“Whoa,” Landon said. “You helped him?”
“I think I did.”
Suddenly, surprising Ava again, Cassie let out an excited, not angry, shriek as she looked at her phone.
“What? What is it?” Ava asked.
“Oh my God, he chirped about you! Look.” Cassie held up her phone. “He mentioned you on his Chirp account. You are gonna get so many followers.”
Ava was stunned. Absolutely stunned. In the years she had been with the kids, never had she experienced them all being nice and happy with her.
She reached out to make a difference in the life of a stranger who sulked by a garbage dumpster and instead, he made a difference in her life.
Even if it was only temporary, Ava was going to bask in the first true feeling of family she had with the kids.
No fights. No cops pounding at the door, or juvenile delinquent tactics. Just laughter and smiles. The world could fall apart around Ava, and at that moment, she wouldn’t care. Nothing could happen that would take the moment away.
<><><><>
If Joel had the ability to record a saying and press a button to repeat it all day, that saying would be, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
First the triple shot of vodka, early bird special Bloody Mary for the woman who didn’t drink. Then Rayne crying by the garbage dumpster and his attendance at the seminar. Not to mention the loud singing of a new rendition of America the Beautiful.
All that was topped off, just after the seminar, when a woman named Felicia introduced herself to Joel as the road rules manager for JJ Wylde.
Joel responded to that with a ‘hmm.’
In her forties, the attractive and olive complexioned woman tucked one side of her short bobbed hair behind her ear and wore a business skirt suit. She carried her attitude more blatantly than she carried her clipboard.
“Who uses a clipboard?” Joel asked. “I can’t recall the last time I saw someone with a clipboard.”
“Mr. Carson, please.”
“I’m joking.”
“I don’t joke.”
“Oh, then you need to meet Walter.”
“Who?” she asked.
“Head of hotel security.”
“Oh, then I will.” She made a marking on the clipboard. “Why are two of your floors still available for guests?”
“Because you booked three floors and that leaves two.”
“These floors need to be cleared.”
Joel laughed. “There was nothing about that in the agreement. I want a full hotel.”
“Well, JJ will pay for the un-booked rooms. We need them empty.”
“All right. However, there’s no discount rate here on them. I want what I would get if I booked them. What’s the big deal, anyhow?”
“Groupies. Crazed fans. People that want him dead.”
“Like a teenager would pay that much a night.”
“When I found out you had rooms available, I instructed your staff to turn people away.”
“You can’t instruct my staff, they’re my staff. And I’m pretty positive we don’t have people beating down the doors for the last fifty rooms.”
“Have you looked outside?”
Joel was going to answer, but instead, because they were so close to the lobby, decided to take a peek.
He didn’t even need to get to the front doors to hear the commotion. “What the hell?”
“They’re waiting for JJ.”
Joel picked up his radio. “Walter, where are you?”
“Trying to disperse the crowd. The police won’t send any more cars over. They said to deal with it.”
Joel heaved out a breath.
“It will be like this all weekend.”
“Not if I have anything to do with it.” Joe headed to the doors and stepped out. The moment he did a loud eruption of screams rang out.
‘Good God,’ He thought. ‘I know I don’t look like JJ Wylde.’
They weren’t near the doors or on the driveway, they had been moved to the grass part. Joel headed their way.
“May I ask what you’re doing?” Felicia questioned.
“Getting rid of them.”
“It can’t be done.”
“Watch me.” Joe walked to the line of girls blocked by a simple police tape.
“Who are you?” One yelled out. “Do you know JJ?”
“I’m the hotel manager.”
The girls screamed. Joel blocked off one ear. “Yeah, I do.”
Another round of screams.
“Go on, Mr. Arrogant,” said Felicia. “Get rid of them.”
More than one person yelled out, ‘When does he arrive?’
Joel visually scanned the girls. He spotted one, about sixteen, crying as she held a homemade sign professing her love. She jumped up and down with excitement and Joel approached her.
“You with a group of friends?” Joel asked.
Excitedly, and laced with a scream the girl replied. “Yes. We love JJ.”
“How long will you wait?”
“Forever.”
“You seem like nice girls,” Joel said.
“We are.”
“That’s what I thought. So …” Joel leaned to her and whispered in her ear.
Her eyes widened, Joel stepped back. The young girl turned to her friends and within seconds, they were breaking the confines of the two hundred plus crowd to get away.
“What did you say?” Felicia asked.
“Watch. It will be a domino effect.” Joe said.
And it was.
It started in the back of the crowd, they started to leave in a rush. The wave of people turning and running, rippled toward the front until everyone was on their way out.
“How … how did you do that?”
“I told her she looked like my niece and I hated to see her waste her time. JJ Wylde and crew are actually staying at the Marriott, ten miles away.”
“Amazing.”
“Yep,” Joel said with an exhale. “And that ...is why they call me Mr. Arrogant.”
He went back inside, wanting to stay clear of Felicia and the JJ Wylde situation until he absolutely had to be involved. After all, it was going to take over his life. He had to stay in the hotel the entire time the JJ crew was there.
