“And you don’t recall him ever acting like that before?” Tristan asked the sheriff deputy, supposedly a friend of Steve’s.
“No, sir,” he answered with a southern accent. “He’s always been cool. Comes from a good family in town, too. His daddy was the mayor for a spell.”
“Oh, really?” This was getting more and more interesting. The sheriff was rude and pissed that he’d come in asking questions, so Tristan had left. This young deputy caught up to him as he was crossing the street going to his truck and told him to meet him around back where he’d talk to him. Tristan wasn’t sure if he was about to get his ass kicked in an alley or what the deal was, but the kid so far had been nice and forthcoming with information, a contrast to his boss in every way.
“Yeah, I even went out with his older sister for a while,” he said. “Didn’t work out. She left for college in New York. Long distance is a bitch, ya’ know?”
Tristan nodded, even though he really didn’t understand the sentiment. Relationships, long distance or not, weren’t his specialty. “So, how come they didn’t want us to give statements? Was it because of his family’s influence in town?”
“Nah, that ain’t it, man,” the deputy said.
His shirt was starched. His shit was in order. Clearly, the kid had discipline and took his job seriously. But Tristan couldn’t understand why he’d risk a job he obviously loved to talk to him. In an alley at that.
“Why didn’t they ask us for statements then?”
The kid, probably twenty at the most, said, “’Cuz of the sickness, ya’ know?”
“Sickness?” Tristan asked, more confused than a moment ago. “What do you mean?”
“That flu,” he explained. “Everybody’s gettin’ it.”
“The flu,” he repeated and got a nod. “What the hell’s the flu got to do with anything?”
“People are gettin’ sick left and right with it,” he said again.
“But what are you saying? He was sick, so they didn’t take our statements? That makes no sense.”
“It ain’t like no regular sickness, man,” he stated. “It makes people nutty or somethin’.”
“The flu makes people nutty? Like how?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know. We’ve seen at least a dozen people, mostly the guys from the oil refinery, coming into town stirrin’ up shit. They always pick fights with folks. I don’t know. Go figure, huh?”
“The flu makes people pick fights with other people, people they don’t even know?”
He shrugged again. “Don’t know. Seems like it. All I know is the sheriff got some email about it.”
“An email? From who?”
The lanky kid shrugged again, “Look, you seem cool and all. You’re from the base, right?”
Tristan nodded.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. That’s the only reason I agreed to talk to you. I wanna’ join, too. Just waitin’ for my granny to get moved to a better nursing home first. Then I’m signin’ up.”
“Good. Sounds like you’ve got a plan,” he said, not really caring, though. “But back to this flu thing. Who’d he get an email from?”
“Don’t know for sure. I just saw that it was printed out and layin’ on his desk. The top of it said something about ‘regarding the recent flu outbreak’,” he relayed with air quotes. “And some shit about following the guidelines and protocols he was already told about.”
“That seems odd,” Tristan said more to himself than the kid. “Wonder what that was all about.”
“Not sure I can say,” he answered. “These flu people get real bad fevers and shit and go nuts or something.”
That didn’t sound right. “What’d you guys do with Steve?”
The kid looked around as if he were afraid he’d get caught talking to Tristan.
“Took him to the drop-off spot,” he said.
“What’s that?” Tristan asked with complete confusion. He should’ve been taken to a hospital and then put in the clink for the weekend to cool off. “What’s a drop-off spot?”
“We’ve been takin’ the sick ones to a place up north in the city…”
“Canton? Akron?”
“Yeah, Canton, to that new Cleveland Clinic hospital,” he stated.
“And then you bring them back to a holding cell till the judge comes in on Monday, right?”
“Nope, ain’t seen any of ‘em come back yet.”
“Why not? They have to stand before the judge.”
He removed his standard issue, brown deputy ballcap and rubbed at his crew cut. “I don’t think they get better, man.”
“Huh,” Tristan stated in a contemplative manner and nodded.
“Look, you see anyone like the sick ones, like Steve, just call it in, okay? They ain’t right, man. They’re like real sick and shit. The last one we got called for before Steve was a couple days before him was a lady trying to kill her husband and kids. Had a butcher knife. A damn butcher knife trying to stab her own kids. Ever hear of anything like that?”
