Chapter
2
I performed a survey of the room. Fifty percent of the people were still seated, the other half were now on their feet, straining to see what was happening. A quick scan revealed something that I had failed to observe previously. With the exception of one man and a woman, they were all sweating profusely. The diner was on the cool side of comfortable at sixty-nine degrees. Mary claimed it was the perfect temperature for a restaurant. If the temperature was too hot, people wouldn’t have an appetite, too cold and you would run them out before they ordered pie. Sixty nine was apparently the magic number. It was low enough that the body felt like it needed more fuel to stoke the metabolic fires which would warm it, but not so cold that it was uncomfortable. It was too cool for people to have sweat dripping from their faces.
Another woman, who was sitting at the left outside edge of her table, appeared to lose consciousness and slumped forward toward the table. At first it was in slow motion. The further she went, the more speed she picked up. The table stopped her forward momentum, but at the cost of redirecting her lean to the left. Her redirected lean was slow at first, but again began to pick up speed. The man sitting across from her made a feeble effort to grab at her shirt. She was leaning too far and the leverage of her falling body was more than he could hold. The silky fabric of her shirt slipped through his fingers like water through the holes in a sieve. There was practically no resistance. She hit the floor with a sickening
kerwump
.
Two people were dead for sure. Two others were following a pattern established by the first woman. If the pattern continued, they too would be dead shortly. All eyes were on Lawrence and me. The badge on my chest and the EMT patch on the chest of his jumpsuit signified that we were public servants. There was an unspoken expectation that we do something to fix the problem. There was no question that we would do all that we could. Take away my badge or Lawrence’s patches and we would still help.
The need to help those in trouble was irreversibly woven into the double strands of nucleic acids that made up our DNA. How else can you explain an off duty cop running toward the sound of gunfire or an off duty fireman running into a raging inferno? Powerful as we seem to people, we have limits. Bucking against the hand of God is far beyond the limit of my ability and this was beginning to look like an outpouring of His wrath.
Looking around the diner, it was apparent that I was not the only one who perceived the seriousness of the situation at hand.
I looked up at Bertha, who was now standing behind the cash register. Both of her hands were over her mouth, sort of like she was praying except that her palms were touching her face rather than held together. She was staring at the small puddle of blood on the floor next to the dead woman, watching as it diffused into the puddles of spilled beverages.
Mary, the owner, was beside Bertha, her face screwed up into a contorted look of bewilderment and disbelief at what was occurring within the walls of her establishment.
Lawrence looked from the bodies on the floor to me. “I can put two in the ambulance and then come back for the others.”
I paused. “No Lawrence, I don’t think we’re going to put anyone in the ambulance. We have four down and several more that look like they are about to go down. I don’t think taking anyone away from here is wise at this point. We need to lock this diner down and try to stop this from spreading while we still can.”
Once again, I clicked the transmit button on the microphone clipped to my shirt, “Dispatch, this is Unit two…” I explained the situation as quickly as possible. I requested that Doc Baker and a nurse come to the diner and treat the patients here rather than moving them away and risk spreading the sickness.
“Lawrence, I’m going to try to help the male,” I said, pointing to the man on the ground. “See which of the females you think would benefit most from your attention and do what you can for them.”
He nodded, placed a hand on the chair next to him and, with a grunt, thrust himself back onto his feet and shuffled to the table where the woman had sloughed out of her seat and onto the ground. It was at the far diagonal corner of the diner from where I had been eating my lunch. I hurried one table ahead and to my right, where the man lay on the ground.
As I knelt beside him, my radio chirped to life again. “Unit two, we have a problem. I just received a call from Joan at the Knick Knack Shack. She said a woman passed out and was bleeding from her eyes and nose. It sounds like the same symptoms as the people in the diner.”
I stood up so I could look out the window and across the intersection to the Knick Knack Shack. I saw Claire Mantell running out the door of the shop, followed by her two kids. Her mouth was opening and closing, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I didn’t have to. Her facial expression told me she was in a panic, which is what I would have expected from her. She lived just down the road from me and she was prone to overreacting. In this case, she probably had the right idea; get herself and her kids away from what was happening. The problem was, it might be too late, in which case, she was going to make the problem worse.
