As if sizing up a present, he bounced the package in his hands gently, finding it much lighter than he’d anticipated.
Forgetting about his bags on the floor behind the door, Noble turned to enter the lab and caught one of the shoulder straps with the toe of his boot. Thrown off balance, he pitched forward, legs pistoning the air with his own words Contagion is probably a better description jumping to the forefront of his mind.
Miraculously, after doing a crazy midair dance with the box cradled in the crook of one arm like a football, he came back down, upright, with the sensitive delivery still in his possession. Heart hammering, trying to escape his chest, he set the box on the table by his latte. After stowing his bags in the professor’s closet, he hung his winter jacket on a hook and donned a white knee-length lab coat.
Not completely convinced the box contained something as benign as this season’s strain of influenza, Noble retrieved the package and paperwork from the table. Carrying it in a firm two-handed grip, he made his way carefully to the back of the room, deposited it on the professor’s desk, and plopped down on the chair.
Chapter 2
Feeling the sun warm on his face, Riker walked past the shadowy recesses of doorways occupied by men whom the night before had arrived too late to secure a cot in the shelter. Off of his left shoulder was a lightly travelled four-lane boulevard. Empty airline liquor bottles and scraps of paper littered the gutter and grass strip paralleling the boulevard.
A block from the shelter Riker was getting ready to step off the curb when a rust bucket of a pickup with no turn signal flashing hung a sharp right and cut the air less than a yard in front of him.
Having already looked to all points of the compass and noticed the truck barreling down the boulevard from behind, he was aware of its proximity but not ready for the two-ton object to do what it did.
Gritting his teeth against the nails-on-a-chalkboard keen of worn brake pads grabbing bare metal, Riker froze mid-step and tracked the truck with his gaze until it ground to a halt a dozen feet to his right.
At least the backup lights work, thought Riker as they flared white and the old Chevy began to reel in the distance between them.
With another squawk from the brakes, the truck stopped broadside to Riker.
“Look before you leap, dickhead,” barked the driver through his half-open window.
Riker felt his ears go hot as a familiar tension began to build between his shoulder blades.
Ignore him, said Riker’s inner voice.
The driver ripped the pair of wraparound sunglasses from his head onehanded and tossed them on the dash. He leaned across the seat and cranked the passenger window down the rest of the way. “Big fucker like you should be able to see all the way to Olympic Park from here. Yet you had to step out in front of me anyway.”
Riker was staring holes in the man’s narrow face. That he was wearing a Chicago Cub’s ball cap made ignoring the verbal barrage next to impossible. However, instead of opening his mouth and letting loose on the guy with both barrels, Riker drew in a deep breath and began to make his way around the front of the idling truck.
Last thing he needed was to lose his cool, beat the guy senseless, then end up in jail due to an injury sustained well over a decade ago and thousands of miles from here.
Disaster averted, he thought, proud of himself for channeling a little of Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy and truly ‘turning the other cheek.’
The driver gunned the engine as Riker made the turn around the right front fender. The truck began a slow roll forward when Riker was fully committed.
All was still well with Riker until he heard the clink of the front bumper hitting his leg.
The heat manifesting in his ears and neck and cheeks was already burning hotter than ever when the vibration from what was little more than a tap coursed through his stump, setting the usually docile nerves there afire.
Back to back, as the driver rolled the transmission to Park and stomped on the emergency brake, there came a heavy clunk and metallic twang of a spring going under tension. In reaction to the sudden stop, the load of scrap metal in the truck’s bed shifted and an old water heater clanged against the bedrails.
The truck was still lurching on its tired suspension when the driver’s door creaked open and the noise of boots hitting the pavement reached Riker’s ears. Instantly advice learned in anger management classes came to him: Diffuse the situation with humor. As he rounded the truck, arms at his sides, Riker locked eyes with the driver. “Listen, fella,” he said calmly. “There’s no sport in fighting a one-legged man.”
In his early thirties, the man was wiry and well-muscled. He slammed his door and squared up with Riker who, at six-three and two-thirty, was a good head and a half taller and carried at least a seventy-five-pound weight advantage.
“There’s no sport in running over a one-legged prick with a truck, either,” shot the man, eyes narrowing as he assumed the classic Jack Dempsey-esque boxer’s pose—fists at half-mast and legs splayed and planted a shoulder’s width apart.
By now the heat had spread north to the crown of Riker’s head and the Calypso beat of his heart was throbbing behind his eyes and in his temples.
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” said the man.
Cars continued on their way, the drivers at the wheels with things to do and places to be mostly ignoring the lopsided standoff.
Sticking with humor, Riker said, “At least the Cubbies might win a pennant in your lifetime.”
“Fuck you and the Braves,” said the man, his breathing now coming rapidly. “We owned you this year. Makes me happy even if we don’t win it all.”
As a last resort, Riker resorted to honesty. After all, Mom always said it was the best policy.
“Hate my Braves all you want. But know that if you swing on me, I’ll parry it. Next I’ll be seeing red and you’ll be down for the count. Cards always fall that way when someone gets my ire up. And I’d call running into a man’s fake leg an applicable offense.”