He’d heard and seen worse but didn’t say that. Instead, like most times when civilians were shocked and figured he would be, too, Tristan just nodded along. His only comment was, “Crazy.”
“Yeah, crazy. That’s what they get. Total nutso psychopath whack-job level crazy.” He paused to think about it. “Hey, man, watch out, okay? If they got them red eyes, stay back. This shit’s real contagious.”
“Red eyes?”
“Yeah, their eyes, they get real bloodshot and shit. It ain’t normal.”
“Steve was talking strangely, too,” Tristan told him. “Is that also a symptom?”
“Yeah, oh yeah. That’s creepy when they get to doin’ that. I don’t know why they do it, either. I mean, it’s like they ain’t even human no more, ya’ know?”
He nodded. He’d seen people on bath salts before. Or in Africa, an herbal drug that tripped them out for days. It reminded him of that. Except for his size, Tristan wouldn’t have figured Steve would’ve been so hard to take down. He was carrying Avery Andersson like a ten-pound sack of potatoes and Tristan on his back like he was another. He wouldn’t have looked at a man like Steve and thought he was that strong. Tristan probably had forty pounds on him.
“And there’s two different strains of this shit, too,” he said.
“Really? Two?”
His head jerked, “Oh, shit. There goes my coworker. I better get going, man. Hey, it was nice talkin’ to ya’. Thanks for your service and all, man.”
“Sure,” Tristan said and shook the kid’s outstretched hand before the young deputy jogged away.
Tristan stood there for a few minutes in order for the deputy to put enough distance between them so that it didn’t seem like they’d just been talking. Then he made his exit from the alley, too. He got back in his truck and drove to the bar where it all went down last night. The sun was getting low in the sky already, reminding him that winter was around the corner. Winter in Ohio was still better than winter in the mountains of western China or Afghanistan. He never cared that he wasn’t home for Christmas like some of his buddies. He didn’t have anyone waiting for him here anyway. The last time he’d actually lived at home, his parents were renting a run-down bungalow in an armpit of a district in east Cleveland near the lake. Nothing was as cold as that, the winds coming off of Lake Erie. It made him shiver just remembering. But at least it was America still and not some third-world hell hole overseas.
The sign on the door stated that the band started at nine p.m., but the restaurant opened at four. It was seven-thirty. He didn’t see the bouncer from last night, and nobody was at the door taking money. Apparently, that didn’t start until the bar crowd came. Inside, it was busy with the dinner crowd, mostly families who probably cleared out once the partiers came. He took a seat at the bar. Only a few other men were sitting there, single men who looked like they just came from work and were eating burgers.
“Hey, again,” the bartender, Livie by her nametag, which he’d missed last night, stated. “Couldn’t stay away, huh?”
“Yeah, guess so,” he said, trying to be cordial. He’d wanted to talk to that bouncer, but maybe he could pump her for information instead.
“I’ve got somethin’ for ya’,” she said and walked away. When she came back, she was holding a phone. “Your girlfriend forgot this. Or dropped it or whatever. I found it on the floor when I came back in.”
“Oh, thank you, ma’am,” he said and took what he presumed to be Avery’s phone.
“I already looked. It’s hers. Sorry, I needed to know if it belonged to her.”
“Sure, no problem,” he said.
“Wanna’ order?” she asked.
He didn’t really want to, but Tristan wanted information. Being a good patron, he ordered a burger and a mixed greens salad. She looked surprised at the salad. Then she gave him an assessing once over and smiled.
“Wanna’ beer?” she asked next.
“Nah, think I’ll just stick with a diet soda. Whatever’s on tap, ma’am,” he joked.
“Sure thing,” she said and left to put his order in.
Tristan swiped Avery’s phone, and it immediately opened to an unlocked home screen. Who did that? Everyone locked their phones with a password. Hell, she didn’t even have a lock on her apartment, so he wasn’t sure why an unlocked phone was that much of a stretch.
Her home screen was a picture of a cello. Wow, exciting. Then because he couldn’t seem to stop himself, and because he lied to himself and said he needed to make sure that it was her phone, he opened her photo album. It was definitely hers.
“One diet Coke,” Livie said and placed his iced beverage in front of him, for which he thanked her, and she walked away.