When I was a kid I used to love to rake the leaves around the sycamore trees in my grandpa’s yard. It was a big job for an eight year old. Once I had all the leaves in a big pile, Grandpa would bring his pickup out to the yard and help me load the leaves in the back. We would cover the load with his ancient canvas tarp and he would let me sit in his lap and drive to the burn pile in his field. On one occasion, I told him I was ready for the pickup and he said he would be out in five minutes after he finished his lunch. Before he came out, a slight breeze picked up from the north. It sent a few leaves skittering across the lawn. I chased them down and put them back onto the pile. The breeze increased and a few more leaves went sailing around the yard. I continued to bring them back one at a time until the breeze suddenly gusted into a gale. The entire pile was immediately redistributed all across the yard and even across the street into the neighbor’s field. No matter how many leaves I brought back to the pile, I could never get close to staying ahead of the wind.
I was hoping that Claire Mantell was not going to be the beginning of the gale. At this point, hoping was all I could personally do because my hands were full.
“Unit two, Doc Baker will head to Mary’s in twenty minutes. He is taking care of a patient right now.”
“I can’t leave the diner to help at the Knick Knack Shack. Contact Unit three and see if he can take care it.”
“Ten-four. Unit three, respond to the Knick Knack Shack and assist with the medical emergency.”
I turned to the recent widower who was still hovering beside me. “Was there anyone on the bus who didn’t come into the diner with the rest of you?”
“Yes, Miyu say she feel sick and no want to eat. She say she go buy gift for grandson instead. Her husband Takumi go with her.”
Leaves in the wind
.
I turned my attention back to the man on the floor in front of me. As I was searching for a pulse, he began to convulse. In police work, patterns are important. If you can establish a good pattern, you can predict what will happen in the future. The pattern that was beginning to develop promised bad things to come.
I looked toward the register where Mary and Bertha had been standing. Steve, the cook, had now joined them. “Mary, can you bring me some ice and some towels?”
She quickly pivoted on her left foot and scurried through the swinging door into the kitchen. Thirty seconds later she reappeared with two buckets of ice and about a dozen dish towels. She brought them to me and quickly retreated to her position behind the register.
I turned to my shadow. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“I Yuto,” he replied with a bow.
“Yuto, I need your help,” I said as I placed a handful of ice in the center of a towel, rolled it up and twisted the ends. “Can you hold this on this man’s head while I try to help the woman over there?”
“I help,” he said, looking relieved to have something to occupy his mind.
I looked at Lawrence who was now tending another man who had fallen to the mystery sickness. Lawrence refused to give up, even though we were obviously fighting a losing battle. I handed him one of the ice buckets and half of the towels as I moved to the next, newly unconscious victim. For the next twenty five minutes we moved from person to person, trying to do anything we could to help.
By the end of twenty five minutes, Mary had refilled our ice buckets twice and brought what she said was the last of the towels. The situation appeared hopeless. At least twelve more people were dead. Out of fifty people from the bus, only six were conscious. Of the six, only Yuto and a woman looked healthy. He was still following me from person to person, doing what he could to help. Four of the remaining five were sweat drenched and two were bleeding from their noses and one from his eyes.
I knelt down yet again to tend to another fallen woman.
“Connor. CONNOR!” I turned to Mary and saw her index finger pointing at the first woman who had succumbed to the illness. Mary’s face showed a mixture of bewilderment and joy at the same time. “She’s moving!”
Chapter
3
She
was
moving. She was trying to sit up. Yuto dropped the ice bucket, which landed perfectly on its bottom. Several pieces of ice flew from the bucket and pirouetted as they descended and finally shattered on the tile floor. By the time the remnants of the ice cubes had come to a rest, Yuto was already by his wife’s side. He began speaking rapidly in Japanese as he knelt beside her. He put his right arm around her back and gingerly placed his left hand behind her head and helped her sit upright, He pulled her in for a tender embrace. She moved her head slightly and nuzzled her head toward his neck.
I began to cross the twenty-some feet separating myself from Yuto and his wife. As I stepped across the bodies and toppled chairs blocking my path, I wondered what this meant. Obviously it was an improvement over the downward spiral of the past twenty-five minutes. But it didn’t necessarily mean we were out of the woods yet.
