The Hysteria: Book 4, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (15 page)

I could hear Manetti talking. “Where is he? Everybody shut up! Where the hell is he?”

I was almost to the department store, still sprinting, when Ms. Universe came barreling back toward me.

She ran like a bodybuilder. Not well. But she was moving fast and she was solid mass. Instead of shooting, I went for the tackle. It was like colliding with a metal wall. I took her down but I went too.

She was dazed long enough for me to put her in an arm bar. I pulled with my arms and pushed with my legs and I could feel the tension down her limb.

“Stop!” she yelled.

“Why’d you do it?”

“I don’t know—”

Crunch
.

“Owwwww! I had to!”

“Who’s Ken Hernando?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’d you get the blade?”

“It was just there…in the store.”

Crunch
.

“Bullshit.”

“Okay, okay! I had it! Stop!”             

“Who’s the man who laughs?”

“Who?”

“The man who laughs.” I pulled just a little harder and felt the cords in her arm strain against my pull, close to the tearing point.

“I don’t know, you hear things.”

“I don’t hear things.”

It was all my strength to keep her arm locked. I tugged a little harder, something popped in her shoulder.

“Shit!”

“The man who laughs, who is he?”

“Ken Hernando! That’s all I know!”

All this time, I heard Manetti talking through the earpiece but didn’t catch a word of what was said.

“Hey!”

A burly man came running at us from the department store. He had something in his hand. I let Ms. Universe out of the arm bar and rolled. I got my gun out and trained it on the other guy.

“Stop!”             

He didn’t.

“Stop!”

He jumped.

I didn’t want to kill anybody else. I wasn’t going to shoot this guy, who might not have understood what was happening. Or who did understand but was sick in the head.

I rolled out of his way, he hit the floor hard, and I got to my feet just in time for Ms. Universe to take a swing at me.

I couldn’t get out of the way so I brought my arm up. She got me in the funny bone and my arm went numb. She moved in with a flying knee, a move she could only have learned in a women’s self-defense class. I saw it coming and angled myself out of the way.

The other guy was getting up and more people were getting curious. There had to be more crazies waiting in the wings here, ready to pounce.

I was out of options.

Ms. Universe grappled with me and damn she was strong.

But I still had the gun.

She tried to get me in a headlock. I got a close-up shot of the veins popping out of her arms.

Krav maga teaches you a lot of things. It had taught me how to defend against a gun if I wasn’t armed. But it hadn’t taught me how to use a gun, and when. I had no training for this, nothing to guide me except instinct.

I shot her in the meaty part of her thigh away from where I knew the femoral artery to be. Blood sprayed and she fell, screaming.

I brought the gun to bear on the other guy. I was amazed at how steady my hands were. No tremors. The adrenaline wasn’t shaking me up. It was focusing me. And then the realization: under the right set of circumstances, I could kill. Even though we were talking self-preservation, it was a sobering thought.

I tasted bile in the back of my throat.

But my hands didn’t shake.

The man’s eyes were slits. I saw what he was holding.

A switchblade.

“You’re one of them,” he said.

Some strange voice came out of me. “Drop the fucking knife or I’ll shoot you.”

Manetti spoke through the comm link. “Eddie, you okay?”

She’d heard the shot. Everybody must have heard the shot. It hadn’t seemed loud to me, though.

“I’m good,” I said. “Just got some company.”

The man brought the knife up.

“Don’t.”

Slowly, he brought the knife back. Like he was going to throw it.

He was testing me. I don’t like tests.

“Last chance, then I pull the trigger and kill you dead.”

He was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt. He was around my age. He wore a wedding ring. He would be bald soon, maybe in a couple years. If he didn’t die before then.

His hands were remarkably steady too, as were his eyes. They lasered in on me like they could see nothing else.

He had the knife almost behind his head, his body coiled, his arm tensed and ready.

We stood like that, ten feet apart.

In the earpiece, I heard Manetti.

“Mobray, it’s okay…we just want to help Megan…help us, help her…”

My nose was pouring blood again. Ms. Universe was dragging herself across the ground. There was a lot of blood around her.

“Put it down,” I said.

The guy holding the knife flinched a microsecond before the throw.

I put a bullet in him, center mass. The gunshot echoed down the corridor. The knife skittered across the floor. He slumped to his knees and stared dumbly at the hole in his chest leaking blood.

