“I feel horrible,” Jenny said. “I’ve never felt this bad my whole entire life.” We’d been knee deep in our conversation when she’d told me that. She’d been coughing the entire time, too.
“Can you tell me exactly what you’re symptoms are?” I asked. “Is there anything out of the ordinary?” I paced a path into my gray rug.
“Sure,” she said. “I feel really, really dehydrated. It’s like, even while I’m drinking, there’s not enough water in the world for me. God. Every bit of me feels so damn dry. Like a desert.”
“Huh,” I said, thinking. “Maybe you should go to a doctor or something. Get some blood work done. Maybe they’ll put you on an IV for a little while. Probably make you feel a lot better real fast.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” she said. “I can’t do hospitals. Especially not on purpose. That’s too messed up. Even for me.”
“It’s no big deal. They’re there to help. That’s what you’re paying all your insurance money for, isn’t it?”
Jenny said, “Right. I get that. But I just wish I could get some antibiotics without having to go to the doctor or a stupid hospital.” She coughed again. “I mean, I really wish doctors would still do house calls. What’s up with that? Doesn’t that make sense? Probably a lot less people would get sick these days. I can remember at least a half dozen times picking up colds from waiting rooms when I was there just for routine stuff. Sucks.”
“Imagine the nightmare it’d be having a doctor going into people’s houses these days?” I said. “With everyone so quick to sue and go to court…I can’t imagine. If I were a doctor, there’s no way I would step away from the safety of working in an office, where everything’s on the up and up. And think about what a horrible position it’d put a doctor in if someone didn’t want to pay. And would he have to bring a pharmacy with him in his trunk or something?”
“You’re assuming the doctor is a male,” she said. “Chauvinist pig.”
“Got me.” We shared a short laugh. “Seriously, hon? Please go see someone as soon as you can. I can take you if you want.”
“Uh, I don’t know,” she said. “Isn’t that a boyfriend-girlfriend thing to do?”
My heart sank. “Well, it could be a ‘just friends’ thing to do, too, you know. Sheesh. And didn’t you just say you wanted to push things along a little? Remember we’re supposed to have our date this weekend for the Bat Mitzvah, right?”
“Oh, that,” she said. She laughed a little. “I’m just teasing. And seriously? I might take you up on it if things get worse.”
“Call me any time you need,” I said.
“Got it, tiger,” she said. She took the phone from her face as she coughed, but I recognized the pattern. It was the same as Laurie’s. Whatever bug Laurie had gotten, I was sure Jenny had caught it. “I think I just need some sleep.”
I said, “Never a bad idea when you’re not feeling good. I’m not too far away if you need anything. Some soup. Some ginger ale. Whatever.”
“You’re a good man,” Jenny said.
“Who happens to be talking to a great woman,” I said.
“Aw,” she said. “Look? Let’s touch base in a couple hours, or tomorrow is fine. This will pass. I’m positive. It’s just one of those super-flu’s or something that’s going around now that everyone’s become so over-prescribed on antibiotics. They’re all becoming resistant.”
“That’s not comforting at all,” I said. “Damn it, Jenny.”
“Sorry,” she said. “But true.”
“Okay. Well, on that note,” I said.
“On that note,” she said. “Talk to you laters.”
“All right, later,” I said.
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
We hung up.
For the rest of the night I milled about my apartment. I couldn’t stop thinking about everything I was experiencing. There was some new bug spreading through Los Angeles. It’d taken down my entire workforce. It’d taken down normal, healthy people in the prime of their lives. It was working on Jenny.
So why wasn’t it working on me?
I had the urge for tomato soup and grilled cheese. Comfort food. So I went to my kitchen, opened a can, poured it in a pot and turned on the flame. I could have nuked it in the microwave, but it wouldn’t have tasted the same as Mom made me when I was a kid.
When Mom made it for me, when I was just a kid.
Then I knew.
Until college, I got sick pretty badly at least once a month. Them’s the brakes for being born a preemie, I guess. Chicken Pox. Flu. Measles. Cold. Flu again. Bronchitis. Pneumonia. More Bronchitis. It never ended. My immune system wasn’t immune to anything, or any strain. I hated it. If I went to school and someone was coughing down the hall, I knew it was only a matter of time until it was inside me, working, waiting to knock me flat out on my back.
