by S. Ganley
Chapter 14
Fairfax County Police Corporal Kyle Anders had reached eight years of service just the week prior. In those eight years he had never encountered such an outbreak of medical emergencies as he was seeing in the last twenty four hours. It had started as an alert across their mobile computer network warning that the CDC had posted information concerning an outbreak of a flu like illness that was highly contagious and had resulted in several deaths across the country. At first this was just information for law enforcement that they should take extra precautions in dealing with the public such as wearing their surgical gloves and to avoid close contact with someone who appeared sick. Ultimately what this meant was that a lot of warnings would be issued until this blew over. Most officers would just site a violator with a court date on a ticket instead of bringing them in for booking over misdemeanor offenses. Even traffic enforcement would start to be overlooked as officers did all they could to minimize the amount of contact they had with the general public to avoid getting sick themselves and missing work. Kyle was single and didn’t have to worry about the risk of bringing home some bug to pass on to his family like many other officers in his department, but just like them he also didn’t want to run the risk of an extended illness that kept him off the job. Because of this, he was also joining the ranks of officers giving the general public a break in arrests for the next couple of days.
Kyle had come on shift at seven Saturday evening for the start of a twelve hour rotation when he got the call from his sergeant for a meet behind a sporting goods store in the Tysons Corner area. Three other patrols were already there when he pulled up. The shift sergeant had informed all of them that normal patrol activities were being suspended and instead they were all to be tasked with supporting the response efforts related to the flu epidemic. He been direct and to the point when he told them that this was an unusual type of outbreak they were dealing with. Two paramedics had been assaulted and a nurse at a hospital in a neighboring town was killed when patients unexpectedly went berserk. The Sergeant informed them that they were going to implement a disaster procedure that they had practiced many times for but had never put into actual use in the past. The closest the department had come was during the terrorist attacks of 9-11 when fear of attacks all across the country had gripped the area. As close to Washington, DC as they were and with the number of high value political figures who made their home in the nearby wealthy towns, this was an area prime for any such act of terrorism to strike home. The disaster procedure they were implementing would call for patrols to each be issued with an M4 tactical rifle as a show of force and the sergeant went ahead and passed those out from a number he had already picked up and stored in his trunk. He handed Kyle a rifle with a loaded thirty round magazine already in it and a magazine pouch containing four additional magazines. Along with the rifle and ammo each patrol received four flash bang grenades and four CS grenades that dispersed a large cloud of tear gas for use against crowds. All patrols were supposed to be bumped immediately to two man units but with departmental budget cuts effecting their number of personnel, that was just not feasible, instead it was decided that Corporals and above would remain single units while all available off duty personnel were called in to ride along with everyone else. This of course also meant that they could count on little if any time off until the crisis passed. Units would continue their twelve hour shifts and then be authorized a four hour rest period in the ready room of either their own station or one of four fire stations within their area of responsibility. Those assignments were made based on patrol area, as a corporal who would be expected to fill in as a shift supervisor from time to time, Kyle was assigned back to their own station which was how he preferred it anyway.
Due to the nature of the current emergency their deployment was not going to follow their prescribed plan in their emergency protocols. Had they followed the book in this situation, patrols would have been assigned to either high value targets known to be in the area, large crowded areas such as shopping malls or scheduled march routes for demonstrations or key intersections in preparation for traffic control and accident response. Instead of those scenarios, they were doing something a little different, they were going to be responding in tangent with emergency services to all medical calls. What they were being told was that ambulance service calls had picked up exponentially in the last few hours and paramedics were continuing to run into situations where police assistance was needed. In most cases relatives of victims needed to be controlled and kept from interfering with paramedics. There was also ongoing concern that some victims of this flu epidemic had become so overwhelmed with fever and delirium they were turning violent on paramedics. Reports of victims attempting to inflict bite wounds had started to filter in. The sergeant said that he had been told to pass along the next part but also that he was to stress that this information was unsubstantiated and was only being reported because it came from an unnamed but well placed government source. Trying to keep as straight a face as possible without rolling his eyes or making other gestures to display how ridiculous the information sounded to him the Sergeant explained that there was a possibility that the dead had been returning to life in some cases. Kyle and the other patrolman had exchanged glances with each other at this news, their Sergeant was a guy who they joked had no sense of humor whatsoever and was never one to sensationalize or exaggerate details. Even though he made every attempt to keep his voice neutral and pass along the information as he had been required, there was no hiding the fact that he put little real stock in the news. Each of them had tried to fire off a bunch of questions and a few smart ass come backs at the notion of the dead returning to life, but the Sergeant had clearly made up his mind that he was not going to entertain any feedback on the issue and that they should take the information as it was and just do their jobs while keeping alert for anything unusual.