Eye twitch giving him away, the man Riker had decided henceforth would be referred to as Napoleon launched off his back foot and unloaded the right cross he’d had coiled and waiting.
Left forearm absorbing the blow, likely breaking a few of Napoleon’s fingers as a result, Riker said, “I told you so,” through gritted teeth and brought his closed fist down hammer-like on the blue button atop Napoleon’s Cubs hat.
As if his power switch had been thrown to Off, Napoleon crashed vertically to the sun-warmed asphalt, legs and arms all akimbo.
Riker bent at the waist and grabbed the smaller man two-handed. Palms cupping the man’s underarms, he easily lifted him off the ground and put him back behind the wheel of his truck.
After reaching across the slumped-over man to kill the engine, Riker pocketed the keys and cast a glance through the rear window. Seeing what he was looking for, he reached his right arm into the bed and came out with a Budweiser can. He shook the empty and was pleased to hear a sloshing noise telling him it truly was not a dead soldier. He dumped the can’s contents down the front of Napoleon’s shirt and closed him inside with the skunky odor of stale, day-old beer.
Riker looped around back of the static pickup, and mounted the curb with a faked look of worry on his face. Waving one arm in the air while pointing at the pickup, he successfully flagged down a woman in a shiny black BMW.
Dressed for business in a navy blue pantsuit, hair tucked nicely into a bun atop her head, the woman snatched her phone from the console and leaned over. Meeting Riker’s gaze, she mouthed, “What’s wrong?”
“Drunk driver,” said Riker. He made a fist and pantomimed rolling a window down. Which the woman did, but only a fist width.
“Want me to call 911?”
Nodding, Riker said, “He hit me as I was walking across the street, then passed out right there.” Sticking his hand inside the window, he dropped the keys on her passenger seat.
The busi
nesswoman’s mouth formed a silent “O.” She cast a furtive glance at the keys then regarded the pale blue truck still blocking the side street. “He hit you?”
“Just my prosthetic leg. Lost the real one in the war.”
Face full of empathy, the woman pounded out a three-digit number on her phone. Mouthing, “I’m sorry,” she pulsed her window down all the way.
Though the traffic noise mingling with the steady, ever-present ringing of tinnitus kept Riker from hearing everything she was saying, her body language and the few words he picked up told him she was grateful for his service and was pissed at the disrespect shown him by the drunk.
Riker merely nodded—his go-to when the tinnitus was acting up. Then, without warning, the woman sat upright in her seat and ran the window up. Seeing her talking animatedly into the phone, free arm waving around the sedan’s interior, Riker rose and scanned his surroundings.
No witnesses.
Good.
The rage-induced heat all but subsided—having retreated down his collar and exited his body through his extremities—Riker resumed his original course and double-timed it down the block.
Up ahead on the right was an electrical substation. A long line of thirty-foot-tall metal towers dangling insulators and sprouting wires rose gantry-like above a cement wall and strategically planted trees mostly failing at shielding its existence to passersby. As Riker reached the center of the block, the subliminal crackle-hiss of millions of out-of-sight volts had the hairs on his arms and neck standing to attention. Though nothing like the similar, albeit in your face sonic crackle-hiss of bullets fired in anger cutting the air nearby, the noise, though diminishing at his back as he strode east, still had his nerves jangling. Maybe the prospect of reuniting with his sister before day’s end was the true culprit, he thought. The business they had to attend to was serious stuff. Then there was the impending encounter with a very proud Marine. He figured should Snuffy rebuff his offer, either the Marine would fix him with a cold stare and abruptly about face, never to talk to him again, or the old Devil Dog would listen to reason and accept his proposition without condition.
Riker hoped for the latter. He truly liked Snuffy. And as of yet, the cancer hadn’t sapped the man of his strength nor drained an ounce of the piss and vinegar that was known to flow through his veins.
Before slipping around the corner, Riker stole a final look over his shoulder. Two blocks distant, the business lady was now out on the sidewalk and waving down an arriving patrol car. As the officers stepped from their Charger, she turned and pointed up the street in his direction.
Before the officers had a chance to react to the woman’s gesture, Riker was already around the corner and out of sight.
***
Eschewing the multitude of chain locations bordering Centennial Park on all sides, Riker chose a little shop off the main drag called COMMON GROUNDS. The ten-table establishment had the look and feel of an owner/operator-run enterprise. A bell above the door signaled his entrance, causing a few of the patrons to look up from their laptop screens or peer over their splayed-open newspapers. The aroma of fresh brewed coffee hit Riker in the face and the twenty-something behind the high counter greeted him by name. As he approached the counter she was going through the ritual of slipping a paper sleeve on the cup and readying a lid.
“The usual?” she asked.
Riker nodded and smiled. A creature of habit, he always took his coffee black. Grounds or no grounds, he didn’t care. The inkier the color and higher the viscosity the better.
