Battered Dreams

by Hadena James

  “Well, this is one of those times.”

  “We have HAZMAT suits,” Malachi joined in. “Let these guys catch your serial killer, we’ll go get the bastard that has released plague into the Lone Star State.”

  “Bitch, actually,” Lucas said from his seat. “You’re most likely looking for a woman. This is essentially the same as poisoning, plus it took nurturing to breed the rats and this particular strain of bubonic plague for years. If I remember right, it was stolen a while ago from a lab at a campus. While a man would release a virus or bacteria to kill, it’d be anthrax or something similar. It would not have been something that needed nurturing like a child.”

  “Oh goody, I can get my ass kicked by another girl,” I snipped. “Everyone out, I have to put clothing on.”

  “Um, no,” Lucas informed me. “Everyone but me needs to leave. You are going to need help with clothing.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine and if your government wasn’t in the middle of a meltdown, you wouldn’t be going,” he told me. I smiled. At least someone cared about it. The smile faded. I was feeling sorry for myself. It wasn’t a pleasant emotion. I didn’t need pity parades with ticker tape and confetti, especially not ones thrown by me. It was my fault, all of it, and I knew it; hence the pity parade. I could point fingers at anyone I wanted, but the truth was I had not treated her like a psychopath, I had treated her like I would have wanted someone to treat my niece. I might as well have used the baton on myself.

  This wasn’t new information. It wasn’t earth-shattering revelations. It was the stuff I had been hiding from for the last thirty odd hours. Admitting my failures didn’t make me feel better about myself, it made me angry. I didn’t need reminders that I could be human, if I decided to be. I needed a reminder of the monster that shared this fragile human shell. I had spent time getting in touch with my feelings while I was down with a brain tumor.

  What I needed was to stop being in touch with them. I needed a reminder that the monster might not be a very good person, but it was a hell of a weapon. I wasn’t Jekyll and Hyde and couldn’t be. I had accepted my darkness and it had done well at keeping me alive. Now, I needed to reaccept it and move on, so that the next time the little sixteen year old serial killer stabbed me, I would do more than hold onto her. Killing wasn’t required, but a little maiming was in order. It was the psychopathic equivalent of being taken out to the woodshed. I’d gotten my dose. She needed hers.

  First though, I needed to suck it up and go to Houston. The CDC was right. I knew a lot about the dissemination of plague. My ability to attract like-minded lunatics was a bonus. Since she had already sent me fan mail, finding me in Houston would probably be an existential moment for her.

  Twenty-Six

  The ten infected individuals lived in a rundown part of Houston. They and their families were currently being quarantined. The cover story was a nasty strain of flu. This was only going to hold water for so long. It was May and flu season was essentially done.

  They also lived near a string of crappy restaurants. Since most of them looked like they served dead rat, there was no chance in hell I would have eaten there, but I didn’t belong to this community.

  Looking at the situation, I realized I had outdone myself. My paper had suggested poor neighborhoods surrounded by open-air markets and food stalls were exactly the sort of places where infected rats would live. They’d actually thrive there. Rats were more carriers than infected species. The Norwegian Rats thought to have caused the outbreak in the fourteenth century had shown some immunity to fleas with bubonic plague. It was when these fleas had abandoned the rats for much heartier meals, like dogs, that they would start spreading to humans.

  The street was very quiet. It didn’t matter that we were two blocks from the quarantine area, it had freaked people out. The restaurants and shops were closed. Every person had just vanished. However, a stray dog was picking through the scraps of a dumpster that catered to three Mexican cantinas.

  “Have you started trapping rats and stray animals?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Peter Corell from the CDC told me. “We started that as soon as the hospital reported their third case.”

  “It’s hard to fathom, really.” I looked at the dog. A rat, bigger than a brown rat, ran across the road. The dog growled at it. I didn’t know what sort of hybrid rats they had in Texas; it was the Lone Star State after all, and everything was bigger in Texas, but it had seemed like an unusually large one.

