Time Clock Hero

by Donovan, Spikes

  Chief Cobb opened his eyes wide and gestured with his hands out, trying to hurry the discussion. “Dr. Cain at St. David’s, and he what?”

  “I took the syringe found on June Buckner, the one with my fingerprints on it, and gave it to Dr. Marcus Cain to analyze. He used a sample on a live rat. He told me the rat went … well, it went June Buckner on him.”

  “And you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying that he thinks a virus could have been added to the Psyke – and if there’s rioting at St. David’s, it’s probably viral. Same thing that happened over in Tusculum. How many times do you want me to say it?”

  Chief Cobb picked up the phone. “Linda, get the CDC on the line. And please hurry. Tell them we have an incident.” He hung up the phone and stood up, rubbing his eyes and scratching the back of his neck. He looked at Phoenix and shook his head. “You better be right about this. Get ready and meet me down in the parking lot because you two are going with me.”

  “We need to talk to Dr. Marcus Cain,” Phoenix said. “Can you call the officer in charge and have them round him up? His office is in the Lutrell building.”

  Phoenix and Alaia, with their briefcases in hand, met Chief Dobbs and a driver on the ground floor behind the police station. They climbed into the rear seat of the chief’s white Chevrolet Malibu and buckled themselves in, setting their briefcases on the small space between them.

  They reached St. David’s twenty minutes later, coming onto campus from Belmont Boulevard, pulling into the circular drive. They stopped behind the S.W.A.T. van, a dark blue box-like truck, that had arrived only minutes before. Police cars blocked the drive up near the library. An ambulance drove away from the campus, crossed the grassy area, fishtailing, spinning its wheels, and it bounced over the curb onto Belmont, nearly tipping over as it sped away. Other ambulances, some small vans, others larger, box-like vehicles, were parked on the sidewalk in front of the Lutrell building with their lights flashing.

  The sound of gunfire rattled out, almost shaking the air, as Phoenix exited the vehicle. He jumped when he heard it, and he instinctively reached for his pistol; and Alaia, who’d climbed out behind him, equally alert, pressed in close to him. Another burst of gunfire, bright and staccato, tore through the air, coming from the left. Then Alaia pulled her thirty-eight.

  Chief Cobb led them forward across the grassy area at a slow jog. They crossed the acre lawn in front of the Lutrell building heading for the front steps.

  A young man, thin, wearing a blood-stained tee shirt and dark blue jeans, came running towards them with his left hand pressed tightly against his right arm. Blood ran from his shoulder and streamed down to his hand. He screamed as he ran, crying, “They’ll kill me! They’ll kill me!” Chief Cobb tried to stop him, but the boy veered to the right, dodging the chief as quickly and as deftly as any wide receiver on the field, and continued on towards Belmont without slowing.

  “Stop!” Chief Cobb yelled.

  Nothing.

  “Stop! Or I’ll shoot!” Cobb raised his weapon and then lowered it. “Hell, I ain’t gonna shoot.”

  Alaia grabbed Phoenix’s arm. “I’m right behind you.”

  “Gee, that’s good to know, little miss I’m-on-top-of-that,” Phoenix said with an incredulous look in his eyes. He called for Chief Cobb. “Hey! Through the front doors – that’s where I need to go. A little back-up wouldn’t hurt!”

  “I need to find out what’s going on!” Chief Cobb yelled grimly. “You know what you need to do – why, I don’t know – so just do it.”

  “How do we know Dr. Cain is even in there?” Alaia asked.

  “That’s the place to start. Let’s go.”

  Chief Cobb and his driver went left towards the side of the building, in the direction of the gunfire. Phoenix and Alaia went right, crossed the sidewalk, and ran up the steps to the entrance of the Lutrell building. Splattered blood and tiny bits of flesh, small particles that seemed to move like hungry maggots through manager’s-special hamburger, covered the glass in the doors, slowly dripping downwards towards the floor.

  “Not good,” Phoenix said.

  Alaia looked to her right and left, and then through the gore-covered glass.

  “Pull the right hand door open,” Phoenix said, wrestling with his fear and apprehension. “I’ll go in, and you cover my rear with something other than your hands.”

