The Dead Don't Bleed: Part 1, The Outbreak (19 page)

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Miranda woke feeling like a new woman, she couldn't remember having a better
night’s sleep. The queen sized bed was more than twice the size of the small cot sized beds she had been used to for the past several years. Mrs. Carpenter had graciously loaned her some sheets, blankets and pillows until she had some time to get out and do some shopping in the coming days. It was such a great feeling to wake up in her own place on the verge of starting an entirely new life, she was feeling on top of the world and just for the hell of it she darted from room to room in her new apartment totally naked just to enjoy the feeling of ultimate freedom. Ending up sprawled across the living room couch, she realized that she was getting hungry and remembered her refrigerator and cupboards were still bare. Dinner the night before with Mrs. Carpenter and her very sweet and well humored husband, Andrew, had been very nice. Just as Mrs. Carpenter had promised, by the time they arrived at her house, Andrew was just unloading an impressive pile of barbecued ribs from the grill. Mrs. Carpenter had explained that her husband loved to grill, but with just the two of them he tended to cook much more than just the two of them could possibly eat. He justified this by telling Miranda that it was a waste to spend the time and material to get his grill going for just two small pieces of meat, so it was often his pleasure to give away plates of grilled meat to neighbors passing by or the occasional unexpected dinner companion which was exactly what Miranda had the pleasure of being the night before. The food had been wonderful and more than plentiful, the conversation had been very entertaining and overall she really enjoyed her visit. She felt that Mrs. Carpenter and her husband liked to consider themselves as friends with their tenants almost to the point of a large family, and Miranda had decided that she would be very happy with a relationship like that with her landlord.

When it was said that the apartment came furnished, she had expected only
items like a couch, table, some chairs and a bedroom set, but what she found went above and beyond her expectations. The kitchen was appointed with all the basic necessities for cooking and dining, pots, pans, plates, bowl and two drawers with neatly arranged cutlery and other cooking essentials. The living room had the sofa and love seat, coffee table, and surprisingly, a large flat screen television mounted inside a very attractive entertainment center. Returning from her dinner with Mrs. Carpenter and her husband the sight of her luggage stacked neatly inside her living room next to the entertainment center brought back memories of the incident at the airport. She had turned on the television hoping to catch some information on the evening news explaining what had happened at Dulles Airport earlier in the day. Flipping the power on, she was greeted with a black screen telling her there was no signal, a check of other channels showed the same message. Her experience with high end TV's and other such entertainment equipment was very limited due to her frugal life style so she assumed there was some type of technical problem. Mrs. Carpenter had provided her home and cell phone and told Miranda to feel free to call at any time with any questions or issues, she decided that a dead television warranted a call. It ended up be an embarrassing answer she received, while the television and other appointments came with the unit, services such as cable, land line phone service and Internet were left to the tenant to arrange for from a long list of competitive providers.

Following a refreshing shower
albeit without soap or shampoo, Miranda dressed in some comfortable clothes and spent less than twenty minutes putting away the few personal belongings that she had brought with her. Sitting down to a cup of coffee thanks again to Mrs. Carpenter who had sent her home with a large cup full of coffee grounds, filters and some sugar, she went about making detailed lists. She had a short page that included to do items with the apartment such as contacting service providers and utility companies to have the proper services started and put in her name. This list she put aside for the time being, since it was Sunday there was little there she could accomplish until the following morning at the earliest. Her next list was over a full page in length when she was done and she was sure after a couple days in the apartment she would discover even more things she needed. Food, toiletries, makeup, toilet paper, paper towels, the necessities alone would take up half her Sunday and several hundred dollars. There was a shopping complex just under a mile away and she figured she would walk over there and take a cab back after filling up several bags with supplies. She thought that while shopping for food she might even pick up everything she needed to prepare a nice thank you dinner for Mrs. Carpenter and her husband and see if they would accept her own offer of hospitality later that evening.

