It was her scream that got me moving. I lowered one shoulder and burst through the door like I had through defensive lines back in school. I hooked one arm around her waist and threw her under the emergency shower. Her tattered mask was soaked through, and his contaminated blood was pink on her teeth. Desperate, I bent her over and jammed my fingers down her throat until she retched and brought up the remnants of her lunch. I’d do anything to cleanse her body of his foulness.
It took two security guards to pry my hands loose. Her face was wet and clean, and the blood and vomit on her gown had smeared into a weird watercolor.
“Get them both to exposure rooms, now!” Dr. Rollins was her mentor. His voice wasn’t angry in my ears. It was the voice of experience. He’d take care of El. He always had. She’d be okay.
She has to be okay.
As they dragged me across the hall to one of the storage closets they’d converted into tiny exam and evaluation rooms, I got a last look at the soon-to-be corpse on the table. One of his tattoos caught my eye. The bright green double-X identified him as a Westside Twenty. I knew the crew. My brain automatically cataloged their territory. If the little bastard had been shot a couple of blocks farther out, they’d have taken him to Bayshore instead of County.
“Can I see her?” I asked.
Dr. Rollins didn’t answer as he dropped the thermometer probe cover into the can to be sterilized and made notes in my file.
“Can I—”
“I heard you the first time. The answer is no.”
I started to speak, but he waved me silent and picked up a swab that looked more like something a drum majorette would twirl in a parade.
“You know the drill. Lean back.”
When I didn’t move, he put his palm on my forehead and pushed. He wasn’t slow or gentle as he extracted a sample of mucus from deep in my sinuses. It came back tinged with blood. I wondered who it belonged to. After dropping the swab into a tube, he tapped the glass to release the reagent. It swirled cloudy, but I knew that was meaningless. The initial result wouldn’t come back for at least twelve hours. If it was negative, I was in the clear. If it turned blue, I was presumptive positive, and they’d send it to the lab for full analysis.
After he sealed the vial, he made more notes.
“So, this is your sixth exposure and test since we went to the combined rapid reactant and PCR protocol. All negative. Very unusual. Has the state health department contacted you about being in an immunity trial?”
“Yes, they have. In fact, I let them poke me full of holes the last time we had this discussion. I have no clue what the vampires are doing with the gallon they took. They were less gentle than you.”
That got me a grim smile. In the last year, the healing arts had gotten a lot less artful. In the increasingly desperate search for a vaccine, two groups could be counted on to be hounded by the researchers: Those who had recovered and those who refused to get sick. I seemed to be in the latter category.
“Doc, can I ask you a question?”
“Possibly.”
“How many times has Eliana been tested?” Funny, it was something we’d never discussed. We didn’t talk about UNSPEC. It stole enough of our lives without inviting it into our home.
“Like all staff, as you well know, the monthly—”
It was my turn to interrupt him. “I don’t mean the spit tests. We both know those are almost worthless after the last mutation. I don’t even know why we still do them. You know the test I’m talking about.” I gestured toward the vial.
“HIPAA prevents me from telling you that.”
“Yeah, like anyone still follows that. Please. We both know that the fever police take people all the time based on all sorts of confidential information.”
That was a nasty little secret in the medical and emergency response community. Anyone who disclosed a potential exposure, had a fever or even a deep cough, ran the risk of being detained incommunicado with a swab up their nose. Public health didn’t care where the information came from.
He stalled by clicking and stowing his pen and closing my file. When he met my eyes, he knew I wouldn’t stop asking.
“This is only her second PCR test. She’s been amazing at avoiding exposures. Her protocols have always been impeccable. So, there’s no track record. We have to wait. We’ve also taken tissue samples from the body as a control and for research.”
“Can I take her home now? We’ll call in tomorrow.”
“No.”
That single word chilled me through. “You’ve admitted her?”
“Yes.”
