Night Zero (Book 1): Night Zero

by Horner, Rob

  “I got this side if you want to move over,” Brandon said, reaching in from behind him.

  “Careful, he’s wild,” Buck cautioned. Danny proved it, bucking and thrashing the instant Buck’s weight began to shift.

  “Jessica, put together a B-52 and get twenty of Geodon cooking,” Dr. Crews said. “Get that in him before you try to get him up. Hope you don’t mind holding onto him a little bit longer, Buck.”

  Jessica ran off, not bothering to repeat the order.

  Buck grunted. “I think me and Brandon can hold him.” Dr. Crews reminded him of his old football coach, a guy who knew what he wanted to happen, could visualize it, and expected everyone to do exactly what they needed to do to fit into his mental picture.

  “Josh, get a stretcher out of an empty room and get Mr. Sprugg on it and into Trauma 1—”

  “Trauma 1 has a patient in it—” Tonya began.

  “Is it a trauma patient?” Dr. Crews asked.

  “No, it’s a guy with vomiting and diarrhea.”

  “Then move him to eight.”

  Some of Buck’s nervousness faded, replaced by a calm acceptance that someone with authority had taken charge. If it was still Dr. Patel…well, things would be different. The Indian doctor knew his stuff and the staff liked him, but in a crisis, you needed someone who sounded like he was in charge as much as someone who knew what he was doing. Dr. Crews was both.

  More orders followed, people coming and going, performing the tasks the doctor set them to. Sirens wailed outside heralding the arrival of the police.

  And Buck held on until Jessica returned with the Benadryl-Ativan-Haldol cocktail called a B-52. She yanked on Danny’s trousers enough to reveal a swatch of pale butt cheek and administered the shots. Buck and Brandon maintained their grip for another ten minutes before finally being allowed to loosen their hold on Danny. No matter what the movies showed, there was no magic medicine for psychotic patients that rendered them immediately unconscious.

  Finally, as the voices of police officers began to clash with those of the doctors, they dragged Danny to room 10.

  It was seven o’clock.

  Chapter 15

  The old Mazda chugged and wheezed up the Interstate, burning as much oil as gasoline and making an excellent case for automobiles as a primary cause of Global Warming. Austin didn’t care. He was heading north, and his stomach didn’t hurt for the first time in hours. Those two things were all that mattered.

  But the cashier at the gas station…

  An image tried to form in his head, but he pushed it down. That couldn’t have been him, coming out of the bathroom at the gas station, finding his Pathfinder stolen, and flying into a rage. He was a calm man, able to keep his cool even when the teenagers in his classroom shot spitballs and threw balled-up missives back and forth containing everything from X-rated suggestions to Fight Club invitations.

  He stood in front of the convenience store in the place where his SUV should have been, unable to comprehend its absence. Had he left it running? He couldn’t remember. All he’d been thinking about was holding his loose bowels in long enough to find a toilet, the amazing invention that magically swept away the worst part of the human condition, raising man above all other animals. We have toilets and thumbs, which we use to grasp the toilet handle. That’s what makes us better.

  Austin reached for the little twist knobs that controlled the radio. Turning on the power resulted in a discordant sound coming out of the tiny front speakers, a harmony of sorts of tinny horns and chimes mixed with drums that carried notes as well as providing the beat. A female voice sang words he didn’t understand in an ululating fashion, which brought to mind the accent of the man behind…

  Fists clenching and unclenching, the reality of his situation sank in. His car had been stolen, maybe by the guy who was buying beer when he stumbled into the store. No, there was no maybe. The guy had to be the thief. And the cashier let it happen. Thank God his wallet was in his shorts where it belonged. But his clothes, his laptop, his phone…those were gone.

  He didn’t know where the guy would have gone with his SUV, but since Austin was going north to Greenville, it made sense the other man must be too.

  Maybe I can catch him. Make him give my car back.

