Hour 23

by Robert Barnard

  “How are you feeling, Jim?” Ingram asked.

  Jim took a seat beside his sergeant, tucking his paper night gown between his bare hind and the bed as he sat. “Like a shivering, drugged raccoon,” Jim said.

  Ingram looked forward from the foot of the bed. He held his hands clasped in his lap. “I’m sure the doctor gave you the news earlier that you’re being mandated.”

  “He did.”

  “I hate to do it, Jim. You look like shit. But it’s bad out there.”

  “Yeah?” Jim grunted. “How bad?”

  “Bad. What you and Chow came upon this morning…that was just the start of it. It’s happening all over. First in the city, and now in East Violet.”

  Jim scratched at the thin layer of stubble starting to form on his face and neck. “Min’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Ingram sighed. “He’s not doing well.”

  Jim nodded. “Hmph.”

  “This morning,” Ingram said, “he picked up whatever that woman, Mrs. Cooper, had. They’re calling it a virus, but—all these doctors and scientists, they don’t know. They have ideas and theories, but deep down, they don’t know. It seems to be blood-borne. You weren’t cut or scratched, so you came back clean. But Min—”

  “Min was doing his job,” Jim interrupted.

  Ingram nodded. “Yeah, and he had to be a hero.”

  Jim turned away and looked out his window.

  “There’s a town-wide quarantine in effect now, Jim. They’re not letting anyone in—or out of—town. Chief Lehman hasn’t spoken up yet, he’s a damn mess. He wouldn’t know what to say.”

  Jim reached over to his table and opened the pint of water that Sherri had left for him. In one hard swig he swallowed it.

  “You’ve been under for a couple hours, Jim. I don’t want to give you any illusions about how bad it’s getting out there. C.D.C. has boots on the ground here, and in the city. But, it’s bigger than that. The National Guard is on standby, things are going to get worse—”

  “Twenty-four hours, Sarge. I’ve been working for a day straight, my partner is dead—or dying—and I just woke from a codeine coma.”

  “I know what you’re going to say—”

  “I need to see my kid. I need to know that she’s all right.”

  “She’s fine, Jim.”

  “Yeah? How would you know?”

  “Blankenship is stationed up at her school. The school’s on lockdown, too. She’s safe there, Jim.”

  “Twenty-four fucking hours. I could resign right now.”

  Ingram leaned back on the hospital bed and clicked his tongue. “You could. Hell, half the force has. But I know you, Jim. You’re one of the good ones. You’re gonna’ throw out a pension and any hopes of being hired as a cop ever again, and for what? To be a chicken shit and run for the hills? To see your kid and get a couple hours of sleep while this town burns itself down? If you want to help your daughter, you’ll stay and help those that need you.”

  “You’ve got kids, Sarge?”

  “I don’t, you know that—”

  “You don’t. So cut the bullshit. Put me at the school with her.”

  Ingram sighed. “I can’t do that Jim.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “A quarantine is a quarantine. I can’t wave a magic wand and have it not apply to you. C.D.C. shut down Maple between East Violet and the high school. It’s a major roadway into town. It’s out of my hands, Jim.”

  Ingram patted a duffel bag at the edge of the hospital bed and stood up. “New phone, fresh uniform, fresh shirts. A badge—didn’t have time to personalize one, obviously, so it’s a temp. A Glock nine with two magazines, and a pair of boots I found in the station. If you decide you want to stay.”

  “Where’s the stuff I came in here with?”

  Ingram said, “Incinerated.”

  Jim let out a deep, sarcastic chuckle. “Seriously?”

  “Again, Jim. Out of my hands.”

  “That’s just great. I had fifty bucks in my wallet. My lucky two dollar bill. A picture of Chloe.”

  Ingram shuffled over to the door. His thick, chunky legs waddled as he walked. “I’ve got other officers to visit. Whatever you decide, I’ll understand. Ask the nurse at reception for me when you’re ready.”

  Ingram left the room. Jim spent the next several moments leaned up in his bed, lost deep in thought. He grabbed the duffel bag that his sergeant left him, yanked the zipper open, and picked around inside. Right away he found a basic flip phone, opened it, saw that it had a decent charge. He dialed Chloe’s number.

