And if he wasn’t answering his phone, wasn’t at home, and wasn’t at work, it was easy to fear the worst. Something damned strange was going on in South Haven, and she feared that Zack had fallen victim to it. Whatever it happened to be.
“They’re closed, too?” a male voice said behind her. “Bummer.”
She turned. It was a man she recognized; he worked at the South Haven Cinema. Tall and gangly, he wore chunky black glasses and a black vest, blue jeans, and Van sneakers. He had a pile of unruly brown hair that looked as if he’d taken it off a mop head. A tattoo of Princess Leia adorned his left forearm. He sipped a cherry Icee through a red straw.
“I’m looking for my boyfriend,” she said. “He works here. He wasn’t home, either. He’s not answering his phone. I need to talk to him.”
She caught herself before she said, “I need to talk to him about my pregnancy.” She didn’t know why she was sharing so many details with someone who was a relative stranger to her. It wasn’t in her nature to be forthcoming about her personal life with anyone except close friends and family. Her growing sense of uneasiness had knocked her off balance.
“Maybe he’s got the sickness,” the man said. He indicated the rolled-up poster he carried. “Was going to put out this new poster for the Screen on the Green, you know we have it every Friday night in the summer, but I think I’m gonna cancel. No one’s gonna show up for it anyway. Not even worth switching out posters. I was gonna show Forrest Gump but whatever.”
“Hold on a minute, please. You mentioned ‘the sickness.’ What sickness are you talking about, exactly?”
He shrugged. “I think it’s like a summer flu or something. Two of my guys called out sick and said they have headaches.” He pointed with the tip of the poster. “I walked around to some of the shops here. A lot of ‘em are closed. The ones that are open, I talked to people on duty and they all said they’ve got someone who called out sick.”
Emily scanned both sides of Main Street. He was right. The hair salon, the frozen yogurt shop, the pizzeria, the florist . . . all of them appeared to be closed, which was unusual for mid- morning on a Friday. The corner grocery store was open, and notably, so was the medical clinic.
It was called the Take Care Clinic, and it appeared to be doing brisk business. She noticed people gathered outside the doors; they sat on plastic folding chairs in the shade of the awning, and they had the weary look of those expecting long waits. She was acquainted with the physician who worked there, Dr. Britt. Years ago, Dr. Britt had encouraged Emily’s medical school aspirations. Could the physician possibly know what was going on?
Just thinking about it, Emily wondered if there was any connection between this summer flu the man had described, and Mr. Pinto and the stone-thrower teenager. It was quite a leap of logic to connect the two together—someone with ordinary flu symptoms didn’t evolve into a crazed killer—but the strangeness of both had set the gears of her imagination churning.
The movie theater guy was hanging near her, blue eyes dancing behind his lenses.
“It’s gonna get a lot worse before it gets any better,” he said.
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s like that in the movies, right? A lot more people are gonna get sick with this virus. Probably the CDC will get called in. They might bring down quarantine, too. Don’t you like, watch sci-fi movies?”
“I’m going to talk to a doctor,” Emily said. “I’ve seen other . . . incidents, too. It might all be connected.”
“Really? Like what?” His eyes looked hungry for some extra titillating tidbit, a bit of gossip.
“Just be careful,” she said. “I’ve seen people who aren’t behaving like themselves.”
He stared at her as if waiting for the punchline, but she turned away from him without going into further detail. She hurried across the street to the medical clinic.
***
Emily literally had to step over people in order to get inside.
People of all ages occupied every available spot in the confined waiting area. It was a basic clinic for a live-work-play community, not a level one trauma hospital serving a major city, and as such, had less than a dozen seats. Folks went there for common colds, flus, tummy aches, and school immunizations. It was never designed to fight an epidemic.
But as Emily stood on a small section of open carpet in the middle of the office and scanned the worried faces of the residents, many of whom she recognized, she couldn’t help thinking that they were in the midst of a mess far more serious than she had feared.
