The Julian Year

by Gregory Lamberson

  Blake made a circular motion, twisting the trocar so that it annihilated his patient’s eye. Then he jerked the instrument free and drove it into her other eye.

  “No!” Without pausing to consider her options, Jessie threw herself over Blake’s back, wrapping her arms around his chest and pinning his arms. She aimed her weight at the floor, pulling him off the patient.

  Blake roared, moving from side to side, tossing Jessie about like a rag doll. He swept his arm behind him, trying to stab her with the trocar.

  Brian stood frozen on the other side of the operating table.

  “Gas him!” Jessie said.

  Brian looked down at the patient’s bloody face with a horrified expression.

  “Do it, goddamn it!”

  Brian ripped the mask off the patient and ran around the table. Blake uttered a string of guttural sounds and lunged at the anesthesiologist, who feinted left and right. Blake jumped back, slamming Jessie’s back against the opposite wall, and she released her hold on him. Then Blake plunged the trocar into Brian’s chest.

  Brian lowered his eyes and watched his chest discharge a fountain of blood. He dropped the mask and sank to his knees, his eyes rolled in their sockets, and he lost consciousness.

  Blake turned to Jessie and pulled the surgical mask off his face. Even though the man standing before her resembled her lover, she did not know him.

  She leapt past him, targeting the instrument tray, but Blake jerked it toward him. She landed across the patient, their faces only inches apart, and she stared into the young woman’s violated eye sockets. Pinkish jelly flowed from the fleshy pits. Screaming, Jessie pushed herself off the young woman just as Blake buried a scalpel between the unfortunate woman’s breasts.

  Jessie searched the OR for another instrument she could use for a weapon, but they were all on the other side of Blake, so she crouched on the floor and pulled the trocar out of Brian’s chest, which produced a steady stream of crimson.

  Blake spun around with the bloody scalpel in one hand, but Jessie no longer stood where she had been. When he turned back, she drove the trocar into his chest with all her strength. He didn’t seem to care. Instead, he scrambled toward her and she backed up. One foot slipped in Brian’s blood on the floor, and she crashed onto her back. Blake dropped on top of her and flailed at her with the scalpel. She raised her arms in a defensive position, and he sliced them in a manner that would cause any qualified surgeon to shake his head in disapproval. She screamed but no one came to her rescue.

  Even though it meant leaving her face vulnerable, she reached for the trocar and pulled it out of Blake’s chest. He slashed at her face, and she felt her flesh open in a diagonal line below her right eye. Ignoring the pain, she drove the trocar up Blake’s left nostril into his septum. His body stiffened, and she set both hands on the trocar, driving it deeper inside his head, pushing him off her onto the floor.

  Maintaining her grip on the instrument, her hands covered with a mixture of blood and mucus, she set her left hand beneath his jaw for leverage and drove the trocar as deep into his skull as possible.

  Five

  Sitting at his desk in the 19th Precinct, Detective Larry Palmer glanced at the bulky clock mounted on the wall—12:54 a.m. He looked at Anibal Rivera, his partner. Under normal circumstances, they would be preparing to clock out. But there was nothing normal about this night: uniformed POs, supervisory officers, and clerks crisscrossed the squad room floor in a flurry of activity while talking heads on the wall-mounted TV conveyed grim news.

  “What do you think?” Larry said.

  “I don’t think we’re getting out of here,” Anibal said.

  “I got plans. I sure as hell don’t want to spend my New Year’s with you.”

  “You’re just playing hard to get. Come on. It’s a new beginning. Let your guard down.”

  Larry rose in a nonchalant manner. “Watch and learn.”

  Anibal sat back in his wooden chair and folded his arms across his chest.

  Larry took his coat off the back of his chair, flung it over one shoulder, and strode toward the exit.

  “Palmer!”

  Larry stopped.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  Sighing, Larry turned and faced Lieutenant Alex Lugones.

