by Hadena James
“Shoot her!” Someone shouted. I turned to see who was shouting and at who. The baton slipped from my fingers. I didn’t draw my guns. I drew a knife. The baton landed a brutal blow to my shoulder. Bone shuddered under it. I turned into it, taking the full impact with the bad arm. My knife slipped into her flesh. She looked shocked. She stumbled back from me. I rushed her, taking us both to the ground. The baton landed another, weaker blow. My head started bleeding. The world went out of focus. I struggled to find my footing and vomited instead.
The shadows of people came into view. I vomited again. I let myself fall over sideways. The knife hilt pierced my skin as it connected with the concrete. I closed my eyes to stop the world from spinning. Blood ran down my head, mixing with my hair before landing on the pavement. I wasn’t sure if she had hit my head or my ear. It didn’t matter. She had rocked my world with that hit. I had vertigo.
“Jesus Christ,” Xavier’s voice came to me.
“Get her, I’m fine.”
“You are not fine.” Xavier informed me.
“She’s a killer. Get her,” I barked.
“She’s wounded and leaving a blood trail. Someone else can get her. I’m going to deal with you. Now shut up and let me look you over.”
“If you open my eyelids and shine any lights into my eyes, I’ll stab you.” I had already pulled a knife.
“That’s new,” Xavier’s hands touched my forehead. “You aren’t cold. How much pain are you in?”
“I just got my ass kicked by a sixteen year old. I’m not in pain. I’m really, really angry.”
“And bleeding from multiple places. Five that I can see. I’m worried about your head. Did she hit the back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you roll up and let me look?”
“If a chunk of my skull has fallen out, do you really want to expose my brain to onlookers?”
“If a chunk of your skull fell out, that is the least of my concerns.” He rolled me onto my side. I vomited again. He swore, so I was guessing it hit him. “She damn near tore your ear off and ruptured your ear drum, which is causing the vertigo. You’ll need to be checked for a concussion. Aside from the knife, what weapons did she have?”
“Little bitch made off with my baton.”
“That would definitely do this kind of damage. Your ass is bleeding.”
“That will need stitches. And I’m getting back that baton.”
“Oh, I have no doubt.”
Twenty-Four
My body felt heavy. My brain felt foggy, and even though I wasn’t completely awake, I knew I was having a bad day. I could smell antiseptic. Either I was in a morgue or in a recovery room. Considering my brain was attempting to work, I guessed it was a recovery room. Prying apart my eyelids took an act of God, signed in triplicate, and delivered by snail. At first, my vision was blurry, but a shadow sat near me.
“Well, I’m not dead, but I am exceptionally thirsty,” I told the shadow.
“I’ll get you some water and let the doctor know you’re awake,” a female voice answered. It wasn’t Fiona, so I didn’t start looking for ways to kill her. My brain instantly caught up. I had passed out, bleeding on the road, after getting my ass handed to me by a sixteen-year-old psychopath who had used my own baton to do it. I’d also been stabbed, in the side, there was a good chance that I had lost a kidney.
“Marshal Cain,” a small, round man with no hair and a wide smile walked into the room. He didn’t have the accent I expected. “We had to repair your colon and part of your small intestine, clean everything out well, and remove an ovary.”
“What’s the bad news?” I asked.
“Most women think the removal of an ovary is a bad thing,” he said to me, looking down at my chart.
“Better than a kidney.”
“Well, when you look at it that way. The knife went in at an angle, which is what saved you. It only nicked your colon and small intestine. The hilt entering the wound caused some internal bruising. If the knife had been an inch or two longer, you would have lost your uterus.”
“Great, when do I get out of here?” I asked.
“A few days. The first day is the most critical. You’ll need help getting up and down. You are going to be extremely sore. Do you remember the incident?”
“How many stitches to my butt? How’s my ear?”
