A few minutes later, with her groceries jammed randomly into thick brown paper bags, she emerged from the store shaken—but with a cart full of free groceries. Easily a two-, three-hundred-dollar score, given they had been out of town for close to two weeks. Worth being chased by a crazy woman? Barely, but definitely not an experience she wanted to repeat. Ever. If that guy hadn’t intervened, who knew what would have happened.
Emma loaded the car and sat behind the wheel, the bizarre episode finally catching up to her. All she wanted to do was get out of here. Her hands trembled, the keys on her key chain lightly jingling as she pulled them from her purse. What the hell had happened back there? The most disturbing part of the entire situation came after the guy had calmed the crazed woman down. Her facial expressions cycled between rage and calm, like she had a split personality. She’d never seen anything like it.
She started the car and drove through the mostly vacant parking lot, trying to push the woman’s face out of her mind. The immediate prospect of Mexican food helped the transition. Fresh guacamole and chips from her favorite hole-in-a-wall restaurant eased all pain. A few minutes later, when she turned her car into the run-down strip mall front that housed La Cantina Roja, she cursed out loud. A black on white, red-bordered CLOSED sign hung in the window next to the door.
“Has to be a mistake,” she muttered before guiding her car into the parking space right in front of the restaurant’s door.
Peering through the reflected sky on the storefront windows confirmed what she suspected. No lights. No signs of an open restaurant. Bizarre. Maybe there was something to this summer flu bug idea. The Subway was open in the corner of the little mall, its yellow and white interior busy with a few customers, but nowhere near the crowd that usually jammed the preparation counter around lunchtime. No way she was eating Subway after dreaming about Mexican food. She had everything she needed to make burritos at home, anyway.
Before backing out of the parking space, she checked her text messages. Something she’d forgotten to do earlier. Only two of the four couples she’d invited for drinks and dinner tonight had responded. She’d forgotten that Angie and Scott were out East, visiting family. The other couple wasn’t feeling well. Both of them, from what she could tell by the reply. She texted the two that hadn’t responded, reminding them to let her know, sooner than later.
Part of her wondered if she shouldn’t scrap the whole idea. She could certainly do without spending a week in bed with the flu, especially in the summer.
Chapter 13
As soon as David Olson turned onto Municipal Drive, he got the strong feeling that the trip would be pointless. The Fishers Police Department building and the town-owned parking lots surrounding it were mobbed with vehicles and people. He pulled his car onto the grass off Municipal Drive and placed his Westfield PD placard on the dashboard. Next, he flipped his badge holder backward and tucked it into the pocket on his shirt. This was going to be a mess.
Walking along the road toward the station, the sound of the crowd gathered outside buzzed with anger and confusion. Hundreds of the town’s citizens were here with the same kind of question. Luckily for David, he had a badge that might get him some answers. Unfortunately, it also attracted unwanted attention.
A frantic woman with a bandage taped to the side of her forehead pointed at him when he approached the main parking lot. She jogged toward him, followed by a half-dozen men and women.
“I need to find my husband!” she said. “They say they don’t know where the ambulance took him, but I think they’re lying. How could they not know where they took him?”
The others simultaneously started to voice similar questions. David slipped his badge fully into his shirt pocket before any others spotted it.
“I work for the Westfield PD, so I couldn’t begin to help you,” he said. “I’m trying to find my ex-wife.”
“Is the same thing going on in Westfield?” said a tired-looking man. “I heard this was going on all over?”
“I have no idea. I just got back from vacation,” said David. “Who told you that?”
“It’s just what I heard from neighbors,” he replied.
“I was talking to him first!” said the woman with the bandage, trying to edge in front of him with her shoulder.
“Take it easy. This will all straighten out,” said David.
“I don’t think so,” said an older guy. “This is getting worse.”
“What’s getting worse?” said David.
“This,” said the man, nodding to the crowds. “It’s at least twenty times the number from yesterday.”
“You’ve been here since yesterday?” said David.
“I’ve been back and forth trying to get answers,” said the man. “My wife apparently rear-ended another car in a Starbucks drive-thru line on purpose. I don’t believe that, but that’s what they told me.”
“You didn’t talk to her?”
“They said she was too hysterical to talk to me on the phone. Asked if she was taking any antipsychotic medications. Maybe she’d forgotten to take them. I didn’t understand what was going on, so I drove down here immediately. By the time I got here, they had already sent her away in an ambulance. She’d hurt herself trying to break out of her handcuffs.”
“You still haven’t found her?” said David.
“No. And don’t even think about going to the hospitals. They’re fifty times worse than this. Nobody knows shit.”
“What do you mean worse than this?” said the woman next to him.
“They’re completely overwhelmed. Some kind of flu bug going around, too. People in beds and cots all over the hospital…and not just in patient rooms. I couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone. I’m not even sure if they’re registering patients anymore.”
What the hell was he talking about?
“All right. I need to get in there and see what’s going on,” said David, starting to walk around them.
