Germ

by Robert Liparulo

  Julia vaulted forward. Her seat belt locked, catching her so rigidly she felt a rib crack. Her air bag erupted like a kernel of giant popcorn, smashing her back. The assailant’s arm tore from her neck. She sensed his body crumpling against the seat back before starting to flip over it, hip and leg first. A moment later, her seat belt kachinked open, her door popped wide, and she tumbled out. Trying to stand, she stumbled, stood, weaved.

  Metal clanged to the ground somewhere, glass tinkled, radiators hissed, liquid dripped, one of the police officers screamed in pain or rage or both. She turned to the cruiser. The cop in the passenger’s seat was pushing down an exploded air bag.

  His door swung open and he stepped out, clutching the window frame for support. He had the crusty face of a lifelong beat cop, over-weight, near retirement. He looked utterly stunned. A ruptured cigarette was smashed against his cheek, strands of tobacco flaking away as he moved. He spotted her, and his face hardened.

  She held up her palm. “Federal agent!” she yelled, her voice hoarse but clear. “FBI!” She could explain the difference later. She staggered toward the policeman, pointing at the twisted metal of her car. “There’s an armed man in my car. He tried to kill—”

  “Are you insane?” he snapped.

  “I’ve got an armed gunman situation here!” She couldn’t believe she was having to do this. She stepped closer, instinctively picking the cop’s name off the patch on his shirt. “Officer Gilbert, my name is Julia Math—”

  “Hold it right there!” He put a hand on his gun but left it in its holster. “Show me some tin, lady, or you can spread-eagle on the ground right now!” He slapped the cigarette off his face.

  She glanced over at the wreckage of her car, saw no sign of the killer. She removed her identification wallet from her front pants pocket, then held it up. The cop—Gilbert—signaled her to step closer. A red crease split open across his forehead as a bullet grazed him, and he fell back. Julia turned toward her car. Through jetting steam and wafting smoke, made nearly opaque by one still-blazing headlamp, she saw the killer behind the glassless windshield frame of her car. He was leaning on the center of the dashboard, his right arm draped over it as if he were chatting it up at a neighborhood tavern. One side of his face glistened with blood. In his left hand he held a bulky semiautomatic pistol, surely a .45. Already big, the addition of a long sound suppresser made it look more like a small machine gun. He turned it toward her. A point of red light flashed in her eyes.

  She dropped straight down, hearing the thunk! of the shot, followed by the tinny sound of the spent cartridge clattering against the crumpled hood. Before she realized it, her pistol was in her hand.

  Officer Gilbert leaped to his feet, the red graze on his brow glowing like war paint. He had drawn his pistol and come up shooting. From her hunkered position, Julia could not see the killer, but the cop obviously thought he had a target. He rattled off six rounds as fast as he could pull the trigger. He was clicking through the paces of reloading before the sound of the last shot faded away.

  She scanned the street. No civilians. Good. The closest businesses were a closed bookstore and an all-night Laundromat that appeared empty. She sprang up, the bead of her pistol’s front sight hovering over the spot she’d last seen the killer. Gone.

  The other cop, the driver, clambered out, falling on his hands. He yanked out his legs and stood with a dizzy swagger. He was pale, but Julia suspected that was his usual complexion: tall, skinny, mid-twenties, a shock of orange hair burning the top of his head. Blood pulsed from his mouth. It was a fighter’s injury: he’d lost a central incisor, rupturing a small artery in the upper gums. Dazed, he bent into the cruiser and emerged with a shotgun. He pumped the slide, chambering a shell. He spat out a mouthful of blood and yelled, “Whatcha got?”

  “Gunman! In the car. I think he nicked me.”

  Neither man showed a trace of panic or fear, just determination and a healthy measure of ire.

  Dang, they breed ‘em tough up here, Julia thought. Crouching, she darted behind the cruiser.

  The killer popped up from behind the dash, fired, and disappeared. She felt the slug zing past her head.

  Both cops let loose with a volley of thunderous shots, evaporating huge chunks of metal and dash and seat upholstery.