  Lugones, a thin man with short graying hair, closed in for the kill. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in crisis mode.”

  “I’ve got plans.”

  Lugones smiled. “Tell him your plans have changed. Rivera’s your new date.”

  Larry ignored the innuendo as always. “How long?”

  “The way things are going? All night.”

  “What do you want us to do?”

  Lugones pointed across the squad room at two POs who sat at opposite desks, typing up statements. “Morelli and Konigsberg brought in a murder suspect. You two interview him.”

  “Why can’t Morelli and Konigsberg interview him?”

  “For one thing, they’re not crackerjack detectives like you and Rivera. For another, after the perp allegedly killed his first vic, got his hands on Konigsberg’s weapon, and killed his neighbor, she had to Tase him. I don’t think he’s going to be very cooperative with her after that.”

  “I’ll Tase him too if it’ll save my New Year’s. Who else did he off?”

  Lugones pressed a preliminary report into his hands. “You know how to read, don’t you?”

  Larry returned to his desk and sagged into his seat.

  Rivera smiled. “Impressive. What do you do for an encore?”

  Larry held up the report. “I just landed us a primo homicide case. We’re going to get famous for this one.”

  “Yeah? What did the perp do?”

  Larry tossed the report onto his partner’s desk. “You can read, can’t you?”

  Standing beside Larry outside the interview room’s two-way mirror, Anibal gazed at the perp inside: Wilhelm Keiper. The man sat with his wrists and ankles shackled to a chair bolted to the floor, which reminded Anibal of a scene from The Bride of Frankenstein with Boris Karloff as the jailed creature. Keiper stared straight at them.

  “He doesn’t look like much,” Anibal said. “He knows we’re watching him.”

  Larry shook his head. “He thinks we’re watching him. He doesn’t know shit.”

  “You want to be good or bad?”

  “I’m always good, even when I’m bad.”

  “I want to have a plan going in there so we can get home.”

  “Let’s just play it by ear,” Larry said.

  “We aren’t actors and this isn’t improv class.”

  Larry smiled, upturning his pencil-thin mustache. “That’s where you’re wrong, amigo. Watch and learn.”

  Larry entered the interview room first, and Anibal closed the door behind them. The perp sat with his back to them, and they circled him and stood facing him from the other side of the metal table.

  Keiper narrowed his eyes and sneered.

  Jesus, Larry thought. The perp’s eyes looked worse than stone cold—they looked evil. Seeing them caused his knees to weaken. “We hear you killed a man. Happy New Year.”

  Keiper just smiled.

  “Did I say something funny?”

  The suspect raised his eyebrows.

  “Mr. Keiper, we’re not here to judge you,” Anibal said. “We just want to understand what went down. Can you tell us what happened to your girlfriend and to your neighbor?”

  Keiper jerked his hands forward, rattling his chains, the muscles in his neck bulging as he bared his teeth.

  Larry and Anibal glanced at each other.

  Larry pulled out a chair and sat. “We have better things to do than sit here playing games with you. Why don’t you just answer a few simple questions? Then we can go home, you can go to your cell, and none of us will have to look at each other again.”

  Keiper glanced at Anibal, then nodded at the empty seat beside Larry.

  Anibal sat beside his partner.
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  Keiper said.

  “What language is that? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before.”

  “It sounds Martian to me,” Anibal said.

  Larry smiled. “How about that? Are you a Martian?”

  Keiper’s eyes widened, and his tongue flicked out of his mouth.

  “I think he’s talking about your mother,” Anibal said in a slow, patronizing tone.

  Larry made a show of bolting from his chair and cocking one fist. “Is that right? Are you talking about my mother?”

  On cue, Anibal restrained him.

  Larry raised both hands. “I’m cool. I’m cool.”

  Keiper grinned and looked from Anibal to Larry as if waiting for them to give him a treat. Then he slammed his face down on the table so hard that the resulting bang sounded like a gunshot.