Success in my job requires complete control of my expressions and my body. Knowing when to relax and when to intimidate was critical. It was time to intimidate. It didn’t take much. I translated and projected my tension and rage into my posture and tone.
“Why?”
It worked. I detected the dilation of his pupils as he looked for an escape. Seeing none, he leaned back and said, “Josh, you were there. Her exposure was catastrophic. One of the worst we’ve ever seen. You helped. You helped a lot. However, you also spread that man’s blood everywhere. The entire team is in isolation, including the two guards who pulled you off her. We’re steam-cleaning the room and hall. We’re closed to trauma for another twelve hours because of your stunt and the, um, condition of the victim. Honestly, he should have never been brought in. I don’t know what the EMTs were thinking.”
Even though grab and go was still the stated mission of the ambulance corps, the reality was that a brutal triage had become the norm. The floridly ill and severely injured were usually slow-coded and allowed to die in situ. It was to protect hospitals and doctors. It was to protect Eliana.
“What about me?”
“You’re going home pending the outcome of your test. We’ve already notified your boss. You’re relieved of duty until you’re cleared.”
“Why can I leave and she can’t?”
This time, I got the look that had terrified a generation of med students. It was my turn to back down from the heat of his glare.
“Don’t be dense. Triage. We don’t have the space. You didn’t get any blood in your face and you have a low-risk testing profile. We have to prioritize.”
The meaning between the lines was obvious. Eliana was more important than me. The funny thing is that I agreed with him.
I had more questions, but he waved me off. “Go home. Don’t call until tomorrow. We’ll call you if we need anything. Go.”
Our balcony hadn’t changed. The perfect southern exposure was still perfect and the sunset was still gentle and muted over the downtown skyline. As for me, I’d changed to bourbon and finished off the plate of brownies I was saving for after dinner. Our dinner. The dinner when I was going to tell her my news. The news about my job offer. The one that could be the first step to getting out of the city. There was no running from UNSPEC, but there were places where its footprint was less intrusive and insidious.
My in-laws were riding out the semi-permanent quarantine in a fifteen-room cabin on a lake about three hours upstate. Ten acres, including a hundred yards of private shoreline, kept the town and the neighbors at a genteel distance. They’d made it very clear that we were welcome any time. At Christmas, I’d told her father about my concerns and goals. He’d agreed, and we’d both worked our contacts. The result was the letter in my pocket. All we needed to do was wait out the last fifty days of the fellowship she refused to abandon. With her credentials, every practice in the area would fall over each other in a bidding war to get her on staff. I just needed to give her an excuse to leave County.
Fifty days was now reduced to twenty-four hours. Our future. My future. I downed my bourbon, poured another, and picked up my phone to make the call before I was too drunk to be coherent.
“Hi, Dad. We need to talk.”
Running out of bourbon took care of the hangover problem. I swiped through the unanswered calls and texts on my phone. I’d convinced her parents to
stay away and that there was nothing they could do. My boss was sympathetic but hinting about how I needed to come back to work. They were short-handed, and every hour without me was an hour of overtime and potential exposure for one of my colleagues.
There was only one call I was going to return, but I had to get ready first. I read through the well-creased job offer one more time before wadding it up and throwing it over the balcony. I wasn’t going to be the new Sheriff in a charming town right out of a movie set. That dream was gone. It was time to face reality.
I wasn’t a police officer. I didn’t keep the peace and help old ladies cross the street.
I was the fever police.
According to the media, I was a heavily-armed door-kicking storm trooper who hauled parents away from their screaming children to the fever camp north of the city. Whether or not they returned wasn’t my problem. There was truth to the stories.
Those people had a fever.
They’d been a problem to be solved.
They were UNSPEC.
And now I had a new problem to solve. I’d lied to my department about staying home during my quarantine and done my recon. I knew where the nest was. Blending in as another homeless type on the street, I’d watched the green-tattooed filth coming and going from their clubhouse. Many of them were coughing. They were UNSPEC.
