Middletown Apocalypse

by Brett Abell

  Chapter 2

  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 and, like a kid attacking a gift on Christmas morning, made quick work of the clear tape and brown paper on the package. Rationalizing his 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 scooted the mysterious brushed-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 upper third of the door to the hallway, and tried to guess where Fuentes was at this very moment.

  At home, and likely still in bed.

  The box had no markings, and its top was secured with latches equidistant from each corner, four in total, all dogged down tightly.

  Just a glance inside.

  After clicking the catches into the up position and casting multiple furtive glances at the classroom door, Charlie Noble 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 saying went, Curiosity had gotten the best of this cat. 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 that was drilled through with half a dozen dime-sized holes meant to hold test tubes upright and separate from one another. And all six of those holes were currently occupied by stoppered glass vials. However, one of the six was much shorter than the others. So Noble reached in and, with thumb and forefinger, plucked 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 glance, he grabbed a handful of absorbent towels from a nearby drawer, wadded one up, 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 himself convinced that getting rid of the damning evidence was the smart—albeit not necessarily most ethical—thing to do. He quickly hid the glass within the soiled napkins, and those he placed inside the parcel’s original packaging and wadded it all up into a tight little biohazard ball and stuffed that into the one-way neck of a wall-mounted Sharps container.

  With beads of sweat erupting on his forehead and upper lip, and less than an hour until the usual time the professor walked through the door, Charlie Noble began drafting the first lines of a grand lie in his head.

  ***

  A dozen minutes after deciding that Special Courier Butters would be the perfect fall guy, Noble’s salivary glands went into overdrive. Mouth filling with bitter saliva and feeling the first tickle of bile rising in his throat, Charlie Noble put Chastity Jones’s paper, titled Cell Phone Radiofrequency Energy and Its Effect on the Human Body, aside and clamped a hand over his mouth.

  With the courier’s words, Like the plague? playing on a loop in his head, Noble rose shakily from the professor’s desk and staggered toward the eye-washing basin. He made it less than five feet, half of the way there, before the vomit surged up his throat and sprayed between his fingers. A torrent of bile and pumpkin spice latte painted the floor and walls surrounding the alcove containing the waist-high stainless steel sink.

  Heaving and sweating, Noble made it to the sink and emptied everything from his stomach—or so he thought—then reached up and knocked the receiver off the wall-mounted phone and, with vision that had suddenly gone double, managed to punch 9 the requisite two times.

  With long streamers of snot making the slow journey from his nose to the gray tiled floor, Noble kept his forehead pressed against the cool steel lip of the sink and brought the receiver up to his ear.

  After four rings that seemed to drone on for half a lifetime, there was a click and a raspy smoker’s voice said, “Custodial department.”

  As though his intestines were stuck in a taffy stretcher, Noble felt a pain in his gut like he had never experienced. Though he wanted to speak into the mouthpiece, the pressure behind his eyes was making him see the floor and the mucous pooling there in Technicolor—pulsing and expanding and contracting—like some kind of an acid trip flashback. Then he felt his body spasm and again he heard the disembodied male voice say, “Custodial department … this is Hal.”

  Noble swiped away the spittle and snot and flicked it at the floor, where it hit with a sloppy, wet smack. Composing himself, he took a deep breath and managed to choke out four words: “Requesting cleanup in bio.”

  Meanwhile, a floor down and on the opposite side of the six-story building from the biology labs, the barista who had made what would prove to be Charlie Noble’s final pumpkin spice latte was busy preparing yet another. And while the steam wand did its thing, frothing the milk in the stainless steel cup that would top what seemed to Tara like the thirtieth pain-in-the-ass specialty coffee of the morning, she cast her gaze up and watched the clouds scudding by through the glass panes making up the all-encompassing atrium.

  As the machine hissed and spit, the twenty-eight-year-old watched students and teachers file through the main doors and then board the pair of elevators directly across the lobby from her tiny kiosk. And once the milk was light and fluffy, she turned back to Dean Kuntz, looked him in the eye, and while coaxing the topping from the cup with a metal spoon, asked in as cheerful a manner as the early hour allowed, “Cinnamon? Nutmeg? Or both?”

  The dean swiped his card and exhaled as he keyed in his PIN. “Nutmeg will suffice,” he said curtly, as if such an inconsequential decision was beneath him. Then, without putting a dime in Tara’s tip jar or even faking a half-smile, the miserable little man stalked off toward the nearby bank of elevators, briefcase in hand, presumably on his way to go do whatever it was that university deans did at the butt crack of dawn.