  Larry gaped as the man raised his head, revealing a ruptured bulge where his nose had been, blood gushing over his mouth and chin. Keiper slammed his face on the table again, and when he lifted his head his nose had been completely flattened. Air bubbles formed in the flowing blood and he coughed. After the third self-inflicted blow, his face became a crimson mess.

  “Jesus, he’s going to kill himself!” Anibal ran around the blood-slicked table and put a choke hold on Keiper, preventing the chained man from banging his head on the table a fourth time.

  Larry faced the two-way mirror and the camera behind it. “We didn’t do anything.” He pointed at Keiper. “He did it all himself.”

  Keiper laughed at Larry, his teeth dark with blood.

  “You want to get some help?” Anibal said.

  Larry walked over to the door and opened it. “Hey, we need a hand in here!”

  Captain Lou Perry slammed his phone down in its cradle. “How the hell are we supposed to loan men to other precincts? We don’t have enough to deal with our own mess.”

  Lugones nodded at the TV in the squad room. “Another building’s on fire, this one on East Seventieth.”

  Perry looked out his dirty window at the city outside. Fire engines and police cruisers raced in all directions. In twenty years on the job, he had never witnessed such mayhem. “It’s getting worse instead of better.”

  “We’ve recalled forty uniforms who went home earlier,” Lugones said. “I called Emergency Services to transfer Konigsberg’s perp to Psychiatric, but there’s no way they can get through until morning, so we’ll have to keep him here tonight.”

  “Keep him under close observation.” Like we can spare anyone to watch him.

  “What do you want me to do with Konigsberg and Morelli?”

  “We can’t bench them. There’s too much going on. I need them on the street.”

  “So I’ll tell them they’re good to go?”

  “Yeah, get them back in their unit. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be investigations later on. Tell Morelli I don’t want any more bodies disappearing.”

  “Understood.”

  As Lugones exited the office the phone rang again, but Perry ignored it.

  Hell in a handbasket, he thought. Maybe it really was time to retire after his birthday in a couple of months.

  Rachel felt cold air against her cheeks as she and Morelli trotted down the concrete steps leading from the precinct house to the sidewalk. The air reeked of smoke and sirens rose on the wind: police cruisers, fire engines, ambulances. Across the street, a man with frizzy black hair sprinted down the sidewalk.

  “Are you okay to do this?” Morelli said.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Because you almost got killed with your own gun two and a half hours ago.”

  They walked to the parking lot at the corner.

  “And you watched a man dive into the East River. Are you okay to go back out?”

  “I don’t have much choice, but you could buy yourself some time if you wanted.”

  She stopped in midstep. “Thanks but I’m fine. Rome is burning. Let’s get out there.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  As they resumed walking, a series of gunshots rang out in the distance, and they crouched behind a cruiser and drew their Glocks.

  “Too far away,” Morelli said.

  Rising, Rachel holstered her weapon. “Let’s just get to the car.”

  They entered the lot and got into the same vehicle they had driven earlier. Morelli sat behind the wheel.

  Rachel pressed the button on her hand radio. “This is unit sixteen, back on the road.”

  “Copy that, unit sixteen,” the dispatcher said. “We have a 10-34 reported at 222 East Sixty-third Street.”

  That didn’t take long. “Ten-four.”

  Six

  Weizak awoke to the sound of his cell phone’s ring tone. The dull throb in his brain and sluggish feeling in his limbs meant that he had drunk too much. Sitting up on his futon, he glanced around his apartment. He was alone.

  In the fog of his hangover, he couldn’t remember the face of the woman who had come home with him, but either his memory or his imagination provided him with mental images of a night comprised of sexual acrobatics. If he didn’t have a good time, at least he could pretend he did.

  Sliding off the futon and shivering in the cold, he picked up his pants from the floor and removed his phone from a pocket. The display showed his work number and that it was 6:30 a.m., half an hour before he had planned to get up. As he pressed the phone to his ear, he didn’t see his Rangers hockey shirt anywhere.

