Quarantined

by Joe McKinney

  “But why kill her, Dr. Cole? I don't understand. Why not just report what she was doing?”

  Cole didn't even bother to laugh at that.

  “No good,” he said. “WHO intended to suppress the evidence in order to keep the public from going mad. And the local organizations are too corrupt or mismanaged by fools to make good on my research.”

  “But you think Dr. Herrera will be able to do something with the information?”

  “I hope so. He's the only one I trust. And now he'll have a human victim to report. That should give him the ammunition he needs.”

  Cole suddenly seemed very frightening to me, talking about his own death like it was just a means to a higher end.

  “Tell me about killing Dr. Bradley,” Chunk said, putting him back on track.

  Cole just shook his head. “A small matter. Not like this,” he said, coughing and pointing at his chest.

  “Humor me,” Chunk said.

  “We argued,” Cole said. “Bradley and I. It got ugly. I was frustrated, so I went back to my van and got behind the wheel. That's when that policeman started yelling at me.” Cole nodded his head, in his mind back at that morning, seeing it all over again. “That smug bastard. He was yelling at me to leave. Saying he would arrest me if I didn't go. I got angry. He was maybe fifteen feet in front of the van. I put it in gear and stepped on the gas. I hit him with the front of the van and knocked him down. I think he hit his head on the curb.”

  “What happened then?” I said.

  “I was still so angry. I got out, took his hood and gas mask off, and started punching him in the face. I don't know how many times I hit him, but when I stopped he was dead.”

  “Bradley was there?” I said.

  He nodded. “I took that policeman's gun. Bradley was standing a little ways off, watching the whole thing, screaming like some bimbo in a horror movie. I walked over to her and shot her once.”

  “Where?” I said, meaning where on her body.

  “Here,” he said, and pointed to the correct part of his chest. “She knew I was going to shoot her at that point. She turned away from me, trying to run away.”

  “What about the two looters? How do they come into it?”

  Cole was still looking inward and back in time. He chuckled.

  “I thought of taking Bradley and the policeman to the morgue. From there, I thought there was a good chance they'd get lost in the system. I started with Bradley. I took off her clothes and dragged her back to my van.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You were behind her, your arms under her arms, her feet dragging through the dirt?”

  “That's right,” he said. He looked genuinely surprised that I knew that.

  “The bottoms of her feet were dirty,” I said. “She had a gray toe tag—an autopsy tag. They rinse down the bodies after an autopsy.”

  “Ah,” he said. He coughed, tried to smile. “That's good,” he said. “It's like Jimmy Stewart said in that movie Rope. There's no such thing as a perfect crime.”

  “That's right,” I said. I remembered the picture. Billy and I had watched it years earlier, the two of us on the couch with popcorn and beer, while Jimmy Stewart outsmarted two effeminate literati types. “All crime is by definition flawed.”

  He chuckled again. “I put her in the back of my van,” he said. “Then I went back for the policeman. But before I could strip him, those looters showed up. Usually they're scared of the van, because they have a vague idea of the work I do, but these two gave me trouble. They wanted the cop's gun. I gave them each a bullet instead.”

  “Why didn't you take them all to the morgue?” I said.

  “Too much time,” he said. “And besides, those looters are like fleas. There's never just one or two.”

  “So you put Wade in the passenger seat of the van, hid it in the garage, and stashed the bodies of the looters in the weeds?”

  He nodded.

  “And you took the hard drives from the computers inside the van?”

  “And the traps too. I didn't want WHO to have partial information. I wanted it to all go public at once. The equipment is in my van.”

  I nodded to Chunk, who got on the radio and called in the Crime Scene Unit to process the van and an EMS unit for Cole.

  “There's one part I don't understand, Dr. Cole,” I said.

  He looked at me with pained, yellow eyes.

  “How did you get Dr. Bradley's body onto the death wagon without anybody noticing?”

  He looked away. “I won't tell you that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I had help. Someone who's not involved otherwise.”

  I thought about that. I thought: I'm out of here tonight. What does it matter, other than to soothe my own curiosity?

  “What if I told you that part was off the record? Just between you and me.”

  He turned those yellow eyes on me again, and it was like he saw right through me, like he knew why I wanted to know, and why he could believe me.

  “A man named Isaac Hernandez,” he said, and I drew a sharp breath through my teeth. I could taste the rubber smell of the inside of the gas mask I was wearing.

  “He lost his entire family to H2N2,” Cole said. “I told him, if I found a cure for the other two strains, I would make sure his two remaining grandchildren got the first dose.”

  “You lied to him,” I said. “You're not working on the cure. Just proving the strains exist.”

  “True,” he said. “One more crime among many.”

  “Is that remorse I hear, Dr. Cole?”

  “If I were to feel remorse for anything I've done,” he said, “it would be for that, lying to him like that.”

  He let his head fall between his knees and the coughing overtook him once more.