  “Hey it’s Chloe, and if you’re hearing this, who leaves voicemails anymore? Text me.” Jim smiled at the sound of his daughter’s voice. “Chloe, it’s dad. Listen. Stay where you are. Stay with Officer Blankenship and do what you’re told. Don’t be scared. I love you, I’ll see you soon. Everything will be all right.”

  “Aren’t you looking spiffy?” Sherri said as she looked up from the nurse’s desk and gave Jim a once over.

  Jim smirked and tugged at his uniform. The pants were too lose and the shirt was too tight.

  “I need to find Sergeant Ingram,” Jim said.

  “Of course. I’ll page him right away.” Sherri reached for a phone and announced Ingram’s name over the hospital loudspeaker.

  As if by magic, Ingram quickly appeared in a hallway opposite the nurse’s desk. The portly sergeant toddled towards Jim, looked him up and down, and gave him a heavy pat on the back.

  “I knew I could count on you, officer.”

  “I want to see Min. That’s all I ask.”

  “Jim, that would be difficult—”

  “I want to see my partner or I walk.”

  Ingram raised his eyebrows and his smile slinked away. He turned from Jim, pulled a phone from his pocket, and dialed a number quickly. The sergeant mumbled back and forth with someone on the other end for a moment, then snapped the phone shut and returned it to his pocket.

  “All right, Jim. Follow me.”

  Ingram marched off towards an elevator, with Jim following close behind. Ingram called the elevator, and the two stood waiting.

  “I’m not sure you’ll want to see this,” Ingram said.

  Jim said, “I don’t want to, but I need to.”

  The elevator chimed and the two stepped in. Ingram inserted a key into a panel inside the elevator, then pressed a button for floor twelve. The two stood side by side quietly for the elevator ride up.

  When the doors opened, Jim and Ingram stood in front of a long tunnel of plastic. A group of astronauts and deep-sea divers clamored around the policemen before leading them towards a decontamination chamber.

  Jim turned to Ingram, who nodded. The two followed a yellow suited space ranger who brought them into a small tent. Ingram and Jim each put on a hazmat suit, layer by layer. A strip of duct tape at their ankles sealed their boots to their pant legs; a strip at their wrists sealed their gloves to their sleeves. The last step involved putting on a bulbous, astronaut-like helmet, which clamped into a plastic liner in the neckline of their suits. Breathing apparatus’s whistled to life in each of their helmets.

  “We’ve got about fifteen minutes of breathe time. Twenty, tops,” Ingram said.

  The pair headed down a long and winding passage of plastic tunnels before coming upon a stairwell.

  “We hike to the next floor from here,” Ingram explained, and he opened the door to the stairwell. The two walked up the stairs to a landing with a large number thirteen spray-painted onto the wall.

  Jim followed Ingram into the thirteenth floor and down another set of plastic passageways. This time they were shorter. After a brief walk, they stood in front of a window of what was once a nursery.

  Min was barely recognizable, strapped to a gurney inside the nursery. His features were eerily lit by the mix of haphazardly hung industrial lights shining through the layers of plastic.

  Jim ached to cover his mouth. His knees started to buckle slightly. He h
ad to lean forward and put a hand on the window in front of him to keep from falling over.

  “I’m sorry, Jim,” Ingram said. He patted Jim’s back.

  Inside the nursery, Min’s body jerked and twitched as it tried to escape the shackles that restrained him. He was missing whole patches of hair from atop his head. Pustules blistered up around his eyes, cheeks, and the corners of his curled back lips. Min looked nothing like the spunky, youthful officer Jim had known from so many years working together. Min’s mouth clicked open and shut; sometimes slow and with long pauses between, and other times in bursts like a camera shutter. His eyes scanned the room around him, bloodshot and yellowed. Lifeless.

  Jim regained his balance, and for the first time noticed others in the room. There was an officer who looked familiar, but who Jim couldn’t place a name to, strapped into a gurney just left of Min.