It felt wrong, but once he started, he couldn’t stop. He scrolled through Avery Andersson’s photos taken with her phone like a stalker. There were some with her and her friends, especially that one with the dreadlocks, Renee. They were canoeing in one, horseback riding in another, on some sort of a hike somewhere in a different one, and at an amusement park. Renee was obviously the more outgoing one in the friendship. Avery always gave shy smiles whereas Renee was a clown and outgoing.
“Here ya’ go,” Livie stated a while later and set a platter in front of him with his burger and salad.
“Thanks,” he said and started with the salad.
He kept scrolling her photos as he ate. There were some with her family. They looked like the blonde Swiss family fucking Robinsons. Her dad was tall, taller than him, it seemed. There were a few pictures with just Avery and her dad and were tagged ‘Cambridge.’ He assumed it was the college in England because it looked like some old college with stone buildings in the background. She had a lot of unusual photographs of just architecture, some in black and white. Others of flowers or road signs or an animal on a farm somewhere. She seemed to like taking a lot of pictures.
They were an active family for being so big. There were photos from Niagara Falls, New York City, Florida, Italy, and a lot of them that just looked like their property. But every one of the photos the family was doing something, either fishing, shooting bow and arrows, paddling around in rowboats, or hiking in the woods. There was even a photo of Avery with black smudges under her cheeks and a tactical helmet on her fair head. It was tagged, ‘let’s get it on.’ That saying and staring at her pale blue mysterious eyes that stood out even more from the darkness under them made something twitch within him. It wasn’t his heart, either. It was a lot lower.
The photo, however, was simply her and her siblings playing airsoft in the woods because the next twenty were of her brothers and sisters, a buttload of them, in black or camo style tactical gear complete with helmets, knee and elbow guards and airsoft rifles. Last night when he’d met her, she’d been so serious. In most of her photographs, she was smiling or laughing with her mouth open wide, exposing all her teeth and her long neck arched back with glee. She seemed like a carefree person, shy but carefree. Tristan clicked her phone off. There was no point even looking at the photos of someone like Avery Andersson.
“Is your girlfriend not joining you?” Livie asked a while later when he was finishing his burger.
“She’s not really my girlfriend. Just…a friend,” he explained, getting a lascivious and very approving grin from her. She licked her lower lip, letting her tongue piercing be seen by him. Tristan wasn’t stupid. He knew the effect he had on a lot of women. Not Avery Andersson, clearly, but a lot of other women.
“I’ll get your check,” she said and swung around. There was a pep in her step this time and a swish of her black ponytail.
He left her a generous tip. Then he asked about the man last night and the other three who’d behaved the same way in the last week. He noticed her tank top was a little lower in the front now, as if she’d pulled it down and pushed up the goods a little more.
“I don’t know what’s goin’ on,” she said, wiping down the bar in front of him. “People have been actin’ strange for the last few weeks. My roommate and I were watchin’ the news the other night, and they said a bunch of people have died from some weird flu or something. It sounded like it was more overseas, though.”
“What about the people who’ve been taken out of here in the past week? Think it was the flu?”
“No, we just seem to draw the local drunks and the weirdos. Your friend,” she emphasized, “shouldn’t come in here thinking she’s not gonna get hit on. I’ve seen her and her friends in here a few times.”
It was more than just being hit on, but Tristan didn’t correct her because he didn’t want to break their rapport. “Yeah? Did they ever leave with anyone?”
It had nothing to do with what happened last night. Tristan just had a sick interest in knowing.
“Nah, they’re all prudes and dick teases if you ask me. Blondie always draws a crowd of gawkers, though.”
He could understand why.
“A girl like that, men just want to conquer them, ya’ know?”
“What do you mean?”
“Goody-two-shoes, ivy league, spoiled rich girl, thinks she’s better than everyone else,” she stated, showing a certain amount of her own jealousy. “Men want to be the first to take what she’s obviously still walking around with. She’s frigid.”
It wasn’t Avery’s fault she was attractive. And Tristan didn’t get any of those impressions from her. Obviously, she came from money, but she hadn’t been braggy about it, hadn’t even mentioned it at all. If he’d been interested in what the bartender was clearly offering before, he wasn’t now. He decided to move their conversation back to the point of his visit.
“What about the other ones? The other people who were bounced earlier in the week? Your doorman said they’d already had trouble similar to last night three times in the last week. You don’t think they were like Steve?”