  He went back inside to confront the cashier, ask him for help, but his stomach started hurting again. It was different this time. Not a need to empty but instead a demand to be filled. The cashier came out from behind the counter to talk to him, he remembered that. He wasn’t a threat, just a down-on-his-luck guy whose SUV had been stolen. Maybe the little Pakistani man was going to offer his car, Austin didn’t know. The small brown hand reached out to offer comfort, and Austin just…

  Desperate, feeling a wave of nausea roil through him, Austin twisted the stereo knob again, shutting the music off in mid-warble. His left hand fumbled at the door frame, seeking a window button. There weren’t any. The car was too old for automatic windows. But it had a knob-and-lever on the door, so he cranked the window down, felt the summer air blowing suddenly into his face. He raised his left arm to set it on the doorframe and saw the blood on his hand.

  He grabbed the small arm at the wrist and yanked it to his mouth. The little man resisted, calling out all kinds of words in his native language, but he wasn’t strong enough to stop Austin from biting him on the inside of the forearm, just above the hand. He screamed, yelled something else, and then his left hand reached into his pants pocket and produced a key ring with about a dozen keys on it. Astonished at his own actions, Austin seized the keyring like a talisman, something to focus on, and let the man go with a shove that sent him sprawling. Before he could do anything else, he rushed out of the store, finding the only key that was long enough to belong to an automobile and using it on the only car remaining near the station.

  The fresh air helped, drying the greasy sweat on his face and pushing the nausea back down. If he threw up, the pain would return. He had no way of knowing this, but he knew it.

  He’d spent a lot of time in that bathroom, passed out on a crapper, something he hadn’t thought would ever happen again after college. Maybe that’s why the cashier was so solicitous. But he was making good time now, cruising up the Interstate at fifty-miles-per-hour. If he tried to go any faster, the Mazda would shudder like the spit, faith, and duct tape that held it together was about to give out.

  But it was all right. He was moving again.

  With the wind in his face, Austin laughed, a not-quite sane sound that disappeared in the wind of his passing as soon as it was uttered.

  It was past the witching hour on the last day of his life, but he could laugh.

  It turned out Greenwood, Mississippi did indeed have a hospital. It wasn’t much, just a few beds down the hall from the emergency department, which was woefully inadequate to the needs of the many people puking and pooping their lives away in the municipal airport. But the staff was competent, for which Carolyn was thankful, and Bitsy was one of the ten patients they agreed to transport from the airport, for which no words could ever express her gratitude. The crazy lady with her burned-out eyes was another, but she went in a police car, while Bitsy rode in the back of an ambulance.

  How they determined who to take and who to leave was a mystery. Carolyn saw nurses wearing hospital masks walking among the cots, taking vital signs and thumbing back eyelids. Every patient they saw got a number written on their hand in black Sharpie. Only those with a 2 got to leave the airport. Carolyn had a 4 on her hand, which she got because of her broken nose, while all the other healthy people got a 5. If Bitsy’s 2 got her a ride, presumably because she was sick enough to need medical attention, what did a 1 mean? She’d seen a lot of them. Did that mean they were too sick to save? What would the airport do when they started dying?

  And why was she worried about it?

  Because it helped her avoid dealing with other things.

  It was Carolyn’s long-standing defense mechanism. If something really troub
led her, especially things she couldn’t affect, it helped to work on a different problem, even if all she succeeded in doing was explaining something to her own satisfaction, like working out the numbers the nurses drew on people’s hands.

  The airport worker, Kim, also had a 2. Carolyn wasn’t quite sure what was broken in her face, but it looked like a lot more than just her nose. The sound the bucket made when it hit her was awful. And the way she just folded to the ground…terrifying. She hadn’t yet regained consciousness.

  From her place in the family member seat, she could see blood in the young lady’s ear, but couldn’t see a source for it. Didn’t some head injuries make you bleed from the ears? Or was that just fictional stuff, dramatic effect to make a movie situation seem dire?