The crowd frenzied. They ran in different directions, yelling, bumping into each other. The screams echoed around us. But five seconds later the space had cleared.

The man was still on his knees, his hands clutching his chest.

“Eddie, you okay?” Manetti said.

Again that alien voice spoke. “Yes. Better get over here when you’re done with Mobray.”

She lowered her voice. “I’m coming now. He’s seen better days.”

“Watch your ass,” I said. “These people are starting to come out of the woodwork.”

Ms. Universe tried to get to her feet and fell in a heap, screaming.

“Mobray’s bleeding out,” Manetti said.

“What the hell was he doing in there?” I kept the gun roving back and forth from the man to Ms. Universe. The guy wasn’t really moving anymore. He sat slumped, head down like he’d fallen asleep.

“Looking for rollerblades.”

I couldn’t tell if she was kidding.

“I’m not kidding. EMT is taking him out now.”

“He wouldn’t tell you where Megan is,” I said.

“No. He told me she was safer if we didn’t find her.”

“Pretty much what she said to me.” The picture of this mess was becoming clearer in my mind.

Ms. Universe had given up on screaming. It wasn’t getting her anywhere. Now she was moaning, the knee of the shot leg hiked up to her stomach. She was muttering for help. The cords in her neck pushed against her skin as she gritted her teeth.

I went over to her.

“Mobray. Did you know him?”

“Who?”             

“The poor son of a bitch you just gutted. Did you know him?”

She frowned. “Why would I know him?”

“Yeah, why would you?” I knelt so I was closer but kept out of limb’s reach. I still had my gun in my hand and I wasn’t worried about shooting her other leg.

Manetti was coming down the hall, a couple rent-a-cops in tow trying to keep up.

“You weren’t looking for him?”

Ms. Universe was still confused by my questions. “No.”

“Then why?”             

“What do you mean?”

Manetti reached us. She immediately started barking orders at the brave gawkers crowding us, pushing them back, widening the circle.

“Why did you stab him?”

She picked her head up an inch off the ground. “I think you know.”

“Why would I know?”

The rent-a-cops had their pieces out and were shouting questions at me. Manetti set herself up between them and me and ran interference.

I poked Ms. Universe’s leg with the gun. She screamed.

“Why’d you come back this way? Why didn’t you just leave the mall?”

“There were more of them in there. They knew.”

“You two aren’t going anywhere,” Rent-A-Cop A was saying. Rent-A-Cop B was standing there, uncertain how much authority he actually possessed.

“Actually, we’re leaving now,” Manetti said.

I laid down on the couch in the Fed’s outer room. Pater brought me some water and more painkillers. My nose felt like it had exploded. I could have shut my eyes and napped for a year.

Except I kept thinking about the woman, and now the man, that I’d killed.

I didn’t even know her name. Somehow that made it worse. One second, she was alive. The next, dead. Because I’d put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.

It helped a little that she would have killed me. But only a little. Now Current Eddie was second-guessing Earlier Eddie, wondering if that guy had made a mistake, acted too rashly. I played the scene out in my mind a thousand-million times, thinking about what I could have done differently.

It was after 3:00. Damned clock was still ticking and we weren’t any closer to Megan Turner or Ken Hernando and things were getting worse by the minute.

Pater continued to monitor the police activity. The emergency lines were ringing off the hook. Local LE was already stretched too thin making all the house calls.

Manetti had her feet up on Pater’s desk. She was chewing on an energy bar. “You should eat something.”

“Not hungry,” I said.

“Eat before you’re hungry, drink before you’re thirsty, sleep when you can.”

“Your motto?”

“Something every agent, soldier, or cop is taught their first day on the job.” She tossed me an energy bar. “You don’t know when your next meal is coming, so eat when you can.”

I opened the wrapper. The bar was a diluted brown, almost gray. I forced it down. It almost came back up.

Pater looked perfectly calm. Unflappable. He went to the desk and powered on a projector. It was synced to a laptop in front of Manetti. Pater brought it out of hibernation.

“Time for a slide show,” he said.

“What’s this?”

“Basic reproductive rate.” Pater offered a grim smile. “Eamon, I’m sharing my laptop.”

“I’ve seen it already.” His voice was small and petulant. It reminded me of the boy I’d once known.

“Chin up in there, Eamon. It’s not like you’re in danger inside your cage,” I said.

“Riehl is a good guy. He was my friend.”

