by David Spell
The white woman in scrubs that Marco had shot was identified by her ID as one of the care-givers. She had bite marks on both of her arms and appeared to have turned quickly after being bitten. Two more residents from the home had escaped before the CDC officers had started their search of the house and had attacked one of the Atlanta Police officers.
As the officer fought off her attackers, she was bitten several times before her partner shot and killed the two zombies. The officer was under close evaluation at Grady Hospital. Rebecca had called the CDC and had some of the experimental vaccine dispatched to the hospital. It was still being tested but it was better than nothing at this point.
And Chuck was right. The virus had gone public. With the Atlanta Police officer's involvement, it was now a news story. The CDC downplayed it as much as they could but a local police officer was hospitalized and another officer had shot and killed the two unarmed citizens who had attacked her.
The Killer Virus story was the top headline on all the local news shows. The networks and the cable news shows quickly picked it up. The CDC’s switchboard lit up and their website crashed because of all the hits. They quickly began posting tips on how to avoid getting infected after the website was working again.
There were also rumors that a CDC Enforcement Officer had been killed but there had been no press release or confirmation yet. That would not happen until after Rebecca notified his family. That was the hardest phone call that she had ever made. Marco’s father had answered. She broke the news as gently as she could, but how do you gently tell a father that his son had had his throat ripped out by zombies?
The infected Atlanta Police Officer died two days later. For whatever reason, she did not turn into a zombie. She had been given several doses of the experimental vaccine in the hospital. After her death, the CDC scientists obtained blood samples from her body to see what they could learn.
It appeared that the vaccine had played some role in the woman not reanimating. While not perfect, at least the vaccine was a start. The CDC scientists and epidemiologists continued to work around the clock trying to find something that would stop the virus.
CDC HQ, Thursday, 2030 hours
The interviews had been recorded. The debrief was concluded. McCain knew that the FBI would be working on this for a while. Rebecca would not be conducting this investigation since she was involved after shooting Marco. She had been interviewed by one of the FBI Agents and then had shut herself in her office to make some phone calls.
McCain had been watching and observing her for a while. Watching her wasn’t hard, but there were several things that just did not add up from the conversations that he had had with her about her background. Chuck had talked to Andy Fleming a few days earlier and shared his thoughts. Andy was always slow to speak. He was a thinker. He processed things.
“I dealt with a lot of spooks when I was in Marine Spec Ops, Chuck. You might be on to something.”
“That makes me feel better. I met a few spooks as well when I was embedded with the special forces,” said Chuck. “This whole thing just feels like it’s more than we’re being told. She said something when she came to the house and offered me a job. She mentioned that she’d talked to the SF team that I'd been assigned to and that they’d given me a good recommendation.”
“That was nice of them,” said Fleming.
“For sure, but check this out. When I was working with them, every so often a few of the guys from the team would disappear for a day or two. I asked the team sergeant if they’d gone on leave. He couldn't tell me specifically what they were doing but said they were on loan to the CIA from time to time.
“Well, one day, I was walking by the team room and I heard some of the guys talking. One of them had just gotten back and he was telling the others about this blonde CIA agent that 'looked like a model but was as tough as nails and was pretty good in a firefight.'”
“Now that's interesting,” said Andy. “What do you think the chances are?”
“I don’t know. Maybe one day I'll get a chance to ask her.”
At the moment, though, he was concerned about Rebecca's frame of mind after having to put Marco down. He had no idea if she’d ever had to shoot anyone before. Shooting her own guy, though, multiplied whatever she was feeling exponentially.
Chuck decided to check on her and knocked on her office door. There was no response. He knocked again.
“Come in.”
He opened the door and saw that Johnson had been crying. She was wiping her face and trying to compose herself.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I just wanted to see if you needed anything else before I leave. Are you ok?”
“No, I'm not ok,” she said, with irritation in her voice. “I just got off of the phone with Marco’s dad. That was a really hard conversation.”
“I'm sorry. That had to be rough. Can I give you a ride home? Maybe you shouldn’t try and drive. I’d be happy to give you a lift.”
“No, thank you, Officer McCain. I’m perfectly capable of getting myself home.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything. I was just trying to…”
“Good night,” she said, cutting him off.
Chuck paused. “Good night, ma’am.”
He closed the door and backed away. That was a rousing success, he thought.
Rebecca's apartment, Thursday, 2250 hours
Chuck sat in his truck outside of Rebecca's apartment building. He wasn’t sure if this was a good idea or a bad idea. He had gone home and eaten and taken a shower but he was concerned about his boss. He felt protective towards her and wanted to make sure that she was alright. It was bad enough to lose a man, but she had been the one to make that shot into Marco’s head to protect herself and to put him down for good.
He picked up his phone and started to call her. He stopped. She probably wouldn’t answer, especially if she saw it was him calling. Or maybe she would. He pushed the number on the screen. It rang several times before she answered.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Boss, it’s Chuck. I don't want to be a bother, but I was concerned about you. I didn’t know if maybe you needed to talk.”
There was a long pause. “I’m…I’m not good. I’m really…I just need to be alone right now, Chuck. Thank you for checking on me.” She hung up.
