Never Walk Alone

by Willow Rose

  I stopped the car in front of Jackson Memorial and got out without saying anything to the passengers in my car. I didn’t know if I should arrest Bobby Kay or not. He’d have to answer for his actions of stealing the virus; that was for sure. But he had told me he’d come willingly to the station and explain everything. He needed to get it off his chest. He couldn’t live like this anymore.

  But all of that had to wait. Right now, I could only focus on my daughter. My poor, poor girl who was being intubated, who was struggling to do something as simple as breathe—whose heart was failing her once again.

  Please, don’t take her from me, God. I don’t know where you are in all this; I can’t feel you anywhere. But, please, I beg you. Let me keep her.

  I ran to the sliding doors when a guard came up toward me, wearing a shield in front of his face, a stern look in his eyes behind the clear plastic.

  “Sir, I’m gonna have to stop you right here.”

  “Please,” I said. “You don’t understand. My daughter…she’s just…she’s being intubated right now. At least let me see her one last time in case she doesn’t make it. She must be so scared right now. I need to be with her, please.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. There’s nothing I can do. If she worsens, the nurses will Facetime you so you can say goodbye. But for now, I need you to step outside the hospital grounds. Those are the rules. No visitors.”

  Tears ran across my cheeks so fast I couldn’t wipe them away fast enough. “Facetime me? They’ll Facetime me to say goodbye to my daughter? What? How…how can you…how can they do this?”

  The guard sighed deeply. He, too, had tears in his eyes that he was struggling to hide.

  “I’m sorry, sir. You’re not the first parent I had to stop today. It’s the same for everyone. I can’t let you in.”

  I stepped outside, then fell to my knees in the rain, tears springing from my eyes.

  Someone has to pay. Someone must pay for this!

  I lifted my gaze toward the crying sky above me, feeling a fire rise inside me, a burning desire to do something, anything.

  “This ends here,” I said into the rain. “I’m ending it now.”

  Reese came out of the car and ran to me. She put her arm around me and helped me get up. I grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her to look straight at me.

  “I need you to tell me everything.”

  Chapter 48

  The three-story mansion seemed deserted from the outside, but a car in the driveway told me we might be in luck. I drove my car up in front of it, then parked. I looked in the rearview mirror as my three colleagues parked their cars on the street, blocking it so no one could leave the property in case they tried to run.

  I had dropped Bobby Kay and Candice off at the station and told Major Walker to have someone take their statements, then added that he might want to call the FBI and alert their Joint Terrorism Task Force since we were dealing with domestic terrorism. After listening to him reprimand me for breaking my quarantine, I told him everything in brief sentences. When he was done listening and had heard the story, he contacted the Florida Chief Justice. It felt like forever while they spoke on the phone. Finally, he returned to me, holding the arrest warrant.

  “Please, don’t let me down on this one, Hunter. I’ve put my entire reputation on the line here. Yours too.”

  He handed the warrant to me and gave me three colleagues to bring with me. Hands on the grips of our guns, we walked up to the front door while I left Al and Reese in the car.

  “Police! Open up.”

  When nothing happened, I kicked in the door. It swung open, and we went in, my three colleagues going in before me, clearing the way. Officer Fox, or Foxy, as we called him, grabbed the door handle leading to the living room and stepped inside. As he did, six shots were fired at him.

  Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

  The sound was overpowering. Foxy’s body jerked and went into spasms before falling to the ground with a thud. The rest of us came crashing down behind his dead body, the wind being blown out of my lungs. I managed to turn over a table so it could be used as protection as more shots were fired at us, bullets flying around our ears. The shots continued, and the bullets were screaming past us.

  We shot back relentlessly. But theirs didn’t die down. They kept going at it like they had an endless supply of bullets. I exchanged a look with the officer to my left, Officer Hanson, and signaled for him to cover me. I was going to try and get closer to be able to see inside the living room. He fired a round of shots, and theirs died down for a second, just enough for me to crawl forward on my hands and knees, heading for the door. Never had five feet seemed so far away.

  More shorts followed as Hanson stopped to reload. I laid down flat on the floor when a shot hit a full-sized mirror behind me, and it exploded, raining pieces of glass down on all of us. I closed my eyes and let them fall, then felt a stabbing pain in the back of my leg as a piece of the mirror went through it. Behind me, Officer Hanson screamed as his shooting hand had been cut by a big piece of mirror, and blood was gushing out.

  I pulled the piece of glass out of my leg with a growl, then ripped a piece of my shirt off and tied it around the wound to stop the bleeding. With throbbing pain in the back of my lower leg, I wormed forward until I reached the doorframe. I pulled myself up so I could look inside, only the top of my hair being in the open. I peeked inside, moving swiftly.

  The first thing I saw was the pool of blood on the floor. The adrenaline was clamping my throat as I stared at the two bodies.

  Wincing in pain from my leg, I managed to get up on my knees, get my gun ready, then stuck my arm inside and fired a round of shots in the direction where the bullets were coming from.

  There was a thud, then a bump, and then nothing.

  Inside the living room, everything had suddenly gone quiet.