“I wouldn’t worry about him. If anybody can survive this…”

“Eddie’s right.” Manetti took her feet off the desk. “Riehl will come out the other side.”

“If we don’t have to kill him,” I added.

“Nobody’s killing Riehl,” Manetti said.

The image from the projector flashed on the wall. I saw a pretty basic spreadsheet filled with numbers and the letters C, P, D, and Ro.

Pater jumped in. “Agent Manetti, your loyalty is commendable. But Eddie has a point. We might have no choice but to kill Agent Riehl. If necessary, can you pull the trigger?”

“You know I’ll do anything to complete the mission and protect taxpayers. But let me make this clear to all in the room: killing Riehl is a last resort option. Anybody that jumps the gun will have to answer to me.”

She addressed the room but everybody knew she was talking to me.

I said, “Take it easy. When I woke up this morning, I didn’t think I’d have to kill anybody for the rest of my life. I’ve already put two very sick people down in the last four hours. It was necessary, I had to do it, but it’s sitting worse than that energy bar. I’m not looking to repeat the experience of killing anyone for the rest of my days.”

Even as I said it I had that feeling there’d be more bloodshed before day’s end. Manetti seemed to accept my explanation, though.

Pater said, “New information has come to light. The predictive model has changed accordingly.”

“What does that mean?” Manetti said.

“It means what we thought was our worst case scenario is actually closer to our best case scenario.”

Everyone went quiet.

Pater motioned to the spreadsheet projected on the wall. “Ro stands for the basic reproductive rate. It’s calculated by multiplying these variables together. C stands for the number of contacts the infectious person makes per day, P stands for the probability of transmission per contact with the infectious person, and D stands for the duration the infected person is contagious to others.”

I had questions but I let him keep going.

“Multiply these variables and you get Ro. Another way to look at Ro is the number of expected secondary transmissions from a single case of disease.” He walked to the wall and pointed to the first row. “With smallpox, Ro is usually between 6 and 7. That means one contagious person can be expected to infect 6 to 7 people on average.”

“But the data we have on MPI isn’t solid,” Eamon said, almost like he was prompting Pater.

“That’s right. We don’t understand the disease process or if it follows the basic pattern of infection. So we built in worst case assumptions and extrapolated Ro for several different models against the local population. We arrived at a total number of infected, or affected, of around eight hundred people.”

“That’s all?” I said.

“Eight hundred is a small army,” Manetti said.

“Fair enough. So why don’t you think that’s accurate now?” I asked.

“With Ro, we follow the disease from person to person.”

“And here you don’t know if that’s the case.”

“Correct. MPI could spread from person to person, or environment to person, or both.”

“My guess is both,” I said.

“And even if it’s not, even if it’s solely transmitted from the environment to person, we don’t have a model for that,” Manetti said.

“Toxic spills help a little, some pollutant in the water or food or air…but nothing is on a par with MPI. Except MPI,” Pater said.

“Worst case?” I said.

“Triple it. Call it twenty-five hundred.”

“Any modeling that predicts how many affected will fall into each group?”

Pater shook his head.

***

Eamon was reading at his desk. Of course the book was
The Count of Monte Cristo
.

“Are you trying to be a walking cliche?” I said.

He nodded at me absently and put the book down.

I stopped short of the glass partition and folded my arms. “So you and Riehl were buddy-buddy, huh?”

“That man was as close to me as anybody could be.”

“Which is to say not a lot.”

Eamon’s face was devoid of anything human, relatable. I half-expected there to be a lizard hiding under his skin.

“How many friends do you have, Eddie?” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms too. “How many?”

“Only a few, but I’d trust them with my life.”

“Yes? And how often do you see them? How often do you and the boys go out for drinks?”

Truth was, never. My closest friend, Stan, I hadn’t actually seen in years. We called each other every now and then. Most of the time I called him when I needed help on a case. I was a loner that filled his days with work, exercise, more work, and reading. The only place I met new people was at the gym.

“You know Riehl well?” I said.

“I know this team well.”

“Riehl knows where we are. Will he come after us?”

Eamon thought about it. “No.”

“That’s what I think, but I want to hear why you think that.”

“He is with Melanie’s people. Though they might have us outnumbered, they do not use guns. We do. It’d be like target practice if they tried to get in here. Not to mention, Pater has a lot of tech here. Tech you haven’t even seen. We could take them down if we wanted, easily.”