  “What?” He asked.

  “That vacuums and flea baths can get rid of all this,” I answered. “Even today, when someone comes down with plague, one of the instructions is vacuum the house, car, and place of business, and dip any pets in flea killer. The disseminator has to be familiar with the area, but does not live in it. You do not release plague-infested fleas in your own neighborhood. You also do not release it where your family works or has a business. So, who else would be familiar with this area?” I continued to stare at the dog. It was now munching on something that had been alive, probably only a day or two ago. “You might grab the mutt and whatever he’s eating.” I pointed him out to Peter Corell.

  “Damn it, where is animal control?” Corell asked.

  “There’s your disseminator.” I pointed as another rat scurried across the road. They didn’t seem to mind the presence of myself, Peter, and about seven other people in HAZMAT suits. They were used to a human presence. Most rats were acclimated to some degree to be around people, that’s why they were good at surviving in cities. I was fairly sure that acclamation included avoiding people.

  “That does seem strange,” Peter agreed.

  “I’m not an animal behaviorist, but don’t rats tend to stay hidden during the day?”

  “Cain,” Agent Green of the VCU walked up to me. I couldn’t remember his first name, but I enjoyed his company. He was Malachi’s leash, which gave us a bond that I could neither explain nor break.

  “Green,” I smiled at the man. He was a few years older, several inches taller, and stocky, and like most of us, there was something wrong with his head. I hadn’t figured out exactly what it was yet, but I would, given enough time.

  “So, who should we be looking for?” Green asked.

  “A woman,” I answered. “A deranged woman. Have you seen the rats around here? They are massive. She not only nurtured the bacteria for several years, I think she was hybridizing the rats.”

  “You are going to have to give me more than that, all women are deranged,” Green told me.

  “Some more than others, this one is tipping the scales in the straight-jacket department. Talk therapy is not working out her issues.”

  “Deranged woman who nurtured a virus and rats.”

  “Bubonic plague is a bacteria, not a virus,” Peter Corell offered.

  “Doesn’t matter, she’s still nuttier than a fruitcake,” Green answered. “I heard you got stitches in an interesting place.”

  “No, you may not see the stitches in my ass and not just because I’m wearing a HAZMAT suit. You have a psycho degree. Profile her.”

  “I do and I’ve tried. This isn’t like the Tylenol Murders or the Bell Tower Sniper. This is new, completely new. Well, not completely new, the Nazis did it, but...” Green trailed off.

  “Nazis,” I reminded him.

  “My thought wasn’t about Nazis. Not exactly anyway. What’s the rumor? Hitler killed the Jews because he was Jewish and hated it. Our killer may be using Y. Pestis because she has the disease or has been affected by the disease,” Green said.

  “You know the Latin name, but not whether it’s a virus or bacteria?” Peter asked.

  “I know, I just don’t care. It’s antibiotic resistant. It might as well be the Hand of God killing these people. We can’t really stop it,” Green said. “How many cases of plague do we get a year?”

  “About two hundred,” Peter Corell answered.

  “Plague is fairly rare as a killer these days
, but it still causes disfigurement,” Green said.

  “I did not realize you knew so much about plague,” I told him.

  “Xavier isn’t the only medical doctor. I do have a psycho degree, but I got it to work with the VCU. I started out as a med student planning to go into practice working with rare diseases. Plague isn’t very common in this area.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Peter answered. “Here we are more likely to get tuberculosis, tick-borne illnesses, and Hansen’s disease.”

  “Leprosy is disfiguring,” I chimed, “and it still makes people pariahs. That would build a whole lot of anger.”

  “Hansen’s Disease,” Peter corrected.

  “I know, I just don’t care,” I mimicked Green. “No one calls it that; if they did, we wouldn’t have the term ‘avoided like a leper.’ Get on your magic machine and start stirring up cases that involve plague or leprosy.”