What else could I do? I tried bringing hand sanitizer to school. Did nothing but dry out my skin. I tried regular washing. Still got sick all the time. Tried not to touch my face or mouth or my eyes ever. Horrible flu viruses didn’t care. I tried a hundred remedies. Airborne. Zilch. No caffeine. No nothing. Changed my diet to vegetarian and got good sleep. Didn’t matter. The flu was still waiting for me with a baseball bat. The chronic bugs only let up my last year of college. Then, two years after that, well, it seems I rarely ever got sick. And drinking too much and making myself sick doesn’t count. No. Getting sick seemed to be something I’d outgrown. I’d kept that to myself; worried I might jinx my newfound luck.
Which made me think.
Say getting sick all the time as a kid had somehow prepared me to deal with the undead near-apocalypse? What if it’d all been some kind of master plan drawn out by my maker? I couldn’t stop thinking that may have been the reason. And this is where I may lose some folks, but so be it. The facts were hard for me to ignore. How would I know one way or another? I’d always run by my gut, and whenever I had, it’d never steered me wrong. It was when I didn’t listen to my gut that things went sour. This time, I listened.
I started the grilled cheese. Bread. Buttered. Daiya Cheese. Fried to perfection, just as my tomato soup began to boil. I had my little meal, and read the paper as I did, doing my best to try and forget about all my bad stuff by reading about other people’s bad stuff.
“We found Jonathan,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.
“What?” I was groggy, and didn’t make the connection.
“Jonathan Nicholas Brinn. The fellow who apprehended Katherine Mulling in Westwood the other day,” said the voice.
“Who is this?” I said, starting to remember as I woke up.
“Officer Morgan Jones,” she said. “I’m a good friend with Miss Scanlon.” That’d have been Laurie.
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Got it. Where are they?”
“Turn on the news,” she said. “Can’t miss it.”
Morgan Jones was right. The story was live everywhere.
Jonathan had somehow gotten Katherine onto the Red Line and they were holed up at the Hollywood and Highland station. I wondered about her bite. Was she still alive? Had she survived the wound, or had she succumbed, and come back?
Fuck, I thought. Let the panic begin. So much for keeping that under cover.
There were cops everywhere. I didn’t see any civilians, which was good. I was surprised the feed was live. I got up and rummaged for something to eat. I kept the TV on while I did.
“Right now, there is an unknown perpetrator keeping a hostage at the end of the car. He’s let everyone else off the train, but is holding her.”
“Do we know, at this time, if this is some kind of terrorist attack?”
“We just don’t know right now.”
“Is this just an isolated situation?”
“Well, there’s supposed to be a press conference soon, so maybe we’ll know more then. Right now, we can only guess. We do know that there are an awful lot of police down and around the station. If you need to come to this area, please know that it is shut down. All the surroundings streets up through Cahuenga are also shut down. Wilcox. The Red Line is closed.”
“This is some serious stuff, isn’t it?”
“It is. We just don’t know what we’re dealing with.”
Damn right they didn’t know what they were dealing with. Hell, no one did. Not them. Not me. Not the Reclamation Crew. Jonathan had changed. His entire body had been distorted and messed up, more so than any of the Zoms or reanimates we’d dealt with before. There was something new happening. The dead weren’t just coming back to life they were morphing and changing into other things. I knew the dust had something to do with it. Everyone who’d come into contact with it was getting sick, other than me. Which made me wonder, how did Jenny come in contact with it? At least Jonathan’s infection made sense. He worked with the deceased. Katherine even told us where Jonathan had worked at UCLA. Jenny? Who knew?
A picture of the swirling dust outside the Archer played in my head. What if similar things were happening all over Los Angeles? How would anyone make the connection? Most people would just think it was dust, right? It took no time at all for it to get in my face and make me feel like hell. Phil, the manager at the restaurant, seemed to be getting sick before my eyes. If it didn’t take much, I wondered how quickly it would disperse in the air and infect tons of people. How would we know what it would do? Would it just get people sick, like they had the flu? Or would they all start metamorphosizing like Jonathan? How long until it spread like wildfire?
It was already October and we hadn’t yet had rain. The temperature was still in the 90s, most days. It made me kind of crazy. If we’d had a normal season, it would have been cooler. The rain might have come and washed the dust away, down into the sewers, lessening the impact considerably. But it hadn’t. The great and wonderful, nonstop heat the rest of the country hated us for was becoming a huge problem.