  Alaia smirked, and she pulled the door open with lightning speed. Phoenix ran inside, nearly slipping in a pool of dark, red, syrupy blood. Alaia followed him, avoiding the mess by jumping over it, and her eyes scanned the halls as if her life depended on what she might or might not see.

  Another student, bleeding from the side of his face, came around a corner from the right, from an open door, screaming, heading for the exit.

  More gunfire pounded the air outside.

  Phoenix waved for Alaia to follow him to the left, towards the bathrooms and the stairwell. In front of the men’s restroom lay the body of a woman, her dress torn to shreds, the skin on her face and stomach ripped and flayed like she’d taken a beating with a whip made of barbed wire. A pool of blood oozed towards the restroom, disappearing under the dark wooden door.

  The sound of running came from the stairwell above them and another student, one apparently unhurt, came hurtling down the stairs. The blonde-haired girl looked at Phoenix and stopped, trying to catch her breath.

  “Nashville Police!” Phoenix yelled. “You’re okay! Get down here, now!”

  The girl grabbed the railing and did as she was told, tripping and falling down the last few steps until Phoenix caught her.

  “What’s happening here?” Phoenix asked her, as he looked up the staircase.

  The girl couldn’t breathe. The tendons in her neck stuck out, and she pressed her elbows into her sides, trying to make herself as small as possible. She shook her head, covered her face, and started to sob. “They’re clawing and biting people! I … I hid in the closet … I hid in the closet!” She removed her hand from her eyes and she started shaking. “We’ve got to get out of---”

  “Alaia,” Phoenix said. “Take her out and keep her safe. I’ve got this.”

  Phoenix, Alaia, and the frightened girl turned when more gunfire broke out. The door at the end of the hall swung open, slamming against the wall, and another student, this one splattered with blood, ran inside, looking frantically at the lock. He didn’t scream, but he struggled to catch his breath.

  Phoenix called out. “Nashville Police!”

  The student turned around. “We’ve got to lock the door!”

  Phoenix hurried over to the student and stopped. He looked out through the glass in the door. Bodies lay everywhere, some missing arms, others missing legs, all probably the result of heavy shotgun blasts. Three or four police officers remained still on the ground. Other students, walking erratically, with their heads lolling and bobbling, reminded him of June Buckner, his wife Tracy, and Dr. Demachi.

  He could see Chief Cobb forming a small perimeter in a light cloud of smoke. Six or so officers stood with him, side by side; and students, students covered with blood, struggled to break through Cobb’s defensive position. Some crawled like wounded rats, others ran like savage dogs; but they came on relentlessly, oblivious to the shouts of the officers who called for them to stop.

  Phoenix called for Alaia. When she came up, he asked her to keep the two students safe. He ran up the stairs with his thirty-eight pointed forward and his eyes and ears open, listening for what, he did not know.

  As he neared the second floor, Phoenix heard the sound of scuffling and moaning, and he could barely contain the fear ripping through his nervous system. He’d heard those sounds before, dreading what would come next. But he heard no cries for help, he heard no screams.

  In a flash, Phoenix flew up the last few steps and turned towards the sickening sound he’d just heard. A person on the floor, lying in his own blood, squirmed and tried to pull himself towards Phoenix, growling and shakin
g his head like a dog with its head over a glass-covered dish full of Alpo.

  Phoenix walked slowly towards the student, careful to keep watch on the surroundings through his peripheral vision. All around him, except for the student at his feet, he could hear nothing except silence. He got within a few feet of the student, noticed a leg dangling by tendons, quivering and bloody, and he raised his weapon and fired. The bullet impacted the student’s skull, and the body fell still.

  Phoenix turned towards Dr. Marcus Cain’s office, hurrying, and found the door partly opened. He called for Dr. Cain and received no answer. He pushed the door open slowly, cringing with the creaking of the old hinges.

  “Is somebody there?” a voice called out.

  “Dr. Cain?” Phoenix shouted. “You’re safe – I think. You can come out.”

  Phoenix pushed the door back and saw the closet door being opened, and then he saw a face peering out. “It’s me, Dr. Cain. You can come out now.”

  Dr. Cain emerged from his hiding place. “I have the test results back, if you’re still interested. But we really don’t have any more questions, do we?”

