Alfred said, ‘When you were helping to restrain Captain Reynolds, were you injured in any way, like scratches or bites, or did you get any body fluids on you, like blood or spit . . . anything?’
I could see that he wasn’t kidding, and so I answered him, ‘No.’
He stared at me for a few seconds, like he was trying to decide if he believed me.
‘OK then, second question. Do you have a strong stomach?’
I said, ‘Al, what the hell is going on?’
He moved his hands off of my chest and his gun and inclined his head to the right, indicating that I should proceed down the hallway to the holding cells. I stared him for a few more seconds but his face was stone, so I went down the hall. Our station isn’t designed as an actual jail; it’s only got four holding cells, all in a row on the west side of the hallway I was in. The far cell was the one we use for juveniles—also where we put Captain Reynolds. The first cell was empty. I could barely make out a low whimpering sound from somewhere ahead. The second cell had somebody in it, I couldn’t tell at first who it was. Female, dressed in gray sweats, sitting against the far wall with her knees pulled up to her chest and hands over her head. She looked very disheveled, maybe some trailer trash meth head jonesing for a fix. The whimper was coming from her and she slowly rocked back and forth. I looked at Al and he said, ‘Evans.’ I jerked my head back to the figure in the cell. I didn’t know Trooper Evans very well; I knew her name, that she was married with no kids, lived on the southeast side of our district in a subdivision called Ashley Estates, not much else. I called into the cell, ‘Marcy . . . Marcy . . . it’s Sam, Sam Ironfeather, are you okay?’ She didn’t answer. I looked at Al, but he’d just inclined his head further. I walked to the third cell. Cell number three and four do not have a solid wall between them, just bars. I could see into both cells but not very well, the lights were out in the cells and the illumination from the lights in the hall were not very bright thanks to the ‘energy saving initiatives’ that came down the pike a year ago when the governor was running for re-election. What I could see in the dim light was . . . well, I don’t know how to describe it, it was like I saw what was there but because of the lack of full illumination, my brain just didn’t process or believe what it was really seeing. I reached down to my belt and grabbed my flashlight, hit the switch and swept the cells with the light. Right about then the smell hit me. Between the smell and the scene I was witnessing, I dropped to my knees and puked my guts out. Al gave me a few minutes to heave and then pulled me back out of the hallway. We went into the station control room and sat down. I grabbed a Coke out of the little mini fridge, swirled some of it around my mouth, and spit it out in a little garbage can.
Al said, ‘A short time after your shift went out the first time, and I mean the first shift after we put Captain Reynolds in cell four, Fernandez radioed in saying that he wasn’t feeling too hot. We didn’t have any replacements and I told him to hang out as long as he could. About an hour later he radioed in again saying he was feeling worse and was coming back to the station. A few minutes later he got here and went straight to the showers . . . said he felt like he was burning up. I offered to run him by the hospital but he didn’t answer, just kept his head under the running water. I told him that if he changed his mind to let me know and I went back to the desk. A few more guys came in to get a couple hours of rest. About a half an hour later I heard screams and yells from the back of the station house. I went back to see what was going on and saw that the guys who came in for a rest had Fernandez pinned under the metal frame of one of the twin beds. Fernandez was making, I don’t know, like animal sounds. The guys who had him pinned were shouting at him; stuff like, “What the hell are you doing Fernandez?” I asked them what was going on and they said that Fernandez just bum rushed them. They started to tell me more when one of the guys holding him down with the bed frame said, “Damn, look at Fernandez’s eyes!” I got a little bit closer and shined my light onto his face—all the white in both of his eyes had turned dark blood red.
‘Keep him there, I’ll be right back,’ Al told them. Then he said, ‘I went to the weapons room and got a taser, checked to make sure it had a full charge and went back. Even with three guys on the bed frame Fernandez was still struggling. I did an about face back to the weapons room and got a second taser, checked it and returned. It wasn’t like we had a lot of options. Fernandez was totally ignoring us, so talking was out. I handed one of the tasers to the guy closest to me on the bed frame and we coordinated our release. As soon as they let go of the bed frame Fernandez was up and moving. We hit him with both tasers. Nothing seemed to happen. Well, not like you’d expect anyhow. He didn’t drop to the ground and flop like bacon. It seemed to stun him a little, though. I yelled for the other two guys to go get more tasers and we kept the juice flowing until they got back. They sunk two more wires into Fernandez before he went down. Four tasers it took to knock him out. He was still naked from his shower so one of the guys, Trooper Barnes I think, gave his taser to me and grabbed Fernandez by the ankles and drug him all the way to cell three. After that, those guys took off—maybe on patrol or maybe to their own houses—I don’t know. About half an hour later, Trooper Evans radioed in requesting back up.’”