McCain got out of his truck and walked up the one flight of stairs to her apartment. He knocked on the door. Steps approached the other side of the door.
“Who is it?”
“Rebecca, it’s me. Chuck. Can I come in?”
“McCain, I told you I need to be alone!” she yelled.
“I heard you, but you really don’t need to be alone. Can I come in? Please? I won’t stay long, I promise.”
The door opened. Johnson’s eyes were red and puffy and it was obvious that she had been crying. He also caught a whiff of her breath and knew that she had been drinking. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt and dark sweatpants. Her hair, normally in a pony tail, was hanging freely over her shoulders.
Chuck stepped inside. Rebecca swayed as she led him into the living room, seemingly resigned that she wasn’t going to be able to get rid of him. She sat down on the couch and picked up her wine glass. It was half full and the empty bottle sat next to her on an end table.
“I would offer you a drink, but this is the last of the wine. I drank it all,” she chuckled.
He smiled. “It looks like you did.”
“So, you can see me. I'm ok. I'm just having a little wine and crying it out but I'll be fine.”
“I just wanted to make sure. It's tough to lose a guy. I lost a couple over the years and it's a hard thing to deal with.”
“Yeah, but I bet you didn’t have to shoot any of your guys,” she said, taking a big swallow of her wine.
“No, you're right. I can’t even imagine, Rebecca. I'm so sorry that you had to do that. But that wasn’t really Marco. That was…that was something else.”
“I hope it wasn’t Ma
rco. I just keep seeing his face as he walked towards me. And I keep wondering what I could have done differently. Not for Marco. There wasn’t anything, I mean he’d turned into a zombie. But if I had planned or prepared better…I don’t know. What did I miss?” She started crying again.
McCain took a deep breath. “When I was twenty two years old, I was a rookie cop working the midnight shift in a rural part of the county. We were getting torn up with armed robberies. There was one guy that was hitting us regularly. He was robbing convenience stores and Waffle Houses. They were the only things open in the middle of the night. This guy was good for at least eleven robberies. He hadn’t killed anybody yet but he had pistol whipped a couple of guys and groped a couple of the women he'd robbed.”
Rebecca sipped her wine and nodded. “Sounds like a nice guy,” she said. She didn’t know where Chuck was going with his story but she was grateful for the distraction.
“We got information from our Crime Analysis Unit that there was a fifty percent chance that he was going to hit the Mr. J’s convenience store in my beat on that night. It was fifty percent he was going to hit that store and fifty percent that he was going to hit a store on the other side of county.
"I knew the girl that was working in the Mr. J’s. She was a single mom and I would stop in at least once a night and have a cup of coffee and chat. This was her second job because she wanted to give her kids a good life. Her name was Sonya. She was always nice to me.
“I sat across the street in the woods for the first three hours of the shift but then I got hungry. I went up the street to grab a quick bite to eat. I had just sat down at the Waffle House when the call came over the police radio of a robbery in progress at the Mr. J’s.
“I rushed back over there; it was just a couple of miles away. I pulled in behind the building and parked beside the store. I got out and walked to the front of the building and as I turned the corner, the front door opened and the guy came out. The guy that had been doing all of the robberies. He had a bag of money in his left hand and a revolver in his right hand.
“He saw me and started to bring his gun up. It happened so fast I didn't even have time to challenge him. As his gun came up, I shot him twice in the chest with my .357 Magnum. He went down and I went over and kicked his gun away and handcuffed him. I was scared. I was happy. I was alive. I had survived. And I'd gotten the bad guy.
“I looked into the store but I couldn't see Sonya. Maybe he’d locked her in the freezer. He'd done that on a couple of other robberies. I called in the shooting on my radio and then I went to check on the clerk. I opened the door and called her but there was no response. I went into store and found her lying behind the counter, dead. He’d shot her in the head.
“The cameras in the store later showed the robber had tried to rape her but she had fought back so he had killed her. I was devastated. It was my fault. If I hadn't gotten hungry, if I had packed some food with me, if I'd just stayed on my surveillance, Sonya’s kids would still have their mom.”
“Wow, Chuck, I’m sorry,” Rebecca said. “How did you handle that?”
He smiled. “An older, salty veteran pulled me aside the next day. I guess he'd heard I was having trouble dealing with everything. This guy had seen a lot of combat in Vietnam and he'd been in a couple of shootings as a cop.
"Danny put his arm around me and said, ‘"Kid, if you need to get drunk, do it one time. That’s it. You did good. You got the bad guy. He’s dead. He’ll never hurt anybody else. I know you feel bad about that woman but there’s no guarantee that you could’ve saved her. You can’t fix the past. It’s gone. But you're a hell of a cop and I'm not going to let you beat yourself up and ruin your future.”’”
“Did you?” she asked.
“Did I what?”
“Did you get drunk?”
McCain paused. “No, I had a few drinks but then stopped. Drowning my sorrows wasn't going to help me. Danny was also the one who told me about the nightmares.”
The wine was really starting to affect Rebecca. She was trying to listen to Chuck. There was something important there that he was wanting to give her. Something she needed to hear.
“The nightmares?” she asked.