Pray for rain, I thought. Pray for rain, as the wind picked up outside.
Sitting down on the couch again, my improvised toast with cream cheese breakfast with me, I tuned in. It was the same shot of the police crowded around the Red Line train. Lower third graphics scrolled by. Man takes hostage on the Red Line. Not yet known if this is terrorism. Hollywood and Highland closed. Police Chief Morton set for press conference at noon. Then it repeated, interjecting the weather every other roll by. Ninety-six degrees. High wind alert.
“Come on, rain,” I said. “Where are you when we need you?”
I thought about Laurie and Ray, stuck at UCLA. I wondered how they were, so I picked up the phone. I dialed. It rang. And rang. No one picked up. None of the numbers I had seemed to work.
While I tried reaching Ray and Laurie, I clicked on to another news station and saw the unfolding madness. There were tons of cops navigating through crowds throughout the Red Line terminal. I sat down on my couch. There was no one to call and talk to about this, either. Just me. I wondered how long it was going to take until they called me up. I hoped they didn’t. It was too hard to take him down with three of us, so I knew with just one of us there’d be no way. They’d probably kill him. Hopefully they wouldn’t kill Katherine. She didn’t deserve to die for doing the right thing, after all. I turned up the volume.
“At this time it looks like the perpetrator has barricaded himself inside one of the trains. There are not a lot of people inside, and thankfully this didn’t happen during rush hour. We don’t know if there are any fatalities. What we’re not showing you is that there’s blood all over the train. The inside. But we don’t know whom it’s from. Could be from the suspect, his hostage, or one or more other people. This has been going on for over an hour now. The train has been stopped, and the police have moved in. Looks like there’s a special team in place.”
I looked at my phone and saw that they were in fact five messages on it already. I recognize the numbers. Dammit. Had to be them. Looking for me. They probably expected me to show up down there. That was the last place I wanted to go. And especially didn’t want them to know I had any equipment with me. That would be a one-way ticket in the slammer, at this point. They are going to be watching everything. Every move by everyone.
Turning up the volume on the TV with my remote, I went to the bathroom. I still hadn’t even gone to the bathroom yet, and it was usually the first thing I did in the morning. I had a bad feeling it was going to be a long day, and took care of business. I listened to more of the coverage.
“Right now authorities are asking everybody to please stay away from Hollywood and Highland. The developing situation has closed down Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Boulevard and many of the surrounding streets. We’re not sure what we’re dealing with, or if this is an isolated incident or if there’s more to it. We just don’t know. So stay away, no matter what you do. They’re not letting anybody through at this point. It’s beyond crucial down here. Wait. I think I see movement. Yes. Definitely. They’re moving inside the train now. It looks like the passengers are moving to the opposite side of the car than the suspect. There’s definitely some action.”
I got back in the living room, and I sat on my couch, careful to watch the TV the entire time. I got why there weren’t any of the best details released. There could be something small that would be crucial to investigators, something that could compromise the entire situation. I should’ve been there. But again, I was glad I was at home safe and sound. I’d really thought about getting a new job. Wasn’t sure what I would do, considering ninety percent of my training was in the acting field before the Reclamation Crew, but it was getting to be a little bit too much. Especially seeing that three-quarters of the team was incapacitated, and especially now that the last quarter fell on my shoulders.
I thought a lot about Jenny. I wondered how she was. I’d fallen asleep so early the night before, and had forgotten to call her back. I looked at my phone messages. Nothing from Jenny. Dammit. I’d wondered if I should call her, or just let it be. She was really touchy about that sort of thing, and I didn’t want to press my luck. Losing her would be devastating. She was one of the good ones, on so many levels. I’d met and dated several great women over the years, but there was something magnificent about Jenny. She was truly special, if only to me. I drifted to sleep.
“Babe?” It was Jenny’s voice, finally calling. “There’s something I have to tell you. Are you watching the news? Something real bad’s going down.”
“Yeah. Been watching. I’m lying down. Just getting up,” I said. “How you feeling? Better?” I was hoping against hope she’d give me a yes.
Jenny said, “Wish that were true. Not doing so hot. Think I’m going to go see Dr. Streicher.”