She didn’t notice anyone who shared the symptoms that had marked the stone-thrower or Mr. Pinto: no inflamed eyes or nostrils dripping blood. The folks she saw just looked miserable. They cradled their heads in their hands and slumped. One patient, a child of about six, was teary-eyed and clutching his mother.
Emily’s heart twisted.
She eased through the knots of gathered people and reached the reception desk. A young black woman who looked to be at her wits end snapped up from filling out paperwork and offered a sad smile.
“Sorry, but it’s going to be a long wait,” she said. Her nametag read, Rita. “You see how busy it is here, right?”
“Is Dr. Britt in?” Emily asked.
Rita shook her head. “She’s out sick, too. We’ve just got our nurse on duty, Jennifer, and me the office manager. You might be better off going to an emergency room at the closest hospital.”
“Excuse me, did you say one nurse to serve all these people?” Emily asked.
“We’re doing the best we can here, miss.”
Emily sucked in her bottom lip. “What symptoms is everyone reporting?”
“Are you a doctor?” Rita asked.
Emily drummed her fingers on the counter. “I’m in medical school. I just completed my second year, at Emory. Maybe . . . maybe I can help.”
The woman’s eyes brightened.
“We need all the help we can get. Come to the door over there and I’ll let you in back and you can talk to Jennifer.”
***
The nurse, Jennifer, was a blonde-haired, green-eyed young woman who looked no older than Emily. As petite as an elf, she wore blue scrubs and sneakers, and she was scrambling out of one of the patient rooms as the officer manager was guiding Emily down the hallway.
“This lady says she can help us out,” Rita said. “She’s in medical school.”
Jennifer thrust her slender hand toward Emily and offered a quick smile. “Appreciate it, honey. You got a name?”
Emily told her.
“Call me Jenn,” she said. “How much experience do you have with patient care?”
“Well, I finished my second year last month, so honestly, not much. But I’ll do my best.”
Jenn waved her off. “It doesn’t matter. Heck, we’re so stretched I’m not turning down anyone who offers to help. Grab some scrubs, please. They’re in the supply closet at the end of the hallway. Then wash your hands and meet me in room three in five minutes. You’ll get filled in on everything while I meet with a patient.”
Jenn whirled away before Emily could ask any questions. The officer manager deserted her, too. Emily paused for a beat, and then walked down the carpeted corridor to the supply closet.
This had to be the weirdest day of her entire life. She’d gone from a positive pregnancy test, to fleeing a couple of crazed residents, to volunteering in a community medical clinic overburdened with patients suffering from the flu. Her life had become like a wacky reality TV show.
The narrow closet contained boxes of latex gloves and surgical masks, and several sets of scrubs hanging on hooks. She found a set that fit reasonably well, pulled them over her shorts and tank top. She took some gloves and a mask for good measure.
As she was washing her hands in the restroom, a choked scream pieced the clinic. The source was close—very close.
She quickly dried her hands with a paper towel and hurried outside. Jenn was rushing into room three. Em
ily followed close behind.
Inside, they discovered a scene out of a nightmare. A woman was sprawled on the floor next to the examination table, blood smeared across her tanned face. Her son, a boy of perhaps ten, gripped an iPad and had wedged the edge of the device across his mother’s neck. He leaned all of his weight against it, using it to systematically crush her windpipe.
“Play it I can!” he shouted, spittle spraying. “Whenever want it play!”
Emily saw the red crust around his inflamed eyes, the stream of blood dripping from his nose. Like Mr. Pinto and the stone-thrower boy, she realized.
The mother’s eyes bulged, her face turning blue.
“Help me get him off her!” Jenn said.
The nurse hooked her hands underneath the boy’s armpits and lifted him up. She was a small lady, barely larger than the boy, but she was much stronger than she looked. As she dragged him away, the boy snarled like a captured beast. He flailed his arms and legs, overturning a chair.
