by Brett Abell
Catching a dose of stink eye from the driver on his approach, out of respect for the woman, Riker stopped behind the line, smiled, and in a low voice said, “The potty mouthed lady back there—” He paused while the driver engaged the brakes. Then, as if saying go on, she looked at him in the mirror with one brow arched higher than the other. So he went on. “She has a gun in her bag.” He said gun real slow and with menace. Then he lifted his left pants leg, showing off his gleaming metal prosthetic. “I’m a veteran. I know a Beretta semi-auto when I see one.”
After killing the engine, the driver looked him straight in the face, winked, and mouthed, “Thank you, sir.”
The doors opened briefly and Riker grabbed the rails and let his muscled upper body do the work as he swung his legs down to the landing. Gathering himself there, he took the final step in one bound, hitting the ground running, prosthetic leg be damned. On his way toward the door to the overly lit waiting room, he peered over his shoulder and saw the driver with the microphone to her lips and the bi-fold door closed tight with the rest of the passengers trapped inside.
He went sideways through the door as a burly security guard with a fresh high-and-tight haircut bulled past him. Smiling at the cat lady’s sudden misfortune, Riker transited the lobby whistling the theme from Mission Impossible. Exiting onto Maple Street, he set his bag between his feet and did his best to look like someone who needed a lift.
***
Securing a taxi driven by someone willing to take him to Middletown wasn’t as hard as Riker had imagined. In fact, it took less than five minutes. However, understanding the man behind the wheel who, judging by the $6.75 fare already rolling forward in red digital numerals, seemed to have started the meter running about the time the Greyhound driver was calling the heat on his former seatmate, was another story altogether.
Settling in the back seat, Riker fished a scrap of paper from his pocket and, reading his own chicken scratch aloud, rattled off his sister’s Middletown address to the driver.
Speaking with the same tone and inflection as the people manning all three tech help call centers Riker had called in his entire thirty-three years as a resident of planet Earth, the severely hunchbacked man repeated the destination he’d been given. Though it came out sounding like blah, blah, blah, followed up with a Milton, the weary traveler merely nodded, sat back on the lumpy seat, and closed his eyes.
Chapter 12
Atlanta, Georgia
Five hundred miles from Oxford, Ohio, deep in the bowels of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, the personal cell phone in Director of Infectious Diseases John Halverson’s lab coat pocket emitted a steady electronic trill. He fished it out and saw the incoming call was from his colleague at Middletown University. Thumbing the Talk button, he greeted his old friend enthusiastically. However, after listening for a brief second, the smile melted from his face and, without so much as uttering a “goodbye” or “talk to you later,” Halverson ended the call—and his plans for lunch.
With his face suddenly as hot as the sun’s surface and a nervous tick taking root in one eye, the CDC DID extracted a secure satellite phone from the opposite pocket and hit a single key that connected him instantly to his direct superior at the newly christened super-secure USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases) facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The second call lasted much longer than the first. Halverson said his piece and then was interrogated for two minutes straight, during which he uttered more than a few “I don’t knows” and half a dozen “maybes” followed up by one line whispered in the lowest of tones, “Someone swapped the samples.” He listened for twenty seconds and when the big sweeping hand on the clock on the far wall made it to twenty-one, he drew a deep breath and, like he actually thought his mistake could ever be rectified, said, “The genie is out of the bottle … I get that. But you can rest assured, General Purnell, I will get a handle on this.”
He waited for the general to end the call and then thumbed in another number from memory. Five hundred seventy-seven miles away by crow, in Kent, Ohio, a person at a desk in Kent State’s graduate level biology lab picked up.
Without letting the person on the end of the line get out more than a Hello, Halverson barked that he wanted to speak with Professor Dirge of Microbiology. And when the professor came on the line a moment later, Halverson, again eschewing pleasantries, said, “This is John Halverson, DID of the CDC.”
“Yes?” said the professor. “What can I do for you?”
“I need you to immediately begin a Level 4 hot conversion of your facilities.”
Silence on the other end.
“Are you still there?”
“Is this a drill?” the voice asked.
