by Tim Curran
The crazy man was very crazy because he got right back up with that lunatic shine in his eyes.
Ray got on his cell and called 911 after dropping it like four times. “YES! YES, THIS IS GODDAMN EMERGENCY! CRAZY MAN TEARING MY PLACE APART! COME QUICK! THIRTY-NINTH AND ST. CLAIR! PEKING BUFFET! YES! YES! YES! HURRY! THIS SONOFABITCH CRAZY!”
By the time he broke the connection, the crazy guy went right at Bobby.
Bobby hit him in the solar plexus and chopped him across the temple with no effect. He drilled him in the face four or five times and the guy bled, but he did not go down. Bobby kicked him twice…and then the guy grabbed him. Grabbed him and lifted him up over his head, shaking him and screaming out a warning to the others that were making for the door in a rush.
Then, howling like an animal, he threw Bobby.
Bobby flew about twelve feet, landing right on top of the sizzling surface of the Mongolian barbecue grill. Bobby hit it, his flesh searing, and rolled off of it screaming. The stink of burned flesh was nauseating.
Then the crazy man went right over to the Mongolian buffet station where the raw meat, noodles, and uncooked vegetables were kept in refrigerator compartments. Completely oblivious to the agony of Bobby Tran—several pieces of his skin were still on the grill, bubbling and blackened—he went over to the raw meat and stood there, stuffing himself with beef, pork, and chicken. Just shoving it in his mouth and making the most obscene slobbering sounds.
He was still at it when the police arrived.
Ray waited behind the counter.
The cops called out to the crazy man and he turned, meat falling from his mouth, a slick of yellow slime at his chin. He said something unintelligible, sensed the threat, and grabbed a butcher’s knife from the cook’s station and came right at them.
“DROP IT!” one of the cops called out to him. “DROP THAT GODDAMN KNIFE! THIS IS YOUR ONLY WARNING!”
The crazy man came on.
The cops opened up with their 9mm handguns. They put a total of six rounds into the crazy man and he kept coming. Ray actually saw meat and flesh-shrapnel and gouts of blood blasted free but it never even slowed the guy.
And by then, the cops aimed for his head.
Two in the skull and the crazy man went down face-first, convulsing, then going limp.
And it was then, as they stood there with Raymond Ho, that they saw the most appalling thing come sliding out of his mouth to make itself known to the world.
CHICAGO: BELMONT CRAGIN
2:47 A.M.
Again, Tommy Quillan was amazed and possibly even disgusted by American women. Everything was for sale. Everything could be bought. Morals were a matter of convenience. Ethics were dispensable. All it took was a fat wallet. You had the green, you laid on the honey, they’d come in droves. After spending so much time in the Middle East he was truly intrigued by the synthetic culture of America.
He laid next to the dead stripper, smoking a cigarette.
Sometimes he would think about ghosts. His experience in death—which was quite extensive by that point—told him that there was no such thing as an afterlife. He’d seen many die and in the end it was never beautiful nor inspirational, no morphing to a higher state of spiritual being but an ugly, messy affair. When humans died they died like crazed, angry animals. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Still…the ghosts.
He had to wonder sometimes if the dead didn’t leave bits of themselves behind, psychic footprints. Right then for example, he could have almost sworn that it was not just him and the appalling butchered shank of meat next to him that had once been a very alluring and attractive female. He could almost feel an unseen other in that room with him. Nothing dangerous, of course, like in some bad movie, but just a reflection, a ghostly trace that could not be erased with a knife.
Something almost permanent.
That made him chuckle.
Of all things and of all people to think it.
He had taken his time with the woman, enjoying her in the flesh and post mortem. He wasn’t quite sure which he enjoyed best. Both had their advantages and disadvantages. It was like trying to decide which was tastier, a hot flame-broiled steak or a cold leg of Southern fried chicken.
He prodded the torso next to him. “Have an opinion then, love?”