  Chapter 11

  The horror stood out against the green grass, and Phoenix was struck motionless and faintly ill by the site of the dead. He stared silently across the campus between the Lutrell building and the student center, carefully cradling his small revolver in the sweaty palm of his right hand. The smell of death – he’d smelled it before, something he could ever quite describe in any meaningful and coherent way – seemed to hit him square in the center of his forehead as well as in the middle of his gut. The officers down below in the garden busied themselves setting up stakes and rolling yellow tape, marking off the area for safety reasons. Most of the deadly activity was confined to a small area.

  “Something like you see in the movies,” Dr. Cain said, standing next to Phoenix on the steps of Lutrell. “Sure, you watch it and think, okay, this will never happen.”

  Chief Cobb, his nice suit splattered red from shots fired against assailants barely two feet in front of him, walked over to where Phoenix was standing. He approached Dr. Cain. “You must be Dr. Cain. I’d shake your hand but, as you can see, I need gallon of alcohol and a bath. What do you have for us?”

  “Viral, no doubt,” Dr. Cain said. “Mixed with, of all things, Psyke.”

  “Is there a chance this is Dr. Carson’s work?”

  Dr. Cain pressed his lips together and shuffled his feet. “The science part of me says, yes. This looks like something only he could make work. The other part, the carnage, tells me otherwise. Dr. Carson is not a killer. In fact, he’s just the opposite. Have you ever considered that---?”

  “Considered what?” Phoenix asked.

  “That maybe somebody wants us to believe that Dr. Carson is responsible for this?”

  “You wouldn’t mind coming in for questioning, would you, Dr. Cain?” Chief Cobb asked.

  “Oh, no I wouldn’t – and I’ll gladly comply,” Dr. Cain said. “And that rat I was testing? It looks as if a student other than the girl assigned to it had handled it prior to all of this.”

  “And that’s how the virus jumped?” Phoenix asked. “By the rat?”

  “I came back from an early lunch and saw someone bandaging a student’s hand,” Dr. Cain said, with his hand on his chin. “The guy said he got bit by one of the rats and, naturally, I just assumed he’d been bit by one of the fifty or so we keep in the lab. They do bite sometimes. So, I went into my office to grade papers and, an hour a later, I heard screaming, so I opened the door. And that’s when I saw a student being attacked, bitten in the throat, by the student wearing the bandage. I saw blood going all over the place, so I closed the door and called the police. The rest of the story you know.”

  Phoenix, Dr. Cain, and Chief Cobb looked at the mess in front of them. Four police officers, six paramedics, and thirty of more students lay dead, all of them by bites or gunshot wounds to the head. In a minute, there’d be over a hundred police officers and every paramedic in Davidson County, including every reporter ever spawned, on the campus of St. David’s University. Sirens could already be heard wailing, almost mourning, coming from every point of the compass.

  Alaia came jogging up the sidewalk from the left, waving and calling out for Phoenix. She came quickly through the grass, keeping herself tight up against the building, trying her best to avoid the unpleasant mess. Then she came up the steps. “So, this is the virus, then? The Psyke virus, from your syringe?”

  “Not my syringe,” Phoenix said. “From Albin’s blood sample, or – heck, I don’t know anymore. June injected me, but I don’t have the virus. Twilight Zone stuff.”

  “And how is it spread?”

  “I didn’t get infected by handling it,” Dr. Cain said. “The rat must have bit a student.”

  Alaia nodded.

  Phoenix looked back out over the now-restricted area, rubbing his hand over the top of his head. “Wait, wait, wait, wait. Can we account for every person? I remember that kid who ran past us when we first got here. Where’s he?”

  “Oh crap,” Chief Cobb said, closing his eyes and shaking his head. He pulled out his phone. “Calling the governor.”

  Dr. Cain bit his lower lip, wrinkled his brows, and shook his head. “I shouldn’t have used the rat.”

  “We need the National Guard out here,” Chief Cobb yelled in his deepest and loudest voice. The officers, including the S.W.A.T. team members down on the ground, looked up. He sped down the steps and waved his men over to him. A minute later, half of the officers hurried away, heading towards the front of the Lutrell building. The chief made a call on his cell phone, probably to the governor.

