The Julian Year

by Gregory Lamberson

  She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “Hang on,” she said before flooring it.

  The cruiser rocketed forward. This time Rachel attempted to pass the Pontiac on its right side. The driver of the car veered right to cut her off too late, and the cars drove parallel to each other. Rachel jerked the steering wheel left, and as the cruiser slammed into the Pontiac, she saw an Asian man leering at her from the passenger seat. The whites of the man’s eyes were dark.

  The impact of the collision sent the Pontiac across the highway and sidewalk, and it disappeared down an embankment of wide steps that led to a plaza beneath a high-rise of condominiums. Rachel stomped on the brake, and the cruiser screeched to a stop.

  “Are you crazy?” Ethridge said.

  Rachel unbuckled her seat belt. “There are two of them working in tandem, like you and me. Call it in and let’s go get ’em.”

  Ethridge turned on his hand radio. “Dispatch, this is unit sixteen. Over.”

  “Go ahead, unit sixteen.”

  “We’re at the corner of Third Avenue and Sixty-third Street. Two Normans turned two pedestrians into roadkill and crashed their car. We’re investigating now and request backup. Over.”

  Rachel hopped out of the car, icy air filling her lungs. Sprinting across the avenue, she drew her Glock and Ethridge followed her. His longer legs should have enabled him to overtake her but he didn’t. She ran onto the sidewalk and stopped at the edge of the steps leading to the sunken plaza. The Pontiac jutted halfway out of a dry cleaner’s at an angle, its dented door open and hanging off a hinge with steam billowing out from under its hood.

  Descending the steps, Rachel held her Glock before her. Seeing no movement inside the Pontiac, she moved closer and looked around but saw no sign of the perps.

  A woman stood inside the dry cleaner’s.

  “Where are they?” Rachel said.

  The woman shook her head.

  “They went inside,” a man said.

  Rachel glanced over her shoulder at a man who stood at the edge of the steps above, pointing at the double glass doors leading into the building. “There were two of them.”

  Rachel climbed the steps and joined Ethridge on the sidewalk, his Glock drawn as well.

  “Maybe we should wait for backup.”

  “You wait for backup. I’m going after those Normans.”

  A muted gunshot caused them both to flinch.

  Without waiting for Ethridge to respond, Rachel glided along the building’s black glass exterior. Ethridge moved past her to the other side of the doors. She measured the look in his eyes: for a rookie he was understandably cautious, not a coward. He opened one of the doors, and she went in first.

  A security guard lay on the mat in the wide lobby, blood seeping between his fingers clamped over his throat. His panicked eyes turned to Rachel as she kneeled beside him. “Gaaaahhh . . .”

  “Don’t talk.” Not that it mattered. His life was slipping away with his blood.

  “He’s saying ‘gun.’ His holster’s empty.” Ethridge rushed to the doorman’s station and looked behind the counter. “There’s another man down here.”

  Rachel rose and the guard struggled to shake his head. She heard his death rattle as she joined Ethridge and stared down at the corpse of the doorman. Blood poured out of the center of his chest over his blue blazer.

  Ethridge ran across the polished lobby floor, taking a single step to the raised level in stride.

  Rachel joined him at the two elevators, where she stared at the ascending numbers on the floor indicator. “They’re going to the roof.” She pressed the call button.

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s SOP for Normans. They’d rather dive from the rooftops and take out someone on the sidewalk than be captured alive.” The second elevator’s door opened and she boarded it. “Coming?”

  Sighing, Ethridge joined her. As the door shut, he spoke into the hand radio clipped to his jacket. “Dispatch, this is unit sixteen. Over.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Our perps killed the security guard and the doorman. They’re heading to the roof and we’re in pursuit. Over.”

  “Copy that. Air support is en route. Over.”

  “We’ll have everything under control by the time they get here,” Rachel said.

  “What makes you think so?”

  She wiggled her Glock in the air.