  Ingram noticed Jim staring at the officer. “Turnbull. Rookie. Not sure you two ever met. Two hours ago he was lying on a hospital bed, clinically dead. Now he’s here—just as clinically dead—but, moving. No brainwaves. The virus eats at the nervous system, reducing the human host to a puppet. That’s all, a puppet. If the virus can yank enough strings, the puppet bites or scratches someone else, and the virus spreads. At least, that’s what all these damn doctors keep telling me. Sounds like hell, right?”

  Jim watched Turnbull spastically jerk in his restraints. Like Min, large patches of hair on his head were missing. Clumps of it littered the floor around his gurney. His skin had turned gray and scabby; it clung tight to the bones beneath it. One eye was completely swollen shut under a mound of dark, purpled flesh. The eye that remained open darted around, milky and clouded. So clouded that Jim couldn’t make out a pupil or the color of his eyes. Turnbull made snappy movements similar to Min’s, but something was different. They were slower. More sluggish. Weak.

  “So this is what waits at the end of the line? This is what happens to everyone who contracts the virus?” Jim asked, his voice crackling.

  Ingram nodded solemnly.

  “So how is it fixed?” Jim said.

  “Jim,” Ingram stuttered. “As far as anyone knows…there is no fixing it.”

  Jim heaved heavy breaths in his hazmat suit. His legs felt like jelly.

  “We’ve only got a few minutes left on our rebreathers before we lose pressure. Come on.” Ingram tugged at Jim’s shoulder and motioned for the stairs.

  Before he returned to the stairwell, Jim stopped one last time to turn and gaze at Min through the nursery window. Jim put one gloved hand against the glass, watched his partner tug violently at his restraints. After a few moments of watching Min snap at the air around him, jittering in his gurney, Jim removed his hand.

  “Goodbye, Min,” Jim whispered, his helmet fogging from his panted breath. Jim’s eyes throbbed with grief. “Goodbye, my friend.”

  EIGHT

  “We’ve been stuck in here for so long, Nole. I don’t know how much longer I can take it.” Chloe sat on the floor, playing with her cell phone. So far, she had worn the battery down to a meager 39% and that number kept dropping. Shitty day to leave my charger at home, she thought.

  “Me too,” Nolan said. He was exhausted. They all were. Every student aboard bus thirty-three had been corralled in the nurse’s station since the crash that morning. “Have you heard any more from your dad?”

  “Nothing,” Chloe said blankly. She spun her phone in her palm and stared at it, as if a call could come through at any moment. “Not since his last voicemail. ‘Stay safe, do what you’re told.’ Look how that’s working out.”

  “I’m starving,” Nolan said, and he yawned. He stretched his arms high up above his head. “And my ass has gone completely numb from sitting on this floor.”

  “Yeah, hey…” Chloe stood up, dusted off her pants, and hollered over to Nurse Lowell, “When do we get lunch?”

  “Sit back down, Miss Whiteman,” Nurse Lowell said in a bitter tone. The nurse had spent the entire morning at her desk, fiddling with either her cell phone, the office phone, or her computer.

  Jared stood up from the desk he was sitting at. “You can’t just go about your day without feeding us.”

  “Everyone stay seated and patient. When I find out I can release you for lunch, you’ll all be the first to know—trust me.” Nurse Lowell looked up from her computer just long enough to scan the room of students. Everything she read online suggested that the virus had an incubation period somewhere between five and thirty minutes. That time depended on a person’s gender, age, metabolism, and other variables. It was going on nearly three hours since the students arrived. If any of them had contact with the virus, it should have been apparent by now. Still, she kept her distance.

  “This is bullshit!” Jared screamed. He threw his algebra textbook across the room like an angry child. It crashed into the wall beside Nolan with a hard whack and the binding split, causing a brief rainfall of white pages filled with word problems. “You can’t keep us locked up in here like animals!”

  Nurse Lowell stood straight up at her desk and picked up the phone in front of her. Without taking her eyes off of Jared, she dialed a number and mumbled something indiscernible into the phone.

  “Everyone sit where you are. I won’t ask again.” Nurse Lowell scowled at Jared, who threw his hands up and returned to his desk.