  I stood up and looked around, at the trees swaying in the breeze and the birds flying overhead and the motes of light lancing down to the grass, and I felt sick to my stomach. So many lives wasted, and the living have all gone mad.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Chapter 25

  We left Cole where he was, sitting on the curb, neither of us wanting to go near him, even in our spacesuits.

  His symptoms were that terrifying.

  It took an hour for EMS to arrive. All that time we stood there, a short ways off, listening to him cough, watching him turn blue from the cyanosis, watching blood leak out from his nose, his eyes, even his ears. We stood there and watched that, a slow motion train wreck unfolding before our eyes.

  I had seen thousands of people die from the mother strain of H2N2. In the early days of the outbreak, when the hospitals were still trying to care for everybody who knocked on their door, the horror was still fresh. My nerves were still raw then. But that had been a long time ago. Or at least it felt like a long time ago. I hadn't felt that way since Chunk's grandmother died. After her, I turned off a switch somewhere in my soul.

  I believed that without really articulating it. I believed that until I saw Cole dying from Strain 2. He was going through the ravages of the disease so much faster than the folks who died of Strain 1. They took twenty-four hours or more to die, but Cole was being torn apart right in front of my eyes. All I could think of was that he was a single serving horror show, the best reason yet for wanting to leave San Antonio.

  At one point he looked up at me, eyes yellow as egg yolks, and said, “What do you see?”

  “What do you mean?” I said, trying to be cool, but still thinking he was terrifying, so willing to die such a horrible death. Put a turban on his head and I'd have believed him capable of blowing himself up in a nightclub in Tel Aviv, or driving a horseshit bomb of fertilizer and ammonia into a Federal building.

  “Me,” he said. “What do you see? Other than a pathetic old man.”

  “Are you asking me to say I understand why you did this? Why you killed four people?”

  The corners of his mouth slumped, like he was disappointed, like I hadn't measured up to
the image he had of me in his mind.

  “No,” he said, “I don't care what you think about what I did. Even if you could understand my reasons. I'm asking you what you see. What does this look like to you?”

  Cole ran his hands down his flanks, like he was modeling some kind of new fashion.

  I looked into his eyes and shook my head.

  “This is what's coming,” he said. “What you're looking at. Just a taste. Imagine this getting outside the walls.”

  He hung his head between his knees and stayed that way for a long time.

  “H2N2 scared the crap out of everybody because its numbers were off the charts. Sixty-five percent of the population infected. Eighteen percent mortality rates. That scared people. Eighteen percent. That's nothing compared to what's coming. Strain 2, we're looking at forty percent mortality rates. Add in Strain Three in the same population group, we're all goners.”

  “Is that a medical term?”

  “What? Goners?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fits, doesn't it?” He smiled at something, a memory maybe, and said, “I told Bradley that same thing the first time I saw her out here. She told me I was a doomsayer. That's when I told her we are all goners.”

  I studied him, looked deep into his yellow, sick eyes. He studied me back.

  “You're thinking about leaving, aren't you?”

  “I can't leave here,” I said. “You're under arrest. I'm required to maintain custody of you until you're brought before a magistrate.”

  He smiled a creepy, knowing smile. “I don't mean that. I mean you're thinking about leaving this.” He opened his arms wide to include everything around us. “I mean all of this.”

  “You mean, leave the city?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Can't be done.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “Can't be done.”

  Cole rattled me. Not much rattles me, but Cole was something else. He had my number.

  When Chunk came back from the car I asked him to watch Cole for a while.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I just need a moment.”

  I went back to the car, leaned against it, and listened to the silence. It amazed me the difference a few hours made. When we'd driven into the GZ earlier that morning, I was feeling like those streets were a retreat from the rage that kept the threat of riot right there in front of me, like a spring ready to explode. But now, after seeing Cole and the effects of Strain Two, I realized that there could never be any peace in this place, not in this city.

  I heard the beating of wings. A flock of birds had set down on a fence across the street, one house to the left of the house where I'd found Bradley's van.

  I watched that flock, and their black eyes stared back at me.

  A feeling came over me, a need to see Carmenita Jaramillo again. There was something I needed to ask her.

  I motioned to Chunk. He came over to me and said, “What's up?”

  “There's someone I need to talk to.” I motioned towards Carmenita's house. “Over there. You mind babysitting him for a few minutes?”

  Chunk looked at where I pointed, then back at me. He thought it was a bad idea. I could see it in his eyes.

  “I'll be okay,” I said.

  “You got your radio with you?”

  I nodded.

  “You holler first hint of trouble, you hear?”

  “Thanks, Chunk.”

  “For what?”

  “For knowing me well enough not to ask any questions.”

  I could tell he was frowning behind his gas mask. “Five minutes,” he said. “You're not back by then, I come looking for you.”

  “I'll be careful,” I said.

  I crossed the alley with its scrub brush growing wild and came up in Carmenita's backyard. A haze of dust hung about the yard.