Emily got her arms around his wriggling legs, noticing that crimson lesions marked his flesh at several points. Together, she and Jenn hauled the kid onto the exam table, the protective sheet of paper crinkling underneath the thrashing child.
The boy unleashed a string of obscenities that made Emily’s face turn red: “Cunts . . . bitches . . . fucking play it . . . can play it . . . cunts . . . play it . . .”
He’s completely out of his mind, Emily thought, and the budding physician in her was racing through a memorized catalogue of illnesses and diseases that could explain these symptoms, but she didn’t hit upon anything—this was outside her limited experience and knowledge.
On the floor, the mother was sitting up, hands at her neck and gagging.
The boy continued to fight like a bucking bronco. Veins stood in stark relief on his face and neck, interspersed with the ugly lesions.
“I need to sedate him,” Jenn said. “We’ve got some Propofol on hand, but only I can unlock the cabinet.”
“Ma’am, we need your help,” Emily said to the mother. “We’re going to sedate your son to help him feel better, but I need you to help us keep him under control.”
The mom slowly got to her feet, grabbing the edge of a desk to help her stand.
“He said . . . he said he just had a headache,” she said weakly. She appeared to be dazed. She looked at her writhing child on the exam table as if she didn’t recognize him. “He was running a fever . . . I thought he had the flu . . .”
As she contemplated the woman’s muttered comments, Emily felt a chill settle deep in her marrow.
“Help me hold him, ma’am,” Emily said.
Nodding vaguely, the mother replaced Jenn at the table, and Jenn scrambled out of the room. When she returned and administered the injection in his neck, the boy’s struggles subsided a bit, but he continued to mumble incoherently, and his mother still needed to hold him.
Both Jenn and Emily stepped away and huddled together in the corridor outside the room.
“That dosage should have knocked him out,” Jenn said. She ran her fingers through her hair, shook her head. “I don’t understand how he’s still alert.”
“I’ve seen these symptoms before, this morning, in other people who live here,” Emily said. “A man I actually know, and a boy. They attacked me. They were shouting unintelligibly, like the child here, and they had all the same symptoms: the inflammation around their eyes, the lesions on their face.”
“His mother brought him in because she thought he had the flu.” Jenn grimaced. “We aren’t staffed or equipped to handle this situation.”
Emily knew that she and the nurse were of the same accord: they had an entire waiting room of people afflicted with the same symptoms. How long until they became violent?
“I have an idea,” Emily said.
Chapter 7
Between The Bloodhound standing in the bedroom doorway, and his crazed wife coming at him with a pair of scissors, Alex didn’t know which threat to fear the most.
Raw instinct took over.
He dipped to the floor and drew his Beretta, his scissor-sliced, bleeding palm making him wince. He squeezed off a shot at The Bloodhound.
The gun’s report was jarring. Seeing Alex draw the weapon, the hitman had slid out of the doorway and taken cover. The gunfire struck a landscape painting hanging on the hallway wall outside the bedroom, a vista of a sun-kissed Mexican beach. The artwork crashed to the carpet.
Melissa was running out of the room, partially shorn hair flapping like feathers from her scalp. She swung the scissors in a wild arc.
“Mel, wait!” Alex said.
In his mind, he could envision what would unfold next. The Bloodhound would easily disarm her. He would balance his trench knife against her throat and demand that Alex drop his weapon. Then he would slowly kill both Melissa and Alex, prolonging their suffering while his eyes gleamed with pleasure.
That wasn’t what happened.
The Bloodhound re-appeared in the doorway as Melissa was dashing out of the room. Perhaps it was her appearance—the inflamed eyes, the chopped up hair—but indecision flickered in his gaze. At that moment of hesitation, Melissa launched herself at him, literally leapt onto his chest like a giddy child leaping into a parent’s embrace. She jabbed the scissors deep into his ear.
The Bloodhound screamed. It had been many years since Alex had heard a man scream like that, and it was a sound he had hoped never to hear again.