  Watching the dean’s wavy reflection in the stainless steel, Tara gave her espresso machine a thorough wipe down, envisioning the man as a kid pulling the wings off flies. Then, realizing that her sleeves were hiked up mid-bicep and concluding that the black and gray tattooed skulls and dragons covering both arms from wrist to shoulder were likely the source of the dean’s ire. She muttered an expletive and, as per rules-and-regs, pulled them both down to where they concealed the forbidden ink.

  Staring out at the cars beginning to line up for the parking lot and knowing that her morning was just about to go from zero to sixty, a flash of yellow caught her attention. Focusing on the highly polished pane of glass to her fore she saw reflected there an overall-clad custodian pushing a wheeled yellow bucket and mop into one of the elevators at her back.

  Chapter 3

  Lee Riker, or Leland as it said on his birth certificate, was rudely awakened when the Greyhound bus he’d boarded in Atlanta came to a complete and lurching stop. He opened his eyes a crack and peeked
at his neighbor’s watch, saw that it was twenty of seven, and closed them again.

  “Fucking dumb ass drivers,” crowed the middle-aged woman with the timepiece. “Where do they get their licenses … out of a gawd damn Cracker Jack box?”

  Through parted lids, Riker saw the woman, who smelled like he imagined a house full of cats might, stand up and walk her gaze over the other passengers, a full three-sixty over both shoulders, and then settle it directly on him. And just when he thought she might see he was sleeping and sit back down and leave him be, her eyes panned forward and she stared daggers and started stabbing her arthritic finger at the bus driver. “If I wanted to see the entire Ohio countryside at a snail’s pace I’d have rented a clown car and driven myself.”

  Doubtful, thought Riker, trying to tune out the woman who was obviously enjoying playing to her captive audience. In fact, she had made it her job to make him and the other passengers listen to her bitch about one thing or another since boarding the bus at the Cincinnati depot. And though he wanted to open his window and stuff her out face-first, he instead shifted his six-foot-three-inch frame to face the window and tried to get comfortable in the seat designed with the average-sized traveler in mind. Feeling the conjoined seats vibrate when the woman plopped down, he closed his eyes and visualized palm trees and softly crashing surf and basked in the momentary silence.

  But his bliss was cut short when the pneumatic hiss of air brakes engaging erased any chance of him falling back to sleep. Sweat dries, blood clots, and bones break. Suck it up, buttercup. Acting on the words pounded into his gray matter by a frothing-at-the-mouth drill instructor years ago, he sat up straight and stretched his arms. Next, he rolled his shoulders and popped every vertebra in his neck, prompting the woman to start bitching about how certain sounds make her skin crawl. Join the club, thought Riker. Finally, pretending the woman was that drill instructor barking in his face, he completely ignored her and stared out the window at the hectares of brown dirt stretching away toward the distant horizon. He saw the raised railroad tracks the bus was sitting atop cutting between level plats of fenced-in dirt, presumably cornfields let to go fallow for winter. Riker let his gaze follow the two parallel razor-straight lines of polished steel all the way east until they disappeared into a pewter smudge of clouds far off in the distance.

  The motor coach was still rocking slightly from the abrupt stop when the brakes hissed a second time and Riker felt it lurch forward again. With his body swaying to-and-fro as it bumped sloppily over the tracks, he leaned forward and stole a look past his cat-lady captor and spied a rundown four-pump filling station complete with the obligatory attached quickie mart, its red and white paint chipped and faded with age. Sitting on a sea of dull gray asphalt and ringed by a dozen late-model cars in various states of disrepair, the only thing new and shiny about the place was the red-and-black Texaco sign rising above its flat roof.

  Wondering why the bus had left the interstate, Riker watched the station slip from view and, as if the driver had been reading his mind, the overhead speaker came alive with a hiss of white noise. She announced that due to a fatal accident on the interstate, they would be making a detour that would add an extra thirty minutes of travel time to the trip.

  While Cat Lady spewed another string of expletives, the driver went on in a cheerful voice about how sorry she was and that the delay would be noted on the arrival boards for anyone awaiting them at their final destination. Which was information that did very little to placate Riker, whose final destination was some distance beyond Oxford, east by north if his memory served. And that Greyhound didn’t see fit to service Middletown—a town of roughly fifty thousand Ohioans—the insult added to that injury meant that for him, a cramped taxi ride was in the not-too-distant future.

  Resigned to the fact that he wasn’t going to be in Middletown for another ninety minutes or so, Riker folded his hands in his lap and revisited boot camp.