As I approached, I could see Yuto’s face. In an instant, it changed from bliss to horror. His eyes opened wide, his cheeks and mouth contorted in agony, his lips parted, and a shriek poured forth. His wife suddenly bolted forward, pushing him onto his back while bringing herself onto her hands and knees. Her head was still at his neck. She pulled her head up and twisted it back to look at me. Her lips pulled back over her upper teeth like a rabid baboon. Her eyes were hollows of madness, looking in my direction but not really seeing me. They seemed to be looking right through me like a junkie high on PCP with a thousand yard stare.
Blood and flesh were dripping from the corners of her mouth, down her chin and onto her shirt. The blood dripping from her mouth and chin completely eclipsed the blood that had previously flowed from her own body. Yuto was laying on his back with a gaping wound on the left side of his neck where his wife’s head had appeared to be nuzzling him five seconds earlier. Bright red fluid gushed forth rhythmically from the wound, spraying an area four feet in diameter with each beat of his heart. Mary and Bertha screamed in unison. No words were uttered; it was a purely uncontrolled exercise of their vocal cords.
A snarl proceeded from the curled lips of Yuto’s wife, reminding me of my dog warning a neighbor dog away from his freshly filled food bowl. Like my dog, she returned her attention to Yuto. She dipped her head back down and closed her teeth on muscle and skin. She twisted her head, jerking it back, tearing another large piece of flesh from the side of his neck.
The jets of blood had diminished. The scarlet pool was turning into a lake as the last of the life sustaining fluid slowly oozed from Yuto’s massive wound. It now covered the floor in a six foot diameter, gushing along grout lines until the flow hit a perpendicular line, at which point it spread out at right angles and continued its forward effusion.
I was raised to never hit a
lady
and I never have. I have hit plenty of
women,
though. Let me fight a two hundred pound man rather than a hundred and twenty pound woman any day. My dad used to tell me women were hard headed. He made that claim without ever having tried to take one to jail. Deep inside, I honestly believe women have a reservoir of strength that is normally reserved for bringing children into the world. From time to time, I have seen a women tap into that fountain and turn into raging wildcats with unexplainable strength. You try to grab onto an arm and it flows through your hands like water. She is nearly impossible to keep within your grasp. When you manage to grab on, it is like a cowboy trying to maintain his hold of the strap attaching him to a crazed bull. Whatever happens, you better not let go.
When faced with one of these situations, no holds are barred. I use whatever force I deem appropriate to take the crazed woman into custody and if that means bludgeoning her in the face with my fist, then that is what I do because she is doing the same to me.
The beast on top of Yuto was no lady and would be treated accordingly. I leaned forward and caught a handful of her hair and lifted her to her feet and flung her against the counter. The violent collision with the counter should have taken all the fight out of her. If it took away even an ounce of fight, she didn’t show it.
She sprang back to her feet as if she had landed on a padded mat and charged with blinding speed. She reached for me with her right hand. I clamped onto her wrist with my left hand and twisted it backwards. With my right hand, I grasped her right hand and pointed her palm straight up, which resulted in her arm being locked out straight at the elbow. Finally I moved my left hand from her wrist to the back of her elbow. Any pressure I applied to the back of her elbow put tremendous strain on the shoulder and elbow joints.
With the leverage I had from her extended arm, I would be able to control her through pain. I applied pressure on the back of her elbow, pushing the now locked joint toward the ground. Even someone wasted on alcohol and drugs cannot stand up to this pain and will instantly fall away from it and end up on the ground laying on their stomach, which is an ideal position to apply handcuffs.
As I applied increasing pressure, she refused to go to the ground. She pivoted around me like an ox pulling a grinding wheel in circles around a mill. She fought with the strength of a gorilla. I had never encountered such unnatural brute strength in my life and I have tussled with some beastly men. Because her right arm was on the verge of hyper-extending, she couldn’t reach around and grab me with her other arm. It didn’t stop her from trying. It took every bit of strength I could muster to maintain my tenuous control. I applied more pressure, knowing that she would succumb to the pain.
She didn’t. There was a loud snap and her elbow joint buckled. I no longer had any means to keep her at bay as every tendon and ligament in her elbow was destroyed. Her arm now flopped back and forth with nearly two hundred seventy degrees of travel, like the pendulum on a clock.