“Dirty roots!” Melissa cried, and went to stab him again.
But The Bloodhound, in a fit of agony and rage, tried to fling her off him. She slashed his face, blades tearing across his eye. Howling, face stained in blood, he finally managed to heave her off him. She hurtled against a dresser.
By then, Alex had opened a bedroom window and kicked out the screen. Warm, flower-scented air sifted inside.
Holding one hand against his ruined eye, moaning, the Bloodhound staggered out of the room. He was wounded, but not dead. A man such as him would never walk away, not even from a blood bath.
“Dirty roots . . . down them to . . . dirty . . . dirty . . .”
Melissa was on her feet again. She was coming at Alex. High on manic energy.
Although armed, he couldn’t fire at his wife. She was sick, out of her mind with an illness he couldn’t begin to comprehend. She needed help, but there was nothing he could do for her then. He would have to get to safety and return with health professionals who could get her under control and give her the medical assistance she needed.
He climbed out of the window and let go of the ledge. He dropped about fifteen feet. A thick row of hedges at the front of the house cushioned his fall, prickly leaves brushing against his skin.
Dizzy, rattled, he stumbled out of the flowerbed and looked up.
Melissa jumped out of the window.
“No!” he said.
But she dove headfirst, like a swimmer leaping off a diving board, with no apparent regard for her own safety. She flew in an arc that took her beyond the hedges and landed her in the rosebush at the edge of the flowerbed, and Alex heard the sickening crunch of breaking bones as she hit the earth in a violent tangle of limbs. She didn’t even scream.
Dios mio, he thought, breathing hard. He wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.
Melissa wasn’t moving. She lay in the roses—roses she had carefully planted and tended since they had moved into the house—her body contorted in an impossible position, skin punctured by a multitude of thorns.
His knees were weak. But he went to her.
Her head had been twisted around almost a full one hundred and eighty degrees. Her green eyes were open, but were as empty as a doll’s.
No, no, no . . .
Hot tears streamed down his face. He threw his head back and shouted at the summer sky, a garbled, anguished stream of Spanish and English. He shouted until his throat felt raw and his voice finally faltered and broke into a ragged whisper.
T
hen he carefully extricated his wife’s limp body from the roses, and carried her inside the house.
The Bloodhound might have been waiting for him, could have regained his bearings and been planning a new ambush, but Alex didn’t care. At that moment, if death came for him, he might have welcomed it.
Without Melissa, he had nothing to live for anyway.
He laid his wife across the cushions of the leather sofa in the family room, underneath a large, framed photo taken on their wedding day. They’d had a destination wedding in the Dominican Republic. They stood on a glorious beach, smiling for the photographer, confident of the happiness they believed was their destiny.
It was never supposed to end like this. In a matter of minutes, everything they had worked for had fallen apart, blown away like a sandcastle under breaking waves.
He needed to call an ambulance, but there was time for that; there was nothing they could do for his wife any more.
He wanted to cover her with a blanket. He couldn’t find one in the family room. Wiping his eyes, he got up, went into the hallway.
Dark drops of blood speckled the hardwood floor. The trail led to the back of the house, all the way to the double doors that opened onto the wooden deck.
Alex felt a hunger stirring in him that he had not felt for many years. The base of his spine tingled, a pleasant sensation.
First, duty, he told himself.
He found a blanket for his wife and gently covered her. He kissed her forehead, brushed her hair away from her eyes.
Now, revenge.
He drew his gun, and followed the blood trail.
Chapter 8
There was plenty more bloodshed and mayhem that day in South Haven.
Pete Staples was getting to the good part with his mistress, Ashley. Pete was a golf pro, employed by the South Haven Country Club, and he also lived in the community. His PGA tour winnings and a handsome trust fund ensured a comfortable lifestyle, and working at the country club put him in frequent contact with the bored, gorgeous housewives who often came in seeking to improve their swing.
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