  Ethridge grunted. “Using a Taser doesn’t even enter your mind anymore, does it?”

  “Only as a last resort.”

  The door opened, and they emerged onto the silent twentieth floor. Rachel surveyed the long corridor with its beige walls and multicolored carpet and wondered how many of the pricey condos were now vacant. She passed the door to a swimming pool and another for a playroom. The rich lived well but money couldn’t buy sanity.

  Turning a corner, Rachel spotted the emergency exit door and approached it with caution.

  Then she opened it.

  Yellow cinder-block walls and gray steps descended twenty floors below and rose to the roof above. Allowing Ethridge to stop the door with his shoulder, she crept up the stairs. The door closed below her and his footsteps joined hers. At the top of the stairs, she faced a sign above the exit door’s panic bar.

  For Emergencies Only

  Alarm Will Sound

  “They could be right on the other side with a gun aimed straight at the door,” Ethridge said. “Let’s wait for air support.”

  “Negative.” She pushed the panic bar and opened the door. No alarm sounded; they never did.

  Rachel saw the city surrounding the residential building but no Normans. She slid the dead bolt on the door forward so that when the door closed they wouldn’t be locked out.

  Ethridge moved to her right, the metal fire door offering both of them protection.

  Somewhere in the distance a chopper droned.

  “Drop it!” Ethridge said.

  Turning, Rachel saw that he faced the opposite direction, his Glock aimed at the Asian man from the Pontiac. A kid really, maybe sixteen. He wore a black leather jacket and waved what appeared to be a .38 in the air.

  A gangbanger?

  She didn’t know and she didn’t care. He had that crazy look in his eyes.

  Rachel fired her Glock twice, striking the young man in the chest. He crumpled to the roof.

  Ethridge started forward but Rachel held him back. “We can’t be sure that the other one isn’t armed too,” she said.

  The blue and white police chopper drew closer.

  Rachel closed the exit door, then returned her hand to the butt of her gun.

  A teenage girl with short blonde hair stood near the roof’s edge.

  A roar filled the sky and the girl looked up. A second helicopter, this one emblazoned with TV station call letters, rose from behind the building. A cameraman with a headset and sunglasses sat in an open hatch with a safety harness. The police chopper hovered to her right, and the wind force from the rotor blades of the two aircraft kicked up dust from the roof, causing Rachel to squint.

  The girl smiled, then turned her back on Rachel and leapt onto the low wall surrounding the roof.

  No!

  The girl crouched low and shot her elbows back, preparing to dive.

  Rachel had no time to think. She fired twice, and two red splotches opened in the back of the girl’s pink coat as she sailed into the air, her arms outstretched like wings. Then she disappeared.

  Rachel ran to the wall and looked over it. As the girl plummeted to the sidewalk below with all the grace of a crippled bird, she couldn’t help but think of Morelli. The girl’s blood splattered across the concrete like water from a ruptured balloon. The human cannonball failed to take out any pedestrians, and the people standing below looked up at the roof while maintaining a safe distance.

  Holstering her gun, Rachel ran over to the Asian man and kicked the fallen revolver aside. She got down on one knee and opened one of the dead man’s eyes. A s
heen of transparent red covered the white and iris like blood. Ethridge said something beside her, but she couldn’t make out his words over the sound of the helicopters.

  When she stood he raised his voice. “You didn’t have to shoot her.”

  She looked at him with mild disbelief. “I thought maybe I could stop her from taking a nosedive, so I took a shot.” Two of them, in fact.

  Ethridge moved closer. “You shot her in the back.”

  “That’s the only place I could shoot her. What’s your beef?”

  “We’re supposed to stop them.”

  “There was no stopping her. She jumped. The law of gravity says she was going down.”

  “Then why did you pull the trigger?”

  “Who do you think we are? What do you think we do? Our job is no longer to ‘protect and serve.’ It’s to put down citizens who refused to turn themselves in when it was time to blow out the candles on their birthday cakes. We aren’t cops anymore; we’re exterminators. Do you really think the bosses want us to arrest these nuts? We’re running out of places to keep them and people to watch them.” Turning on one heel, she strode to the door.