  Why is he staying in the car? she wondered. Something’s wrong.

  As if in answer, the assailant sprang up from behind the trunk, his laser-sighted weapon already leveled at them. Before they recognized his presence, he fired and vanished. The bullet shattered the window of the open driver’s door and tore a hole in the chest of the orange-haired cop. He cried out and flew backward, knocking Julia to the ground and pinning her feet.

  “Stinky! Stinky!” Officer Gilbert called. At least that’s what she thought he said; it could have been “Stanky” or “Spanky.” The officer’s name patch was no help: the bullet had ripped right through it.

  Gently, quickly, she pulled her legs out from under him. He gritted his teeth, grimaced, rolled his eyes toward her. He looked so young. She got her legs under her and crouched down, ready to leap, run, or roll. With one hand she applied pressure to the wound; the other gripped her pistol.

  Gilbert was already screaming into a microphone, stretching its coiled cord out the door as far as possible.

  “Officer down! I need backup! Now! Now! Now!” He gave the cross streets. A female voice squawked in reply.

  He dropped the microphone, bobbed his head up and down, high enough to see the wrecked car through his own broken windshield. “How is he?” he asked, not turning to look.

  “Alive. Looks bad.”

  Stinky was holding on to consciousness by a thread.

  Gilbert jumped, seeing something. He rose, thrust his arms over the roof, and fired three rounds.

  And waited.

  Nothing.

  Sirens swelled in the distance, approaching fast.

  A flicker caught Julia’s attention, and she looked down. A red spot of light hovered on Gilbert’s ankle.

  “Move!” she yelled and leaped toward him, too late.

  His ankle exploded as if from an internal detonation. Before the next event happened, she knew it would. The cop yelled and fell to the street. A red spot appeared in the center of his forehead, seeming to have already been there, waiting for him. The back of his head ruptured with the assailant’s exiting bullet. The killer had calculated that maneuver with obscene perfection.

  “Noooooo!” Moving low, close to the rear tire, she hooked her gun under the car and rapid-fired along the ground in the general direction of the assailant.

  On the opposite side of the cruiser, a police unit roared onto Brainerd from a side street and squealed to a stop, headlamps illuminating her Taurus. The assailant fired at it from behind the trunk.

  Brainerd filled with a kaleidoscope of lights as a half dozen cruisers converged on the two wrecked cars, three from behind her car, bathing the assailant in white light. He spun on them, shooting huge holes into their windshields. Doors flew open, cops beat it for cover behind their cruisers.

  The assailant bolted away from the car, running for an alley between the bookstore and Laundromat. As he did, he shot at Julia. The red point of his laser zigzagged around her as bullets plunked half-dollar-sized holes in the cruiser’s sheet metal and shattered the asphalt in front of her. The tire behind her ruptured. Holding her ground, she fired back. As his foot touched the curb, one of her bullets struck his shoulder, spinning him around. He glared at her, his eyes wild.

  She froze. Only a second … less. But in that time, he leveled his gun at her. She didn’t see but felt the laser center on her forehead.

  A thousand banshees screamed—it took her a moment to recognize the sound of many guns firing at once.

  The assailant, still glaring at her, spasmed as round after round tore into his body. Blood and gore sprayed out behind him. Store windows erupted. White powder burst from brick facades, so fine and abundant the building
s appeared to be smoldering.

  He would not fall. He jerked his head to look at the police, at the muzzle flashes and smoke that marked his demise. He swiveled his gun toward them and returned fire. He seemed to be absorbing the firepower and hurling it back.

  Julia rolled behind the cruiser, trying to press her body into the street. From this prone position under the rear bumper, she took aim at the crazed assailant. She’d heard of doped-up druggies, so numbed to pain, so high on artificial stimulants that it took a virtual army to bring them down. But this was something … different.

