by Caleb Cleek
Infected:
The Fall
© 2014 by Caleb Cleek
All rights reserved.
Cover designed by Caleb Cleek.
Cover photo of Bastrop Texas by Larry D. Moore.
ISBN 978-1502811745
This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, events, and places are a product of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to a real person, location or business is purely coincidental.
To Heather,
The mother of my children and the
best looking woman I know
Thanks for making breakfast
Chapter 1
I ducked just in time. A fraction of a second later, my nose would have been plastered flat against my face, erupting in a profusion of blood. Had I ducked a millisecond earlier, I would have escaped completely unscathed. As it was, I ended up taking a whopper of a blow to my forehead. I won’t say it didn’t hurt because it did. It hurt a lot, but not nearly as much as it hurt Ricky Jimerson. He may as well have punched a brick wall. An arch is one of the strongest architectural shapes you can build and the human forehead is a very strong arch.
I’ve been hit a lot of times and one of the first things I learned about getting hit was if I stop and assess the damage I received, I’m going to get hit again.
Without taking stock of the situation, I was pretty sure I wasn’t hurt badly. I also knew I didn’t want to get hit again, so as soon as the bright starburst and darkened vision dissipated, I laid into Ricky with both hands. When I initially ducked my head, I pulled it down and to the left. With the way my weight was distributed, I was loaded for an explosive left uppercut and I let loose with a dandy. Ricky had opened his mouth to yell after he broke his hand on my head. My upper cut clacked his jaw shut hard before the beginning of his utterance could make it further than the back of his throat. Lucky for him, his tongue wasn’t between his teeth when I slammed them together or it would have ended up significantly shorter. I followed the uppercut with a hard right to his solar plexus.
He was a run of the mill tweaker and didn’t have much padding to absorb the second blow. It was a devastating shot and I was pretty sure it was enough to put him out of commission, but I wasn’t taking any chances after he had sucker punched me. I lashed out with my left foot and kicked him in the knee. He fell hard and landed in the fetal position, clutching his broken hand with his good one. He was trying to say something, but had no wind left after the second blow. I imagine he was attempting to voice his capitulation, but he didn’t need to. It was obvious. He had lost the will to fight. He was beat. Using his left arm for leverage, I rolled him onto his stomach. His right hand was caught underneath him. His hundred and fifty pound frame ground the hand into the sidewalk and brought back enough wind for him to scream like a little girl.
The scream brought my partner out of the apartment like it was on fire. He took in the scene and knelt down with his knee on the side of Ricky’s head. Ricky attempted to roll to the left as he squirmed away from the pressure. It was enough to enable me to pull his right arm out from beneath him. With both hands behind his back, I ripped a pair of handcuffs from the pouch on the back of my belt and firmly clicked them closed around his wrists.
“You’re under arrest,” I spat, rubbing my forehead.
“I thought you were taking him outside to talk. What happened?” Matt asked with alarm.
“After knocking his wife silly, he felt like a big man. I guess he didn’t realize I’m 75 pounds heavier than her. Or maybe the meth he’s been smoking told him my size didn’t matter. Turns out, I’m a little harder to slap around than a hundred and five pound woman.”
By this time, all the neighbors were standing in the open doorways and second story windows, gawking at the spectacle. They weren’t used to seeing people hauled off in cuffs this early in the morning. This particular brand of entertainment was usually reserved for after dark.
Ricky lay on the ground, whimpering. When Matt stood him up, Ricky looked at me and released a guttural scream of combined anger and anguish. “You broke my hand!” he wailed.
“No, you broke your hand. I broke your jaw,” I corrected, noticing that his jaw was askew with one side hanging visibly lower than the other. I was surprised I hadn’t broken my hand, too.
People living on the other side of the two buildings that formed the corridor we were in heard the commotion and began congregating at both ends of the buildings, watching the show as we hauled a screaming and resisting Ricky to the car and stuffed him in the back.
Three hours later, I was sitting quietly in my normal seat at Mary’s Diner. Matt, normally would have been with me, but he received a last minute call from dispatch to a farm thirty miles out of town to deal with the theft of some cattle. It didn’t require both of us, so I was eating solo today. Eleven fifteen was a little early for lunch, but I was in town and had nothing else to do.
Bertha brought the plate I had come to expect: a quarter pound burger with cheese, a side of fries, and a Coke.
“Can I bring you anything else?” she questioned as she rubbed grease from her hand onto her extra large checkered apron which barely surrounded her girth.
“You’ve asked me that question every day since I started eating here and I have never needed anything else. What makes you think today will be different?” I chuckled.
“My goal is to keep the local constabulary happy. I figure it will help me out if you ever stop me for speeding.” She worked the word constabulary into a sentence nearly every time I talked to her. Each time she uttered the word, she paused before saying it. The short hiccup in the flow of her speech made sure my attention was drawn to what she was about to say with laser beam focus. Then she would say the word, her voice an octave higher than it was for the rest of the sentence.