She howled in anger, seemingly oblivious to the pain she should be experiencing. Having lost all semblance of control, I grabbed her wrist with both of my hands. I took a step back and pivoted at the same time. I continued my spin and centrifugal force straightened her arm out. Her body was pulled to the outside of our circular dance. When my arms were nearly parallel to the brick wall next to the entrance, I let go. Physics did the rest.
Once I let go, her body was no longer forced to follow the arc of the circle we were spinning around. Like a rollercoaster freed from its tracks, her momentum carried her in a straight path, a path that directed her headfirst toward the brick wall in which the door was set. She struck the wall with her face, but didn’t go down. She didn’t even flinch. She turned around and eyed me cautiously from fifteen feet away. Her nose was smashed flat and her left cheek bone had lost its curvature. Her lips raised in another snarl and I could see empty spaces where teeth should have been. She belted out another growl and charged me again.
This time I stood my ground. I was standing with my feet shoulder width apart, my left foot forward and my right foot back. When she was almost an arms length away, I began a swing with my right arm. As my fist came forward, the right side of my torso began rotating toward her. My right shoulder went ahead of my left shoulder and the heel of my right foot came off the ground while the toe of my boot stayed in place, allowing further rotation as I pivoted on it. I aimed my fist at her already destroyed nose. It was the location which offered the most padding. This made it the least likely place on her face to break my hand. This was not the punch I would normally lead with in a fight. It left the right side of my head and body completely exposed, but this was not a normal fight. So far, she was impervious to pain. I wasn’t going to waste time with distracting jabs which probably would have no effect on her.
My right fist landed exactly where I intended it to. With the full weight of my one hundred eighty pounds behind the punch, there was no way anyone could stand up to the kind of abuse I had just unleashed and she didn’t. She crumpled backwards, flopped off a table, landed on the floor and didn’t move.
For about a second.
Then she leaned forward, put her hands on the ground and pushed herself erect without effort. The best I could dish out hadn’t even fazed her.
As she was coming back to her feet, my left hand went for my Taser. My thumb was already pushing the power lever up to the “on” position as it cleared the plastic holster. The yellow, plastic body of the Taser came parallel to the ground and the red laser dot came to rest on her belly. I pulled the trigger. There was a loud pop caused by nitrogen cartridges explosively releasing their air charge. The nitrogen propelled two metal cylinders with barbed hooks toward her. The top probe buried itself in her right shoulder. The second impaled her left leg just above the knee. It was a perfect deployment.
Electricity traveled from the top probe, through her torso and down her leg, to the lower probe. Every muscle between the probes was confused into a full contraction. The massive contraction locked each muscle between the probes into a rigid state, leaving her completely immobilized. Her attention was diverted away from me toward the agony of fifty thousand volts coursing between the two probes.
At least that is what was supposed to happen.
She was able to reach her right hand to her shoulder. She clawed at the shoulder and somehow ripped the probe out, which broke the flow of electricity, allowing her to regain control of her muscles. She charged again.
I attempted to take the spent cartridge out of the Taser and replace it with the spare, but there wasn’t time. She was going to close the ten feet between us before I could remove the spent cartridge, much less load a new one. I dropped the Taser onto the ground and brought my right thigh parallel to the ground as my lower leg raised up and straightened out. The bottom of my boot connected with her chest and sent her reeling backwards. Other than knocking her down, it didn’t have any effect. Whatever was spurring her on was too strong for me. I was no match for her strength and her inability to feel pain.
I unsnapped my holster and grasped the plastic handle of my Glock 22. It was loaded with fifteen, one hundred-eighty grain forty caliber Speer Gold Dot hollow points, packing four hundred-twenty foot pounds of knock-you-on-your-butt-fight-stopping-power. As the pistol came up, I was already aligning the front and rear sights. When the sights were centered on the middle of her chest, I squeezed the trigger two times in rapid succession. She slowed briefly, nearly stumbled, and then regained her balance. She resumed her charge at full speed. I raised the sights thirteen inches and squeezed the trigger again. A small red crater appeared in the center of her forehead. The floor, tables and wall behind her were spattered with mushy pink matter as she fell to the ground with finality.