By the time he made it to his office to take a breather, Walter arrived.
“Why’d you hire him?” Walter asked as he stepped into Joel’s office.
“Have a seat.” Joel held out his hand. “Who are we talking about?”
“Raymond.”
“Who?”
“Raymond. His middle name is my name. I don’t like that.” Walter sat down.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Raymond Nee.”
“Oh.” Joel sat back. “Rayne. Yeah. He’s just temporary.”
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“He doesn’t need to know what he’s doing, he just has to look mean.” Joel reached for his phone when it rang. When he saw it was from his wife, he cringed, then answered. “Yes, Dear. No. I won’t be home. I told you I am staying all weekend. No, you can’t come up. No. You can’t … fine. Come to the hotel. Stay.” He hung up. “Oh my God.” He rubbed his temples.
“Your wife is joining you?”
“Yes. Maybe I can talk her into making that kid wear pants that fit.”
“Oh, he better not be showing his drawers here in our hotel. We have a strict no walking around in your underwear policy.”
“Please enforce that.”
“I will.”
There was a knock on his door, then Melissa, the food and beverage manager poked her head in. “Hey, Joel. Felicia just told me that JJ and his crew only drink fresh squeezed orange juice. I don’t think we have enough oranges. Should I run down to the store?”
“No. Joel snapped. “You aren’t running to the store. He’ll drink what we have or he doesn’t drink.”
“Okay, just checking.” Melissa star
ted to close the door and stopped. “Oh, by the way, thanks for hiring Rayne.” She giggled like a teenager. “He’s so hot.”
The door closed.
Joel’s head lowered to the desk and gently he tapped his forehead against the surface a few times.
“Ben Gay won’t help that kind of headache,” Walter said.
Joel lifted his head an inch and peered up at Walter.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s only Wednesday.” Joel sat up. “Can this week possibly get any worse?”
<><><><>
CDC Headquarters
Atlanta, GA
The images on the screen in the meeting room were grainy. Amita supposed they were probably grainy to begin with, and when enlarged to fit the flat screen, they became even more distorted.
They were simple surveillance videos of JFK airport, with no sound. But she didn’t need sound to decipher what was happening
It was one of the visual aids for those attending the emergency meeting that thankfully was coming to a close. Despite the fact that it was a packed room, her eyes went to her notes and to the screen while her mind screamed, ‘where did we go wrong?’
Taiwan was unofficially closing its borders.
The Plaza Hotel in Paris was filled to capacity with ill. Almost all the original one hundred quarantined were symptomatic.
Heathrow started showing virus effects as well.
Amita looked at the footage. She watched a man on the video cough and sit down.
She was glad Randall had been moved there. He would be a liaison for the WHO in the United States working in what would be a cross agency effort to contain the virus.
More than anything, Amita wanted to cry out once more that her place was in the lab or with patients, not playing virus P.I., but she knew that would be futile. She and Randall were, without a doubt, the chase and catch people.
“Incubation period is three to four days,” Randall said. “Then there are four stages once they became symptomatic. Stage one is the onset of typical flu like symptoms. Stage two is full blown symptoms resembling that of pneumonia. Stage three is brain hemorrhage and the final stage is death. All of which take place in an unbelievable time frame of eighteen to twenty four hours.”
“Has it mutated more?” A man in a dark suit asked. He was from the government, a Senator or something, Amita didn’t know his name, she just called him the government man.
“Not since Taiwan. So we’re hopeful. It has all the same markers though. This…this virus … is brilliant. It is Mother Nature’s masterpiece of population control. It's just amazing. It was as if nature designed it to clean house and waited until now to release it.”
“Can you curb your enthusiasm some?” Government man asked.
“My apologies but I am just blown away by this. We have teams working on a cure. Even outside agencies are working around the clock. There are positive aspects. One, it looks as if it has an eighty percent communicability rate. This is judged by our Paris Hotel and Heathrow first contact victims.”
“That’s positive?”
“Could be a hundred percent, so you see it’s vital,” Randall spoke, “each person we quarantine, remembers every single thing they did since exposure. From stopping for gas to going to the store. We get everyone we can.”
“And how does this play out with your ‘sealing’ procedure?”
“Less symptoms, less contagious. If we get them while they are symptom free, they infect less people. Eventually we’re gonna find the end of the line.”
“And if we don’t find the end of the line or we miss one of these gas station stops, what then?”
“Then …” Randall exhaled. “We pray it burns itself out, because if we miss something or it gets even more ahead of us, then Nature will win this one.”
Chapter 5
Thursday, May 7
Atlanta, GA
When Amita cuddled with her husband, not long after midnight, she told him two days’ time would let them know if they had to prepare for Uncle Bruno’s birthday. She dozed off and didn’t expect her phone to ring less than three hours later, but it did.
It was Randall, and he sounded distraught, “We lost control.”
“What?” Amita sat up. “What happened in three hours?”
“Our loose end,” he said. “I’m on my way to your house. Pack a bag. I’ll be there in twenty.”
Pack a bag?
Where was she going?
Randall’s big thing was always finding the end of the line. Find it, contain it, stop it.