I checked the load on my service weapon and stashed three more mags in my jacket pocket. I added my drop piece, a beat-up Sig Sauer, to the other pocket. My old sawed-off was bulky in its underarm sling, but nobody looked too closely at anyone on the street. Not anymore.
It was time to make the call. I punched the number from memory.
“Dr. Rollins.”
“One moment, please.”
“Josh, how are you doing? I’m worried about you.”
“Doc, you don’t have to worry about me. I want to talk to you about Eliana.”
His silence told me there was no change.
Finally, he asked: “What can I do for you?”
“You have my permission to take her off the vent. Let her go.”
I hung up before he could answer. It was a formality. She and I had already signed all the protocols about exposure-related treatment, including when to end it. Her position still demanded that the niceties be observed. She’d crashed before the swab had a chance to turn blue. The PCR confirmed what we already knew. Forty-eight hours later, we passed the point of no return, even though they still pretended to consult with me.
I closed that door in my heart and turned to the immediate problem. The problem I had the skills to solve. I put my black-banded badge next to our wedding picture. Most officers didn’t even wear the ribbons anymore. Our constant state of mourning was assumed. I kept the frayed reminder of all that I’d lost. I added my wedding ring. I didn’t want Eliana to be part of what was coming.
It was open season on UNSPEC and there was no bag limit.
By Nick Kolakowski
Under ordinary circumstances, the offseason life is the slow life, and hopefully you’ve saved up enough money from the summer to see you through seven months of long nights and quiet days. I hadn’t. An unexpected medical bill in July, plus a big-bill car repair, meant I faced a harsh winter unless Jimbo’s needed another chef to work the line—and fat chance of that, given the emptiness of its dining room after Labor Day.
So imagine my surprise when Dennis Smith, Jimbo’s owner, called me on a cold morning in early October with a fat job offer: Five hundred dollars a week to flip burgers and fry potatoes for the few year-rounders who still drifted through his dining room every night.
“If you stick around, job’s good until April,” he said. “If Larry Johnson’s healed up, I gotta let you go then, unless something opens up on the line, in which case—”
I interrupted him. “Wait, what happened to Larry? He sick?” For the past month, the news had buzzed constantly about the virus creeping its way through the big cities. Way out here on the sandy fingertip of Long Island, we could delude ourselves that it would never reach us, but I supposed it was inevitable that a few year-rounders would come down with that deadly cough. If Jimbo’s was an infection zone, I wanted no part of it.
“Nah,” Dennis laughed. “At least, not in the way you’re thinking. You know Larry’s got a drug problem, yeah?”
“Worst-kept secret in town.”
“Let’s just say that Larry made some very bad mistakes over the weekend with crystal meth. Crashed the mayor’s car with—get this—an actual motherfucking gibbon riding along with him, then set himself on fire. Anyway, too long a story to tell here. Champ, you want the job or not?”
“Absolutely.” What choice did I have? A long time ago, I might have waved off an offer to slap cheese on burgers and steam clams. I had trained in the world’s best kitchens. The food critic at The New York Times—that miserable prick—had once called my bucatini pomodoro with black winter truffles the finest pasta he’d eaten this side of Rome. But that was a long time ago.
“Good,” Dennis said. “Because we got more customers than we can deal with.”
I had no idea what he meant by that. During the offseason, the town’s population is maybe two hundred souls, and most of them—like me—prefer to spend those cold, gray months locked in their homes, drunk as hell and watching a bright screen. Although some of the summer people will drop by for the weekend, or a bit longer if their spouses have booted them out of their beautiful apartments in Manhattan or Los Angeles or London, those folks rarely drift into a place like Jimbo’s, which offers fried seafood and burgers instead of Royal Ossetra caviar and duck foie gras.