“Yeah, he told me not to be surprised when the bad dreams came. That was often how our subconscious minds processed things and it was a part of the healing process.”
“So, were the dreams bad?”
“They were really bad,” Chuck answered. “But knowing that they were coming helped a lot and they only lasted a couple of weeks.”
Rebecca nodded at him. “Thanks for telling me that.”
They sat in silence for a couple of minutes. Her head dropped to her chest and she was asleep, or passed out, depending on how you looked at it. Chuck pulled her legs up on the sofa and covered her with the blanket that was on back of the couch. He wasn’t sure what to do. He probably should just head home. She'll be ok, he thought. He turned off the lamp.
As he started for the door, he saw a bottle of Glenlivet twelve-year old Scotch sitting on her small bar. Well, that changes things, he thought. She was holding out on me. He poured himself two fingers worth in a tumbler and sat back down in the recliner. He sipped the Scotch and watched Rebecca sleep.
Chuck woke to the sound of someone whimpering. He instinctively reached for his pistol. Then he realized that he was sleeping in Rebecca’s recliner. She was still on the couch. He looked at his phone. 0200 hours.
Rebecca was talking in her sleep. “Stop. No! Please, Marco. No. Please stop!” She started to thrash around as the nightmare became more intense.
McCain knelt beside of her and laid his hand on her head. He whispered into her ear, “It’s ok, Rebecca. I'm here with you. It's just a bad dream.”
She didn’t wake up, but she did calm down. Chuck went back to the recliner and watched her until he fell asleep again.
Rebecca’s apartment, Friday, 0700 hours
Rebecca woke up to the smells of coffee brewing and breakfast cooking. With a start, she realized that she was lying on her couch and not in her bed. Her head throbbed and her mouth tasted like cotton. And who was cooking in her kitchen?
Then she remembered that Chuck had come over the night before. He had been so concerned about her. It was really a nice gesture. But why was he still here? She got up and peeked into the kitchen to confirm that it was Chuck in her kitchen. His back was to her as he was working on something on the stove.
Johnson went to the bathroom. After she was finished, she brushed her teeth and her hair to make herself a little more presentable. When she walked back into the kitchen, McCain was putting something on plates. He saw her and smiled.
“I hope you like cheese omelets. You didn't have much variety in your fridge.”
“Chuck, why are you still here? Did you, I mean did we…? I don’t remember a lot from last night.”
“Did we talk?” he offered, handing her a plate. “We did. We talked. And then you fell asleep on the couch. I started to leave but I have a confession to make. I saw your bottle of Scotch and I took advantage of it and had a little drink.”
McCain poured them both a cup of coffee and handed her one. “I sat there sipping my Scotch, ok, sipping your Scotch and I guess I fell asleep. I’m sorry. But then you started having a really bad dream. It woke me up and I was able to let you know that it was just a dream and you seemed to calm down.”
Rebecca remembered the dream. It had been horrible. Marco was eating somebody and then he’d come after her. She had tried to shoot him but in the dream her gun wouldn’t fire. The memory of that nightmare made her shudder. She closed her eyes.
She felt Chuck touch her shoulder. “It’s ok,” he said. “You're going to be fine. And I’m sorry if I was a little pushy last night. I was just worried about you.”
“Why did you come over last night? Really?” she asked him. When she opened her eyes, she saw that he was staring at her.
“Everybody needs a friend who’ll sit with
them when they’re having a bad dream,” he said.
Her eyes filled with tears and she felt a surge of emotion. That was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to her. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
“Thank you, Chuck,” she whispered. “Now, don’t get any ideas. We have to go to work.” She wiped her eyes and smiled at him as she took a bite of her omelet.
“Ideas?" He smiled. “I’m always full of ideas but most of them can wait until we get to the office.”
CHAPTER SIX
Getting the Pieces in Place
CDC HQ, Friday, 0830 hours
After leaving Rebecca’s apartment, McCain spoke to Andy Fleming on his ride into the office. He and Smith were still on their surveillance west of Atlanta, near Douglasville. They had been out there since the previous afternoon and had missed the action that had claimed Marco’s life.
There was a lot of activity at the house they were sitting on but they had not seen Amir al-Razi yet. Two white vans and three cars had arrived at the house that morning. The vehicles had pulled behind the house and it was clear something was going on.
They still had the arrest warrant for al-Razi. He was the other Iranian bio-terrorist that they had been looking for. Team Two had just missed him at another location a week before.
Chuck pulled his truck into the parking deck at HQ. He promised to send reinforcements to back his guys up. “I’ll ask if Eddie and Jimmy can come relieve you. Check into a cheap hotel when they get there. Get some sleep and let’s keep this stakeout going. It's the best lead that we have at the moment. I'll try and get out there later in the day as well. It sounds like this may turn into something.”
McCain changed into his work out clothes and went into the weight room. He needed to release some stress of his own. He lifted weights for forty-five minutes and then walked over to the heavy bag. He pulled his hand wraps out of his bag and wrapped his fists. He slipped on the twelve-ounce boxing gloves that were in his bag. He set the timer app on his phone for ten three minute rounds with a minute of rest in between rounds.