  She didn’t remember everything that happened after getting her bell rung. One second she was standing up to the crazy lady with the scorched earth eyes, grabbing her arms to prevent her from slinging that awful bucket down on Bitsy’s head, and the next thing she knew she was on her ass, flashes of light still popping in her brain like the paparazzi of old, each flash punctuated by the bursting of a light bulb. Then her vision cleared, and she saw people, men and women, grabbing and holding her daughter. And Bitsy fought, kicking, swinging, even biting one man who got his hand too close to her mouth.

  Bitsy was stronger. Bitsy was fighting. Maybe she was going to be okay.

  And then the energy just fell out of her. Someone tased the crazy lady, but that didn’t matter. She got to Bitsy just as the little girl passed out.

  She tried to thank the men who saved her daughter from the woman with the bucket and who kept her from falling to the ground, but they seemed as deflated as Bitsy looked. Like they’d done a job, gotten a little scratched up—hey, don’t worry about it, just a part of the job—and were going back to watching over their own friends and family.

  The drop of blood in the lady’s ear drew her attention again. Was it coming from inside of her head?

  Bitsy never woke up while the nurses did triage in the airport. She’d offered no resistance to being loaded on a stretcher and jounced into the back of the ambulance. The vital signs the nurses took meant almost nothing to her. Carolyn didn’t know a good blood pressure from a bad one. 120 over 80—weren’t those the magic numbers, or was that only for adults?

  She knew a bad thermometer reading when she saw one. And Bitsy’s was bad. 104.9.

  The ambulance was slowing. Carolyn’s head hurt and she tried to remember to breathe through her mouth because every time she forgot, her nose refused to work and it reminded her, in no uncertain terms, that it did not appreciate her making the attempt.

  The blood in the lady’s ear looked thin. Watery.

  As the ambulance came to a stop and the paramedic started weaving his way between the double-parked stretchers, ready to offload his cargo and, presumably, go back to the airport for another trip, Carolyn reached out a finger and lightly brushed the shell of Kim’s ear.

  The blood wiped away and didn’t return.

  What if it wasn’t her blood? What if it splashed on her when the lady swung the bucket?

  Compared to the hit in the head, would it even matter?

  Maybe not, but it gave her something else to think about instead of the things she couldn’t do anything about.

  Like, where was her husband? Why couldn’t she get him on the phone?

  Worse, what was going to happen to Bitsy?

  Better to think about a splash of blood.

  At least for now.

  At the small airport, Jesse Franks decided he’d had enough of the runaround. It was time to get the hell out of Dodge.

  He’d been at one of the small hangars where the weekend aviators kept their personal craft. His pride and joy was a single-engine Cessna Skyhawk, and it was gassed and ready to go. He had plans to hop down to Destin for a guys’ night at a bungalow on the beach—steaks, beer, poker, and some beach bunny sight-seeing.

  Then the big jet came in, roaring hot down a short runway, tires laying streaks on the tarmac as the brakes worked to bring the big thing to a stop before it went from passenger craft to over-sized backhoe. Damn, but that had been a thing to see!

  Like everyone else, Jesse rushed to the lobby/terminal to see what was going on, and to offer help if he could.

  And there he’d been stuck. No one was cleared to leave. It had the feel of government intrusion, but it might just be good old common sense. With dark coming on, who knew what condition the runway was in? He hadn’t seen any lights working the line, so maybe that was the only problem. All the crewmen were inside, handing out cots, getting drinks of water, and rushing this way and that with towels, little first aid kits with betadine and Band-aids for all the small scrapes and scratches. There seemed to be a lot of those, which didn’t make a whole bunch of sense. The plane hadn’t crashed, after all. Maybe the hard landing caused luggage to fly out of the overhead bins, and that explained the cuts.

  Then came the incident with Bloody Mary, the chick with the bleeding eyes, and Jesse decided it might be time to quit the nuthouse before the inmates took over.