A few of them followed him through the agitated clusters of people, repeating the names of the loved ones and friends that had gone missing in police cars and ambulances. They gave up halfway across the lot. David felt bad ditching them, but there really wasn’t anything he could do to help. He didn’t want to believe what the old man had said, but the scene surrounding the police station told him it was true. There was something bigger at play here. But what?
A pandemic flu bug might explain it. A lot of people getting sick and desperate at once could panic the population, pushing enough people past their already low tolerance thresholds. If even a small fraction of them let their anger get out of control, that could be enough to overwhelm the police and EMT crews. But to this degree?
Not to mention the fact that his ex-wife was about as levelheaded as they come. Sick with the flu was one thing. Violent was another. It didn’t add up.
As he got closer to the front door of the two-story police station, he was surprised by the complete absence of police officers. Not a single uniform in sight from what he could tell. Not even at the doors. He suddenly wondered if he’d made a serious mistake pushing this far into the crowd. The badge in his pocket suddenly felt like a liability.
David fought the urge to slide his hand closer to the compact pistol concealed behind his right hip. Maybe he should try a different entrance or the fenced car pool. Surely they had an officer in the lot to make sure nobody tried to scale the fence. He didn’t relish the thought of flashing his badge among this many people.
Fortunately, the crowd had left enough room around the doors for him to give it a try. They appeared to have given up any hope of the police opening the doors, which would work to his advantage. Slipping through the people seated on the steps, he carefully worked his way across the concrete terrace in front of the doors. He slid his badge out of his shirt pocket and kept it concealed along the side of his thigh until he reached the door. At that point, he shifted the hand in front of his thigh and pressed the badge against the glass while knocking on the d
oor with his other hand.
“They won’t answer,” said a woman behind him.
He nodded. “Have to try anyway.”
“We’ve been doing it all morning,” said another.
“And all last night,” announced another voice. “They stopped talking to us yesterday afternoon. They’re supposed to be on our side.”
David knocked again and muttered, “Come on, guys.”
“Someone needs to remind them we pay their salaries!”
“They haven’t given a shit about us for years!”
“Just when we need them the most, they fucking cut us off. Vanish. What kind of crap is that?”
He rapped on the glass more insistently.
“That guy doesn’t care,” said a voice he remembered from the parking lot.
David glanced over his shoulder at the woman with the bandage, who stood a few people deep in the crowd. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. Don’t do it, lady. Please.
“He’s one of them.”
Fuck. He kept knocking, his mind running the scenarios. Draw weapon and fire a warning shot? Draw weapon and point at the crowd? Try to make a break for it? None of them sounded good. What the hell was taking so damn long?
“You’re a cop?”
“From Westfield,” said the woman.
The questions came rapid fire, louder and more belligerent by the second. David didn’t hear any of them. His mind focused on the rising volume of noise and the reflection in the glass door, calculating that he had another second or so to draw his weapon—if that was really what he intended to do. He wasn’t exactly sure. Movement beyond the reflection, inside the building, caught his attention, and he backed up a few steps. If this wasn’t a rescue, he’d just given up the remaining space between himself and the rapidly deteriorating mob.
The door suddenly opened outward, stopping halfway.
“Get inside!” yelled a gruff male voice behind the door.
David didn’t need to be told twice, or the first time, actually. He squeezed through the opening, his foot getting caught as the crowd pushed against the door. A quick yank sent a flare of pain up his leg, but the foot came free and the door slammed shut. The officer turned the lock and helped him to his feet. The officer looked at least two days unshaven with dark circles under his eyes. His uniform consisted of hiking boots, jeans and a gray T-shirt—an olive drab nylon tactical vest fit snugly over his clothes. A black thigh holster extended down the side of his right leg.
“You all right?” said the officer.
“I’m good. Close call.”
“I almost didn’t hear you,” said the officer, extending a hand. “Mark Peters.”
“David Olson, Westfield PD,” he said. “You don’t keep anyone inside the lobby? It’s getting kind of crazy out there.”
Heavy pounding on the door emphasized his point.
“That’s exactly why we keep the lobby empty. It just pisses them off more to see someone in here,” said Peters. “On top of that, we just don’t have the officers to spare.”
“What if they try to breach the door or windows?”
“They can have the lobby. All of the doors leading deeper into the station are seriously reinforced, and the glass in front of the reception counter is bullet resistant. They’d have to use C-4 or a rocket launcher to get deeper into the station. It all goes back to the manpower issue. We don’t have enough people to keep them out of the lobby.”
“How many officers do you have at the station?”
“Five.”
“Five?” said David. “Are you serious?”
“I wish I wasn’t,” said Peters. “We have forty-eight out on patrol out of one hundred and seven total.”
David did the math. Roughly half of the force was out of commission. Peters seemed to read his mind.
“We’re right at about half strength. Most of the officers missing are sick. Some are taking care of sick family members. Vacation, out-of-state training and injuries siphoned off a few more.”
He couldn’t believe it. No wonder Sergeant Jackson at the Westfield station was having a cow.