Fairfax County Police Corporal Kyle Anders had reached eight years of service just the week prior. In those eight years he had never encountered such an outbreak of medical emergencies as he was seeing in the last
twenty four hours. It had started as an alert across their mobile computer network warning that the CDC had posted information concerning an outbreak of a flu like illness that was highly contagious and had resulted in several deaths across the country. At first this was just information for law enforcement that they should take extra precautions in dealing with the public such as wearing their surgical gloves and to avoid close contact with someone who appeared sick. Ultimately what this meant was that a lot of warnings would be issued until this blew over. Most officers would just site a violator with a court date on a ticket instead of bringing them in for booking over misdemeanor offenses. Even traffic enforcement would start to be overlooked as officers did all they could to minimize the amount of contact they had with the general public to avoid getting sick themselves and missing work. Kyle was single and didn’t have to worry about the risk of bringing home some bug to pass on to his family like many other officers in his department, but just like them he also didn’t want to run the risk of an extended illness that kept him off the job. Because of this, he was also joining the ranks of officers giving the general public a break in arrests for the next couple of days.

Kyl
e had come on shift at seven Saturday evening for the start of a twelve hour rotation when he got the call from his sergeant for a meet behind a sporting goods store in the Tysons Corner area. Three other patrols were already there when he pulled up. The shift sergeant had informed all of them that normal patrol activities were being suspended and instead they were all to be tasked with supporting the response efforts related to the flu epidemic. He been direct and to the point when he told them that this was an unusual type of outbreak they were dealing with. Two paramedics had been assaulted and a nurse at a hospital in a neighboring town was killed when patients unexpectedly went berserk. The Sergeant informed them that they were going to implement a disaster procedure that they had practiced many times for but had never put into actual use in the past. The closest the department had come was during the terrorist attacks of 9-11 when fear of attacks all across the country had gripped the area. As close to Washington, DC as they were and with the number of high value political figures who made their home in the nearby wealthy towns, this was an area prime for any such act of terrorism to strike home. The disaster procedure they were implementing would call for patrols to each be issued with an M4 tactical rifle as a show of force and the sergeant went ahead and passed those out from a number he had already picked up and stored in his trunk. He handed Kyle a rifle with a loaded thirty round magazine already in it and a magazine pouch containing four additional magazines. Along with the rifle and ammo each patrol received four flash bang grenades and four CS grenades that dispersed a large cloud of tear gas for use against crowds. All patrols were supposed to be bumped immediately to two man units but with departmental budget cuts effecting their number of personnel, that was just not feasible, instead it was decided that Corporals and above would remain single units while all available off duty personnel were called in to ride along with everyone else. This of course also meant that they could count on little if any time off until the crisis passed. Units would continue their twelve hour shifts and then be authorized a four hour rest period in the ready room of either their own station or one of four fire stations within their area of responsibility. Those assignments were made based on patrol area, as a corporal who would be expected to fill in as a shift supervisor from time to time, Kyle was assigned back to their own station which was how he preferred it anyway.

Due to the nature of the current emergency their deployment was not going to follow their prescribed plan in their emergency protocols. Had they followed the book in this situation
, patrols would have been assigned to either high value targets known to be in the area, large crowded areas such as shopping malls or scheduled march routes for demonstrations or key intersections in preparation for traffic control and accident response. Instead of those scenarios, they were doing something a little different, they were going to be responding in tangent with emergency services to all medical calls. What they were being told was that ambulance service calls had picked up exponentially in the last few hours and paramedics were continuing to run into situations where police assistance was needed. In most cases relatives of victims needed to be controlled and kept from interfering with paramedics. There was also ongoing concern that some victims of this flu epidemic had become so overwhelmed with fever and delirium they were turning violent on paramedics. Reports of victims attempting to inflict bite wounds had started to filter in. The sergeant said that he had been told to pass along the next part but also that he was to stress that this information was unsubstantiated and was only being reported because it came from an unnamed but well placed government source. Trying to keep as straight a face as possible without rolling his eyes or making other gestures to display how ridiculous the information sounded to him the Sergeant explained that there was a possibility that the dead had been returning to life in some cases. Kyle and the other patrolman had exchanged glances with each other at this news, their Sergeant was a guy who they joked had no sense of humor whatsoever and was never one to sensationalize or exaggerate details. Even though he made every attempt to keep his voice neutral and pass along the information as he had been required, there was no hiding the fact that he put little real stock in the news. Each of them had tried to fire off a bunch of questions and a few smart ass come backs at the notion of the dead returning to life, but the Sergeant had clearly made up his mind that he was not going to entertain any feedback on the issue and that they should take the information as it was and just do their jobs while keeping alert for anything unusual.