  “Why did you pull the trigger?”

  “Because I could.”

  Rachel leaned against the patrol car, drinking a cup of coffee while she watched Ethridge speak to two detectives from the Internal Affairs Bureau. The helicopters continued to hover above the building.

  Once upon a time, a cop who shot a perp had to turn in his gun; once upon a time, any cop who shot a perp needed to be arrested at the scene. Rachel would go to the squad room and fill out a report, and then she would go right back out into the maelstrom. Her Glock remained in its holster, where it belonged.

  A taxi pulled over to the curb, and a blond-haired man who had become familiar at crime scenes during the last month got out. He flashed his press credentials at a police officer guarding the crime scene tape, then pointed at Rachel. The PO raised the tape for him.

  Rachel looked away as Weizak joined her.

  “Good morning, Rachel.”

  Rachel stared at the corpse lying in the blood splotch on the sidewalk. “Call me Officer Konigsberg, Weizak.”

  “Call me Julian, Officer Konigsberg.”

  Rachel glanced at him. “Where did you come from?”

  “One Hudson Square.”

  “No, I mean where did you come from? Six weeks ago I never heard of you. Now you’re the city’s number one Norman reporter.”

  Weizak took out his notepad. “Sudden attrition is opening doors for a lot of people who never would have moved up the ladder otherwise. What’s a Norman?”

  “Norman Bates. You know, from Psycho.”

  The reporter smiled. “Ah. These Normans ran over a woman.”

  “Technically, I ran over her. They hit her and threw her in front of my patrol car.”

  Weizak glanced at Ethridge and the IAB detectives. “You were driving?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Rachel said. “There was nothing I could have done to avoid it. She was probably already dead.”

  “What was the initial call?”

  “They ran a red light. Then another one and another after that.”

  “How do you feel?”

  She sipped her coffee.

  A siren cried out in the distance, and the police helicopter flew off. The news chopper remained.

  “The real breaking news is that these Normans acted together,” Weizak said. “As far as I know, they’ve never teamed up before.”

  “Crazy people usually don’t play well with each other.”

  “But these two got along.”

  “You sound like you don’t believe me.”

  “How do you know they were both disordered?”

  “They spoke the language of love.”

  “Did you ID them yet?”

  “Nope, that isn’t my job. I just kill them. That’s off the record.”

  “Did you already give them your statement?” He motioned to the IAB detectives.

  “That’s right, and as soon as I fill out my report I’ll be back in the saddle.”

  “Shouldn’t you, you know, speak to someone first?”

  Now Rachel smiled. “You mean like a shrink? I’m not crazy.” She nodded at the blood splotch. “They are.”

  News Alert

  Today President Rhodes signed into law an emergency bill authorizing the conversion of closed military bases, hospitals, and schools into detainment centers to accommodate the growing population of citizens suffering from the Omega Disorder. White House spokesperson John Qualiana said the new law will ease the sudden overcrowding in prisons across the country.

  Fourteen

  February 13

  In West Virginia, George Wherle awoke at the crack of dawn. He did this on instinct, as he did every morning. Without waking his wife, Susan, he climbed out of bed, dressed in his sweats, and went outside for his customary five-mile run. As he trod through the snow, he focused on all passing motor vehicles. He had read far too many reports of disordered individuals using their cars, SUVs, and trucks as murder weapons. The number of daily homicides in the US had plummeted over the last three weeks, thanks to the deployment of troops on home soil.

  After his run, George took a long, hot shower and dressed in a black suit with a matching tie. When he got downstairs, Susan had breakfast waiting for him.

