Red Tide (5 page)

Corso was cursing the fact that the huge blue van blocked his view when he heard the sound of engines starting and then the slap of soles on concrete. He cringed as two pairs of black shoes skidded to a stop on either side of the ambulance. He heard the doors open and felt the aid car rock on its springs as its occupants levered themselves inside.

The engine started with a roar. Corso heard the click of the transmission being dropped into gear. His throat tightened. If they backed up, he’d surely be dragged to his death beneath the vehicle. Without thinking, he rolled left. Toward the haz-mat van and the safety of the open sky. Kept rolling as he covered the five feet of bare pavement separating the vehicles. Rolling until he was completely beneath the Critical Incident van.

He scooted back between the giant rear tires and waited. Despite the temperature, beads of sweat rolled down his face. He mopped his brow with his sleeve as the ambulance began to move uphill toward the freeway.

Across the street, the fireman in the biohazard suit had pulled back enough of the plastic to allow the robot to roll inside. He looked over at his buddy in the street and gave a two-fingered salute.

The guy in the helmet adjusted the wire-thin microphone so that it hung just under his lower lip, grabbed the joystick in both hands and spoke.

“We’re ready, sir,” he said.

7

A
ssistant Fire Chief Ben Gardener sat down in front of the quavering TV monitor, laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles. At fifty-eight, he was still ramrod straight and in possession of a full head of wiry salt-and-pepper hair. Less than a year and a half from retirement, he and his wife Cyndi planned to spend their golden years in Port St. Lucie, Florida, where their divorced daughter Tracy and their three grandsons had finally taken root. He unbuttoned his suit jacket, started to remove the coat and then thought better of it. Even with the chief on vacation, it probably wasn’t a good idea. Recent SFD policy had mandated that he give up wearing his uniform and instead report for duty in a business suit. More professional, the chief said. More twenty-first century. Gardener hated the idea. Said it made him feel like an insurance salesman. In a subtle act of defiance, he’d purchased three suits…all the same color…all the same deep blue hue of his beloved uniform. He bent low over the desk and pushed the green button on the telephone. A hiss of static filled the tiny speaker.

“What’s your status, Hamilton?”

“We’re ready, sir,” came the electronic reply.

Gardener swiveled in the chair and looked around the room. That’s when it hit him. There was nobody there. Not downstairs in the lobby and not up here in the Special Operations Room either. No press. No publicity seekers. No nothing. He shook his head in wonder. What could well be the defining moment in the city’s history and only six people were going to be present to bear witness. Seven if he counted himself.

Somebody was pulling serious strings to keep this one under their collective hats. Probably the mayor. Lord knew nobody liked to jerk the reins of power more than Gary Dean, and nobody was better at controlling the spin than Dean’s press liaison Harlan Sykes. This had all the earmarks of what Sykes liked to refer to as “optimum information control.”

Dean and Sykes were huddled together in the far corner, their body language making it abundantly clear they weren’t looking to chitchat. Over by the door, Police Chief Harry Dobson of the SPD was waving a blunt finger as he made a point to a tall guy in a blue blazer. Dobson was built like a fire hydrant and wore so many departmental commendations on his uniform he looked like an admiral. Good man though. A stand-up guy and a very capable administrator who had a knack for ending up with what Gardener always figured was just a little bit more than the SPD’s share of the public pie.

Out in the middle of the room Mike Morningway from Emergency Management shared a whispered conversation with a moderately attractive blonde woman in a pale green lab coat. Harborview Medical Center was stitched on the coat in red. Gardener had seen her before someplace, but couldn’t remember where or when. He thought she might have been a speaker at one of the many conferences he’d attended in the past few months, nearly all of which had been aimed at preparing for a moment just such as this, but which, at this point, all ran together in Gardener’s head as little more than an endless series of presentations, punctuated here and there by bleak rubber chicken lunches.