“I just returned from vacation yesterday. My sergeant has been hounding me to fill some shifts, but I have my son until Sunday,” said David. “That’s why I’m here. I drove by my ex-wife’s house a little earlier, and the neighbor told me she had been taken away in one of your patrol cars last night. I guess her boyfriend left in an ambulance. Sound familiar?”
“Sounds like every one of our calls,” said Peters. “Someone ends up in the hospital. Someone ends up in a patrol car.”
“She might still be here, right?” said David.
He knew it was unlikely. If the police department was getting that many calls, the station’s jail cells would have reached maximum capacity long ago. Part of him was relieved. If Josh’s mom was locked in a cell here at the station, he wasn’t sure what he could do—or what he would do. At least Joshua would know that his mother was safe.
“We quit bringing most arrests into the station yesterday afternoon. It got to be too much to handle. We’re part of a system slapped together by the county. Arresting officers bring subjects to a collection point at the public works garage out on Eller Road. A prisoner transfer bus from county makes the rounds every few hours, picking up whomever we’ve collected. We send them with some basic paperwork.”
“To the Hamilton County Jail? How many people can they house?” said David.
He didn’t think they had more than three hundred beds.
“I really have no idea how they’re doing it. I’m just glad they stepped up.”
The pounding at the lobby doors intensified and spread to the windows along the front of the room.
“We better get out of sight,” said Peters, heading to the sturdy-looking door next to the reception window.
The officer removed a thick plastic card from one of his vest pockets and placed it against the gray, scratched-up card reader surface next to the door. A solid click, followed by a small blinking green light, gave him the go-ahead to pull the door open.
Once inside the station, they were met by an officer carrying an M4 rifle and wearing body armor. She appeared just as exhausted as Peters. Behind her, a large administrative space, packed tightly with workstations, sat mostly empty. A few very unhappy-looking men and women sat behind monitors, glancing around their screens in his direction.
“Everything all right out there?” she said, eyeing David apprehensively.
“Should be,” said Peters. “This is David Olson with the Westfield PD. His ex-wife was processed by our department last night. He’s been on vacation, so he has no idea what’s happening.”
“Welcome to the party,” she said. “Sorry about your ex.”
David nodded, still trying to process what to make of this. The whole situation sounded insane.
“I’m gonna run him through the tank area. See if she might be here for some odd reason. Then I’ll turn him loose on the stacks of transfer tickets.”
She nodded. “I’m headed back to the locker room to suit up. Fogelman twisted his ankle. Martinez is heading back with him right now.”
“Did you talk to the lieutenant about this? We can pull their car out of the patrol rotation. Give Martinez a break until another spot opens up. We could use the help around here,” said Peters. “You don’t have to go out there.”
“I’m not telling Harvey,” she said with a stern look. “And neither are you.”
“What’s going on?” said David.
“That isn’t an extra layer of armor under her vest. Officer Sterns here is eighteen weeks pregnant,” said Peters.
“I can do the job just fine,” said Sterns. “I’m barely showing.”
“Yeah. Well, normally I’d agree with you, but pretty much every call leads to an altercation now,” said Peters.
“Minor altercations.”
“For now,” said Peters.
“It’s that bad?” said David. “How many are we t
alking about?”
Officer Sterns pointed to a cluttered table on the other side of the administrative room. Two women were sorting through a mess of paperwork, seeming to sense that they were being called out.
“The team over there can tell you. A few hundred at least. If your ex isn’t in one of the tanks, the ladies should be able to find her paperwork. That’s assuming it was filed. Last night was a mess.”
A few hundred? Westfield didn’t process that many assault cases in an entire year! Maybe two years.
“I gotta roll,” she said. “Good luck finding your ex.”
“Watch yourself out there,” said Peters, giving her a serious look.
She gave him a thumbs-up. “I got it.”
“What’s going on out there?” said David.
“We have no idea. There’s a flu bug going around that’s hitting people pretty hard. The hospitals, urgent care clinics and doctors’ offices are completely overwhelmed. The violence is probably linked, but we haven’t detected any obvious connection. Not that we’re putting much effort into finding one. We’re one hundred percent reactive right now.”
“This is—” started David, his phone buzzing. “Crazy.”
He pulled the phone out of his pocket, recognizing the number immediately. It was about to get crazier.
“Give me a second,” said David, answering the call. “Sergeant?”
“Sorry to do this to you, David, but we’ve initiated a crisis recall of all officers, active and reserve. If you’re not here within an hour, you’ll face disciplinary action. End of story.”
“Give me to noon. I’m at the Fishers station, trying to find my ex. She was arrested last night. There’s a good chance she’s at the Hamilton County—”
“Hold on. Hold the fuck on,” said Jackson. “You’re at the Fishers station? Wrong station. Get your ass to the Westfield station, or you can stay there and apply for a new job. I’ll give you to noon.”
“I can’t leave my son alone,” said David.
“Your son is going to be a senior in high school. He’s old enough to take care of himself for a little while. Noon. Goodbye.”
The Zulu Virus Chronicles Boxset (Books 1-3) Page 8