She remained silent and Quillan pulled off his cigarette, sighing. He looked over at her and was somewhat aghast at the unsightly mess which was the end result of his passions. She looked like a fish that had been crudely filleted. Her legs were splayed wide and what was between them was no longer recognizable as part of the female anatomy. Her breasts had been severed. She had been gutted, quite neatly, what was in her belly now on the bedside table. Her face—once so captivating—had been peeled like an apple. But unlike a freshly carved fruit, it was hardly appetizing.
The knife.
It was the knife that had done it.
Funny how it’s gotten with you, old son. Once you had but one penis. That simple, quite average shaft of flesh and you were quite good with it when properly aroused. Then you found the knife, the razor-edged steel phallus. And with it, you became an artist. A sculptor that found realism in his subject and hacked at it until it was purely abstract.
Dear God, the ugliness of it.
The obscenity.
He had to turn away from the dead woman as some nearly-submerged sense of right and wrong bobbed to the surface and made him aware of what he had done. But he sent it back to the bottom and looked at the woman. See the beauty in death? Yes, yes. In fact, it aroused him again to a nearly painful degree. He stood up on the bed, hard as a tent stake and masturbated until he spilled his seed over the disemboweled corpse.
Immediately he was guilty.
Then pleased.
Then guilty.
Then both at the same time until he screamed and then he felt better. Just because he tortured women, raped them, carved them with a knife, violated their corpses and then despoiled them with his semen… that hardly meant he was some kind of deviant.
It was simply how he got his kicks.
And, by God, with the state of the world these days you had to get them where you could. One shouldn’t be too dainty about expressing the inner man (or woman) and satisfying base urges. With that in mind, Quillan felt much better about who and what he was. Because truly, his private life aside, he was a professional and very good at his chosen profession. His bank account stood testament to that.
Relaxed, almost giddy, he took a leisurely shower and washed the blood off himself. Once he was finished and dressed, he left the stripper’s room and faded into the night. One phone call and a car came to get him to bring him to the safe house. Now that the fun and games were done, it was time to get to work.
MANHATTAN, 50th AND BROADWAY:
THE THEATER DISTRICT, 2:59 A.M.
Robin Hewitt saw the whole thing and moments after it had transpired, she was still standing there, slack-jawed, wide-eyed, listening to the woman in the I LUV NY hoodie screaming her tourist brains out. It happened fast, of course, like all truly weird and wild things. It came and went with such rapidity that she questioned exactly what she had seen.
Robin and her three associates—Kim, Cherise, and Tony R—had watched Wicked at the Gershwin, did a little clubbing and bar-hopping, and by the time they were standing on the downtown platform of the 50th IRT Broadway, waiting for the A train, they were feeling no pain. The dozen or so people standing around with them were mostly theater people coming back from late-night parties. They gathered in little groups, laughing and chatting and then—
“Hey!” said the lady in the I LUV NY hoodie. “Hey! Lookit! There’s a lady on the tracks!”
Robin hadn’t actually heard what she said, but she’d noted the volume.
Kim said, “No shit! Check it out!”
And by then Robin was looking. In fact, they’d all inched closer to the edge of the platform to see something down on the tracks which was not rats like usual.
As Robin stared, a voice in her skull was saying, what’s that crazy bitch doing? Doesn’t she know the A is coming any second now?
Maybe she was expecting some crazy old bag lady or homeless person with a paper bag of empties because no one in their right minds got down on the tracks…but what she saw was a young woman. And although she was dirty, her face streaked with grit, her dishwater blonde hair hanging over her face in a greasy tangle, one look and Robin knew she was no street person.
It was the way she was dressed more than anything.
Robin was a buyer for Macy’s and she knew money when she saw it. The wool crepe executive jacket, finely-tailored… the matching pencil skirt… there was no doubt in Robin’s mind that the woman was wearing at least $2000 and that didn’t take in the torn hose, the jewelry, or the single black pump she wore. And it was more than the money because this lady knew how to wear that suit. There was something very elegant about her.