Gardener watched Morningway think it over before responding to whatever the woman was saying. He wondered how Morningway felt about administering a program everybody hoped never to need. Wondered how one kept his troops battle ready when all they were ever called upon to do was clean up moderately toxic spills from the highways and help with household recycling.

The mayor looked Gardener’s way and cocked an eyebrow in an exaggerated manner which made it plain he’d spent hours practicing the move in the mirror.

“I believe we’re good to go,” Gardener said.

Just as he uttered the phrase, at the moment when people began to cross the room, the TV picture started to roll. Gardener kept his face intact as his innards collapsed like a dying star. This was the first time the SFD had patched directly into the robot for a remote video feed. The department had put a lot of money into the technology, money most of city government would have preferred to spend elsewhere. Any kind of failure here would surely not bode well for next year’s appropriations. He crossed his fingers and smiled.

When the screen went blank, Gardener pretended not to notice, busying himself, instead, in the top drawer of the desk. Before anyone could speak, however, the screen reappeared, rolled once and then again, before suddenly coming to rest. Mercifully, the picture was considerably better than Gardener could have hoped. Far from the grainy images of the past, the picture on the screen was crisp and clear. The sound was so good they could hear the crinkle of the plastic when the gloved hand pulled the film aside to allow the robot to enter. Gardener adjusted his expression to suggest he’d known all along the system was going to function properly and refocused on the screen.

They were now looking at the world through the robot’s eyes. The Pioneer Square Station lay deserted. Everything seemed huge and ominous from the robot’s three-foot-high point of view. The safety railings looked like a forest of blue metal trees receding to the horizon, the stone floors like a wide, polished runway, leading off in all directions.

“Give us a little background, will you, Ben?” It was Harlan Sykes, doing what he got paid to do…making people feel informed whether it was true or not.

Gardener stifled a sigh and began to speak. “First call came into the downtown station at three thirty-six
P
.
M
. Said we had a dead guy on the escalator in the bus tunnel. We dispatched an aid car to the scene.”

“Only one?” the mayor interrupted.

Gardener kept his voice neutral. His dislike of the mayor was well known within governmental circles. The way he saw it, Dean was a habitual self-promoter, a sycophant, whose only real interest in public service was in his own reelection. Worse yet, he was a man who always seemed more interested in fixing the blame than fixing the problem. This close to making his thirty, however, Gardener could see no sense in baiting the bear, so he kept his face clear and his voice flat.

“At that point, the call was nothing more than a standard request for assistance,” he said.

A low-frequency electrical hum announced that the robot was moving. All eyes fell on the screen. Gardener spoke as he watched. “The aid car arrived six minutes later. By that time a pair of SPD officers were on the scene. They confirmed the guy on the stairs.”

“Who called Emergency Services?” Sykes wanted to know.

“The SPD officers,” Gardener said. “While they were satisfying themselves the guy on the stairs was beyond help, they observed a pair of victims at the bottom of the escalator. Apparently there was some visible discharge, so they went downstairs for a look.” He hesitated, looking around the room. “According to the officers…” he started again, “both the northbound and southbound concourses are full of bodies.”

“How many…” the mayor began.

“Too many for conventional violence. That’s when they realized they were dealing with something…something unusual.”

“Jesus,” somebody in the back whispered.

“They backed off, immediately called Emergency Services and sealed off the tunnel as best they could from that end,” Gardener finished.

“Good move,” the mayor commented.

“Good training,” Chief Dobson quickly corrected. “Both men had been through Emergency Incidents Training within the past ninety days.”

Dobson enjoyed his self-congratulatory moment as they watched the robot round the corner and head toward the escalator at the far end of the frame.

“Where are they now?” Sykes wanted to know.

“Up at Harborview,” answered Dobson. “The medics are keeping both the cops and the EMTs in complete isolation until we know what we’re dealing with here.”

“Far as we know, those four are the only people who’ve actually been
inside
the station since the incident,” Sykes said.

Dobson spread his hands as he spoke. “We’re detaining about fifty civilians who were in the area at the time.” He looked over at the mayor. “Fifty very unhappy civilians, I’m given to understand,” he said.