Sam paused for a few seconds, shook his head and said, “I remembered hearing that call, but no one responded, no one could, we were all swamped as it was. Even when she called out, ‘Shots fired, shots fired!’ no one could break free, we all had our own shit to deal with and bullets were flying all over town.”
“Anyhow, Al kept talking,” he said, ‘About an hour later Evans showed up, driving her personal car and dressed like she was. The phones had stopped ringing a short time before, I think that’s when the land lines went down, and here comes Evans, walking like she’s in a daze. She comes right up to the window, and I can see she’s been crying. I buzzed her in and walked back to ask what’s up, but she heads straight to the cells and goes in number two, shuts the door and just stands there. I ask her what the hell is wrong, and she turns to me and says, “I just shot my husband.” I tried to get her to talk, but all she would say was that she shot him and that she was so sorry and to leave her the hell alone. To be honest, it seemed like the entire city was falling apart and I didn’t have time to deal with her crap right then, so I left her in there and went back to control. Just about then, the secure line from Homeland Security rang. I picked it up, and me and the guy at HS went through the authentication process; it checked out OK but I could hardly hear him, the connection wasn’t that good so I turned down the volume on the audio monitors for the cellblock cameras so I wouldn’t have to listen to Evan’s cry. I spent the next twenty-five minutes relaying personnel information, like who showed up and who was still fit for duty. Somewhere in the middle of that, the buzzer up front rang. I put HS on hold and walked up to the window. Captain Reynolds’s wife was there and wanted to see him. I told her what had happened; she apparently had already heard it from another trooper, I don’t know which one. I buzzed her back and gave her the code and keys for the detention hall and cell number four. She had been in the station a lot and knew her way. I got back on the line with HS and told the guy about Captain Reynolds and Fernandez but he totally blew that off, didn’t even acknowledge it. He then read back a list of duty assignments for all personnel effective immediately, code Alpha—highest priority. By the time I was done writing that down another five or so minutes had passed. Then he had the balls to order me to read it back to him. I bit my tongue and did it. We hung up and I was getting ready to radio all cars to report back to base for new assignments, when I happened to look at the monitor. I could see Evans with her hands on the bars of her cell, it looked like she was screaming or yelling. The lights were out in numbers three and four and I couldn’t see much, but it looked like the captain, Fernandez, and Mrs. Reynolds were having some sort of pow-wow at the bars that divided their cells. I took off back there and—of all the rotten luck—I couldn’t
find the damn keys to open the door to the hallway. Then I remembered I gave my set to Mrs. Reynolds. Five or six minutes later, I finally found the spare set so I opened the door and went back to the holding cells. I don’t know why, but I kept my hand on my gun. Evans’s cell looked OK, she was sitting on the floor in the back just like you see her now. I asked her what went on and what was she yelling about, but she wouldn’t say anything, just sat there and rocked, making that whimpering sound. I pulled out my Maglite and went forward. I saw the same thing that made you puke.’”
Sam continued, “Al crooked his index finger in a ‘come here’ gesture. We walked over to the surveillance system monitors and sat down in the swivel chairs. The video feed had already been time indexed to right before Mrs. Reynolds entered the hallway. We hit ‘play’ and watched. Mrs. Reynolds walked down the hall looking into each cell. She stopped briefly at number three where Fernandez was, seemed to shift her head a little bit, and then went to number four. She leaned against the cell bars and it looked like she was talking. Al hit the pause button and told me that when he turned down the audio so he could hear the guy from HS, he must have accidentally hit the mute button on the audio recorders as well, so we didn’t have any sound to go along with the images we were watching. We started up the video again and watched Mrs. Reynolds use the code and key to enter cell number four. She walked over to her husband; we could see he was still struggling with the cuffs and irons. Then we watched her reach into her pocket and pull out some small object. Who’d have thought she would have brought her own handcuff key. We watched her unshackle his legs and fumble around a little bit trying to get his cuffs off. She managed to get one of them unlocked before . . .”
Sam paused, took a deep breath, and said, “Did you ever watch one of those shows where there’s a street magician doing some type of trick . . . cards or rings or some other type of sleight of hand? And they show it to you again and again and you think you see how he’s doing it, and you’re like, ‘The ace of spades is not under his hat where I’ll bet most people think it is, because I’m more clever than everybody else and I saw him move it underneath the empty cup on the little wooden table in front of him.’ And then he takes off his hat and sure enough there’s a bouquet of roses there instead of the ace of spades and you’ve just about convinced yourself that you’re ‘Karnack the Infallible’ and could never be fooled by a simple card trick, and then the guy lifts up the empty cup to reveal two white doves that flutter away. And then, the magician has the guy who’s filming the show open his wallet and sure enough the ace of spades is in there.” Sam continued, “And the narrator of this documentary on magicians and their tricks says something like, ‘OK, so you missed how he did it, but when you were watching him perform did you notice the two monkeys and the zebra walk past in the background?’ So they replay the clip one more time and sure enough while the magician was showing you the card trick, in the background two gorillas and a zebra walked by, but you were so focused on trying to learn the trick, trying to figure out the secret that you never noticed?”