That was if the veins of the monster hadn’t already moved in so many different directions they could never technically find an end.
Amita was barely dressed when he arrived at her home. Her head spun trying to take it all in. “Where am I going?”
“On site. To work on this. Ground zero just expanded. This is about to explode and we need to be there.”
“How?” She asked. “How did it happen so fast?”
“It didn’t happen fast. It just happened under our radar. This is big. It may be to the point where we’re not just shutting down buildings, but cities in the U.S,” Randall said. “Like you, I was watching that surveillance footage of JFK. I was hoping that some of those who looked ill were just coincidences.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Exactly. Seventy-nine symptomatic people. But this one …” he produced a still photo, “bothered me. Look at her. What is her uniform?”
“Samson Budget Rental Car.”
Randall then pulled forth a map. “Samson is on the other end of the airport. This woman is confirmed stage one. Which means she had to be a first contact victim from a carrier from Flight 7430.”
“We ran cross checks on all those rental places. No one from flight 7430 rented from that place.”
“So we thought.” Randall held up a finger then slid a map, pointing to each location he described. “An emergency room doctor in Wilkes-Barre PA reports a case of BV-1....or so he believes. Not an hour later, at State College, we get another report. An hour later … three ill in Erie, PA. They were all hotel workers.”
“All a direct route from New York.”
“None of these are confirmed through testing. But … our missing passenger wasn’t just a traveler. She was a traveling bio bomb.”
“But there was no car rental from that missing passenger.”
“Ah...but there was. Here’s the connection. There were four car rentals in that immediate time frame after Flight 7430 landed. We made an error. One of the cars was rented to Semora Love. Semora drove to Erie PA., and she did a seminar for fifty or so people.”
“Semora isn’t our missing passenger.”
“Yeah, she is. I did an internet search. It’s an alias for Caroline Grimly.”
Amita’s hands went to her face. “She drove across the state and stayed at a hotel, doing a conference for fifty people.”
“But we believe we know where she is. Unfortunately, she did another seminar yesterday.”
“This is a nightmare.”
“Oh, yeah, it is,” Randall said. “Because our little woman who innocently trots about trying to save the world, may have started the end of the world with her first cough.”
<><><><>
Ambassador Suites
Independence OH
It wasn’t even five in the morning and Joel wondered why he was even awake. The arrival of JJ Wylde and crew was nothing short of pandemonium, with JJ throwing a hissy fit because he didn’t have screaming fans outside.
“Someone get him a chamomile tea. Hurry!” Some assistant shouted out. “There’s no chamomile? My God, what kind of place is this?”
Thankfully, Bianca always had her Chamomile bags and Joel snatched one up for the prima-donna singer. Joel’s stress headache started and it ended with him sleeping on the couch in the suite because Bianca couldn’t take the ointment smell.
All well and fine, until he got a call from Walter.
>
There was a problem in the kitchen.
“Problem in the kitchen at 4:40 am?” Joel asked. “I’ll be right down.”
Joel tossed on a tee shirt and pair of jeans and headed down. Walter was standing outside the kitchen door. Clearly Joel could hear banging.
“Do we have kitchen staff on this early?” Joel asked.
“They come in at five. This isn’t the kitchen staff.”
“Who then?” Joel asked.
“One guess.”
“Our little pop star?”
“You got it.”
“Have you tried to handle this?” Joel asked.
“Oh, yeah, he got smart with me and before I lost my temper I called you.”
“Swell. Okay, stay here, call Rayne. I’ll handle it.” Joel pushed open the swinging doors and followed the sound of banging.
Sure enough, wearing shorts that were too big and rested just below his buttocks, exposing his boxer shorts, was the young JJ Wylde. He was moving pots and pans, opening cabinets.
“Don’t you sleep?” Joel asked.
“Sleeps done.” JJ turned around. His blonde hair was tucked under a backwards baseball cap. “Yo, you people don’t have Fruity Mashers? JJ been looking everywhere.”
“Fruity mashers?” Joel asked.
“Yo, yeah, it’s a breakfast cereal. JJ put it on his list.”
“Well we don’t have it. And I’d appreciate if you and your …” Joel waved his hand around and pointed to the average height, yet, heavily muscled man behind JJ, “henchman would leave my kitchen.”
He swayed his head as if he had a muscle disorder. “Well, dog, looks like you gonna have to go and get some. JJ Wylde needs his Fruity Mashers.”
“Well, puppy, looks you’re out of luck and gonna have make do with Cheerios. Sorry about that. Joel Carson needs his kitchen back. ”
JJ’s arms went out. “Who?”
“Me. I’m Joel Carson. I thought we were all talking third person, here.”
“JJ wants Fruity Mashers,” JJ said. “And JJ …” Suddenly the young man’s eyes shifted out then up.
Joel smiled. He knew what that meant. He looked over his shoulder to see Rayne had walked in. “Oh, this my hotel special detail guard. Meet Rayne. Four time wrestling champ and a large man who is pissed off at the world right now. Rayne meet JJ Wylde and henchman.”
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