  Later, every cop there would admit to their colleagues, their wives, or themselves, feeling the same sense of astounded terror, like waking to the realization that everything you thought about the universe was wrong. Despite the killer’s uncanny ability to withstand horrendous injuries, nothing startled them so much as the unflinching concentration he displayed when he changed ammo clips. In the midst of an unceasing barrage of gunfire, he swung another magazine up to his gun just as he fired his last round and the slide locked open. The spent clip dropped away. He jammed in the new one with the ease and thoughtless habit of checking the time. Shattered and shooting, he had somehow kept track of his every shot, knowing the precise moment to change clips. The process delayed his shooting no more than a second.

  The moment the new magazine was seated into the handle of the gun, his free hand dropped down to his belt, where another magazine was clipped. His hand stayed there, ready.

  Then his chest erupted in a mist, and he toppled.

  The quaking of guns ceased. Silence rushed in to fill the void like water into a new footprint; its presence felt heavy. All eyes watched the body sprawled across the curb. A sheet of blood fanned out on the sidewalk from the chest and shoulders; rivulets of it began snaking from under other parts—head, arms, legs—and flowed into the gutter.

  Somebody coughed, breaking the spell; another cursed loudly. Then the air filled with the sound of guns being reloaded, magazines refilled, spent shells being kicked on the ground and swept off car surfaces.

  Julia watched as three patrolmen cautiously approached the body, shotguns poised to continue the onslaught should the body so much as twitch. They were spaced well apart to avoid being slaughtered as a group.

  A noise erupted from the killer. A melody. Lights appeared on what Julia had thought was another magazine clipped to his belt. It was the man’s cell phone, and it was ringing.

  The three cops instantly locked into combat firing stances.

  The musical ring tone was a song Julia knew: Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” After about ten seconds, it stopped.

  One of the cops glanced over his shoulder, checking his comrades for guidance they didn’t have; another inched forward, kicked away the assailant’s pistol, and stretched his hand to the assailant’s neck. An eternity later, he gestured that he’d found no pulse. While the other two covered him, the first hefted the body on its side to cuff the hands behind the back. Julia had seen corpses cuffed before, but never with so much gravity. The cop ran a hand along the body’s perimeter, pulling a heavy knife from an ankle sheath and the cell phone from the belt. He tossed them aside.

  Julia closed her eyes and lowered her face to the pavement, feeling tiny pebbles bite into her cheek. She was grateful for their solidarity, for how real they felt. She stayed like that as EMTs assessed Stinky— he was alive with surprisingly strong vitals—and until a cop came over and pressed his fingers to her throat.

  “I’m okay,” she said and cupped her face in her hands.

  thirty-two

  Gregor woke from a dream in which he was field-stripping a rifle, alone in a vast arctic landscape. The rifle made sense: he’d broken down and cleaned and reassembled a fair share of them. He wasn’t so sure where the winter conditions came from. His foster parents had lived in Wyoming, which certainly got cold and snowy, but nothing like in his dream. Maybe it had something to do with his thirty-year stretch in a tropic climate. No snow. Ever.

  His room was dark, except for a soft, unfamiliar light. At the very moment that he saw the light was coming from one of the two cell phones on his nightstand, it rang. Its previous ring must have been what pulled him from his imaginary midnight wandering.

  “Yes?” It came out as a croak. He repeated the word.

  He recognized the voice on the other end, and his mind cleared immediately. The voice recited a code phrase. Gregor thought for a moment, then returned the proper reply. He listened. “But aren’t you there now? … Chattanooga, Tennessee … Of course, I can resend the files, but—hold on, let me get a pen.”

  He threw back his blankets, swung his legs off the bed, and turned on the bedside lamp. Something wasn’t right. The great warrior Ts’ao Kung said the essence of battlefield success was “to mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy.”

  The enemy! Gregor thought. Not your allies, not your commanders!

  Code phrase or not, the call worried him. But the man was not someone you questioned or angered. He possessed the phone number, the code phrase, the voice. Gregor didn’t know what else to do. He stood and stumbled toward his desk for a pen.