The
first call for assistance to support an ambulance run came from Kyle's sector before their shift supervisor had concluded his briefing. The call was to a residential area off Lord Fairfax Road on the south side of Tysons Corner. Kyle had pulled in front of the house just seconds before the ambulance rounded the corner with lights and siren blaring. Not exactly sure what to expect, he had hefted the M4 rifle and kept it slung over his shoulder feeling a little ridiculous walking into a residence on a medical call armed as if he was going into a riot situation. There was a four person family living in the house, two parents in their mid-50's and their teenage son and preteen daughter, the father and daughter had come down with the flu just before going to bed the previous night. In the middle of the night the father had awoken to a bout of nausea and a high fever. While her husband was bent over the toilet in the master bedroom the mother had gone down the hall to the daughter’s room to check on her, she found the girl on the floor next to the bed covered in blood tinged vomit and shaking violently with convulsions. This was what had prompted her 911 call bringing Kyle and the ambulance to their house in the early morning hours. Not really sure what he was supposed to do, he just did his best to stay out of the way of the ambulance crew as they checked the daughters vital signs and started running an IV into her arm. They also made a check of the father and deemed that while he was indeed running a bad fever he would probably be ok if he took a cool bath, continued taking aspirin and kept up with fluids. Due to a rush on local hospitals they were limited in the cases they were authorized to transport. The daughter on the other hand met the criteria and they had bundled her up and whisked her off with the mother jumping in her own car to follow along behind. There had really been little for Kyle to do on that call and he had hoped the rest of the crisis would continue just as smooth.

Starting with that first call, Kyle's night started to really pick up speed. Normally the late hours on a Saturday night and into Sunday
morning were fairly busy anyway, mostly dealing with DUI's, some bar room brawls and the occasional drunk induced domestic disturbance, tonight however those calls were low on their list of priorities. Ever since that first call the radio had not stopped with calls stacking up for all patrols across the different sectors his department was responsible for. He had even heard their detective’s call signs being used as they were added to the mix in being sent along with emergency responders. He knew that the detectives were probably cussing up a storm and pulling in every favor and trick they could come up with to try and get out of this shit duty. They made little effort to hide the fact that they considered themselves above the grunt work reserved for the patrol section. Kyle could at least enjoy a little laugh at the fact that those guys clearly had been overruled by the higher ups and were out and about running from call to call just like him.

His first real sign of trouble came close to four in the morning, during his fifth call for assistance. The first couple of scenes he had responded to all played out very similar to the first one, arrived with medical personal, stood off to the side feeling useless, returned to service and en
route to the next call. His patrol report was just cut and pasted with the only changes being the addresses, times and ambulance number he assisted for the most part. His fifth call sent him to Tysons Tower Apartments, a location he was very familiar with. Servicing primarily foreign families, this complex was a literal melting pot that paid tribute to the engraving on the Statue of Liberty that proclaimed in part "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore...". In fact one of his first calls to the apartment had been a vandalism where that phrase had been artfully spray painted along the outside brick face of the central building. So many different ethnicities were represented in those apartments that it was inevitable it would cause friction and he had been back and forth multiple times for just such calls. Usually just the presence of the police was enough to cool everyone's heels and it was seldom that he had to do more than just spend a few minutes listening patiently to each side of an argument before advising both parties to just stay the hell away from each other.