“No. This is not a drill,” said Halverson calmly. “We have an event in your jurisdiction. Just keep it quiet and start the process. I need you up and running and ready to receive samples by 1900 hours.”
“Today?” the man said, his voice gone hoarse from stress.
“ASAP,” Halverson replied. With another question hanging on Dirge’s lips, Halverson ended the call. There was nothing more to say. And a whole lot to do before the day was done.
Hoping to hear whispered from the big wig at the CDC that this was all just a drill, Professor Dirge held the handset to his ear for a long moment. But the soft click he had heard wasn’t background noise in the room. It wasn’t a centrifuge spooling up—yet. Nor was it static in the landlines or caused by the decades-old handset and coiled cord attached to it. The line was dead and the fact the threat was real pressed his chest from the outside like the lead vest draped on you before an X-ray. The sense of urgency in Halverson’s voice wasn’t lost on Dirge. Something big was going down somewhere in Ohio, that was for sure. And his little laboratory at Kent State was about to receive the byproduct of the unfolding situation. So he too canceled his plans for lunch and began making preparations to intake samples of a virus the likes of which he never in his wildest dreams expected to see darken the door of Kent State’s Level 3 bio-lab.
Hueston Woods State Park, Oxford, Ohio
Four hundred fifteen miles north of the CDC, Ohio National Guard Staff Sergeant James Morrison was swinging the ten-pound sledge, driving steel tent poles into the ground with all the fury of John Henry working the railroad.
Stopping for a moment to sip from his Camelbak, Morrison heard the low growl of a 6.2-liter GM Hummer engine approaching and turned in time to see the squat tan vehicle grind to a halt. Wondering what all the hurry was for and where the fire was, he clamped down again on the flexible stalk, took another pull, and watched demurely as a corporal dismounted the vehicle and ran at him full bore, one arm extended and a cell phone held face high.
No words were exchanged between sergeant and corporal as the phone changed hands. Sergeant Morrison immediately pressed it to his ear, announced himself, and listened intently.
***
Three minutes after taking the call, and acting on orders from someone several paygrades above his, the perplexed sergeant barked orders of his own to the eighty-eight man-and-woman guard detachment. Soldiers stopped what they were doing and sprang into action. One baby-faced lance corporal ran by with a ruck still on his back. “We just got here, Sarge. And we’re leaving now without setting up the gear?”
Another soldier screwed up her face. Then, hands on hips, she said, “We can’t be going back to Mansfield already … we just started setting up the med tent.”
The sergeant nodded affirmative to the first question. He looked an order at the nurse and she went scurrying away. The sergeant put his hands on his hips and looked over the assemblage of uniformed troops. They were all sizes and colors and genders. All came from different backgrounds and most held civilian jobs. Only a handful, he realized, were actual combat veterans. To set things straight once and for all, he raised his voice, saying, “That’s right, people. The drill is over.” He bellowed to be heard across the
clearing. “Drop everything. We have a new mission. We will not be returning to Mansfield nor will we be returning to our garrison. We will, however, be asses in seats and Oscar Mike in two minutes.”
A minute later, sledgehammers were left lying in the grass next to partially driven tent stakes, and a dozen diesel engines were throbbing to life. Gray-black exhaust hung low to the ground as the men and women mounted up, the latter of which were mostly Medical Corp personnel recently attached to the unit for this weekend of training and driving their own specialized M997 ambulance Humvees—slab-sided vehicles emblazoned with the universally recognized Red Cross symbol.
At the two-minute mark, as per Sergeant Morrison’s orders, two deuce and a half troop transports and ten Humvees lined up bumper-to-bumper on the swath of crushed grass. They pulled out one at a time, inexplicably leaving thousands of dollars’ worth of gear sitting in a clearing smack-dab in the middle of Hueston Woods State Park.