  In no time at all, Principal Chaplik appeared at the nurse’s door and pulled her outside. Nolan studied their conversation through the window that overlooked the hall. He couldn’t make out much, except for when his principal quite loudly asked “are you sure?”, to which Nurse Lowell nodded repeatedly. After that, Principal Chaplik entered the nurse’s office.

  “Okay,” Chaplik said with a quick clap of his hands. “We’re going to move you all to the cafeteria. Be quick about it.”

  The students groaned and cheered. Nolan clapped sarcastically.

  “Except for you, Mr. Moore,” Chaplik said. He pointed a sausage-shaped finger at Jared. “You stay behind for a moment.”

  Jared sat at his desk, arms crossed. He tapped his foot as the students filed out of the nurse’s office.

  “This is insane,” Nolan said as he walked Chloe into the main hallway.

  Chloe exhaled. “It is. But what can we do, you know?”

  “We can’t just sit around here all day, pretending like this is okay. We should be going home.”

  “Nolan, my dad said we should stay here. And besides, they’re going to start evacuations soon. The first place they’ll come is a school, right?”

  Nolan thought about the article that Chloe had shown him earlier. It stated that massive evacuations of New York City were underway and urged people to stay in their homes until help arrived.

  “It will be a while before they get to us,” Nolan scoffed. “Do you think this place will last until then?”

  Nolan and Chloe took seats at their usual lunch table. On any regular day the table sat eight, and unless one of their friends was ditching class, the table was always packed. Today it was just Chloe, Nolan, and Rachel Epps. Rachel didn’t typically sit with Chloe and Nolan, but her regular table had filled by the time the group arrived at the cafeteria. The spot where Jared sat was still empty; no one had seen him since the nurse’s office.

  Whatever teachers had shown up to school that day patrolled the cafeteria. Mr. DePierre, the chemistry teacher, walked deliberately down each row of tables with his arms crossed. He seemed to inspect each student one by one before he continued. It reminded Nolan of a TV show about prisons that he had watched once.

  “You three, go ahead. Go get some lunch,” Mr. DePierre said in his nasally voice as he passed Nolan’s table. Chloe, Nolan and Rachel all looked around at each other without moving.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Mr. DePierre said. “Get moving, other tables want to eat, too.”

  “We’re just waiting on someone, if that’s okay,” Nolan said.

  Mr. DePierre said, “It’s not okay, it
’s your turn. Go.”

  “Our friend is really hungry, can’t you let another table go ahead of us?”

  The chemistry teacher was growing impatient. “Mr. Fischer, if you were as passionate about covalent bonds as you were about arranging lunch schedules, you might have had a chance at passing my class. I won’t ask you again. Go. When your friend gets here, I’ll escort him to the line personally.”

  Nolan’s chair scraped against the linoleum floor as he stood up from the table. “Fine.”

  Rachel, Chloe, and Nolan approached the lunch line and grabbed a tray.

  “What was that about?” Chloe asked.

  “Huh?” Nolan mumbled, before tossing a chocolate milk onto his lunch tray.

  “You and Jared aren’t that good of friends. Why the sudden crusade to make sure he has lunch?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem fair, I guess.”

  “You’ve gotta’ find a more constructive way to channel whatever anger you have bottled up today, Nolan.”

  “Are you my therapist now?” Nolan held his tray up and a woman behind the lunch counter scooped a cup of macaroni and cheese onto his plate.

  Chloe said, “Nolan, dude. Chill. I just don’t want you burning out over frivolous things. Save it for the important stuff, you know?”

  The three had barely made it back to their table and sat with their food before the cafeteria doors burst open.

  “Oh my Gawd,” Rachel gasped, and she dropped her forkful of macaroni.

  Standing in the doorway were Principal Chaplik, Officer Blankenship, and Jared Moore. The principal and the officer each held Jared by an elbow and dragged him forward. Jared’s face was bruised—worse than it was earlier—and he had a bloody nose. His hands were cuffed in front of him. Principal Chaplik had a welt on his left cheek.

  The students in the cafeteria immediately began to chatter, and a low rumble of murmurs and whispering filled the air.

  “Everybody settle down,” Officer Blankenship ordered. “Simmer down and eat your food.”