Reaper

by Buckhout, Craig

  Max and Beth split up to opposite sides of the street as they approached the Acura. When they got close, Max took a position of cover behind a metal power box and protected Beth during the last few yards.

  He saw Beth walk to the passenger side of the car, carbine up, stop, look, stare, and then turn away, bending over and throwing up Frank’s teriyaki lunch all over the sidewalk.

  Max crossed the street, eyes still all over the place, carbine at the low ready, heart pumping, knowing without knowing what he was about to confront, as he walked around the front end of the Acura. There on the sidewalk were two bodies, a male and a female in their early twenties, probably Hispanic. The male had been decapitated, his head resting in the gutter on its side with eyes wide open, staring, almost as if he was somehow still alive. As for the woman, apparently he and Beth had interrupted the suspects doing the same to her, because she was face down with her throat cut all the way through. The sidewalk and gutter were awash in blood and smelled of barf and feces. Max turned away and threw up too.

  Using his handheld, Max notified Communications of the new information and was informed that one patrol unit was on the way from the downtown area and another from the northeast section of town, ETA thirty minutes.

  While they waited, Max set about changing the tire on the SUV, while Beth stood back and away, watching the street, not looking at the victims. Neither of them said anything for the longest time until eventually Beth offered, “Does this happen around here? I mean I’ve heard of it being done in the mid-East, and also along the border with Mexico by the gangs, but not here, not in San Jose. Why would they do that? They were already dead. What was the point?”

  Max thought back a few weeks to the speculation that the drug cartels were working with the Islamic terrorists. “There’s only one reason they’d do something like this; it’s a warning. They’re putting everyone on notice as to who’s running the streets.”

  Beth shook her head. “Is this what it’s coming to? Is this gonna be our life from now on?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  Max opened the door to the communications room, stepped in and asked, “So what’s up? You got something?”

  Heidi, who was standing next to Seth with one hand resting on the back of his chair, the other on the counter supporting his laptop said, “Well, we’re not exactly sure. Something’s happening.”

  Max closed the door and stepped closer, looking over Seth’s other shoulder.

  Seth turned his head toward him. “Calhoun sent an email a few minutes ago to who we think is his wife. Basically, he told her to get the kids, pack up all the food in the house, and drive straight to the cabin.” Seth looked back at his screen. “He wrote, ‘I’m not at liberty to say more than that right now. Trust me on this. I’ll call you tomorrow if I can and explain more.’ He also said, let’s see here,” Seth searched the text with his finger, “not to tell anyone where she’s going or why. And here’s the scary part, ‘if you have to stop for gas, wait until no one is around the pumps, put on rubber gloves before you touch anything, and then get rid of them before you get back in the car.’”

  Max frowned and pressed his lips together. “Hmm.”

  The door opened and Will stepped inside. “Oh, there you are. Good. I guess they filled you in, huh?”

  Max said, “Yeah, just, and I can’t think of too many explanations other than something contagious; but what?

  “A bad flu maybe,” Heidi offered.

  “Maybe, but if so, it’s a really, really bad one.”

  “How about checking the Center for Disease Control website,” Will suggested. “They might have something posted.”

  Seth banged away on the keys and pulled up the site. The Outbreak section only showed outbreaks of salmonella in poultry dated two weeks before and for clover sprouts about a week before that.

  “You don’t put on gloves and hide out in a cabin because of a localized salmonella outbreak,” Max said.

  He picked up one of the handheld radios from its charger and asked the front gate to check their log to see if Dr. Patel had checked out.

  “Still here,” was the reply.

  He replaced the radio onto the charger, asked Heidi to call the infirmary to see if Dr. Patel was there, and then picked up the handheld again. He informed the front gate security not to let anyone leave or enter until he gave the go-ahead.

  Another idea came to mind. He got a hold of the front gate again and asked if there were any sworn who were currently working. The reply was a list of ten, one of whom was Justin Peavey. Using his cell phone, he looked up Peavey’s number in his contact list and called him. He had to leave a message.

  “She’s there,” Heidi said. “I asked her to come as soon as possible.”

  “I may have no choice but to bring her into our confidence regarding hacking Calhoun’s email. Maybe Myra, too.”

  “Do you think Calhoun figured out we were snooping him and is trying to trick us?” Seth said.

  “Any of his other emails seem suspicious in that regard?”

  “Kinda hard to tell, but I don’t think so.”

  “He has a point, though” Will said. “Maybe they’re on to us or trying to test us out. You know, if we start acting like there’s some virus going around, he’ll know we hacked him. After all, there wasn’t anything on the CDC website.”

  “Maybe, but that kind of news is something the feds might censor; at least for a while anyway.”

  Seth went back to his keyboard again.

  Max’s phone rang. It was Peavey.

  “Hey, Justin, can you swing by the federal courthouse and see if it looks like the DHS is up to anything?

  “You mean like gearing up for a raid or something?”

  “Yeah, something like that. In fact, when you get there, call me will you?”

  “Sure, I’ll head over in a few.”