“We reattached your ear, your eardrum is ruptured, so don’t go swimming any time soon. Part of the top cartilage was removed, but a plastic surgeon might be able to do something, if you want. As for your rear end, that was actually the worst injury, as far as scarring. I understand you were struck with an extendable baton and it left a mark very similar to a whip. It required over a hundred stitches to close. You’re going to have to take it easy, we couldn’t put in staples and stitches rip out easier.”
I frowned. Hospitals were hard on normal people. On someone like me, they were pure torture. There was nothing to do. The drugs made you feel like crap. They lowered your ability to focus on anything and I needed something to focus on or I would go out of my mind. My heartbeat picked up just a little. My blood pressure increased. I watched the monitors, watched my body going into sensory deprivation mode. I needed something to focus my mind on.
The light outside my window caught my attention. I stared at it, as if it could rescue me from the dungeon that was my own mind. As I stared, I realized that there were three days until the full moon. I hit the button on my bed, calling for the nurse.
“I need my phone. I need to call someone,” I told her.
“You can’t have a phone until morning, Marshal Cain,” she responded.
“It’s important!” I pleaded.
“No.” She turned to walk away.
“Fine, contact the FBI office in San Antonio, tell them to have Malachi Blake contact you,” I scribbled the note for Malachi down on a piece of paper and handed it to her. Her face contracted and paled. The note wasn’t that bad. However, I might as well have handed her a ticking bomb.
“I’ll get your phone,” she told me, crumbling up the note.
“Aren’t you supposed to be recovering?” Malachi’s voice didn’t sound as if he’d been sleeping, but that didn’t mean much with Malachi.
“You’ve got a full moon coming,” I told him.
“So?”
“So, if your killer is pretending to be a werewolf, he’ll be all decked out in his strange skins when the moon finally enters that phase. You can catch him by following the number of wolf and werewolf calls that night.”
“That may be a problem,” Malachi told me.
“Why?”
“I’ve been reassigned, temporarily. You will be too, tomorrow, or the next day.” Malachi hung up. We were both about to be reassigned. That couldn’t be good. Had someone broken out of the Fortress? My mind instantly conjured up images of Patterson and Eric running free in their grey jumpsuits. Grey was supposed to be soothing. I wasn’t sure if it was or not. I didn’t find it soothing, I found it irritating, but I wasn’t a normal person. Of course, neither were Patterson and Eric, so maybe they didn’t find grey soothing either.
There was no TV remote. If I was being temporarily reassigned, it meant that Jessica Blanks wasn’t in custody yet. It also meant the evil teenager still had my baton. I wasn’t sure which of those pissed me off more. They were equally annoying. I should have had her. There was no way she should have been able to get my baton.
Yet she had. Because she was sixteen. My humanity had leaked through. I had let a sixteen-year-old get the better of me because I hadn’t wanted to kill her. I hadn’t wanted to beat her to a pulp with the harsh, carbon steel baton. I’d attempted non-lethal control while dealing with a psychopath and I was paying the price.
It wasn’t the stitches or the knife wound or the fact that I was now in a hospital. My punishment was knowing that I had ignored my own rule. When dealing with a psychopath, lethal violence was the norm, not the exception. I could and should have s
hot her. I should have broken out the baton and beat her into submission. I should have had control of the situation from beginning to end.
However, because she was sixteen, I had never been in control. Sociopath or psychopath, she had reminded me of my niece and I had ended up getting the shit beat out of me because of it. Her age had quieted the monster that lurked in the silent darkness within my soul. I was lucky the little bitch hadn’t killed me.
Then there was the Taser. That stupid blue cartridge that had ejected from it, after firing, had also been working against me. It hadn’t had the charge to drop the psychopathic teenager. It had simply pissed her off. I knew because they pissed me off when I got hit by them. There was no doubt that was Fiona’s doing, and I was just starting to like her. Now, I wanted to pop in an orange cartridge and use it on her. Of course, it would probably kill her, but I was okay with that. She had nearly gotten me killed by replacing the cartridge with a lower output model.