  Chapter 49

  Had I hit the shooter? Was that what this sudden silence meant? Or was it a trick to lure me out in the open? To get me to walk in and then finish me off?

  I turned to look at Officer Hanson; he was okay. He was in obvious pain but breathing. Breathing was good. But he couldn’t shoot anymore. I then turned to my last helping hand, Officer Conley. He was a big guy and not fast on his feet. He wouldn’t be able to move quickly if this turned out to be a trick.

  I decided to test it. I grabbed one of my shoes, then pulled it off and threw it through the door opening. It landed inside on the floor with a bump, but nothing else happened. I waited a few more seconds, just to be sure, then decided it was enough.

  I rose to my feet, then went for it. I rushed inside, pointed my gun in the direction of the shooter, but as I did, I saw nothing. No one was there.

  Not even the shooter’s dead body.

  “Shooter is gone,” I yelled, then took off. The only way out was the big sliding doors leading to the massive backyard and the water behind it. If there was a boat at the dock, the shooter might escape that way.

  I stormed to the end of the living room and out the open sliding doors. My eyes scanned the area outside, but I didn’t see anything at first. The pool area, the tennis courts…everything was empty. Then, I spotted something—a figure darting across the grass and down the yard toward the water.

  I took off, sprinting in the same direction. The figure had gotten a pretty good head start, though, and I would have to push myself to catch up. I had long legs and was a good runner, and soon I was storming down the grass toward the water. My joints were aching, and my muscles felt like they were burning. I was going fast, but the figure was too far ahead of me. If there were a boat by the docks or another outlet, I wouldn’t be able to get there in time. I assumed there had to be some way out by the end of the lot; otherwise, the shooter wouldn’t try to get out this way. I tried to push myself harder but wasn’t gaining anything. The yard felt endless, and I was about to give up reaching there in time when I saw something come out between the trees at the bottom of the yard, runni
ng directly toward the shooter. It took me a few seconds to see what it was and realize it was a person. This person leaped for the figure at the bottom of the yard, arms reaching out. The person crashed on top of the shooter, causing the body to tumble into the grass.

  As I got closer, I realized this someone was wearing a full-body hazmat suit and a gasmask.

  It looked mostly like a giant mosquito in full-blown attack-mode.

  Chapter 50

  Al!

  They were fighting in the grass. The shooter was trying to get loose from Al’s grip. But she was quite the fighter, despite her small size. She knew quite a few tricks, and soon, the shooter was pinned to the ground, her on top of him.

  I approached them, panting agitatedly.

  “Al! What the heck? Where did you come from?”

  “I heard the shots and got out of the car to see what was happening…to make sure you were all right. That’s when I saw him run out the doors. I stole a golf cart that was parked by the tennis courts and drove till I reached the trees where I couldn’t get any closer, then ran the rest of the way.”

  I smiled while catching my breath and leaning on my knees.

  “You’re amazing; do you know that?”

  “I do,” she said. She looked down at James Hudson beneath her, struggling to get up, but having no luck. “You done?”

  He became quiet. I pointed my gun at him.

  “You can let go now,” I said to Al. “I got him.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I kind of enjoy sitting on him, holding him down. I could give him another round if you like. Ruffle him up a bit.”

  “It’s okay,” I said and reached down to pick up James’s gun from the grass, where he had dropped it when Al attacked him. “I have a feeling this is between him and me right now.”

  Al crawled off him, and he sat up, dusting grass off his clothes.

  “How so?” Al asked. “How is it between you and him?”

  “Well, at first, I yielded mostly to your theory,” I said. “That it was all some attempt to change the world we live in, but as soon as Reese told me the name of the guy that had injected her with the virus, that it was James Hudson here, I suddenly remembered where I had heard his name before. And that was when I realized this was personal. I thought he had chosen Reese because she was an easy target. After all, she was off her meds and had no idea what she was doing…or they thought they could get her to do anything for them since they promised to help her get her kid back, but that wasn’t why at all. He had chosen Reese because he wanted to kill her. And not just that, he wanted to kill my family and me as well. This was never about infecting the entire world; it was all about my family and me. That’s why he gave Reese the virus. She told me he came to her apartment and attacked her. He knocked her out before he injected the virus in her blood. That’s why she didn’t remember it until now. She didn’t know it had happened. When she woke up, he was gone, and she feared she had dreamt it or that it was a hallucination. She went about her day, went to work, and so on, infecting hundreds of people, and within days, the virus traveled all over the world, causing everything to shut down because so many got sick, especially children. She had no idea until she got very sick after five days and fainted at the supermarket. Four weeks in an induced coma and Jim here thought she was definitely dead. He had also thought she’d visit her family or that we’d at least see her in the hospital, somehow getting infected ourselves. When it didn’t happen, and he realized I was searching for Candice, he hoped the bomb would take care of us. He wanted me to find her and Bobby. As a journalist, he is deemed an essential worker and can get through the roadblocks.”

  “But why, Harry? Why you?” Al asked.