  Reporters showed up first, some coming from the direction of the student center, others from the front, but all of them came running. Other police officers arrived, driving up the sidewalks and onto the grassy areas, their tires digging ruts into the soft, wet ground. Ambulances brought up the rear.

  Chief Cobb ended the call just as other law enforcement officials joined him. He waved for Phoenix, Alaia, and Dr. Cain to hurry down from the steps of the Lutrell building. “The governor has already activated the National Guard, seemingly, on the advice of the Center for Disease Control. He knew about this before we did. They’re quarantining everything this side of Green Hills, Granny White, and Woodmont. Everybody, including the paramedics, are to stay outside of the perimeter.” He looked at one of his sergeants. “Make it happen, now,” he said firmly.

  The sergeant turned. Chief Cobb grabbed him by the arm. “If anybody crosses that line, for any reason, they’re to be shot – and that’s not my call: that’s straight from the governor. Tell them this thing was a terrorist attack and that bioweapons were used. That ought to keep them back. The CDC is on its way with a team. Just hold until they arrive.”

  The sergeant nodded and hurried away.

  “The governor knew about this before we did?” Phoenix asked.

  “He had the CDC and the Guard in motion before we got the call,” Chief Cobb said. “No biggie – we got the call a minute later, that’s all. The CDC is already watching Tennessee because of the June Buckner incident and after what happened to---”

  “Did somebody call the CDC or the governor from this campus?” Alaia asked. “Kind of odd if you ask me. Seems like NPD would’ve gotten the call first.”

  “I called NPD,” Dr. Cain explained, “just as soon as I saw blood.” He reached for his phone, hit the home button, and scrolled through his calls. “Here it is, the call to you guys – twelve-thirty, a one-minute call.”

  “Do you know who patient zero is for this event?” Phoenix asked. “You said you saw one student attacking another in the hall. Can you identify that student?”

  Dr. Cain bit his lip. His forehead, wrinkled enough, wrinkled some more. He put his hands together, almost as if he was praying. “I never saw the young man’s face. But he had on a Titan’s cap and a white tee shirt. Aeropostale, I think. Yes, Aer
opostale – I’m sure of it.”

  “I shot a guy wearing a Titan’s cap,” Chief Cobb said.

  “Do you remember where you dropped him?” Phoenix asked.

  “Look, we need to stand down and wait for the CDC,” Chief Cobb said, looking askance at Dr. Cain, quickly, and then turning away.

  Alaia cut her eyes over to Phoenix, and Phoenix caught her gaze and held it. Then he nodded towards the body-littered grass. They both moved quickly, hurrying down the steps together, tuning out the shouts of Chief Cobb telling them to stop, and they crawled under the yellow tape.

  Chief Cobb and Dr. Cain came right under the tape behind them, Chief Cobb waving off the sergeant and nearly coming to verbal blows with Alaia and Phoenix.

  “Where were you standing, exactly, Cobb?” Phoenix asked. “I thought I saw you here, near the big guy – the fat one.”

  Chief Cobb rolled his eyes and carefully picked his way through the tangled mass of bodies with Phoenix behind him. He reached down and, with his two bare hands, and with his massive muscles bulging in his arms and back, he flipped the fat guy over. “Guy with the Titan’s cap.”

  A gunshot wound to the head, two or three holes in the chest. Face pasted red, mouth open like a wild animal’s, eyes completely redded-out like a pair of pirate’s rubies.

  Dr. Cain and Alaia tiptoed through the mess and stopped next to Phoenix. Dr. Cain said, “Same guy. He’s wearing the same Aeropostale shirt. No question. Wish I could see his face more clearly but there’s nothing left of it.”

  Phoenix pushed Chief Cobb to the side. He tried turning the body over, straining with every bit of his one hundred seventy-five pounds. Chief Cobb sighed and helped. With the body flipped back side up, Phoenix went through the victim’s pockets and found a wallet. He tossed it to Alaia. “Here you go, Ms. Personal Assistant.”

  Alaia shot Phoenix a dirty look and went through the wallet. “Vernon King, twenty-eight, lives in an apartment in Murfreesboro, Tennessee,” she said. “No student ID.”