“Speeding? In that old heap you drive? The only thing I’m likely to stop you for is impeding traffic.”
She laughed and turned from the table. As she sauntered away, she looked over her shoulder and replied, “Enjoy your lunch.”
As I hungrily eyed the plate in front of me, I noticed a yellow tour bus pull into the parking lot of the gas station kitty corner to the diner.
Tour buses are common in town during the summer. They are an easy and convenient way to get from the airport to the scenic byways around the country.
About the same time I was busting Ricky, the people on the bus had landed at the airport. They got on the bus and the bus brought them here. My town wasn’t the final destination. We don’t have raging rivers to raft, or massive peaks to scale, or canyons to descend. The only thing we have to offer is a decent diner and a couple trinket shops. They aren’t actually good enough to attract tourists by themselves. The thing that attracts tourists is the isolation. It is simple mathematics. The highway that leads to the places people want to see passes through our town. If a bus leaves the airport or surrounding hotels at nine, it reaches our town at eleven-fifteen, barring unforeseen delays. Eleven-fifteen is not the ideal time for lunch, but two is worse and that is when a bus would reach the next town, so they stop here. Six or seven buses a week, June through August, may not seem that significant in most places. Here, it is the difference between a struggling economy and a ghost town.
This bus wasn’t all that different from others that came through. The bottom was for luggage. If you looked close, you could see the vertical and horizontal lines in the yellow paint that indicated where the baggage compartment doors were. The passenger compartment was way up high, judging from where the windows were located. They were so high, it appeared that loading the bus up with people would make the bus top heavy and risk tipping it over at the first curve in the road. The truth was, I had no idea
how high the seats actually were. The windows were tall and they were dark. When I say they were dark, I mean it could have been glossy black paint that covered them rather than tint. You couldn’t even glimpse an outline of who was inside.
Ten seconds after the bus pulled into the parking lot, twin doors pulled apart in the middle and folded to either side like a polka playing accordion. People began cascading down the steps. These weren’t the people I was expecting. They were foreigners. The typical tourist climbing down bus steps in our town was sixty to seventy years old and white. There were always some younger people, as well as an occasional black or Hispanic couple; however, the normal person stepping off the bus was a retired white American. As the passengers began to stream out of the bus in single file, I realized they were all Asian. I’m not great at identifying Asian ethnicities, but I was pretty sure these were Japanese.
This was a good change of fortune. People who can afford to fly across the world normally have more disposable income than the a white, sixty-five year old couple on a fixed income who stopped in town at the start of their budget minded vacation; it meant more money would be discarded on the town. Ten years ago it would have been cash. Today it would be plastic. In the end it was all the same thing; bigger tips for the waitresses, and more profit for the local stores which made eighty percent of their yearly bottom line from tour buses that stopped in town for lunch.
The passengers filed into the diner and seated themselves at the tables. I noticed a couple of oddities as they continued to parade inside. Everyone seemed to be moving slower than normal and everyone was strangely quiet. People on tours are normally boisterous and talkative, moving with excitement and anticipation. This group was different. Maybe it was a quirk of Japanese culture. I barely understand American culture, so Japanese culture was completely out of my arena.
The other thing I noticed was there was a lot of coughing. In the end, I chalked the coughing up to their lungs being unaccustomed to our dry air.
Five minutes after my meal arrived, it was gone. I was about to meander to the register and pay my bill when I heard a crash to my left. I glanced toward the sound and saw a woman laying face down on the floor with shards from two broken glasses strewn around her. A dark liquid and a light liquid were converging together to form a lighter version of the dark and a darker version of the light. Several people stood up from their seats and stared in horror. Two knelt beside her.
Our town of fifteen hundred people is unique because of its isolation. Under normal circumstances, a town our size would never have an ambulance, much less a hospital. Our town had both, but it didn’t make sense to keep specialists on staff or the latest high tech equipment in inventory, so if you were seriously sick or injured, you would get a ride out of town in a helicopter or an airplane to a faraway hospital with better facilities than ours could offer. The goal was stabilization and then transportation elsewhere.
I pondered getting on the radio and calling the ambulance to deal with the issue, but I was here and even though I didn’t know much when it came to medical care, I probably knew as much as the EMT on the ambulance. I had seen him in action a thousand times. It was like watching my eight year old son’s magic shows. A couple minutes and he was out of tricks. In the end, I made the radio call for the ambulance. The call was a formality, C.Y.A. By the time the ambulance arrived, I would have handled the problem.
I assumed she had gotten a little over excited about her appetizer and choked. It wouldn’t be the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. I had performed the Heimlich before. There wasn’t much to it. When I rolled her over, I realized I was dealing with something altogether different. The blood coming from the nose was expected as she had landed face down: blood always flows from a broken nose. What was unexpected was the blood coming from her eyes. Her face was covered with glistening beads of sweat.
I could see her chest rising and falling slightly, a good indication her airway was clear. I placed my index and middle fingers to the side of her neck, feeling for a pulse. The amount of heat emanating from her clammy skin shocked me, but it accounted for the perspiration. At first I couldn’t detect a pulse. After searching, I found it. It was slow and weak, but it was there.