It was a different scenario when he arrived early on Sunday morning just after the ambulance crew pulled up. There was only a single paramedic waiting in the lobby by the bank of elevators when he arrived. Kyle had asked about his partner only to learn that they had started dividing emergency crews into single operators to give them more coverage with the overflow of calls they were receiving. That was probably the first sign Kyle had that things were only going to from bad to worse. The apartment was on the sixth floor and as soon as the elevator doors opened
they heard the screaming and fighting from halfway down the corridor. Several residents were peering from their partially open doorways down the hall having been awoken by the commotion. Kyle instructed the paramedic to wait by the elevators while he assessed the situation and made sure it was safe for him to follow along. The door to apartment 621 had a large crack down the center of it that Kyle could see was fresh, and it was standing partially open. The screaming inside was that of pain more than anger and he made the decision to enter without knocking. Stepping into the living room he was confronted with a scene straight from hell. Laying across the couch in the center of the room he noticed an adult female, naked from the waist up and covered in more blood than he could remember seeing outside of the most deadly of car crashes. The entire front side of her neck and a good portion of her face were completely missing, ragged and torn skin marked the edges of a wound pattern that he could not immediately recognize but was sure hadn't come from any type of knife. There was little doubt that she was already gone, the blood had stopped pumping from the wound and what remained had pooled over her body and onto the couch underneath her. Laying in another puddle of blood on the floor between the couch and a matching love seat he could see the legs of a small boy that he thought was probably somewhere between eight and ten years old, he was doubled over at the waist forming his body into a tight ball as he clutched tightly to a wound along his stomach. Kyle couldn't see the specifics of the injury but from the amount of blood around the kid it was clear that it was significant, but at least he was still alive. The real action was happening a little further into the apartment, the small dining area next to the kitchen once had a table with seating for up to eight, six original wooden chairs and two folding card table additions probably for younger children. All of those furnishing were now either smashed, upended or shoved carelessly out of the way as two adult males and one female were rolling around on the floor amongst the remains of several smashed chairs. Underneath the squirming pile of people Kyle could see the flailing arm of a younger person, most likely a male, and clearly the focus of all of their attention. He initially thought he was witnessing some kind of really over the top child abuse with a teenager getting his ass completely tore up by a pile of adults, his blood started to boil at the notion. Before he could take two steps closer to the pile to start pulling people off the poor kid, his face shot into view from under the squirming mass of screaming and fighting adults piled on top of him. What he saw caused him to recoil and step back again towards the door while instinctively bringing the barrel of his rifle up in a reflex move. The kid looked more like a rabid dog fighting against his owners instead of the poor abused little boy Kyle had been expecting. He was snarling and snapping with his teeth trying to sink them into any available piece of flesh he could reach. The eyes of the kid really struck him as unbelievable, both eyes were completely filled with a dull milky white glaze that made him think of the eyes of a corpse. Kyle also noted that the skin color of the kid was different that he would have expected. The family was clearly Hispanic and where most Hispanics had a natural light brown to tan color this kid seemed to have a case of jaundice or some other affliction, his skin was a pasty yellow color more closely resembling a wax figurine. He felt reasonably certain there was something really wrong with this kid and what he had first thought was a case of child abuse may actually be an attempt by the adults to keep him under control. Watching the pile of adults moving around on top of the kid he thought that the little bastard must be a hell of a lot stronger than he appeared. He estimated that all together there was close to two hundred and fifty or so pounds worth of screaming and thrashing parents piled up on him and he was moving them around and almost throwing them off like he was superman. Drugs was another thought that came to Kyle's mind, maybe the kid was whacked out on PCP or something, that would account for the unusual strength and maybe even the color of skin but he had never heard of a drug that hazed over someone's eyes like that. Whatever was happening he knew that he needed to do something to help get this situation under control before anyone else got hurt. There was already at least one dead body in the room and another child in desperate need of medical attention. The paramedic was not going to enter this scene until Kyle had it secure and in that time the kid was probably going to bleed to death.