The guy in the blue blazer spoke up. “Your people did a heck of a job, Chief.” Dobson nodded his appreciation of the compliment…at which point Mike Morningway from Emergency Management piped in. “We immediately called Metro and closed down the tunnel. Got a crew started in sealing off the entrance.”

Gardener took over again. “We’ve got the tunnel sealed off. Metro reversed the ventilation output from both the University Street Station and the International Street Station, which should keep whatever we’ve got down there pretty much confined to the—”

“Pretty much?” the mayor interrupted.

Gardener’s voice tightened. “It’s not a closed system, Mayor. It’s a tunnel. It connects one thing to another. It was never designed to be completely isolated.”

The robot approached the top of the escalator from an oblique angle. The top of a man’s head was visible…resting on the upper landing. The remainder of the body was hidden behind the silver side of the escalator. The robot stopped.

“Hutchinson.” Gardener spoke into the phone again.

“Hamilton,” the voice corrected.

“Take us around the far side,” Gardener said.

The robot began to move again. Skirting around the top of the corpse until it was looking at the body from the opposite side. The victim lay splayed across the metal stairs. The powerful mechanism had wedged the body between the rails at an inhuman angle, contorting the spine and preventing the stairway from dumping the lifeless form onto the upper landing. The right side of the man’s face was visible. The sight of his silhouette against the ribbed metal background of the tread stopped their collective breaths.

His face was beet red and contorted into a grimace which left little doubt as to the painful manner of his passing.

“What the hell is with his face?” Harlan Sykes muttered, brushing shoulders with the mayor as he leaned closer to the screen.

The woman from Harborview slid her pastel smock past both the mayor and Sykes and peered down into the screen. She cupped her chin in her hand and narrowed her eyes as she gazed at the image before her. Half a minute passed before she took a step backward and looked over at Gardener.

“Can you get us a close-up?” she asked.

Gardener spoke into the telephone. A moment later the camera began to move, jumping one electronic magnification step at a time…closer and closer…As the successive images appeared, a buzz of whispered anxiety filled the air.

At the point when the victim’s head filled the entire screen, his malady seemed little more than a general irritation of the skin, which, as the camera moved closer, appeared puckered and shiny in places like a burn. Two jumps later, however, everyone in the room stiffened, as it became evident that the redness was, in fact, caused by thousands of puss-filled lesions, many of which had burst, leaving a waxy red film coating the surrounding tissue. Another magnification…and then another until the stubble on the victim’s chin looked like shrubbery and they could make out that the blemishes were shaped like bones…thin at the center, widening out into knobby ends. The woman’s involuntary groan brought silence to the room. “Stop,” she said.

“Dr. Stafford…” Sykes began.

She held up a hand and leaned closer to the screen. “Can’t be,” she muttered.

When she looked back over her shoulder, her face was the color of oatmeal and her lower lip was beginning to tremble. “You said the officers saw other victims at the bottom of this escalator?”

“According to the report,” Dobson said carefully.

“Can you get me a look?” she asked.

Gardener relayed the request. After a ten-second interval, the robot began to move, wheeling around to the top of the escalator and moving forward until the victim’s head must have been directly between the machine’s rubber treads.

The view down the frozen metal stairway revealed little more than a single dark smudge on the floor at the base of the stairs.

The robot’s operator anticipated her next request. A bright halogen light suddenly snapped on; the camera zoomed, and the smudges on the floor became a woman and a little girl. Matching blue jackets and matching red faces. Only this time their heads were surrounded by a wide halo of coagulated blood, spread out black and sticky-looking in the harsh artificial light. The doctor turned her gaze back toward the room.

“Call Atlanta,” she said. “Get the Centers for Disease Control.”

The mayor opened his mouth in protest. She cut him off.

“Hurry,” she said. “Get them here now.”

8

M
eg Dougherty spoke directly into the driver’s ear.

“Don’t lose him,” she whispered.