  Son of a bitch.

  He had known the night was too good to be true. Cathy—if that really was her name—had spotted the shirt and moved in for the kill. What a sucker he’d been. And now he remembered her face.

  “Weizak,” he said into the phone.

  “It’s Ruth. I can’t believe I got through to you; the circuits have been jammed. How about coming in an hour early to help me, and I’ll stay an hour late to help you?”

  Ruth Schneider worked the night shift in the obituaries department at the Daily Post. She served as his counterpart, along with Jerry Byrne, who worked the evening shift.

  “Do I have time for breakfast?”

  “I guess you haven’t heard: the city’s gone haywire. Rosen says for you to get your ass in here right now.”

  Joe Rosen worked as the night-shift editor. It wasn’t often that he sullied his hands with a department as lowly as the Obit Squad.

  “What’s going on?” At that moment he realized sirens had been wailing outside since the phone had awakened him. He had heard them on and off throughout the night.

  “How do one thousand homicides and counting grab you?” His body tensed. “What?”

  “We’re looking at another three hundred perp suicides, four hundred police-related shootings, and three hundred other suspect deaths under investigation.”

  “Terrorists?”

  “Honey, except for a plane crash on Queens Boulevard and some arson casualties, these are unrelated homicides. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said the city’s gone nuts. Get over here. And please be careful. The madness is spreading like wildfire.”

  Weizak hung up. Two thousand people. How was such a thing possible? Thank God he had no family in the city. His mother lived upstate, and his brother, whom he hadn’t spoken to in years, lived in Florida. He hurried into the bathroom to shower.

  Weizak turned on the TV and took the time to shave, because if things were as crazy as Ruth had described, he might be stuck at the paper for days. Ruth had told him what it had been like after 9/11. Nearly three thousand people had died in those attacks.

  But those murders were coordinated by a single enemy force—

  “Good morning,” the female news anchor on Manhattan Minute News said. “Mayor Baldwin has declared a state of emergency in all five boroughs this morning after a record number of inexplicable homicides following the start of the New Year. The death toll has been called too high to calculate at this time. Mayor Baldwin and Police Commissioner Kelsey urge citizens to stay home today and sa
y that people who must travel to work should do so in groups.”

  There you have it, Weizak thought. Once it’s on TV, it’s gospel.

  He stuffed some clothes, toiletries, and most of the food from his refrigerator into an army backpack, pulled on his red ski jacket, and headed out the door. He heard the sounds of televisions coming through the doors on each floor. A lot of his neighbors were awake early for a Saturday, let alone on New Year’s Day.

  When he opened the front door to his building, he gasped. A car had been overturned in the street, and another had caught fire. Dozens of people ran in scattered directions. A man lay facedown on the sidewalk across the street, and blood pooled around his head, which appeared to have been caved in. Smoke lingered in the air, and so many sirens sounded that he couldn’t pinpoint their direction. The sun had not yet risen.

  “Help!”

  Weizak raised his gaze to the rooftop of a building across the street.

  A black woman in her early twenties stood up there, wild eyed. “Mister, help me!” She looked over her shoulder, then looked back. “He’s going to kill me! Please help me!”

  Then she disappeared, replaced by a bulky young man in baggy clothing. He too disappeared.

  Weizak took out his iPhone and called 911.

  “All circuits are busy. Please try your call again. All circuits are busy . . .”

  Sliding his phone back into his pocket, Weizak debated whether to try to help the woman, continue on his way to work, or go back inside and lock his door.

  Taking a deep breath, he crossed the street. He had no trouble getting into the building’s vestibule, but getting beyond that point posed a challenge. Pressing all the buttons on the door buzzer directory, he waited for someone to answer.

  “Yes?” an older sounding woman said.

  “I live across the street. A woman on your roof’s in trouble. I’d like to help her.”