  As I stepped onto the porch I heard a cooing sound. The plank boards of the sagging porch creaked beneath my feet. It must have echoed through the house, for there was a fierce, panicked rustling, and then a wall of Mexican doves took wing and rushed out the doorway and windows in front of me. For a moment, my world was a terror of flapping gray wings and yellow, glassy eyes and angry squawks. I threw my arms over my face and turned away, and when the last of the birds had gone, I stood there on the porch, breathing hard and in a state of shock.

  I didn't know what to do, and so I did nothing. I stood there, letting the silence wash back over me, until a weak, far away sounding voice called out my name.

  “Carmenita?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice coming from somewhere back in the shadows of the empty house. “Yes, yes. Come in, sweetie.”

  I put my hand on the doorjamb and peered inside, past the patches of sunlight on the warped, wooden floor and the hanging bouquets of dried herbs, to the ancient, mummy-skinned woman in the rocking chair in the far corner.

  “Come in, Lily. You're letting the air-conditioning out.”

  I felt like a penitent, and I didn't know why. I walked across the room, stood before her, her in her gray rags and tattered shawl draped over her shoulders and me in full biohazard containment gear, sounding like Darth Vader as I breathed, and then dropped to my knees.

  We were eye level now, but I sensed she saw much more than I did. Or at least saw what was there much more clearly.

  “You found something,” she said.

  “Yes. Thanks to you. We found the man responsible.”

  Her gentle smile never wavered.

  “How did you know?” I said, meaning the chocolate cake, not the crime we'd just solved. “How did you know what I needed?”

  “It's not magic. Far from it. What I do, it's read the things you tell me in your eyes.”

  “I don't understand that,” I said.

  “Some people are easy to read,” she said. “Especially honest people. You, you are easy to read.”

  I shook my head, still not understanding.

  “Sometimes you won't get an answer. Not one you like.”

  “Carmenita, I...” I didn't know how to finish what I'd started to say. The words stuck in my throat thick and hard as a walnut and wouldn't come loose.

  “You are still looking for something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something bigger than over there.” She waved a gnarled, yellowed hand in the direction of her backyard.

  “Yes.”

  “Why haven't you made your mind up yet?” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know what I'm asking you. That, over there, there was a time when that was all you wanted. When that was enough. But now finding answers to questions like that doesn't satisfy you. Now there's something bigger in front of you, and you can't make up your mind about it.”

  I coughed a little, choking back a tear that came without my knowing it. Hadn't I made up my mind? I knew what was really important. My family. They mattered more to me than my career, my reputation, even my oath. Why then the confusion? Why the nagging self-doubt?

  “You ask hard questions of yourself,” Carmenita said. “The questions are harder than they need to be.”

  “What questions do I ask?” I was trying to be tough now, defensive for no reason. Hadn't I come to her for a reading?

  “You are leaving.”

  The words came out of her quietly, but they rolled over me like a sand storm.

  “How did you know?” I asked. “Is it written over my head or something?”

  “Hard decisions are like shouts into a canyon,” Carmenita said. “They leave echoes behind. What troubles you is not how hard the choice is, but how easy it is. You wonder if you are right when the decision to do something so big is so easy to make.”

  I hung my head a little. “Yes,” I said.

  “You wonder why you're conscience isn't at ease.”

  “Yes.”

  She was silent for so long that I raised my eyes to hers. Her black eyes sparkled like obsidian in the sunlight.

&nbs
p; “This is a wasteland,” she said. “This is no place for a child. Leave here, and if you ever doubt that you have done the right thing, look into your child's eyes and be at peace.”

  My mouth opened, but I didn't speak. I couldn't.

  “Go,” she said. “They are calling you.”

  I rose to my feet, still looking into her eyes, and from somewhere out in the backyard, heard Chunk yelling my name.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Chapter 26

  Cole died in the ambulance.

  We had his body taken to Arsenal, with a hold placed on it for Dr. Herrera. Chunk and I then went looking for Dr. Herrera himself, the idea being that we would tell him personally what to expect. But that never happened. We were met on the main floor of the morgue by Lt. Treanor and Dr. Laurent. Both, it seemed, already knew about Cole.

  “You did good work,” said Treanor, shaking our hands. All of us wore gloves. “I understand you got a full confession?”

  “That's right,” I said.

  There were two SWAT officers standing a short distance away, both of them armed with MP5s, nasty little machine guns. There was something about the way they were watching our conversation with Treanor that made me think something was very wrong.

  “You'll send me a copy of the Prosecution Guide, I trust?” Treanor said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Laurent stood a short distance behind Treanor, her eyes little green pinpoints of hate in her fat, round face.

  “Lieutenant,” she said. The impatience in her voice was palpable.

  He glanced over his shoulder at her without turning all the way around, looked back at us, and sighed.

  “Do you have the property from the crime scene?” he said. “The hard drives and Dr. Bradley's journal?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “They're out in the trunk of our car.”

  He nodded. Then he turned to one of the SWAT officers and waved him over.

  I watched the officer approach.