“Traffic like this…” Stevie said, “there ain’t much I can do.”

As he spoke, the gray van suddenly turned downhill and disappeared from view. Stevie gave it a little gas, pushing the cab up Broadway toward the brightly lit drugstore on the corner.

“Come on,” Dougherty chanted.

They’d spent the past forty minutes winding around the top of Capitol Hill in an endless series of loops and whorls seemingly headed nowhere. He’d stopped four times. Twice in the street, where he just sat in the van and looked around. Once at the Summit Tavern, where he’d gone inside and had a couple of beers, and finally up on Twelfth and Pine, where he’d spent a full five minutes parked in front of the first apartment they’d rented together. For the first time in nearly six years, she’d wondered what he was thinking.

Stevie swung the cab out into the turn lane, floored it past an ancient Chinese man driving at the speed of lava, and then again to pass an empty police car, light bar ablaze, parked in the middle of the street. They were roaring toward the intersection when suddenly the light cycled to red. Instantly the street was filled with pedestrians. Stevie jerked the cab to a halt, the front bumper halfway across the crosswalk. He banged the heel of his hand on the steering wheel in disgust, caught her eyes in the mirror and shrugged a silent apology.

“Shit,” Dougherty hissed. She threw herself backward in the seat, bouncing off the cushions. “He’s gone,” she said. “Goddamn it.”

A cycle dyke slammed her hand on the hood of the cab as she crossed the street, her narrow eyes etching displeasure at the cab’s intrusion into the crosswalk.

“Fuck you,” Stevie muttered, racing the engine.

She stopped, making like she was going to come back and kick his ass; Stevie was reaching for the lock button when she smirked, shot him the finger and strode away.

A pair of red dots appeared on Stevie’s cheeks. A moment later, a slight break in the stream of humanity proved to be all the encouragement he needed. He nosed the cab the rest of the way through the crowded intersection, waited another moment for side street pedestrians to pass and then squealed around the corner.

The rear of a tandem Metro bus loomed like a mechanical mountain. “Wash Me” had been fingered into the thick dirt on the back window. Stevie screeched to a halt, throwing Dougherty forward in the seat, bouncing his chest off the steering wheel.

The cab’s interior was hot with their frustrated breathing as slowly…incrementally…the knot of traffic began to unwind and the bus began to nose into the curb, the front coach sliding along the bus stop, leaving the rear hanging out into traffic, until suddenly the air was filled with the sound of squeaking brakes and the hissing of hydraulic doors. “Goddamn it,” Dougherty said again, slapping the seat.

Stevie hit the gas, throwing the cab toward a narrow opening between the bus’s big ass and the steady stream of oncoming traffic. The breath caught in Dougherty’s throat. It seemed certain they were going to have a head-on with a red Dodge pickup. The truck’s driver jerked the wheel to the right, narrowly avoiding a line of parked cars as the truck fishtailed in the street. Stevie kept the cab so close to the bus Dougherty could see the screws that held the advertising signs. Then
bang!
And the tinkling sound of broken glass. Stevie looked around, as confused as she was. Couple of blocks later she saw him wince.

“We hit mirrors,” Stevie said disgustedly.

Dougherty slid across the seat and peered along the side of the cab. Where the side view mirror had once been was now nothing more than a jagged pair of torn-out screw holes in the yellow sheet metal. She turned in the seat, looking for the truck, but the bus completely blocked her view.

“Oh…man…I’m gonna be in deep shit over the mirror,” Stevie said as he wheeled wildly down the street. “Gonna get my ass fired for sure.”

“The damage is on me,” Dougherty breathed. “You just catch him.”

He snuck a peek over his shoulder, making sure she was serious, and then floored it.

The street ahead was temporarily clear. “Come on…come on,” she whispered as they raced down Denny Way, her hopes fading with every passing block.

Halfway down the hill, a yellow Penske truck was trying to turn left onto Summit Avenue, holding a dozen vehicles hostage as a steady stream of uphill traffic prevented the maneuver. Brian Bohannon and the gray van were third in line behind the truck.