“Twenty-five hundred of them?”

“Not that many. But enough to dissuade the rest.”

I shook my head. “They’ll keep coming. Witherspoon kept coming. The man in the mall kept coming.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“I’m not saying he’s coming, I don’t think he is.”

“Why not?”

“Because they don’t need to. We don’t know anything they don’t. They’re probably closer to Megan than we are, they are a network of people working together. Coming here is walking into a gunfight for no reason. They won’t come here.”

“They’re not acting rationally though.”

“Some of them are.” I wondered why I was talking it out with Eamon Moriarty of all people. “Melanie is. Some of them can control themselves, pretend to be normal. Maybe they can guide the others.”

“Why are you talking to me?”

I sat in the chair. We studied each other through the glass partition.

“I want you to tell me something.”

He watched me with curious eyes.

“What’s it like, going around every day knowing you’re a murderer?” I asked.

He actually smiled. “You are asking because that’s how you see yourself now.”

“Wrong, dipshit. I’m no murderer. I acted in self-defense. All the same, it’s burning me. So I’m wondering, if I feel this bad and I’m innocent, how must you feel when you’re guilty as hell?”

“I know you don’t want to hear this, Eddie, but in a way, I’m innocent as well.”

“Because you were a kid when you killed my brother?”             

“Because I didn’t understand right from wrong. My age had nothing to do with it. Because all my life I’d been mistreated by my family and I wrongly believed my new family would do the same. Because I was only trying to get away when you and your brother came into the house. Because a lot of reasons.”

“None of them are good enough for me.”

“I know.”

“Don’t forget it.”

“Eddie, as mad as you are, you don’t scare me.”

“Then you are still crazy.”

“Don’t mistake me. I’m not afraid of you because I don’t think you’d actually kill me if you had the chance. You’re a good person.”

Not more than four hours ago, I’d learned that I could kill. I’d feel bad about it after, but when it came to pulling the trigger, I could do it if I felt justified. Maybe all we need are the wrong circumstances, or someone to push us into that dark place where Eamon had lived most of his childhood.

I said, “Do you still think about them? Your family?”

He nodded slowly. “I wonder what they’d be like if they were still alive. But I don’t miss them.”

“What about your adoptive family?”

“I miss Chefaun. She was a good person. Maybe if I’d just had a little more time with her…”

“You ever talk to her?”             

He shook his head. “She came to see me a few times, early on. But after awhile that stopped.”

“She couldn’t deal with you anymore.”

“Too much heartache.” Eamon looked away. “She and Sean split not long after Stephen died.”

“You mean after you killed him.”

“Yes. That.” He was still looking away. “Then Sean self-destructed.”

“I know.”             

“Did he try to have you killed? When you were in prison?”

I nodded. “Didn’t work out so well for the other guy.”

“Or Sean.”

“He blamed me for his son’s death, just as much as he blamed you.”

“He was a time bomb.” Eamon finally looked at me again. “If it wasn’t his son’s death something else would have set him off eventually. The man had a terrible temper.”

“Anger is a brief madness.”

Eamon shook his head. “Not in his case.”

I stood. “You’re wrong. He was an asshole but his son’s death sent him over the edge. You just need to believe that anything could have done that to Sean so you can sleep at night.”

I headed for the door, tired of all this reminiscing.

***

“What do we know?” Pater said.

Manetti was at the desk again. I went back to the couch and laid down. The headache was still there, most of the pain was in my nose again. It only hurt when I breathed.

“Two scenarios. There’s one MPI causing a group of people to react in very different ways. Or there are two simultaneous MPIs causing two very different reactions.” I looked over at Pater. “Any closer to finding the trigger?”

He shook his head and paced the room. “Either way, both reactions are violent.”

“In different ways and in different degrees,” I said.

Manetti nodded. I could tell this was no revelation to her. She’d been thinking the same thing. “Some people like knives, some like guns. And the two kinds don’t like each other very much.”

“The people who like guns are the ones who faint,” I said. “I don’t think the others faint.”

We sat there and ruminated. Though the door was closed, I could feel Eamon’s presence in the other room. He was listening because the comms were still functioning. But he hadn’t said a word.

“Megan’s group, the gun group, they’re hiding.” Pater kept pacing. “The other group, Melanie’s group, they’re not hiding.”

“So who are the good guys?” Manetti said.

“There might not be any,” Pater said.