly, planned demonstration. He had made that very clear to the hired demonstrators.

He had no idea who these other people were or why they had arrived.

Of course, there were always certain hazards when organizing this type of thing, given the sort of people one had to use. Even the two Huguenots Deneau had brought and assigned to assist him weren't the sharpest knives in anyone's drawer.

The miscalculation this time, although Dumais had no way of knowing it, was that two of the men contacted by Bryant Holloway early in his circuit of the towns of Thuringia were genuine anti-autopsy fanatics. When they had heard that there was to be a demonstration against the sacrilegious practices of the up-time hospital on a certain date, they had not only come to Grantville themselves, but had brought their friends.

Jacques-Pierre was cautious by nature. He found it prudent to withdraw from the scene. It was not as if his presence had been conspicuous to begin with. He had merely been standing among the rear of the first group in the parking lot. He crossed to the other side of Route 250 and stood back from the highway, near the corner of a building. Corners were good places to stand. In a pinch, a person could always go around the corner and emerge somewhere else.

From his location at the rear of the original group, he had been providing instructions to Friedrich Klick from Halle, who was playing the role of leader in the anti-vaccination demonstration. When Dumais disappeared without leaving any guidance as to what his puppet should do next, Klick began to panic. He had no knowledge about the additional men who were arriving, no contacts among them, and no way to get them organized. He slipped to the side of his group, walked backwards for several steps, and then ran. Several others of the original fifty or so followed him. Others surged forward to take their places.

By the time the Grantville police were fully in place around Leahy, there were an estimated two hundred fifty participants in the demonstration.

Two or three smaller bands had attempted to force their way into the building.

Inside, the staff was evacuating all patients into center rooms.

Outside, the police had taken ranks at all the entrances. The police dispatchers had contacted the fire department and advised them not to bring ill or injured people to the hospital. Traffic on Route 250 had been blocked in both directions. The trolley to and from Rudolstadt had to turn around several blocks to the east of the hospital and return from there.

Two hours after Gary Lambert's first call, the demonstration at the hospital had nearly the entire on-duty Grantville police force fully occupied. Not all of them. Jurgen Neubert and Marvin Tipton were down by the Y where the bridges came together, since someone had called in a disturbance in front of Cora's. One of those anti-Semitic ranters who'd been showing up in several nearby towns the last couple of weeks had finally made it to Grantville, it seemed.

Angela Baker, on dispatch, was contacting those off-duty to come in.

Police spokesmen with bullhorns attempted to persuade the demonstrators to disperse. A call for the leader of the group produced Klick. He came around from behind a parked wagon at the edge of the lot and was quite willing to speak to the police, but it turned out that his main wish was that they should get him away from the site.

As he said, plainly, he had, after all, been hired to come and do this. As had everyone who had come with him. He would be quite willing to tell the Polizei everything he knew in return for the favor of being removed from the scene. More than willing to do it. Happy to do it.

When the rest of the anti-vaccination demonstrators saw him being placed in a police car, they moved toward that side of the parking lot. This allowed the anti-autopsy demonstrators to take up a more central position, directly in front of the main entrance.

A shoving, pushing, and shouting match developed at the side. No one seemed to be able to get the idea across that Klick was being evacuated at his own wish.

"It looks to me," Bill Magen said, "that a batch more of these guys are getting ready to pull out their signs and start waving them. They're twitching at their cloaks."

"Moving forward, too," the officer next to him answered. That was Karl Maurer, who was scowling fiercely. "I don't like this. It's a good hospital. When my son was so sick in the winter, coughing, they brought him here. The physicians cured him."

A man moved to the front. "We demand that you surrender to us the surgeon who violates the bodies of the dead!"

Many of the demonstrators reached under their cloaks.

"Those aren't signs!" Magen called. "Those are guns."

Ralph Onofrio, the senior man on duty, moved forward to try to calm the situation.

The more aggressive autopsy protesters began to move forward from the perimeter, pushing the earlier anti-vaccination demonstrators who had not moved to the side already toward the hospital. One man lost his balance and fell forward. Several, trying to escape the readied guns to their rear, ran over him as they were pushed in the direction of the hospital entrance.