  Dr. Patel knocked and entered the room, closing the door behind her.

  “Okay doc, we need your help with something. But first, I’m going to insist that you keep the part about how we know this information confidential; at least for now anyway. Can I have your word on this?”

  “Sure, I guess so. What is it?”

  “We’ve hacked the email account of one of the management people at the Department of Homeland Security. That’s the part we need to keep confidential, we’ll talk about the rest after you read the email. Seth, can you pull it up and let her read it?”

  Seth tapped out of the search he was doing and went back into Calhoun’s email, hit the print function, heard the printer come to life, and returned to his search.

  After reading the email through a couple of times, she said, “It sounds like he thinks there’s something seriously contagious going around.”

  “That’s what it sounds like to us, too. But there’s another possibility. He may be aware that we’ve hacked his computer and is trying to confirm it.”

  Dr. Patel nodded her head. “Okay, I guess that’s another explanation. But I suppose you called me here to see if I could find anything out.”

  “Exactly, only through unofficial channels if possible.”

  “Now?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Okay, let me see what I can get from the hospital.”

  Max’s phone rang. It was Peavey again.

  “So, anything going on?”

  “If there is, I sure can’t tell. They’re just hanging out at their checkpoints, doing their regular thing.”

  “What are they wearing?” Max asked.

  “Well, okay, maybe that’s a little weird. It’s not exactly cold out here and they’re wearing those things that cover their faces except for the eyes. You see the Mexican federal police wearing ‘em in news photos so they can’t be identified.”

  “How about their hands; any gloves?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact they’re wearing black gloves; all of them are. Why?”

  “Not sure yet. It may be nothing. You can take off an
ytime but keep your phone with you. I’ll call you back after we have a chance to talk here.”

  “Ooookay, a little weird, but I’ll do it.”

  “I’ll call you back.” As soon as he hung up, Max felt guilty for not telling Peavey what was going on.

  “They’re wearing masks and gloves,” Max told the others.

  “Still could be part of the trick,” Will said. “Maybe they figured we’d do something like that …check them out.”

  Seth spun around in his chair. “Okay, there’s something about a flu virus on a website called British Colombia Center for Disease Control. It simply says that there are reports from hospitals of an increased number of persons complaining about flu-like symptoms and lists the usual, wash your hands, stay indoors, get rest, and so forth. If you want, I can also see what some of my friends in other cities can find out,” Seth said.

  A Canadian report? The flu? I don’t know, Max thought. “What do you mean, your friends? How?”

  “Encrypted email. No way the government spies are gonna read it.”

  “Okay, go for it,” Max said. “See if you can find out what the DHS is wearing.”

  “May take a while,” Seth replied, once again pounding away on his keyboard.

  Dr. Patel hung up the phone. “Well that was interesting.”

  “Find something out?” Will asked.

  “I spoke with one of the physicians in the ER. He said there’s been a slight increase of persons complaining of fever, headaches, muscle pain, and in some cases, nausea. A few of them have been admitted for dehydration and because they’ve presented what they are calling fever blisters.”

  “Do they know what it is? A flu?” Max said.

  “That’s what they think it is. They’re following the standard protocol of notifying the proper people, Department of Health and so forth.”

  A chill ran through Max’s body. “Is it anywhere else in the country?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t mention anything.”

  “Hey, Seth, were you able to tell where Calhoun’s wife lived?”

  Seth didn’t even turn around. He just shook his head no and kept on typing.

  “Is there a way you can check and see if other hospitals are experiencing an increase of flu-like cases?” Max asked Dr. Patel.

  “I can try. I have some classmates I can call.”

  “Okay, do it.”

  “Uh, oh,” Seth said. “This isn’t about people getting sick, but this guy I know in San Diego says there’s some serious shit going on; his words not mine, Dad. He says that the National Guard is in a big old battle near the border with a group that is comprised mostly of drug cartel people who are declaring San Diego and all points south to be part of Mexico. A lot of people are getting out of the city because of it; freeways are packed.”

  “If there’s any doubt that the feds are censoring the news, this certainly proves it,” Will said. “There wasn’t’ a word about that on the morning news channels.”

  “What about the DHS?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  The problem now was, Max thought, do we start taking precautions? The presence of a highly contagious flu, or whatever, was more likely true than not true, and he had an obligation to protect the people inside the fence. With everyone living so close together, any strain of flu getting loose here would be a nightmare. Some would leave. Others, if they stayed and got sick, would present some difficulty in terms of care. And a bunch of sick cops wouldn’t be going to work. Then there was the question of what precautions could he take? There might be people here who already had it.

  Dr. Patel, who was talking on her phone, asked the person she was speaking with to hold on, and took a waiting call. After a couple of minutes she disconnected with the new caller and went back to the one she had first been speaking to. “Okay, the main thing is can you find out if your hospital has been experiencing any increase in people with those symptoms.”

  Listening.

  “Oh, that would be great. Yeah, just call me back.”