Chapter 13
During the short drive east from Oxford to Middletown, fighting sleep, Riker passed the time watching the scenery glide by, which helped little, as most of it was nothing like the modern architecture dominating the skyline of the city he’d left behind a dozen hours ago. Watching the old one- and two-story brick structures flit by—along with the occasional glass-and-metal strip malls erected where the former had been razed—was no more stimulating to Riker than listening to the liars on C-SPAN. And still holding onto a good deal of their leaves, the trees lining State Route 127 added to his funk, quickly becoming nothing more than a hypnotic multicolored blur. Between the two towns, however, he found much more to look at. There was the occasional pasture full of grazing cows. He saw a big sign that had been erected in a farmer’s field decrying the current sitting president while also bemoaning the senate sitting in opposition. A man of his own mindset, thought Riker. Eff ’em all, and let God sort them out. Near a north-south running two-lane intersecting 127, he saw a roadside vendor setting up a stand, probably to hawk Blu Blockers or some other crappy Chinese-made fad item du jour. And serving as a backdrop to it all, set back on bigger plats of land and hemmed in by rusted barbed wire, were sturdy old houses and swaybacked outbuildings lorded over by gargantuan barns and silos, one and all, in one way or the other, fighting the ongoing effects of gravity and the forward march of time.
In no time, the thin belt of countryside gave way to Trenton, Ohio, an unchanged little blip of a community, and no more stimulating than the scenery Riker had already absorbed. Then, awash in the flat light of late morning, the Great Miami River, an extension of the Eerie Canal to the north, came into view, brown and wide and snaking under the elevated roadway. Shortly after crossing the river, simultaneous to Riker looking out his window and seeing a sign reading Middletown Pop. 48,694, the driver, in a singsong voice, said, “Almoss dair.”
And he wasn’t lying. Tara lived southwest of the university on the far west side of town. A couple of minutes after entering the town proper and one left turn down a narrow tree-lined street, the cabbie pulled to the curb, put the car in park, and with a flourish turned and said, “Vee are ear.”
Riker said nothing. Instead, he nodded and smiled and then passed the man two crisp twenties. To show his appreciation to the man for picking up a fare in rumpled clothes, carrying a minuscule bag, and nearly twice his size, Riker had the man keep the eight dollars and change that was left over. Then, with something sounding distinctly like Tank you berry mulch coming from the driver’s mouth and a toothy smile directed his way via the rearview, Riker planted his bionic leg onto the street. Clutching the canvas NRA bag he’d received for donating a year’s subscription to a soldier still toiling away over there under the hot desert sun, he grabbed the bar near his head and unfolded his oversized frame from the backseat.
Bag in hand, he closed the door and waited in the street while the cabbie completed a crisp U-turn around him. After watching the taillights flare and the yellow Crown Vic slide around the corner on a tack due west, presumably taking it back to Oxford, Riker crossed the street and stopped on the frost-heaved driveway.
There was no sidewalk, only a trampled brown path cutting through the grass parking strip. Riker stood with the deserted street at his back and stared at the two-story apartment building his sister called home.
Obviously built in the sixties or early seventies, when architects were smoking grass and designing things the old-fashioned way—not on a computer—the cedar-shingle-roofed twelve-unit building had all the charm of a Kleenex box and the powder blue exterior to match.
He scanned the parking lot for Tara’s car but saw only econoboxes—foreign and domestic vehicles bigger than a coffin yet still small enough to be buried in if the Jaws of Life couldn’t pry you out. His gaze reached the far end of the rectangular lot, and still no Chevy Impala. As he made tracks in the dew-laden grass, in his side vision he saw an emergency vehicle blaze by the end of the street, right to left, heading east, its flashing lights but a Technicolor blur.
With the noise from the warbling siren fading away, Riker slipped between a pair of parked cars and scaled the nearest run of cement steps. Suffering from the ever-present phantom pains of his amputated leg, which were exasperated by the chill still in the air, he made the second-story landing breathing hard and freshly reminded that he was a bit out of shape and not entirely whole.
Chapter 14
The key was where Tara said he would find it. He let go of the mat and it settled with a wet flop. He stuck the key in the door, turned the knob and tensed when he heard Tara say, in a voice purposely forced to go a couple of octaves deeper: “Go away … I’ve got a gun.”