  I swallowed a growing knot in my throat when thinking about Josie and my dad. “Reese and I are the ones he wanted to hurt because Reese and I killed his mother.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Once I remembered his name, I realized this was what it was about. Revenge for his mother being killed when he was just a child. Reese had just gotten her driver’s license a few months earlier, and we had taken a road trip to New York that weekend. Just the two of us. But while we were on the road, Reese lost control of the car and drove into the side of another car at an intersection. The driver of that car died instantly from the impact, while her little boy survived.”

  “And that little boy had nowhere to go after that,” James Hudson said, looking up at us. “His dad didn’t want him; his aunt wanted him but had no room, unfortunately. I was tossed into the system. The family that finally took me in changed their minds and left me at a fire station. I became angry and lashed out at everyone, then ended up growing up at an institution for troubled children. All because of you and your crazy sister. Because you were goofing around in the car, not paying attention to the road. You both got to go on with your lives, living with both your parents, while my life was destroyed forever.”

  As he said the last part, James pulled out a knife attached to his shin, then reached up and stabbed Al in the stomach. She gasped, then looked down at the gushing blood. James rose to his feet and tried to get away.

  I screamed, lifted my gun, then fired it at James, shooting him in the upper part of his back, hitting him between the shoulder blades. He fell forward, face-first into the grass, and dropped the bloody knife.

  Chapter 51

  “His name is Jacob Lebedev, and that over there is his sister, Petra Lebedev,” I told the paramedics as they approached the two dead bodies inside the living room. It was almost evening now, and the sun was about to set. The place was crawling with people…police, paramedics, and techs. Keeping up the social distancing rules was turning out to be pretty difficult. Still, they were all doing their best. The paramedics had cleaned the wound on my leg and bandaged it, but it wasn’t bleeding any more. Officer Hanson had been taken to the hospital for treatment of his hand, while Foxy had been taken away in a body bag.

  Al had been airlifted in a chopper to the hospital, and another chopper had come to take James Hudson as well. I was hoping for his survival since I wanted him to have to be held responsible for what he had done to us all. I wanted the world to know what had really happened to us, and I wanted him punished for it for the rest of his life.

  I just hoped the hospitals had the capacity to take care of two wounded people amid everything else that was going on.

  “One heck of a mess, huh, Hunter?” my partner Propper said as he approached me yet stayed six feet away from me. He had been called in to help out since he hadn’t shown any symptoms so far.

  “How’s the kid? How’s Josie?”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t spoken to Jean in hours.

  “I don’t know.”

  Propper sent me a smile. “Guess the last thing you can do now is pray to that God of yours, huh?”

  I smiled back. “It’s never the last thing I do, Propper. Always the first. Besides, He’ll come through for my family and me. Just you watch Him.”

  “I admire your faith; I must say that,” Propper said. “Tell him, if He does, then I might even start coming to that church of yours.”

  “Careful what you say,” I said. “I might hold you to your word.”

  Propper pointed at me with a grin when my phone rang in my pocket, and I pulled it out.

  It was Jean.

  “Harry, I’m sorry, but…I don’t know how to tell you this. I am afraid she’s gotten worse. Honey…I…”

  My heart dropped instantly. I looked at Propper and thought about how I had just said all those things confidently, like I really believed them when the fact was that inside I was being ripped apart with worry. I had my faith, yes, but it was diminishing by the second, and right now, I was about to lose it.

  “I’m sorry, Harry,” Jean said. I could hear she was crying but fighting to keep it from me.

  I hung up, wiping tears from my eyes, then looked around the room. Techs were working to secure evidence; the bodies were being taken away. There w
as no more use for me here, and there was somewhere I really needed to be right now.

  Even if being there wouldn’t make a difference.

  Chapter 52

  Of course, my car broke down on the way there. I could see the hospital in the distance when the car suddenly died. I had asked Propper to drive Reese back to my house, before leaving. I turned it onto the side of the road, tried to get it back up and running, but the battery had died. It didn’t even give me a cough. It was suddenly completely dead. I growled loudly, then walked out into the rain, pulling the collar of my Miami PD jacket up to cover my ears, closing it to keep the rain out, and decided to walk the rest of the way.

  By the time I reached the hospital’s entrance, I was completely soaked. Luckily, I wasn’t cold since it was very hot out still. But my jeans had turned dark from the rain, and my hair was hanging flat, dripping on my face.

  I sat down in the rain, back against the wall, staring at the entrance. I knew they wouldn’t let me inside, no matter how much I begged, but this was the closest I could get to my daughter right now, so this was where I wanted to be. I didn’t care about the rain soaking me or even the thunder I heard in the distance. I didn’t care that it had gotten dark and night would come soon. This was the only place in the world that I wanted to be.

  While sitting there, I texted my dad to check in on him. He didn’t answer for quite some time, so I called instead. I was relieved once he picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Dad, it’s me. How are you doing?”

  He groaned and wheezed into the phone. “Not good, son. Fever has gone up again tonight, and I’m struggling to breathe.”

  My heart dropped for the second time tonight, and I fought to keep my tears at bay.

  “Where are you, son?”

  A deep cough followed that turned into a fit of coughing, and for a second, I feared he would die on me right there. But he managed to get his breath back again.