  Chapter 4

  Middletown University

  The bell dinged at the second floor. All alone in the elevator, Hal Crawford, acting head of MU’s custodial staff, waited patiently as the car slowed and settled with a slight bounce. Once the doors parted, he pushed the industrial-sized wheeled bucket out ahead of him. With gentle course corrections delivered via the mop handle gripped in his calloused hands, he shoved off to the right and, with the ding and grating sounds of the elevator doors closing a dozen feet behind, negotiated the ninety-degree right and set out on the long walk down the godawful orange carpet. Along the way, he passed a wall-mounted clear plastic box emblazoned with a big white sticker that contained red universally understood icons and instructions in several different languages. Nestled inside the box was a defibrillator connected to a pair of paddles by thin, coiled cords. As Hal stopped to drink from the nearby fountain, he saw that the device’s red power light was illuminated, indicating that it was carrying a full charge. Two birds, he thought, making himself a mental note to initial the monthly inspection form for this particular unit once he returned to his office.

  As he continued down the hall, pushing the bucket ahead of him carefully lest he slop the bleach water and risk the orange floor covering being replaced by something even more repulsive, his attention was drawn to the window and the queue of cars pulling into the secured parking lot. And by the time he reached the far end of the biology wing and was unclipping his key ring from his belt, he had witnessed the yellow-and-black-striped bar open and close, allowing a dozen vehicles entry. Still the line had grown longer and now snaked along the west side of the building and curled around back.

  Working his fingers over the ring, Hal found the oversized passkey by feel, worked it into the lock and opened the door. And as he backed into the darkened room, pulling the bucket after, the automatic overhead lights simultaneously flared to life and the bitter reek of vomit hit him full on in the face.

  Reflexively, Hal covered his nose with his T-shirt, fished a rubber stop from his back pocket, and jammed it under the door, trapping it two-thirds of the way open. Then, breathing through his mouth, he traversed the room and wheeled the bucket expertly around the lake of yellowish ammonia-scented liquid and saw the responsible party. Revealed in little slices—like degrees cut off a compass—he first saw the waffle-patterned lug soles on a pair of well-oiled leather hiking boots. One more half step past the professor’s wide desk, he walked his gaze from the boots, up the brown corduroy pants’ legs, to the hem of the white lab coat, and realized he was looking at a man kneeling and hunched over the emergency eye wash sink. Everything from his shoulders on up was hidden from view inside the stainless steel alcove. There was more vomit here than he’d seen in one place before. It coated the floor and walls, and yellow tendrils of bile were still making the lazy journey from the front of the sink to the gray tiled floor.

  Based on the man’s size, Hal knew at first glance it wasn’t Professor Fuentes. Much too big. His best guess was that he was looking at a student teaching assistant trying to ride out the mother of all hangovers.

  “You called me for this?” Hal said, a trace of indignation in his voice.

  The man was unresponsive.

  So Hal upped the ante by moving closer and tapping him on the back. Three little jabs between the shoulder blades.

  Still nothing.

  So he gripped the man’s shoulder and shook him gently.

  Zilch. Zip. Nada.

  Finally, at the top of his voice, Hal bellowed, “One too many Irish Car Bombs at Horse Feathers?” Which was a place Hal had never been, but knew from eavesdropping on student conversation was a popular after-class hangout.

  Bingo.

  The man started to moan. The harsh sound, amplified by where his head was resting, lasted a couple of seconds, during which every hair on Hal’s arms stood to attention. The noise continued as the man hauled himself up then lessened in volume somewhat as he took a drunken step away from the sink.

  Hal hustled over to the oak desk and pulled the stu
rdy wooden chair over, the legs etching a pair of lines in the vomit.

  “You better sit, buddy,” Hal ordered.

  Now wavering on shaky legs, the slightly overweight fella turned and emitted a sound kind of like a cornered animal’s worried yelp. Which was wholly inappropriate considering the second Hal saw the man’s bared teeth and lifeless, glazed-over eyes, it was he who felt trapped. There was a split second where Hal entertained the idea of talking the fella into splashing cold water on his pallid face and telling him to go home and sleep it off. But that thought was edged out a nanosecond later, when the primeval lizard part of Hal’s brain screamed fight or flight and, of course, flight won out. However, as the synapses were firing off impulses to get his arms and legs pumping, his leaden extremities weren’t processing the signals in any kind of organized manner.

  Instead, he looked like a drunken break-dancer as he back-pedaled away from the growling student. Finally, a couple of things went right and he got his torso turned around, but still his feet and legs were a half-beat behind in responding. But that didn’t matter, because the soles of his outdoor boots were no kind of answer to the saffron yellow mix of bile and half-digested four-dollar coffee coating the floor.

  In the end, Hal fell flat on his face and his momentum carried him through the morass in a slide that would have made Charlie Hustle proud. Still in flight mode and only two seconds removed from looking a monster from his nightmares straight in the face, Hal willed himself up on all fours. Finally, looking like a water bug on an oil slick, he got his hands and knees moving but only managed to get himself winded before, once again, pancaking to the floor.