“Bullshit, sis,” Riker said, pushing the door in. “You’re a self-described pacifist. You don’t even own a flyswatter.” He entered the gloomy front room, set his bag on the floor, and smiled down at his younger sister who actually had a gun pointed at him, albeit a pretend one made with a clenched fist and index finger for a barrel.
She lowered her arm but didn’t laugh at the absurdity of the gesture. Instead, she rushed Riker, nearly bowling him over in the process.
“What’s wrong?” he asked as she tried squeezing the life from him.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she answered, releasing her arms from around his waist.
His jaw took on a hard set. He looked down at her and said, “Try me.”
She wavered.
Fearing the worst—an abusive boyfriend, maybe a rape that resulted in her becoming pregnant—he insisted she spill.
Tara sat on the worn couch and started her story from the first pumpkin spice latte of the day. When she was finished, Riker was relieved his first assumptions weren’t why she wanted to talk. However, when she got to the part about the fella who had bled every drop of his blood out onto the lobby tiles and then came back to life a minute later, he began to wonder if she had started taking drugs. Maybe a boyfriend started her on some stuff and she was having flashbacks. After Mom died and she started telling him about all of her crazy new tattoos, the fear had been planted that she was hanging with the wrong crowd. So, taking the initiative, he broached the subject.
“Is the bath salts thing up here yet?”
Tara made a face. “The what?”
“That drug”—he enunciated the word drug—”that kids are doing down in Florida. One guy … thinking he was a zombie or something, ate that homeless guy’s face right off. It was caught on surveillance tape. I watched it … three times.”
She stared blankly at him.
“Maybe that kid was on bath salts,” Riker said, stressing the last two words.
Tara took a step closer, looked up, and locked eyes with him. “You think I’m on drugs, don’t you?” Tara pissed off was not a good thing—pacifist or not—this Riker had learned the hard way growing up with the hothead.
“I saw what I saw,” she said slowly, taking a cue from him and also enunciating each word.
He had been studying her face, clos
e enough that he could smell the stale coffee on her breath. He picked up none of the telltale micro expressions indicating deception. He had read about the subject in Popular Science Magazine or something. Tara didn’t look away. She never crossed her arms or shifted from foot-to-foot. She was solid and he was beginning to believe her version of what she saw. Then, remembering the Ohio Guard convoy that passed his window earlier and the emergency vehicles screaming out of Oxford, coupled with the one that had just roared by the end of the street heading east, all of Riker’s doubts did an abrupt and complete one-eighty. He continued looking at her and cocked his head as the obvious dawned on him. He paced to the coffee table, grabbed the remote off of it, and pressed the Power button while pointing the brick of a thing at the cable box.
“Why don’t we see what’s on the news,” he said, matter-of-fact-like.
The television flared to life. Realizing he didn’t know the channel lineup, he handed over the remote.
“Doesn’t matter what they’re saying on the television,” she said. “In the car I had the radio on WKNU and heard the deejay say there was an active shooter at the university. Then down by the Dairy Queen a SWAT van blazed by going the opposite direction.”
“Heading towards MU?”
Tara nodded. She began surfing through the channels, skipping the fluff on the lower end and going straight for the big numbers, where CNN, FOX, and MSNBC were parked. She found nothing but the same drivel spewing from all of the perfectly coiffed and credentialed anchors.
“Local news, sis,” Riker said. He removed his ball cap and mechanically ran a hand through his hair.
Punching in a lower number brought up a local station and sure enough, a mousy little reporter Tara recognized was in front of the camera describing a whole lot of nothing. She looked to be standing on the far southwest corner of the student parking lot where she might be able to see a sliver of the front of the building if she was lucky. However, when the brunette reporter turned and pointed, she wasn’t pointing in the direction of the atrium where Tara had witnessed the unthinkable. Instead, she was hooking her arm, trying to indicate the area behind the university. A street was back there. It ran west to east, entering North Verity Parkway in the former direction and ending up as Manchester Road in the latter. Though she didn’t find herself back there often, Tara knew that was where the city bus stops were. The reporter said: “Back behind MU’s main building … out of sight of our cameras, is where the gunman boarded the MTS eastbound Number 9 and unleashed two of his fifty-bullet clips from his assault rifle.”