The first call for assistance to support an ambulance run came from Kyle's sector before their shift supervisor had concluded his briefing. The call was to a residential area off Lord Fairfax Road on the south side of Tysons Corner. Kyle had pulled in front of the house just seconds before the ambulance rounded the corner with lights and siren blaring. Not exactly sure what to expect, he had hefted the M4 rifle and kept it slung over his shoulder feeling a little ridiculous walking into a residence on a medical call armed as if he was going into a riot situation. There was a four person family living in the house, two parents in their mid-50's and their teenage son and preteen daughter, the father and daughter had come down with the flu just before going to bed the previous night. In the middle of the night the father had awoken to a bout of nausea and a high fever. While her husband was bent over the toilet in the master bedroom the mother had gone down the hall to the daughter’s room to check on her, she found the girl on the floor next to the bed covered in blood tinged vomit and shaking violently with convulsions. This was what had prompted her 911 call bringing Kyle and the ambulance to their house in the early morning hours. Not really sure what he was supposed to do, he just did his best to stay out of the way of the ambulance crew as they checked the daughters vital signs and started running an IV into her arm. They also made a check of the father and deemed that while he was indeed running a bad fever he would probably be ok if he took a cool bath, continued taking aspirin and kept up with fluids. Due to a rush on local hospitals they were limited in the cases they were authorized to transport. The daughter on the other hand met the criteria and they had bundled her up and whisked her off with the mother jumping in her own car to follow along behind. There had really been little for Kyle to do on that call and he had hoped the rest of the crisis would continue just as smooth.
Starting with that first call, Kyle's night started to really pick up speed. Normally the late hours on a Saturday night and into Sunday morning were fairly busy anyway, mostly dealing with DUI's, some bar room brawls and the occasional drunk induced domestic disturbance, tonight however those calls were low on their list of
priorities. Ever since that first call the radio had not stopped with calls stacking up for all patrols across the different sectors his department was responsible for. He had even heard their detective’s call signs being used as they were added to the mix in being sent along with emergency responders. He knew that the detectives were probably cussing up a storm and pulling in every favor and trick they could come up with to try and get out of this shit duty. They made little effort to hide the fact that they considered themselves above the grunt work reserved for the patrol section. Kyle could at least enjoy a little laugh at the fact that those guys clearly had been overruled by the higher ups and were out and about running from call to call just like him.
His first real sign of trouble came close to four in the morning, during his fifth call for assistance. The first couple of scenes he had responded to all played out very similar to the first one, arrived with medical personal, stood off to the side feeling useless, returned to service and en route to the next call. His patrol report was just cut and pasted with the only changes being the addresses, times and ambulance number he assisted for the most part. His fifth call sent him to Tysons Tower Apartments, a location he was very familiar with. Servicing primarily foreign families, this complex was a literal melting pot that paid tribute to the engraving on the Statue of Liberty that proclaimed in part "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore...". In fact one of his first calls to the apartment had been a vandalism where that phrase had been artfully spray painted along the outside brick face of the central building. So many different ethnicities were represented in those apartments that it was inevitable it would cause friction and he had been back and forth multiple times for just such calls. Usually just the presence of the police was enough to cool everyone's heels and it was seldom that he had to do more than just spend a few minutes listening patiently to each side of an argument before advising both parties to just stay the hell away from each other.
It was a different scenario when he arrived early on Sunday morning just after the ambulance crew pulled up. There was only a single paramedic waiting in the lobby by the bank of elevators when he arrived. Kyle had asked about his partner only to learn that they had started dividing emergency crews into single operators to give them more coverage with the overflow of calls they were receiving. That was probably the first sign Kyle had that things were only going to from bad to worse. The apartment was on the sixth floor and as soon as the elevator doors opened they heard the screaming and fighting from halfway down the corridor. Several residents were peering from their partially open doorways down the hall having been awoken by the commotion. Kyle instructed the paramedic to wait by the elevators while he assessed the situation and made sure it was safe for him to follow along. The door to apartment 621 had a large crack down the center of it that Kyle could see was fresh, and it was standing partially open. The screaming inside was that of pain more than anger and he made the decision to enter without knocking. Stepping into the living room he was confronted with a scene straight from hell. Laying across the couch in the center of the room he noticed an adult female, naked from the waist up and covered in more blood than he could remember seeing outside of the most deadly of car crashes. The entire front side of her neck and a good portion of her face were completely missing, ragged and torn skin marked the edges of a wound pattern that he could not immediately recognize but was sure hadn't come from any type of knife. There was little doubt that she was already gone, the blood had stopped pumping from the wound and what remained had pooled over her body and onto the couch underneath her. Laying in another puddle of blood on the floor between the couch and a matching love seat he could see the legs of a small boy that he thought was probably somewhere between eight and ten years old, he was doubled over at the waist forming his body into a tight ball as he clutched tightly to a wound along his stomach. Kyle couldn't see the specifics of the injury but from the amount of blood around the kid it was clear that it was significant, but at least he was still alive. The real action was happening