  As usual—at least since the trouble had started—she kept the TV off. Susan preferred to pretend that her universe remained in order, and George was content to allow her to shut the horrors out of their home. After dozens of school shootings across the country, Susan began homeschooling Sally, their nine-year-old daughter. Under the circumstances, George saw no harm in this. After all, they would only be a family for another three months: in May Sally would turn ten, and in July Susan would turn thirty-one. He tried not to think about his own birthday in September.

  “What would you like for dinner?” Susan said, sitting opposite him at the kitchen table.

  George sipped his coffee. “Whatever you want is fine with me.”

  “How about hot dogs and hamburgers? We could pretend it’s the Fourth of July.”

  Since our daughter won’t be alive on the real Fourth. George smiled at his wife. “That sounds like a good idea. We still have some sparklers and firecrackers in the basement. We’ll make a show out of it.”

  “Sally can help me bake an apple pie. Oh, I’ll need you to pick up some ketchup on your way home from work.”

  Because of icy road conditions, it took George forty minutes to reach work, twice as long as usual. He didn’t complain because he enjoyed the scenery, especially the snowcapped trees. After presenting his credentials at the security gate, he parked his Oldsmobile in a crowded parking lot and went inside one of several identical-looking buildings in the complex, where he presented his ID again.

  At the elevator bay, he set his palm on a scanner. A door opened and he boarded the car and rode it to the second basement level, where he swiped his key card. After strolling down a nondescript corridor populated by other professionals like himself, he entered the anteroom to his office.

  Jane, a heavyset woman in her early thirties, greeted him with a smile. “Good morning, Mr. Wherle.”

  “Good morning. Please hold my calls.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  George sat at his desk, turned on his computer, and opened his e-mail. He didn’t like what he saw: a lunchtime briefing with his superiors had been scheduled, never a good sign. That gave him only a few hours to produce results that had so far eluded him for almost six weeks.

  Ten minutes later he exited his office, walked farther down the corridor, and used his key card to enter a locker room where he took off his jacket and tie and pulled on a powder-blue jumpsuit complete with a hood and shoe coverings. He also put on gloves and protective goggles and followed the lockers to a steel door and another swipe slot. On th
e other side of the door, he nodded to an armed military guard who nodded back, then descended a flight of metal stairs. At the bottom, he joined Specialist Tommy Jones, his assistant.

  “Good morning,” Jones said.

  “We’ll see about that.” George circled the nude figure lying upon an oval metal table, not very different from an autopsy table, with drainage holes and tubes to dispose of spilled blood. The overhead light resembled a giant insect.

  The man strapped to the table breathed in an irregular pattern. George examined his broken toes and fingers and the welts and cuts that crisscrossed his entire body. Then he gazed upon the man’s features. Boils and lesions speckled the man’s face, which had a yellowish hue to it.

  “Good morning,” George said to his subject.

  On the table, Wilhelm Keiper smiled, revealing bleeding gums where George had pulled out several of his teeth. His bloodred eyes gleamed like mirrors.

  “Let’s see if we can’t get you to open up a little today.” He looked at Jones. “Let’s begin with shock therapy.”

  Larry pulled up to the Brooklyn apartment building on Forty-fifth Street in the passenger van he had rented and called Anibal. “Car service.”

  “We’ll be right down,” Anibal said.

  A few minutes later Jasmine exited the building with Juan and Julio, and Anibal dragged out several pieces of luggage. Larry got out and opened the side door for Jasmine and the kids.

  “Uncle Larry!” the boys said in unison.

  “Hey, guys.”

  Jasmine kissed his cheek. “Thanks for doing this. You didn’t have to.”

  “Sure I did. We want this vacation to be perfect, don’t we?” Larry helped Julio and Juan into the passenger van. “Let’s go.”

  Jasmine followed her sons into the van, and Larry shut the door. Then he opened the back doors for Anibal and climbed behind the wheel. “Are you guys ready to fly on an airplane?”

  “Yes!” Juan said.

  “Disney World!” Julio said.

  “All right,” Larry said. “I hope you fellas appreciate what your mom and dad are doing, having early birthdays for y’all.”