“There’s our boy,” Stevie said.

Dougherty dove forward, once again hanging over the driver’s seat and peering intently out through the windshield. “Sure is,” she said. She clapped him on the shoulder.

The van was ten cars in front of them. They sat and waited. Another dozen vehicles crawled uphill before the truck was able to make the turn onto Summit.

Stevie glanced over at the torn metal where the side view mirror used to be and then turned to meet her gaze. “You sure you don’t wanna just call the cops on this guy?” he wanted to know. “This is getting hairy.”

“No,” was all she said.

He lifted his hands from the wheel in an unspoken question. She answered.

“I don’t know, man,” she said. She stared straight ahead as the traffic began to move. “I used to dream about what I’d do to him…all the ways I’d make him pay for turning me into a freak…” Stevie began to object, but she kept on. “How I’d sit in court and watch him get sent off to prison. Or even better how I’d take care of him myself. How I’d…” She stopped…shook her head once and clamped her mouth shut.

Stevie fed the cab some gas. Several cars turned off, disappearing this way and that, reducing the number of vehicles between the cab and the van to five. Stevie closed the gap.

“What were you gonna do to him?” he asked.

She shook her head again. Made a wry face. “It all seems so silly now,” she said.

“And you ain’t no freak,” Stevie said with a mock frown. “That’s no way to be talkin’ about yourself.” He waved a hand and put on a boyish smile. “You keep that kinda talk up and I’m gonna have to ask you to vacate the cab.”

Before she could reply, the van made a sharp left. The cab hustled up the street and followed suit. By the time they rounded the corner, the van was making another turn, right, downhill again, toward Olive Way. “He used to live on this block,” Dougherty said. “Back when we first met.” Stevie snapped off the headlights.

A series of images flashed across her mind’s eye. Of parties that ran long into the night, parties where nobody ever had to be anywhere in the morning, where the politics involved ridding the world of corporations, and their long-range plans never ventured further than the following week. She could see him there with his Billy Idol hair and that smug smirk on his lips, as if to say he had no doubt about anything, when if you knew him at all, you could see right away it was just for show, and under all the bullshit was a scared little boy who knew he was never going to live up to his rich parents’ expectations and so had decided not to try, had decided to go the other way so that nobody, not even his worst tormentors, could say he’d failed…only that he’d chosen a different path.

Stevie pulled to a stop. A block down, the van was backing into a parking space. They sat in the darkness, watching Bohannon take three tries to work the van to the curb.

“Shitty driver,” Stevie commented as they watched the lights go out and Brian Bohannon’s shadowed form appear on the sidewalk, hands thrust deep in his jacket pockets as he headed down the hill at a loose-jointed shamble.

Dougherty popped the door handle and stepped out. A car rounded the corner at the head of the street, its ultrabright halogen lights sending Dougherty’s shadow halfway down the block. She shaded her eyes and waited for the car to pass, but apparently the driver was otherwise occupied. The car didn’t move. Just sat there, lights ablaze, throwing a painful purple glare over the entire block.

Dougherty leaned down and looked into the cab. In the bright artificial light, Stevie looked like he had only half a face. “I’m gonna…” she began.

He nodded. “I’ll meet you at the Starbucks on Olive,” he whispered.

And then, without warning, the lights went out and the street faded to black. She jerked her eyes in that direction. Blinked a couple of times. The car was gone. No headlights. No taillights. No nothing.

She had only a split second to wonder. Brian Bohannon had nearly a full block lead on her. Another short stretch of sidewalk and he’d be down on East Olive, where the lights grew brighter while her chances of going unnoticed grew dimmer.

She reached down, pulled off her shoes and began to jog down the street with the black pumps bouncing in her hand like a scuffed bouquet.

The sidewalk was uneven, cracked by time, heaved by tree roots, the concrete slabs tilted this way and that like some funhouse promenade. She kept her eyes on the uneven ground as gravity pulled her into a full run that stretched her long legs until her hip joints began to loosen and she settled into her stride.