  He wished he were back field-stripping a rifle in subzero temperatures.

  thirty-three

  Julia wasn’t about to hang around. She’d been trying to avoid cops all day, and now she was surrounded by them. It wouldn’t be long before they found their composure and wanted to know more about her involvement. She’d be brought in to police headquarters and questioned until the FBI or CDC showed up to relieve them of the burden that was Julia Matheson. No doubt there were people in several agencies who had questions for her.

  At the moment, each member of the local PD was busy describing the action from his or her own perspective. There was the kind of laughter that comes after extreme stress, and cops saying, “No, no, no, this is the way it went down,” and cops who were in a blue flunk about the casualties, and cops who wanted to fight because they didn’t understand how someone could laugh at a time like this. There were few, it seemed to Julia, who had set all that post-traumatic stuff aside and were going about the business of securing the crime scene and interviewing witnesses. Those who were doing their jobs moved slowly, distractedly, and focused primarily on where the assailant’s body fell.

  She went to inspect her car. She found what had kept him in the car long after he should have bolted: in the accident, his right arm had apparently become wedged between the crumpled hood and dash. He’d only escaped by slipping his arm out of a wicked-looking gauntlet, leaving it behind. A string of blood dripped from it as if it were a severed arm.

  She told a patrolman that she needed to pry open her car door and borrowed his crowbar; she had left her own crowbar with the other tools stashed in the alleyway behind the bar. She levered the hood metal back enough to wiggle the gauntlet loose, then dropped it into a deep canvas book bag, along with a few papers scattered about the interior. Then, acting as if she were doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing, she marched around the corner and kept on going until she reached another major street and hailed a cab.

  She was in her room and slumping on the bed before the extent of her injuries became apparent: She hurt everywhere. Her side throbbed where the rib had fractured; her hips ached from thrusting against the seat belt; her throat still felt as fragile as blown glass; various spots of pain flared on her face and arms where fragments of erupting asphalt had bitten into her.

  She pulled the memory chip from her pants pocket, turned it around in her fingers. So small. In centuries past, when people fought over a small item, it was usually a jewel or a key to a locked treasure, maybe a deed to some estate or a religious relic. Now, as often as not, it was information. And a lot of information could fit on a tiny square chip like the one she held. Didn’t look like much. Worth ten bucks in a computer or camera store. But throw some information on it, and it became invaluable. She thought of the cost so far. Goody. Vero. The cop Gilbert. Even th
e assassins—the two killers who’d died in the bar and the one tonight. Not that their lives were worth anything, but they did contribute to the tally. And those were only the deaths she knew about. What had happened before Vero tried to get this chip into the right hands?

  I hope you’re worth it, she thought.

  She scooted back on the bed, grabbed her laptop, and turned it on. She leaned over and rummaged through the computer case until she found an adapter card, which she pushed into the computer’s expansion port. When she pushed the chip into that, the screen immediately flashed a pattern of multicolored static and froze.

  Julia winced.

  She restarted the computer four times: twice she started it with the chip already slotted, and twice she waited until the operating system had booted. Each time, it crashed the computer.

  Groaning, feeling every bruised muscle, she rolled off the bed, grabbed her purse, and left the room. At the pay phone outside the motel office, she used a calling card to dial a long-distance number.

  “Wha—?” She heard a male voice say on the other end of the line.

  “Bonsai?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Julia. Don’t say my last name.”

  “Like I would. What time—?”

  “Late. I need your help.”

  “Call back in the morning, Julia. No, I’ll call you. I’m really beat, you know, with the new kid and all.”

  “Goody’s dead.” There was so much silence, Julia said, “Bonsai?”

  “Goody?” He was stunned. “When?” No sleep left in his voice.

  “Today. Yesterday, now. There’s some weird stuff going down. I need your help, and no one can know. Can you help?”

  “Sure, yeah, whatever.”

  “Can you get to a secure phone?”

  “This one’s good. I sweep it every day.”

  Of course he does.

  “I have a memory chip. It’s—” She read a shallow impression in the chip’s plastic case.“An SDx30. I’m pretty sure it’s at the heart of what got Goody killed. But I’m afraid it got damaged.”