And that made it all that much more insane.
“Ma’am!” Cherise called to her. “There’s a train coming! You have to get out of there!”
Already, two or three people were down on their knees reaching out helping hands.
The woman just stood there, staring at them.
There was something devastated about her. Like she was a vessel that had been poured out and filled with something poisonous. She stared up at them through strands of hair, her mouth moving but no words coming out. Her skirt was slit up one side, revealing more leg than the designer had intended. One spidery white hand was pressed to her belly and everyone saw the curious mound beneath it.
Pregnant?
This woman’s pregnant and wandering around on the fucking tracks at three in the morning in a high-dollar business ensemble?
These were the words Robin heard in her head and she was about to speak them when I LUV NY said in a clear Midwestern twang, “She’s… she’s gonna have a baby! Would you look? She’s gonna have a baby! She’s carrying a baby for the love of Mike!”
Now everyone was calling to her, doing everything they could to entice her to edge towards the platform so she could be plucked free and she was shaking her head violently from side-to-side. And the really disturbing thing—if it could get more disturbing, that was—was that she would move a step closer to them, then physically, violently throw herself backwards as if something inside her was fighting against her and she was fighting against it.
“Somebody should go down there!” I LUV NY was saying. She was looking around at the men on the platform. “What the hell’s wrong with you guys? There’s a pregnant woman down there! There’s a train coming! DON’T THEY GOT ANY FUCKING MEN IN THIS CITY?”
“She’s right,” Kim said. “Somebody better get her out of there before that train gets here.”
And then Cherise, Robin, and Kim were staring at Tony R, of course, who sighed and said, “Okay, okay. Shit.”
He made his way to the edge of the platform, looking down at the oily tracks, the garbage, the rats scurrying into darkness, and trembling at it all. He swung his legs over the edge and instantly felt the rumble.
“The train,” someone said. “It’s coming.”
“Oh dear Jesus,” said I LUV NY.
“Tony! No!” Charise said.
Tony R nearly hopped down, then thought better of it. With all the others calling out to the woman, his own voice cut through them all—a dramatic tenor, Julliard-trained, thank you very much—and was even more desperate than theirs. “Lady, please! Just three, four more steps and you can grab my hand! We’ll pull you out! We’ll be careful of the baby…but please, please, take my hand! C’mon!”
Now they could see the train’s lights coming through the tunnel and it was mere seconds away, the din it created getting so loud that they could not hear what each other were shouting and they certainly could not hear what the woman said as she chose that moment to speak.
She backed away.
“THE TRAIN!” I LUV NY shouted now. “THE TRAIN IS COMING!”
Tony R was suddenly possessed by a madness of heroism and valor. He would jump down there, pull the woman away from the tracks and save her life and the baby’s life and he’d be a hero, by God. But as he made to do so, the train like rolling thunder in the tunnel now, hands grabbed him and pulled him back.
And then he saw why.
With the train bearing down on her, the woman sank to her knees right in its path, convulsing, shaking, her entire body whiplashing like it was plugged into a 440 line…and then, just as the train’s shadow reached out for her and I LUV NY screamed with primal terror…she vomited out a pink/yellow slime of bile and they all saw what came out with it…the squirming white worms, immature and writhing, each no longer than a pencil…then five or six larger ones like living hoses. They hung from her mouth like white lace, each of them segmented and hideously squirming.
Then the train took her.
There was a meaty thud, a spray of blood, and it was all over with, except for the continual blaring screams of I LUV NY and the sound of someone vomiting. It didn’t take long before Robin joined in and all that rich food and good wine came pouring out.
CHICAGO, S. DEARBORN:
PRINTER’S ROW, 3:41 A.M.
It was a hell of a hunt to find a pay phone in these enlightened days of cells but Harry Niles found one near Dearborn Station. He had Shawna hid out down in Chinatown which he figured would be the last place their enemies would be looking for them. He dialed Gabe Hebberman right away and was surprised when it was answered on the second ring.