  “I’m not a performing monkey,” Peter told me.

  “Excuse her, she’s kind of socially awkward, even among those who are socially awkward,” Green apologized. “But she has a point. If I had Hansen’s disease and was disfigured, I’d be significantly angry. Considering they are using plague to kill now gives some foundation to the theory that our killer was afflicted by a condition that caused social distancing and disfiguration. Also, while it’s rare, they can both have neurological side effects. You might consider checking syphilis as well.”

  “Adding syphilis would take months,” Peter informed us. “It’s still really common as an STI.”

  “What’s an STI?”

  “Sexually Transmitted Infection,” Peter answered.

  “What happened to disease?”

  “It was changed to sound less terrifying.” Peter was opening up his tablet, which was much bigger than my own with more interesting features. I was pretty sure that if I touched it, it would break.

  “Sexually transmitted infections should terrify people,” I countered the name change. I didn’t like when things changed at random.

  “The word infection gives a sense of security because infections can be treated and cured. Diseases are far scarier, so people tend to avoid testing, because they don’t want to know that they have a disease. Testing and treatment has increased since the change,” Green explained to me.

  I didn’t argue. The name change made sense. It was unsettling to realize that a word change could alter the way an entire species thought about something. It was illogical. Changing from Leprosy to Hansen’s disease hadn’t removed the stigma of getting it. I remembered the armadillo I had helped earlier. It was possible that in twenty years, I would develop leprosy. I wondered if any of my friends, if they were still alive, would avoid me.

  Peter Corell was still doing stuff on his tablet. I looked at the screen. It was a list, a very long list. Leprosy took years, sometimes decades, to become symptomatic. It also took a while to treat, during which time all manner of things could go wrong. My instincts told me that anyone on that list could be a suspect and it probably went back thirty or forty years. It was also likely that while it was a list of people who had caught leprosy in the US and been treated in the US, it also probably contained people that had caught it in other countries and been treated in the US. If there were three hundred or so cases of leprosy every year, the list of suspects was probably anyone on that list.

  “How is the werewolf case going?” I asked Green, trying to ignore the never-ending list of suspects that kept popping up in my life.

  “Nowhere,” Green answered. “Do you have any idea how many people have reported seeing a werewolf in the last month?”

  “Yeah, Malachi told me.”

  “That’s not counting the handful of people who are legitimately locked up because they suffer from clinical lycanthropy. If we hadn’t found traces of steel in the bite wounds, I might have started believing there was a werewolf in the tristate area of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. Your theory about Dogmen helped, but only in the sense that people started telling us stories about people who had gone places and heard unnatural growling attributed to Dogmen. In Ohio, there’s something known as Grassman, which might be Bigfoot or some other primate, or it might be a type of Dogmen or a type of werewolf, or another cryptid. I didn’t realize how many people actually believe in cryptids.”

  “I believe in cryptids,” I told him. “Not Bigfoot or aliens, although I have no reason not to believe in them either, but other cryptids.”

  “That was a confusing and strange statement, Cain,” Green told me.

  “I am confusing and strange,” I told him.

  “Do you believe in miracles?” Peter Corell asked.

  “I do not disbelieve in them, does that count?” I countered.

  “Well, start hoping for one. No one on our list that lives in Texas has a science or medical background. Any other strange diseases you want me to check for?” He asked.

  “Damn, I already did this once in Texas. Turned out the killer is just a really smart sixteen year old. Don’t suppose that list has the IQs of everyone?”

  “No,” Peter said.

  “IQ only tests one type of intelligence. They are essentially useless, unless you are looking for someone with good math skills, spatial aptitude, and nonlinear based logic,” Green pointed out.

  “I scored high on one,” I answered.

  “I believe that, but had you been given different tests, you probably would have scored even higher. Just because a person can do astrophysics doesn’t make them brilliant. It makes them a genius. To be brilliant requires more skills than just those tested on an IQ test,” Green countered.