The smaller groups by the bakery and laundry moved toward the main entrance, pulling weapons as they came.

Then the whole crowd moved forward a few steps, several of the demonstrators readying their guns. Within five minutes, the demonstration had become an armed confrontation.

Onofrio was still calling orders when Maurer, the policeman whose croupy child had been treated at the hospital, fired. Most of the other down-time policemen, without waiting for orders, followed suit.

The Grantville police had notably more firepower than the demonstrators, not to mention better body armor. Still, it was not exactly a massacre. There were many more armed demonstrators than policemen and they did not hesitate to shoot back.

A significant number of the unarmed anti-vaccination demonstrators were caught between the two armed groups.

It lasted quite a while. Several of the armed demonstrators had remained around the edges of the parking lot. They sheltered behind vehicles, fences, landscaping, just as they would have done in their home villages if fighting a delaying action against a marauding mercenary band.

The firing continued for quite some time as the police attempted to disengage enough of their people ringing the building to get behind the scattered shooters.

As long as the shooting continued, it was impossible for anyone to try to deal with those who had fallen dead or wounded outside the building.

Several of the panicked, unarmed original hired anti-vaccination demonstrators, caught between the two sources of fire, managed to break through the police line, seeking refuge in the hospital's main lobby, which started a second sphere of action as the hospital staff attempted to prevent them from pushing farther into the building.

"Oh God, Marvin," Jurgen Neubert cried out to his partner, who was standing on the sidewalk by Cora's. "He's dead. It came in over the car radio. Ralph's dead. Angela, Angela, what is happening?"

"The demonstration. The one at the hospital. There were other groups, off to the side. Press is on his way over there. Marvin, I've got to tell you. We fired the first shot. Bill Magen is dead, too. I know that for sure."

Marvin Tipton grabbed the hand-held.

"Who fired?"

"Maurer. It was Karl Maurer who shot first. It's all so confused, still."

"Hang in there, Angela. We're heading over."

"What do you have, Franz?" Jurgen asked.

"Three more of yours, here. Besides Officer Onofrio. Maurer. And both of the Hansen. Shruer and Schultz. The two ex-mercenaries. The ones who were always together. There are several more wounded policemen. They have taken them inside the hospital, Erika Fleischer said. She is okay. Not hurt."

"Perps? Ah, demonstrators. How many?"

"Seventeen here."

Here was the morgue.

"Inside?"

"I am not sure. Many. Almost forty, maybe. There were others who could still run, and did."

Pam, Ron, and Missy came out onto the sidewalk in front of Pam's apartment when they heard a shot. Followed by lots of shots.

The gunfire wasn't really close, so they stood there, listening.

"Over toward the hospital," Ron said.

"I think I can guess why we're low priority for the police," Pam answered. "Should we grab our guns and head over there?"

"The dispatcher didn't sound flustered or say anything about getting the reserves out when we talked to her," Ron answered. "We'd probably be more in the way than anything else. Let's concentrate on writing up every single thing that happened to you girls this morning, in order. So you'll have it when they do get around to talking to you."

"Including that we were planning to sneak into Veda Mae's garage?"

"I think we can leave that out," Ron said. "We can tell that to Cory Joe, for Don Francisco, but as far as Preston Richards and the Grantville police force are concerned, let's start with Pam walking down the street and seeing the guys unloading the signs out of Veda Mae's garage."

Pam was about half way through her part of the narrative when she stopped writing. "Do you know what we forgot to do while we where there?"

"What?"

"We forgot to look in the extra garbage cans. They're why we went in the first place."

"Well, we can't very well go back now. There are people swarming all over the place because of that shooting over by the hospital."

"Maybe we can try again next Sunday morning."

Ron and Missy looked at her. "Pam," Ron said, "by next Sunday, whatever was there is likely to be long gone."

"Then maybe we should go back now."

This time the other two looked at one another with the mutual unspoken feeling that Pam was maybe getting a little over-involved in this project.

"I don't think so," Missy said.