Francis and Marty were both nodding their head, saying that they just saw something last month on a show called “Magicians and Their Secrets” that had that very scenario on it.
Sam said, “Yeah, I saw that too, it’s what came to mind with what happened next.” Sam got up and went to the coffee machine for a refill. We waited. Silent.
He stayed standing, took a long drink of black coffee and said, “We were so focused on Mrs. Reynolds that we never even noticed Fernandez. He was standing at the bars that separated the two cages. When Mrs. Reynolds unlocked one side of her husband’s cuffs he lurched upwards and latched onto her hair. She was apparently screaming and hitting at him, kind of like an old woman would hit at somebody with a purse, only she didn’t have a purse with her. This was when Evans in cell three started yelling. Mrs. Reynolds was backing up, putting up a pretty good fight. Her husband slipped or twisted his leg somehow and went down, and almost immediately started crawling towards her. She backed away—still screaming—and backed right into the arms of Fernandez.”
Sam looked around the room and said, “We watched it right there on the video as Trooper Fernandez and Captain Reynolds tore her to shreds.”
Nobody said anything. We sensed there was more. There was.
Sam leaned his left arm against the window sill to steady himself, his eyes lost somewhere on the horizon of Ghost Echo Lake. We watched him raise the coffee mug to take another sip, noticed it shake in his hands, saw him put it back down without drinking any, unsure of the steadiness in his own hands. Without looking our way Sam said, “We watched them eat her.”
After a minute or two Sam sat back down and continued, “We were sitting there, not believing what we were seeing, not saying anything to each other; I guess ‘stunned’ is the closest word that applies. The secure fax line from HS spit out several more sheets of paper. Al reached up and grabbed them. The first was confirmation of duty reassignments. I had just started reading down the list when we heard a gunshot, then two more, and then another. We raced back to the cellblock, guns drawn as several more shots rang out. The lights in the hall were bright enough to show us a scene right out of H.P. Lovecraft’s worst nightmare. Captain Reynolds, or rather the thing that used to be Captain Reynolds was outside of cell two, covered in blood and entrails. He . . . I mean ‘it’ was groaning and hissing, trying to reach Evans through the bars. Apparently Mrs. Reynolds didn’t relock the cell when she entered. Two more shots rang out. Evans must have brought her gun with her. I saw Captain Reynolds stagger back slightly as the rounds impacted him, but he didn’t drop. Our ears were ringing from the gunshots, but I distinctly remember hearing Evans shout, ‘Not me—not this way.’ Captain Reynolds moved toward the cell again and both Al and myself opened up. I know I hit him at least half a dozen times but he didn’t drop, instead he started walking toward us. Both of us emptied our mags into him and he finally fell not five feet from me. I jumped over the body as I was yelling for Al to get the keys for Evans’s cell. I looked in just in time to see Evans raise her head, mouthing those words, ‘Not me—not this way.’ Then she stuck her SIG in her mouth and blew out the back of her skull.”
“Holy crap,” said Walter.
Sam was silent for a few minutes, and then he sighed and said, “Fernandez was still in the cell, still reaching for us anytime we walked close by. We made a decision, Al and I, and went and got a shotgun out of the armory. On our way back to the cell block we made a detour through the control center—I don’t even remember why now—but as we passed the fax machine, I looked at the remaining pages underneath the new duty assignments. The first was marked ‘Classified: approved only for release to authorize personnel in law enforcement . . .’ blah, blah, blah . . . the same crap they put on all of their faxes. Anyhow, it was a map of the USA with shaded gray areas indicating confirmed infection zones. Almost all of the major cities were in those shaded areas. The last fax was different. It was marked ‘Classified: top secret, eyes only level four and above.’”
We waited.
“That fax was from Homeland Security via USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. In it they started spelling out the signs and symptoms of what they were calling ‘MKCP—variant Z,’ whatever that stood for. I scanned over the fax; I wish I would have kept the damned thing, but in it they listed several sub variants. Again, I didn’t read everything, most of it was written in that obscure ‘egg headed rocket scientist’ language, I just skimmed over it until I came to the part about treatment. There, in big black letters was something that I could understand. It was one word, and it said ‘NONE.’
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