  “I scored high on all my aptitude tests,” I told him.

  “This conversation is pointless,” Peter interrupted. “For experts, you aren’t much help.”

  “I am not an expert, I’m a trained monkey,” I pointed out. “I find serial killers and mass murderers and make them stop. Usually by beating them up. High IQ aside, I’m essentially a weapon to point at bad guys. I can’t even remember to wear gloves at crime scenes. This HAZMAT suit is killing me. I’d ditch it if I wasn’t terrified of getting plague.”

  “You wrote the paper that described this exact scenario,” Peter Corell pointed out.

  “Yeah, when I was seventeen and needed an A. I wrote the first part of the paper for a history class on the Byzantine Empire. I added the second part and edited the first part when I took a class in advanced microbiology and needed an A. I didn’t even know it was going to be published until I was in grad school at a totally different college, and I never would have believed anyone would read it, let alone use it to start a biological holocaust. As far as weapons go, plague would not be my first, second, or even last choice. It just worked for different classes and I got lazy,” I admitted. “I was taking twenty-four or more hours a semester. Sometimes, I got tired of searching for new material to write papers about.”

  “Wait, you plagiarized yourself?” Green asked.

  “Essentially. I definitely did not cite my other paper as source material,” I answered.

  “They can take your doctorate for that.” Peter joined the conversation.

  “I’m a US Marshal chasing serial killers, no one calls me Doctor anyway. They can yank the degree; they cannot yank the knowledge out of my head,” I snapped. “Sorry, my wounds hurt. I didn’t mean to get cranky. I’m just not the plague expert you think I am. I’m not sure I’m an expert on anything except crime. Even with that, plague is not a good biological weapon. They tried it in the middle ages, catapulting infected corpses over walls to infect the occupants. The only thing it did was lead to new designs for catapults.”

  “Cain, focus,” Green said. “If you were a serial killer, using your paper as a blueprint, what would you do?”

  “First, I’d need the bacteria. So, our killer robs a lab at a university and gets it. They have to be associated with the lab to know it even exists. Then I infect some fleas via infected animals, probably rats. Brown rats are the mo
st popular rats for scientific experimentation, but any rodent in the Rattus family is essentially a brown rat. These seem to be abnormally large brown rats, so I have bred them in a fashion that makes them bigger. Most likely through superficial identification and mixing them with one of the other fifty members of the Rattus family. This takes years. I have to keep a large breeding population of rats, this means I have a society. It might mean I have multiple societies. That takes a lot of room.”

  “Stop,” Peter held up his hand. “You are talking about thousands of rats. It’s impossible to keep that many without a laboratory.”

  “Not necessarily,” Green answered. His face was pinched. “When I was a kid, a friend of mine had two rats. His bedroom wall was lined with these tubes. The rats lived in them. There were boxes for nesting, feeding, sleeping, and exercising. We figured it up and there was almost a football field worth of tubing on his wall.”

  “For two rats?” I asked.

  “That’s the part that bothers you?” Green asked.

  “I just believe they would have been as happy in a large cage,” I shrugged.

  “Shut up,” Green told me. “So, if you have a barn that isn’t used for anything, you could end up with miles of tubing. That would be enough to hold thousands of rats and create different colonies, not societies.”

  “You introduce enough rats at one time to a single area and if they are bigger and more aggressive, they attack the colony already present. The alphas are killed and the new rats take up residence. The new rats are carrying fleas with Y. Pestis. They accept a few newcomers and then the cycle of plague starts,” Peter finished.

  “And all you need is a barn,” Green added.

  “Well, I’m glad you guys worked that out. When you find a deranged woman with a barn full of tubing and multiple rat colonies, call me, and I’ll beat her up for you.” I started walking off. I wasn’t sure we had accomplished anything. Well, I knew I hadn’t. Green and Peter Corell might have accomplished a lot.

  Critical Threshold