“Good. Want to come with you?”
“It’s okay. I know you’ve got to go to work. This is no big deal,” she said.
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” I said. “There’s some stuff you should know.”
She asked, “Like what, did you get me sick?”
“Not me. But it might’ve been something else. Something else I’m seeing. And it’s on the news now.”
“What?” she asked.
“Dust.”
“Dust?”
“Yeah,” I said. “From the dead. The undead.”
There was a pause. She said, “That doesn’t make any sense. Haven’t most of those things been taken care of by now, so what do you mean dust?”
I said, “There plenty of them left. Trust me. I killed them all the time. And some of them are starting to leave dust behind. It’s because they’re old. I think it’s their bodies drying and the skin flaking off and making a kind of dust with their skin. Kind of like ashes, or dandruff. Were seeing a lot of it now. Out of nowhere.”
“That’s really weird. How are you finding the stuff? The dust? Where is it happening?” she asked. “Everywhere? Or just with us?”
“Please keep this between us,” I said. “I’m telling confidential stuff from work. I saw it first in the medical community, but now I’m seeing it in residential areas. I believe it’s making people sick. Everyone I’ve seen that comes in contact with it without protection is getting sick really fast. Just like the guy on TV right now. He was working with processing the deceased at UCLA. The dust made him sick. But it also made him different.”
“Are you sure about this? It seems unreal. How come it’s not on the news? How come there’s no one talking about the dust yet?”
“No one’s really hundred percent sure what’s going on,” I said. “I’m making the connections here. I’m pretty damn sure that’s what’s going on. I work in this every day, twelve to fourteen hours a day, so I know. At first, we thought it was isolated, but now it’s spreading quickly. Every person on my crew, except me, has gotten sick. They’re all in the hospital.”
Jenny asked, “Are you sick too? Is that why I’m sick?”
“I don’t think it spreads person-to-person. You’ve got to somehow inhale the dust,” I said. “Even a small amount seems to be enough. For some reason it hasn’t affected me. Had a face full of it two days ago, and somehow I’m fine.”
“That’s crazy. I don’t remember reading anything like that. Are you sure this didn’t happen from you being around it?” Jenny asked. “Maybe you had some of it on your clothes, or something, when I saw you. Maybe it was in your apartment.”
“But we wear suits at work,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I’m not infected at my apartment. I clean up pretty good before I come home. But you may be right.”
“Well, I guess it’s hard to say. Does sound likely that I might’ve picked it up from your place somehow. But whatever. What should I do?” Jenny asked.
“Going to Dr. Streicher is perfect. I think that’s the best thing you can do at this point. He can give you great medical care. We’re not quite sure what this is at this point. It may be nothing. It may affect people very benignly. But it’s good to get on some kind of antibiotic as a precaution. That’s exactly what I’m going to do if I start feel any symptoms at all.”
“Okay. So you’ve got me terrified. What the hell? Maybe I should go right to Dr. Streicher’s. Get off the phone with you.”
“I think that’s a grand idea. And please keep me updated. But don’t tell him or anyone anything I just told you. Okay?” I asked.
“Sure. Got it. Roger that. Your secret’s safe with me,” she said.
I was glad she still had her sense of humor. She was still Jenny, even when she was sick.
“Copy, copy,” I said, “let’s be in touch later.”
“Okay. Bye.”
“Bye.”
Things regressed at the Hollywood and Highland station. I watched intently, even though all I could really see was a huge puddle of police in front of the Red Line train, but they were much more packed now. The ticker the bottom read that there were shots fired from inside the train. Dammit. My guts twisted.
I looked at all the other messages on my phone. There were several all too familiar numbers. I knew they wanted me to go down there. I knew the questions they’d ask. Thankfully, they had all called within the last hour, so it wasn’t unreasonable for me to call them back without seeming suspicious or neglectful of my duties. And it was early. Not even nine o’clock in the morning yet, so I could tell them that my phone was off. Then I got paranoid and thought that they could check my phone records and probably tell that I was up, and it was going on, and that I must have been avoiding them. They were Feds after all, and I was a Federal employee, so it didn’t surprise me that they might have had me on some kind of monitor in that fashion. Who knows? With all the privacy questions coming up, and all the whistleblowers? Our government had to have had millions of people under surveillance, and I’m positive that any person with my job was completely under their watchful eye. I had to assume that I was.