“Harry? Glad to hear it’s you. I was worried. Where are you?”
“Probably better if I don’t tell you.”
“Understood.”
“What’s going on? Did you find out anything?”
“Same, same.”
Harry had a bad feeling it would work out that way. These people were desperate and they had resources. They’d already scratched Shawna out and he figured they’d do the same to him if they couldn’t bring him in within the next day or so. They wouldn’t fuck around. He wondered if Gabe’s phone was tapped yet or they had a line on his cell. It was probably only a matter of time. They’d make the connection between Harry and Gabe quick enough and then Gabe would be in danger, too.
“There are things happening, Harry. Just murmurs so far but I think things are going to break come morning.”
“What sort of things?”
“Whatever Shawna saw, I’m guessing, it’s connected with some sort of outbreak. There’s rumors coming into my office of Homeland Security running biological containment operations. It’s quite possibly an outbreak of contagious disease.”
“Jesus.”
“Yes, I think we’ll begin hearing things later today.”
Gabe went on to tell him that there were several hospitals under quarantine as they spoke. He didn’t know what it was or where it was coming from, but it was big. This wasn’t a state or local matter. It was federal and even his staunchest contacts were getting jittery about it all.
“Jittery?” Harry asked.
“Yes. To put it in plain King’s English they’re scared shitless.”
“Because of the possible outbreak?”
“No, Harry,” Gabe said. “Because of the people who are trying to contain it.”
Harry knew it was big the moment Shawna laid it out for him. He played Devil’s Advocate more to reassure her and calm her down than for any other reason. But he’d known. He’d felt it in his guts: something rotten was beginning to stink and somebody was trying damn hard to keep that particularly foul odor away from the American taxpayers.
“Harry?” Gabe said, sounding very old and worn suddenly. “You know me. You know how I work. You know I don’t run scared. But I’m getting a bad feeling here and when an old Jew gets a bad feeling, you’d better walk softly. I don’t know where you are and I don’t want to know, but you better stay there and keep your head down.”
“Oka
y, Gabe. If you hear from me, it’ll be normal channels,” he told him, which meant Harry would call him at the office during regular business hours or get a message to him. It would be low-key whatever it was.
“I gotta go, Gabe. Watch yourself.”
“God bless, Harry. Give my love to your lady.”
The connection was broken.
CHICAGO, 77th AND LOOMIS:
AUBURN GRESHAM
4:17 A.M.
When Stein and McKenna arrived, there were four tactical vans on site, the area cordoned off by a combination of Homeland Security goons and Chicago Metro cops. And when Stein saw that, first thing he thought was, this is out of control now, way out of fucking control, we’ll never contain this situation. But he didn’t say a word and part of that was because he knew better and another part was the fact that he was not so sure of McKenna anymore.
There was something going on with him.
He was certain of it.
Once Cave got them within the defensive perimeter which kept the locals at bay, he pulled them into the back of a tac van and said, “We have what looks like a major infestation. We have four BCTs standing by. The three of us will be Green Team. We’re going in the front. Orange Team will take the back. Blue Team is on stand-by. We’re going in heavy.”
And that was another indication to Stein that this had gone way beyond putting down a few infected veterans. This was no longer a black bag job, a covert op, this was a major clean-up.
McKenna and he outfitted themselves in black Kevlar vests and black fatigues, combat boots, and ballistic helmets with night-vision goggles attached. They weren’t bothering with the .50 cal dart guns this time. They were issued H & K MP5 submachine guns and 12-gauge Remington tactical pump-action shot guns. This time, when they put one of the worm boys to sleep, they’d stay asleep.
Stein noticed with some amusement that they had U.S. MARSHALS SERVICE printed on the back of their fatigues. Apparently perception management had not been completely abandoned. This one couldn’t be swept under the carpet so they’d tell the media it was an assault against armed criminals. The BCTs were strapping on flamethrowers of all things.