“I guess they were. Who knows? They probably all got a bad batch of crack or something. Last year they busted some drug dealers lacing crack with bath salts and animal tranquilizer. It’s probably just that shit going around again, ya’ know?”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said and stood, figuring he wasn’t going to get any other information from her.
“Hey, I get off at eleven tonight,” she said.
“Bummer, I gotta work the midnight shift tonight,” he lied, although he had no intention of coming back. “Maybe another time, though.”
“Hell, yeah,” she swore and wrote her number on a cocktail napkin and slid it across the bar to him. Tristan nodded and tried to offer a partial smile.
He left the bar and went to a local coffee house to use their wifi. Tristan scoured every bit of information he could find on the web about this flu going around. With it hitting so many cities and overseas, as well, according to the bartender, he sure didn’t come up with a lot of information on it. He logged on to the Army website and searched there, too. In a chatroom about schools on base where it was mostly moms asking questions, he found a thread about it. He scrolled down and started reading the comments and posts.
Most of the comments were about the moms being worried about the flu season. Then they became more ominous. One mother said her child was sick. She was looking for more holistic medicine ideas because nothing the doctor prescribed was working. Then another mother stated that her son was sick, too, and so were three other children in his kindergarten class. He tapped on the second page and kept going. A new mother on the thread stated that her daughter had died from this flu. The term RF1 was used. Tristan had not heard this name before.
After that, he found reference after reference to RF1. He had no idea what that meant or stood for. The nightmares of these poor mothers seemed to get worse as he went. By page six, he had to stop. He also tallied up in his head that eighteen children were dead from this flu. The first post on page seventeen was from three weeks ago. The last week of August.
When he couldn’t take anymore, Tristan ordered another coffee and stepped outside for a smoke. The air was becoming cooler. Before he left base, he looked for his leather jacket. It was gone. He remembered loaning it to Avery outside the bar, but he thought she left it in his truck. He’d grabbed a black hoodie instead, one with a gray American flag on the back.
He finished his smoke and went back in to retrieve his coffee, leaving a tip for the teenage girl working the counter. Then he got back on their wifi and looked into this RF1 flu. So much of the information out there was either misleading or just plain confusing.
Leaving the coffee house, he drove around for a while and ended up whether consciously or subconsciously on the road to Avery Andersson’s family property. It was dark as he pulled off the side of the gravel road at the top of the hill, stopping way before the closed driveway gate. Their property probably started somewhere around here, but the home sat far back from the street. He had an uncanny feeling come over him while he was driving around the back-country roads that he should check on her. It was stupid, and he felt even dumber as he sat in his truck idling it. He wished he could see the house from here, though. That unlocked, unsafe apartment.
Instead of being a total creeper, Tristan put it in drive and kept going again all the way back to base. A party had kicked off at Royce and Spencer’s place. He went to his own house and grabbed a bottle of beer. Then he scrolled through her phone again. There were a lot of dude’s phone numbers, but most were tagged with friend emojis or labeled like: John from church, Pastor Eustace. It didn’t seem like she had a boyfriend, but someone named Joshua was in a lot of photos with her, and he had dark hair, so it wasn’t a brother. He had a sudden need to punch the guy.
Instead of figuring out who Joshua was or where he lived, Tristan looked at the photos some more. She seemed to really like taking pictures but wasn’t in a lot of them. She had close-ups of a single leaf or flower petal or a section of faded white fencing that probably was an animal paddock. There were some tagged ‘Renee’s’ and had horses in them. The girl sure did like nature and animals.
He watched the twenty-four-hour news channel on the internet that he followed (definitely not mainstream) while he consumed a bag of cheese Combos. They were reporting unprecedented cases of the flu, an unnamed flu without the positive identity that would link it back to the term RF1. He figured it was the same one, though. Over a hundred thousand people around Europe had died from it already. The numbers in Asia were even worse, and they said that there was no cure or a preventative vaccine yet. Strange that he was just learning anything about it. It made him think about what that young deputy had mentioned. Nowhere on the news or the internet searches he’d performed were there any mentions of a flu that made people violent. If that guy and the others didn’t have this weird strain of deadly flu, which had made people crazy and violent, then what the hell was wrong with them?