Yet, she had been blinded by the same thing I had. The age of our killer. It was one thing to chase adults who killed. It really was different when the killer was practically a child. The part of me with a history degree reminded me that sixteen wasn’t really young, definitely not child-like. However, the part of me that dealt with serial killers on a regular basis disagreed. Sixteen was definitely old enough to be a killer. Sixteen was definitely old enough to be tried as an adult and sent to The Fortress. Even sixteen year olds had the impulse to kill, and not enough maturity to control it.
Maybe it wasn’t entirely Fiona’s fault. Even without the Taser, I could have subdued her. I could have broken her other arm. I could have strangled her until she passed out. I could have overpowered her. I didn’t.
Now, I was beating myself up over it in the hospital. We should have been on a plane, heading home or to wherever this big secret thing Malachi was working on existed.
This was why sociopaths shouldn’t have time to themselves. At least not much of it. Aside from building up our own egos and self-aggrandizing, we could be rather brutal, and it gave us time to place blame. My heartbeat sped up a little more. My blood pressure ticked up another couple of notches. My anger was beginning to seep out of the place where I tried to keep it contained.
I hit the button on the Demerol. The liquid was suddenly coursing through my veins. The drug helped, but my mind continued to spiral. My anger continued to grow. I studied the machine. It wanted a code to access it. The nurses had typed in a code earlier, when they had set it up. I had been half-asleep. It was seven digits long. My brain searched for the memory. Once found, the movement of her fingers gave me the knowledge I desired.
I punched in the code. It unlocked, giving me access to the dosage. I considered my current state. Valium or Ativan would have been better, but I wasn’t on either of those. Demerol was all they were giving me except saline and antibiotics. I didn’t need a super dose of either of those. I needed something to help me control my anger. Demerol could do it, if it could force me to sleep. However, in small doses, Demerol didn’t work like that, not on me. It wasn’t strong enough to dull my mind and my mind did a better job of controlling the pain.
Remembering Xavier’s lecture on Demerol, I selected a dosage and typed it in. The plunger on the automated machine depressed. The second, larger dose hit my veins. Coursing through me, it began to have the desired effect on my brain. A fog began to settle on it. The anger, which was threatening to overtake me, subsided, unable to continue to flame and explode because the fuel source had been shut down. My senses dulled.
My nose, which had been smelling antiseptic and a sickly sweet odor associated with illness, stopped working. For a moment, I wondered if this was how Malachi smelled the world. His olfactory system was underdeveloped. His sense of smell was terrible and his sense of taste was altered by it.
Then the world began to darken. Tunnel vision and dancing flashes of light filled my eyes. The lids closed against the spectacle, but even closed, I could still feel them. This was exactly what I needed. I’d shot up enough Demerol to trigger a migraine.
The pain exploded in my head. The world fell away. There was only the pain.
Twenty-Five
“Were you trying to kill yourself?” Gabriel shouted.
“No, she was trying to induce a migraine,” Xavier’s voice was much quieter. “She does that from time to time. It stops whatever is about to happen to her.”
“Like…” Gabriel didn’t finish. He flopped into a chair and sighed. It was hard being my boss. I knew it.
“I should not be left to rot in a hospital with nothing but my own mind for entertainment.” I held up my phone, which was very dead. It had died during my reconfiguring of the Demerol dosage. The dosage needed for the migraine had actually been an overdose. I hadn’t thought of it when I did it. I had just known that I needed something to control my rage. Migraines were the ultimate control.
The door to my room was shut. Lucas was taking up one chair. Xavier was futzing with the machine. Gabriel was sitting in the other chair.
“Why is the door shut?” I asked.
“We can’t have the hospital staff hearing Gabriel chew you out for the overdose. They think something went wrong with the machine,” Lucas informed me. “Were you trying to kill yourself?”