  The only reason he hadn’t left right away was Kim. He had a bit of a shine on her and wanted to make sure she was okay. While Ms. Mary with her tiny skirt wriggled on the ground from the taser—and hadn’t that been a nice sight, not the tasing or the wiggling, just the little skirt riding up, showing a red thread running between her tight cheeks like a scene from a teeny-teaser flick riding the line between PG-13 and R—he’d rushed over to Kim, who was still prettier, dammit, even if she didn’t quite have the porn star body. He’d elevated her head, which sported a bucket-sized dent on the left side, and checked for a pulse the way they taught him to in the Army. There he’d stayed until the ambulance people started arriving. He’d have gone with her, but he wasn’t family and there wasn’t room.

  The cops drove off with Bloody Mary Tight Ass, and that was all right.

  What wasn’t all right were the growing number of people that didn’t feel right.

  You didn’t survive two tours over in the desert without being able to tell when someone wasn’t right. All those Muslims might look the same, but you could tell which ones wanted to help, and which ones wanted to drive a bomb right up your poop chute. Right as rain and sure as shit, you learned the difference.

  And right now, there was a whole lot of people eyeballing him, each other, and the other locals like they were aliens hoping for a hole to plant a few eggs in.

  There were weird things happening with their hands and arms too, but he tried not to look too much at those. It couldn’t be healthy, all those red and blue lines growing bigger and darker. And he didn’t want to be around when they snapped, because that’s what was coming. Soldier or civilian, everyone had a breaking point. There were signs if you knew to look for them.

  So, Jesse faded into the background, no longer walking around with medical supplies or blankets, just a part of the surroundings. He hugged the wall and tried to work his way to the exit that gave out to the tarmac. If he couldn’t get out that way, maybe he’d make a go at the front door, but there was a whole lot of crazy in that direction and a lot less on this end.

  Even a small airport like this had a TSA agent attached to it. Jesse supposed that any airport that allowed passengers had to have one, ever since nine-eleven. He hadn’t been a pilot back then but was still old enough to remember when things weren’t so bad. There’d always been security and X-ray machines at airports, but the people who ran them were employees of the facility, not jumped-up jackboots taking a paycheck from Uncle Sam and looking to unionize as a way to avoid a full day’s work.

  That probably wasn’t a fair way to characterize them. They weren’t all bad, after all. Take Sam, the guy who’d zapped Crazy Lady with enough voltage to get through her silicone and make those nipples almost poke out of her shirt. He had the duty at the back door right now, and he was a guy who’d been a part of the airport before the government
folded him under its wing. Sam was good people. He never missed a Sunday at church, and him and his wife hosted one helluva backyard barbecue come football season. He wasn’t much to look at, biblically ugly and scrawny as a vegetarian at a hunting lodge, but he could be as loud as a drill sergeant and he hit what he aimed at.

  “I know what y’all are thinkin’,” Sam said softly as Jesse eased up to him. “An’ th’ answer’s no.”

  “I got the ‘Hawk all gassed up, s’all I’m sayin’,” Jesse replied. “Had a green light before the big bird landed. Can’t imagine that’s been turned off.”

  “I got orders, man. You remember what those are, don’t you?”

  “Whose orders? It’s just a bird that served some bad soup, right?”

  Sam shook his head, wrestling with something. Jesse let the matter lie for the moment. One thing you learned about guys like Sam. You had to let him come to something on his own. If you dragged and pushed, he’d resist like a mule. A mule with a gun and a taser and the ability to use both.

  “Somebody screwed the pooch,” Sam whispered. “It’s a big screw up, s’all I know. That, and I’m to keep anyone from flying off outta here.”

  “It’s a goddamn airport with a service drive,” Jesse returned. “Who’s to stop Bobby or Fun Frankie from driving in thataway and taking off?”

  “Those gates won’t open,” Sam said. “The power’s been cut to them. Same with the hangar doors.”

  “My bird’s already out.”

  Sam shook his head. “It don’t matter. National Guard’s on the way here to make sure we stay grounded. Them’s the only ones what’ll be let in.”

  Sirens swelled then cut off.

  A wave of…awareness…blew through the crowd, like watching the wind blow through tall grass. Heads turned to look at the front doors. Shoulders leaned that way, bodies preparing to rise.