  She hung up the phone and turned to Max and the others. “So one of those calls was from a friend in New York. She says they’ve also been receiving a slight to moderate increase in people complaining about flu-like symptoms. She also mentions blisters, but she doesn’t describe them as fever blisters. She says they’re more like blood blisters. One of their patients with these blisters is critical and as a precaution is in isolation. They don’t know what the virus is yet, but think it’s probably a new strain of the flu or maybe even measles.”

  “Okay, what can we do to keep it out of here?” Max asked.

  “Well, unfortunately, it may already be here. There’s usually an incubation period of a few days where people aren’t contagious, but it’s inside their bodies, replicating and getting stronger. Eventually, it presents itself, and that’s typically when someone becomes contagious. If it’s like most viruses, at first you might think you’ve just got a cold or maybe strained your muscles a little. At that point, because you don’t feel too bad, you’re still doing things, interacting with others, and of course at the same time infecting them.”

  “How long’s the incubation period?”

  “It’s slightly different for different viruses; as a general rule of thumb, seven to fourteen days. From a contagion standpoint, the longer the incubation period, the longer it is before you know you have a problem, especially when you don’t know what the virus is. If it’s highly contagious and misdiagnosed at first as something like the flu, infectious patients are sent home to self-treat. Because they aren’t that sick,” she made quote marks with her fingers, “they still go to the grocery store, the drug store, maybe their favorite restaurant, and so forth, so they’re infecting more people. Studies indicate that anywhere from ten to twenty people are infected by just one contagious patient not kept in isolation. So if you have, say, one hundred sick people, and each of them infects twenty others, and each of those, twenty more, and so on, if I’m doing my math right, you could have eight hundred thousand people infected within a month to a month and a half.”

  “Jesus.”

  “In theory.”

  “Okay, so we may have infected people living here. But we may not, too. Or we may have only one or two who have been exposed and haven’t passed it on yet. So the question is still, what do we do?”

  “Well, I’ll have to do some research, but it’s pretty basic. First off, most everyone here hasn’t been outside the gate in what, at least seven or eight days. There are probably even people who haven’t been outside the gate in two weeks. That’s a big help. Find out who those people are.

  If you want to do it right, you start by masking everyone and making sure they either wear disposable gloves or keep their hands away from their face. The masks help with that. Then you check everyone to see if they have any symptoms. If nobody is showing any symptoms, they’re probably not contagious even if they’ve been exposed. Now you can be reasonably sure those who haven’t been outside the gate in a couple of weeks are disease free. As a precaution, maybe they still continue to wear a mask for a few days, but they should be safe. So we put them in one part of the building.”

  “Next you turn your focus on those who’ve been outside the gate in the last two weeks. Maybe you break them down into different groups. Those who’ve been inside the gate, say for five days or less, those who’ve been inside for five to ten days, and those who’ve been inside for ten days to two weeks and isolate them in groups. All that means is they move into an area of the building where they’re kept apart from those not in their group. We check them every day for symptoms, twice a day even. As they reach that two-week mark, they are released to join the others who we think are disease free. For some it will only be a couple of days, for others it may be a full two weeks.”

  “Now,” she continued, “if someone shows any symptoms at all, they’re immediately isolated from all the others until we know if they’re infected with whatever this is. Anyone who has co
me in contact with them in an unprotected condition is also isolated. By isolation I mean they are sequestered under lock and key. Their meals are brought to them by people in protective gear; gloves and masks are enough in most cases; gowns, eye protection and so forth if the disease has a high fatality rate. Those helpers are decontaminated after they do whatever it is they do. If it turns out they’ve got it, we get them to a hospital. That’s probably the best way to do it if you want to do it right.”

  “Sounds intense.”

  “Intense is a good word for it, Max. The realities are that some people aren’t going to want to go into isolation or wear a mask and gloves. You can expect some may even lie to you and say they feel fine but they don’t. Others will sneak out of their group using the justification they feel fine, or it’s just a cold, or we’re making a big deal about nothing, so there’s no reason for them to follow the rules. You’re going to have to enforce it, maybe even expel those who don’t go along with the program. Families may want to stay together, too, even though there is only one of them who may be infected. It’s not going to be easy.”

  “Can you get enough masks and gloves? I’ve got a credit card we can use.”

  “As it turns out we have ‘em. In that shipment of medical supplies we received from the army, for some reason they included a whole big crate of masks, gloves, and gowns.

  Dr. Patel’s phone vibrated. When she disconnected, she looked shocked, even frightened. “That was another classmate. This one works in Boston. They are having the same exact thing going on there; high fever, headaches, body aches, and blood blisters. Only, they have a fatality. Death came five days after the patient was admitted. His symptoms progressed such that the blisters flattened out and turned the skin a deep purple underneath. Just prior to death, the patient actually purged dark blood from his nose, mouth, and rectum. They are in full isolation mode. Every person who came in contact with this patient is being isolated. This changes things. It’s not just a new strain of flu.”

  “Do we know anything about the patient?”

  “I guess not much other than he was in his early twenties, a student at MIT, and had an Iranian passport.”