The woman suddenly started into a seizure. At first her hands and arms began twitching. Then her legs began kicking spastically, followed by the distinct grinding of teeth. There was a popping noise as her jaw clenched to extreme pressure and ground back and forth, breaking a tooth. Her entire body began to flop around like a fish tossed onto the bank of a stream, her head thrashing up and down on the tile floor. All I could do was hold her head in an attempt to limit the damage. As suddenly as it started, the seizure stopped.
She lay there completely still except for the nearly imperceptible rise and fall of her slight frame as she labored to breathe. As her chest heaved up and down, I hoped that whatever she had was not contagious. For over two hours, her bus mates had been pumping air she had exhaled in and out of their own lungs. Now my body was inhaling the same air.
I reached with my left hand for the radio microphone which was clipped just below the second button on my shirt. I pushed the transmit button and waited a quarter of a second for the chirp that signified the electronics in the trunk of my car were warmed up and ready to transmit.
“Dispatch, this is Unit two. The female patient is bleeding from her nose and eyes and has an extremely high temperature. She just experienced a seizure. Contact Doc Baker in the emergency room and advise him of what we are sending him.”
“Ten four. I will advise,” the dispatcher came back.
My radio extender chirped again, signifying the end of the transmission. I heard the ambulance siren wailing from the west. Soon, I saw the red and white van pull into the parking lot, make a sweeping left turn, and then back towards the door of the diner. The driver side door opened and Lawrence ungracefully slid out of the seat to the ground.
Everyone else called him Larry, as it was his given name. When I first met him, I assumed Larry was short for Lawrence and started calling him Lawrence. By the time I found out Larry wasn’t short for anything, it was too late. He had already been branded as Lawrence in my mind.
Lawrence made up for his lack of knowledge with an unequaled work ethic. That being said, he never did anything fast. It wasn’t that he didn’t want too. Gravity prevented it. He must have tipped the scales at close to four hundred pounds.
His personal car was a 1998 Saturn with blistering blue paint and a severe case of what I called perma-lean. Lawrence lived about twenty miles away in a small gathering of houses that was referred to as a “town” by the people who lived there. With a population of only twenty-three, it didn’t really meet the qualifications. The daily forty minute drive to and from work, with his massive hulk sitting in the driver seat, had crushed the suspension elements around the front left wheel of the Saturn.
The first time I saw him get out of the car, I assumed it would spring back to level once he stood up. It didn’t. The left front corner appeared to have resigned itself to the fact that it would, forever, live in bowed subservience to the other three wheels on the car.
You could search the globe and never find a nicer, more compassionate guy than Lawrence. He would literally give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. I had seen him do it before. A year ago, we arrived at the scene of a rape at the same time. The victim was sitting naked in the grass in the middle of the park. Her knees were pulled tight to her chest, attempting to cover herself as she rocked back and forth, whimpering. Lawrence walked up to her and took off his shirt. He gently wrapped it around her quivering body as he quietly told her that nobody was going to hurt her anymore. The shirt was enormous on her, but it served its purpose. It restored a small fraction of the dignity that had been ripped from her. That was Lawrence.
I watched as he shuffled to the front door. He stopped at the entrance and reached for the handle, which was a six inch vertical piece of metal bent ninety degrees so
the part you grabbed was parallel to the door. It was probably chrome plated at its inception. Forty years of use had worn the shine away: it no longer had a luxurious silver luster. After the plating wore off, the handle showed its true identity to be nothing more spectacular than aluminum. Granted, it was a hardened alloy, but it was aluminum never the less. Lawrence grasped the handle and pulled the door toward himself, ringing the bell as it opened.
The motion was counter intuitive. Psychologically speaking, entering a business should be as uncomplicated as possible. A person’s forward motion should be enough to push the door inward, making entrance effortless while subliminally making the customer feel welcome. The architect who designed the café had not paid attention in freshman psychology.
As Lawrence’s bulk filled the doorway, I could see that the five day stubble he normally sported had grabbed onto part of his early lunch as it had began a downward plummet from his mouth to the ground. He approached the table where I was knelt down and his face changed. It was only a slight widening of his eyes, but I caught it. My life depended on catching minor changes in people. Minor changes often give away secret intentions. If a person planned to fight, he tended to tense up, fingers would curl and uncurl, his head may roll slightly as he subconsciously loosened his muscles for the ensuing struggle. A person breaking eye contact while recounting an event denoted he was about to tell a lie. Lawrence’s change in visage denoted disbelief. He didn’t realize the gravity of the situation prior to walking through the door.
Lawrence slowly knelt down next to me. It was a feat I had seen a hundred times as he prepared to treat a patient. Each time, I wondered what kept his knees from blowing out. The force on them was tremendous, but they never failed him. He began the minute and a half of tricks he had at his disposal. Once they were completed, he would go back out, roll the gurney in, load up the patient, and be off to the hospital.