But the following afternoon, I maneuvered my smog-farting junker into the restaurant’s parking lot only to find it full of Ferraris, Bentleys, BMWs, Teslas, and Mercedes sedans. I squeezed my wheels into a narrow slot beside the dumpsters in back, then headed inside to prep for the dinner rush. Dennis hadn’t lied about the crush: Through the swinging doors that connected the kitchen with the dining room, I spied every table filled with banking executives, real-estate guys, minor celebrities, and even an ultra-famous country-music star whose albums I’d bought obsessively since childhood.
The kitchen was a storm of steam and clashing metal, four cooks and a dishwasher trying to maneuver in a tight and dripping-hot space. José, the junior chef temporarily elevated to the top slot after Larry’s bad weekend, never stopped slicing huge piles of vegetables as he yelled over the din of the radio pounding out Mexican hip-hop. “Full house for lunch,” he told me. “Full house, dinner, too. Thank God your skinny ass is here.”
“Why aren’t they at Beautiful Dirt? Or Manifest Destiny?” I asked as I slipped on Larry’s white chef’s jacket, conveniently left on a peg beside the door. Those two luxury restaurants, located a half-mile up the town’s main drag, served citrus-cured trout, scallion mousse atop charcoal-grilled wagyu, and other hundred-dollar entrees. Their executive chefs both hated my guts—just one reason why my shadow had never darkened their doorways.
“Dude, all those places are still closed,” called out Beau, Larry’s brother, who worked the dessert station and was busy squeezing chocolate sauce over a colorful array of ice-cream scoops in tiny blue bowls. “Everything’s closed but us and the grocery. And the liquor store.”
Spreading my knife roll on the counter, I drew my Victorinox Fibrox eight-inch chef’s knife, which was my favorite: lightweight, well-sharpened, impressively sturdy. I had no idea how well this kitchen was stocked, and what we were running low on, but I figured that I could improvise a fine clam chowder if I had to. I felt the familiar adrenaline rush that marked the start of a shift, an old friend that kicked my heart into higher gear.
“All these rich pricks flooded into town at once,” Beau added, lowering his voice in case the doors opened at that moment. “What do they know that we don’t?”
As it turned out, those rich pricks knew quite a bit.
Eight days later, the President declared that the entire northe
ast, from Maine to Delaware, was under “strict quarantine.” From what we saw on the news, the U.S. Army locked down the bridges, tunnels, highway exits, even the ports. The virus had infected millions—and the lack of testing made it impossible to tell how fast it was advancing.
By that time, hundreds of the ultra-rich had flooded into our tiny corner of the world. They brought their kids, friends, entourages, mistresses, masseuses, chefs, and nannies. They came in luxury SUVs followed by trucks loaded with enough food to feed an army. When the police shut down the bridges that connected us to the rest of Long Island, they began arriving by yacht and private plane and helicopter.
Along the beach, their huge compounds burst with light and music. When they ran low on supplies, they stripped the local grocery stores of everything but bread—too many carbs.
They also brought the virus with them, and the nearest hospital only had three ICU beds and two ventilators. Dennis shifted Jimbo’s from dine-in to takeout-only, and still the cars jammed the parking lot at all hours. We worked until our hands ached and our knees quaked, and then we slept in our cars for a few hours before doing it all again. The overtime pay was beautiful, and none of us wanted to question whether the almighty dollar would be good for anything other than toilet paper by the end of the year. The trucks arrived with fresh supplies, despite the bridge closures, and we did our best to avoid interacting with the customers—we knew that the bandanas we always wore over our faces would do little good to block the virus.
Bernita, who had worked Jimbo’s register since approximately the dawn of time, snapped on a pair of surgical gloves and a gas mask in order to hand out the food. She was six feet of muscle, her corded forearms inked with elaborate tattoos, and nobody—not the year-rounders, not the billionaires—ever talked back to her.
When it wasn’t blaring José’s favorite rappers, the radio reported the rising casualty counts, the piles of dead in every hospital on Earth. We did our best to ignore it. The scientists would find a cure, right?
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