I was worried about Katherine. Had Jonathan shot her? I hope it’d just been a warning shot for the cops, who were obviously closing in. I wouldn’t put it past the networks to accidentally keep the feed going, that way viewers would “accidentally” see the fatal shot. If it bleeds, it leads, and all that. The networks were supposed to be on a five-second delay, but only a few of them actually stood by that. Most the time, there wasn’t anything that extreme happening that’d warrant a delay. But they didn’t know what they were dealing with. I knew I had to call them. Let them know. Spread the word. Hell, we didn’t even know if people could infect other people once they were sick. I was of two minds about it. Maybe I’d be an exception. I may have had a tolerance, kind of like how some people can drink and drink and drink, and never get drunk. I’m like that with anesthesia and painkillers, too. They could never give me enough juice at the dentist in order for me not to feel the pain. Maybe that was part of it. I wondered, though, if I should’ve called the Feds? Tell them what was happening? I had the numbers at the Reclamation Crew office. Give them an update. If I did, they’d probably swarm down. I’d likely be put on leave, then locked away in a hospital for observation like Laurie and Ray. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to pick up the phone and clue in the bureaucrats. If I got caught, I could always just tell them things got too busy, and I ran out of time. Hopefully that’d fly. Sometimes playing by the rules…their rules…didn’t pay off.
Instead, I decided to call the hospital and check on Ray and Laurie. When I did, I couldn’t get through. There was an operator, finally, when I reached the hospital, but they would not put me through to the rooms. None of the doctors I asked for would come to the phone. No one would give me any concrete information. Visiting hours were not available for the sections of the hospital where they’d placed Laurie and Ray. Damn it. I was stonewalled.
There was no one on my side that I could talk to. I was pretty much all alone in the situation, with no one to back me up and no one to run anything past. I knew if I spoke to any of the folks up north, it’d open a can of worms on me. Best to wait, I thought. Best to see how it all panned out.
Meanwhile, the train situation on TV looked even bleaker. The cops were huddling in faster. The commentators were going nuts.
“Looks like the police are moving in. Looks like they got themselves a standoff, one way or another. We have no idea what we’re going to see here. I think we’re going to switch on the five-second delay, folks. Sorry to say. But we just don’t know. Standby.”
The screen froze for several seconds. Then the action picked up again. Weird. Even though I knew they’d just enacted the delay, it looked live.
The commentators went silent.
Groups of Special Ops pried open the train doors. In a blink, several officers were inside the car. There was the flat sound of live ammunition. It always sounded a lot less impressive than it did in the movies. And it was over much faster, too, than in the movies or on shows. Maybe five seconds.
Then it stopped. A lot of the cops gathered in formation outside the car fell back, allowing space in front of the train’s doors. Something was happening. We had a clear view, for the first time, of what was actually inside the car. I only saw one person standing. Katherine. She had her arms up near her head. I was so relieved. She was upright, and it didn’t look like she’d been hit. They must have iced Jonathan. Of course, he’d been killed before. At least three times—once from the dust, and once from us, and now again from the police. I had a feeling he’d rise again.
Within moments, there was a huddle of cops walking Katherine off the train. She cried the entire time. Fuck. She looked normal. I didn’t see a trace of the wound on her neck, although the shot wasn’t close up. Did that mean Jonathan had been mortally wounded? With the time delay, I knew if anything dramatic happened, they’d probably cut away from it. I had to know.
Katherine and the cop escort disappeared into the crowd, followed by another team that exited the train car in back of them. The second team pushed a stretcher out. Covered. Couldn’t see the body at all, just the shape beneath. Looked bigger than most people. I knew who it was. Jonathan. They’d taken him down after all.
The commentators yapped away again.
“Looks like they’ve got the perp. Right now we have no idea who the person was, or if they had any kind of motives other than kidnapping the woman you just saw released.”
Idiots. They always stated the obvious, over and over again. I was getting so tired of them. I’d have turned off the sound, but I knew I’d probably miss something important.
Turns out I wouldn’t, though. They rolled the gurney out, into the crowd, and out of sight. Then the screen shot back to an image of the two commentators in their studio. I turned it off. My phone rang. And then it didn’t stop ringing.