The small flat-panel television atop the counter was tuned to CNN. The female anchor’s lips were moving but no sound was coming out of the speakers. It was the words on the crawl at the bottom of the screen that caught his eye. As he read the tail-end of a story about a big pharma company and the new batch of performance-enhancing drugs they were set to test on military volunteers, the woman he knew as Kylie pushed his coffee forward and quietly said, “Two dollars, please,” which was the initial reason he bypassed the corporate entities in the first place. After all, service-connected-disability bump on his monthly check or not, two bucks was a lot less than the big boys wanted for basically the same product. Soon all that wouldn’t matter, he mused, as he slid a five across the counter and instructed Kylie to keep the change.
Chapter 3
Ten minutes into grading a stack of technically correct, yet awfully put-together early semester research papers, Noble’s gaze settled on a desktop stationary set—a gift Professor Fuentes had received from the World Health Organization—recognizing his efforts in the ongoing fight against Ebola. In fact, one particular component of the set was calling his name.
He plucked the gilded letter opener from its indented resting place. Wasting no time, like a kid attacking a gift on Christmas morning, he corralled the parcel and made quick work stripping it of the clear tape and brown paper. He sliced the tape sealing the top of the box and began to pry it open. Rationalizing the action, he thought, Just going to open it up so the professor doesn’t have to be bothered with it.
He replaced the letter opener on the tray and carefully lifted the brushed-aluminum box from within the cardboard shipping container. Feeling a touch of guilt creeping into the equation, he pushed the aluminum box to the top corner of the desk blotter, where he stared at it and sipped his drink for three long minutes.
What could one little peek inside hurt?
He looked over the top of the chest-high tables, fixed his gaze on the door to the hallway, and tried to guess where Fuentes was at this very moment.
At home, and likely still in bed.
The aluminum box had no markings. Its lid was secured with latches equidistant from each corner, four in total, all dogged down tightly.
Just a glance inside.
Noble clicked the catches into the up position and cast a furtive glance at the classroom door.
Clear.
He wiped a bead of sweat from his brow and lifted the lid free. It wasn’t an easy endeavor, and once or twice he thought about turning back. But as the old idiom went: In for a penny, in for a pound. There was no turning back for Noble. He had already lost the penny, might as well wager the pound. Wanting badly to see what DOD USAMRIID at Ft. Det., Md. had sent little old MU Biology by way of the CDC DID for the professor—and hopefully his TA—to analyze, Noble gently rocked the lid back-and-forth to separate the rubber gasket from the box’s tooled metal lip.
The lid came off with a soft hiss as trapped air leaked out. He placed the lid where the box had been and peered inside. The box was fitted with a hard plastic insert drilled through with half a dozen dime-sized holes meant to hold test tubes upright and separate from one another. All six holes held stoppered glass vials, one of them much shorter than the others.
Noble reached in and, with thumb and forefinger, removed the shorter vial from its sleeve, finding instantly that it had shattered and was empty, its milky contents now coating the bottom of the box.
In a bit of a panic and with hands tremoring from the hot mess he had just gotten himself into, Noble lowered the broken vial back into its slot. With unsteady hands, he tried to mate the two pieces back together so that the vial again sat level with the others. Satisfied it would pass a cursory inspection, he grabbed a handful of absorbent towels from a nearby drawer, wadded one into a ball, and soaked up the spilled agent. Lastly, he policed up the tiny shards of broken glass from the bottom of the box and placed them on the original wrapper, suffering a series of microscopic cuts in the process.
In the first half of his next heartbeat, Noble had replaced the lid and dogged down the latches. In the latter half of the same beat, he had convinced himself that getting rid of the damning evidence was the smart—albeit not necessarily most ethical—thing to do. He quickly hid the glass and the parcel’s original packaging in the soiled napkins and stuffed the tightly wadded biohazard ball into the one-way neck of a wall-mounted Sharps container.
With beads of sweat erup
ting on his forehead and upper lip, and less than an hour to go until the professor was due, Noble began drafting the first lines of a grand lie in his head.
Atlanta
Confident his unlikely antagonist was out of his hair for good, Riker retraced his steps from Common Grounds back to the shelter.
Sure enough, when he rounded the corner by the electrical substation and paused there to take a sip of his coffee, Napoleon, his rattletrap truck, the lady and her shiny black BMW, and the bored-looking Atlanta P.D. officers were no longer there.
Putting the substation and its angry white noise behind him, he stepped onto Lovejoy Street and noticed a cluster of men standing near the mission door.
Twenty feet from the mission door Riker was met by the expectant looks of three men who were regulars of the Shepherd’s Inn. After halving the distance from the curb to the entry, the three men parted to reveal Koss standing back to the door with retired United States Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant, Snuff Wilburn—all five-foot-six of him—stationed on the sidewalk, fists clenched and squaring up to him.
Tucking the newspaper into his waistband near the small of his back, Riker raised his arms in mock surrender. Careful to keep the paper cup level lest he lose some of its precious liquid cargo, he stopped a yard short and looked down on the grizzled Marine combat veteran.
“If you’ve got something to say to me,” said Snuff, a touch of red creeping up his neck, “you better say it here and now.”
Riker's Apocalypse (Book 1): The Promise Page 2