Her bouncing eyes watched him turn right, up the little sliver of street that fronted the Hillcrest Market. She was thirty yards away and closing quickly when he turned along the front of the market and disappeared from her view.

She short-legged it to a stop. She could feel the rough sidewalk through the freshly worn holes in the bottoms of her stockings. Her mouth hung open, but she was breathing easily as she peeked around the corner. No Brian.

Another step forward and she could see into the store. He was at the counter, buying cigarettes. Waving his hands around, making small talk with the four hundred pounder on the other side of the counter.

Dougherty crossed the side street, angling over to a small traffic island and a pair of battered utility poles. She settled into the semidarkness just in time to watch Brian emerge from the market. Through the space between the poles, she watched as he opened the cigarettes, shook one out into his hand and then lit it with his silver Zippo lighter and a practiced flip of the wrist. He liked to think he smoked like James Dean. All cool and casual like. His hair was dark now and combed forward in a series of waves. Working the butt, he watched the passing parade until he spotted a break in the oncoming traffic and then stepped off the curb, all squinty-eyed, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

He got three steps into the street when she heard the roar of an engine rise above the hiss of traffic. Brian must have heard it at just about the same time because he snapped his head around toward the dark blue Mercedes sedan screaming up the hill, full-tilt boogie, lights out, coming right at him like a high-end German missile. He started back for the sidewalk, but slipped and went to one knee in the street, before scrambling to his feet and limping back the way he’d come.

The driver must have been drunk. As he rocketed closer and closer, he began to veer toward the right almost as if he was intentionally trying to catch Brian before he made it to the curb. Nearly on him now, the driver snapped on the headlights as if to fix his quarry in the beam at the moment of collision.

Involuntarily, Dougherty turned to face the terror. She pressed her back into the rough surface of the poles. The car, lights ablaze, engine screaming, was now coming right at her. She opened her mouth to scream, but all that came out was a hoarse croak, the sound of which was swallowed whole by the scream of the approaching Mercedes.

The right front tire bounced over the curb six feet away from her. She closed her eyes and waited for the impact…and then…a violent
whoosh
of air stirred her clothes and the heat of an engine rose to her cheeks as the driver veered back into the street, missing Dougherty and the telephone poles by no more than a couple of feet.

Breath raced like a hurricane in her chest. Her knees shook so badly that, had it not been for the utility poles, she would have dropped to the ground. And then she remembered Brian. And the evils she’d mentally visited upon him over the years. The horrific pictures she’d savored. Pictures of his bent and broken body as it paid in blood for what he’d done to her in ink. And…she began to cry.

She turned slowly and flattened her chest against the poles. The smell of creosote filled her nostrils as she drew in a long breath and held it. And then she heard his labored breathing and the small keening sound that was coming from his chest. He sat on the pavement, gathering himself. She watched as he struggled to his feet and then staggered out of view. Dougherty pressed her cheek against the rough wood and listened to his heels clicking on the pavement. After a moment she peeked around the utility poles and watched Bohannon limp back up the side street toward the van. His gait was unsteady and his line crooked as he moved from shadow to streetlight and back until finally, about halfway back to the van, he stepped into a thick blotch of shadow and…then…somehow…never stepped out. She waited, staring intently into the darkness. Her eyes thought they detected a sudden rush of movement in the darkness, almost as if he was dancing, and then, above the rumble of traffic, perhaps the sound of a strangled cry. And then nothing. Nothing at all.

She hurried up the street, taking advantage of a break in the traffic, loping diagonally through the intersection, all the way to the far curb and then up the opposite side of the street, staying in the deep shadows as she moved abreast of the spot where she’d lost sight of him. A narrow alley running between apartment buildings. At the far end of the passage, a glint of light on metal caught her attention and she thought she could make out a car, its headlights dark, as it bounced backward across the sidewalk and disappeared from view.