a little further into the apartment, the small dining area next to the kitchen once had a table with seating for up to eight, six original wooden chairs and two folding card table additions probably for younger children. All of those furnishing were now either smashed, upended or shoved carelessly out of the way as two adult males and one female were rolling around on the floor amongst the remains of several smashed chairs. Underneath the squirming pile of people Kyle could see the flailing arm of a younger person, most likely a male, and clearly the focus of all of their attention. He initially thought he was witnessing some kind of really over the top child abuse with a teenager getting his ass completely tore up by a pile of adults, his blood started to boil at the notion. Before he could take two steps closer to the pile to start pulling people off the poor kid, his face shot into view from under the squirming mass of screaming and fighting adults piled on top of him. What he saw caused him to recoil and step back again towards the door while instinctively bringing the barrel of his rifle up in a reflex move. The kid looked more like a rabid dog fighting against his owners instead of the poor abused little boy Kyle had been expecting. He was snarling and snapping with his teeth trying to sink them into any available piece of flesh he could reach. The eyes of the kid really struck him as unbelievable, both eyes were completely filled with a dull milky white glaze that made him think of the eyes of a corpse. Kyle also noted that the skin color of the kid was different that he would have expected. The family was clearly Hispanic and where most Hispanics had a natural light brown to tan color this kid seemed to have a case of jaundice or some other affliction, his skin was a pasty yellow color more closely resembling a wax figurine. He felt reasonably certain there was something really wrong with this kid and what he had first thought was a case of child abuse may actually be an attempt by the adults to keep him under control. Watching the pile of adults moving around on top of the kid he thought that the little bastard must be a hell of a lot stronger than he appeared. He estimated that all together there was close to two hundred and fifty or so pounds worth of screaming and thrashing parents piled up on him and he was moving them around and almost throwing them off like he was superman. Drugs was another thought that came to Kyle's mind, maybe the kid was whacked out on PCP or something, that would account for the unusual strength and maybe even the color of skin but he had never heard of a drug that hazed over someone's eyes like that. Whatever was happening he knew that he needed to do something to help get this situation under control before anyone else got hurt. There was already at least one dead body in the room and another child in desperate need of medical attention. The paramedic was not going to enter this scene until Kyle had it secure and in that time the kid was probably going to bleed to death.
With everyone yelling and screaming in Spanish and him knowing only a few words and only then if they were spoken slowly and clearly, he had to make a decision on what to do based solely on his own interpretation of the scene. The kid on the bottom of the pile was the most obvious threat at the moment and getting him under control and restrained would be his first priority, he weighed his options on how to handle it. Verbal commands were out of the question, even if they understood English he could tell no one was in a position to comply with him. Mace and his Taser were also out, they were too packed together in a pile for him to hit his target accurately, the mace would probably also affect him in the tight confines of the apartment. That left him with only a few options, one of which was to just shoot the kid. He dismissed that option as soon as it entered his head, there was no way he could justify that level of force against a teenager in this situation, plus there was also the same problem with so many of them tightly packed together, even a well-aimed shot to just wound him could pass through his body and hit someone else, possibly even fatally. As he was quickly running these options through his head, the leg of one of the men piled on top of the kid flailed loose from under the pile a
nd jiggled in front of the boys snarling mouth like a fisherman shaking an attractive lure in front of a prize fish, just like that fish the kid shot out with his mouth and sunk his teeth deep into the soft flesh of the guys bare calf muscle. In an instant he had chewed deep into the leg and with three vicious shakes of his head he tore loose an impressive face full of mangled meat and destroyed muscle. A deluge of blood poured out over the pile of bodies from the wound as if a fountain had been turned on over top of all of them. Kyle had never before in his life heard such a cry of pain as he heard coming from the owner of that leg buried deep in the pile of writhing bodies. Without thinking about what he was doing, he hefted the rifle high over his head and charged forward across the room to bring the butt stock crashing down across the temple of the kid as he turned his face once again towards the floor and actually started chewing away hungrily on the piece of human flesh in his mouth.
Kyle weighed in at two hundred and fifteen pounds and was an avid weight lifter and fitness enthusiast, in most cases he was able to take on two assailants at a time bare handed without breaking a sweat. Even though he had tempered the blow to avoid killing the kid, he still bore down with a powerful strike that was sure to knock him out cold, raise a nasty welt and probably cause a concussion. As he felt the force of the rifle hitting against the side of the kids face he immediately thought he had overdone it, there was little chance of him avoiding an excessive force charge by the department, let alone the inevitable lawsuit against him personally, the department and city, he saw his entire career ending in that fleeting moment. Even as he recovered the rifle back towards his chest from the follow through of the blow he was already second guessing his actions and considering what he could have done instead of a blunt force shot across the head of a raging teenage kid with the butt stock of an automatic rifle. He could already read the headlines in tomorrow’s paper, the damn Washington Post would probably even pick up the story, and it wouldn't be termed as excessive force they would use phrases like brutality and savagery, the kind of verbiage that would follow him for the rest of his life. If his next job wasn't making license plates for the bureau of prisons on a ten to fifteen year hitch, he would consider himself very lucky.