“No.” I answered. “Look, I know it’s unconventional, but you have never been locked in my brain. If I didn’t stop thinking, I was going to start doing something worse. So, I programmed the machine to give me a small overdose. Demerol can trigger migraines. As violent as I get when I have them, I don’t normally start killing people. I had to shut my brain down. The Demerol induced migraine did exactly that.”
“And made you sleep for nearly thirty hours,” Xavier said. “She’s right. The dosage she gave herself was only an overdose because of the amount she had injected using the button immediately before it.”
“Next time, fake a panic attack,” Gabriel told me. “How do you feel?”
“Honestly, really good. I always get the best sleep on large doses of drugs,” I admitted. “I had no dreams, nothing bothered me. It was nice, really restful. The medically induced coma was not as restful. How’s the manhunt?”
“Hindered,” Gabriel sighed. “You have less than twelve hours of bedrest left. Soon, you and Xavier are going to be requested in Houston, by the CDC. Malachi is already there.”
“Xavier and I?” I looked at him.
“It seems that as an undergrad, you wrote a paper on how bubonic plague spread so easily through Constantinople during the reign of Justinian, and then equated that with modern day cities. They would like you to consult.”
“Modern day cities would be excellent places to release bubonic plague, if you wanted maximum casualties,” I told him.
“Don’t go into the specifics.” Gabriel held up his hand. “I read your paper, as did Xavier and just about every epidemiologist in the country. Houston has had ten people diagnosed with bubonic plague in the last twenty-four hours. It’s the strain they saw in California last year and it is antibiotic resistant. Since the strain was engineered in a lab and stolen, they are considering this dissemination as intentional. You are the expert that will accompany the VCU to find the person responsible.”
“I do not like working with Malachi,” I told Gabriel.
“We will be joining as soon as we find Jessica Blanks. Everyone is trying to keep this quiet to stop the crisis that will happen when the information gets leaked out. Nothing like bringing back the Black Death to start chaos and panic,” Lucas told me.
“Uh, yeah, what if I don’t want to go?” I asked.
“Why wouldn’t you want to go?” Gabriel asked.
“Someone sent me a dead squirrel with that particular strain of plague. My guess is it’s the same someone that has managed to infect people in Houston. Only, here’s the problem, humans are a terrible host for plague. So, how the hell are they disseminating it? They aren’t injecting the people directly. Most mammals die wi
thin a few days of infection. That makes this particular killer the craziest person to ever live. Because they have spent time breeding rats to carry the fleas and then released the damn rats into the city to infect other animals, which is why it is now infecting humans. In my paper, rats passed it to pets, pets passed it to owners in the form of fleabites. Problem is, we’ve invented the vacuum cleaner and that is the leading cause of flea death in the world. This isn’t some third world country where diseases spread from poor hygiene. This has been well thought out, well planned, and well executed. If it is not a scientist, it is someone that was going to be a scientist. The problem with lab rats is they die at the end, and anyone going into Houston is a lab rat. We’d be better off to nuke the city.”
“I don’t think dropping nuclear bombs on Houston is an acceptable option,” Xavier giggled. “Besides, cockroaches survive.”
“But fleas do not,” I sighed. “In reality, my paper was written to get me an A. It isn’t feasible, not really, because we’ve done what we can to eliminate fleas.”
“Ten people would disagree with you,” Malachi walked into the room. “I’m here to escort you, if you are well enough.”
“I’m not. I have a ruptured ear drum, stitches in my behind, and a stab wound that took out an ovary.”
“That was two days ago,” Malachi said.
“It’s a lot of trauma to recover from.”
“Are you concerned about getting the plague?” Xavier asked.
“Slightly,” I admitted. “If it was just bubonic plague, that would be one thing, but it isn’t, it is antibiotic resistant bubonic plague. It’s a nightmare situation. It’s also the sort of thing that caused millions to die in the fourteenth century. Plague only becomes super deadly once in a while.”
“I’m aware, I am a doctor,” Xavier reminded me.