by Ed Kurtz
“NO!” Ami bellowed, and she sank her teeth into the cop’s wrist, breaking the skin and drawing blood. The cop wailed, brought his injured hand up to his chest while punching her square in the chin with the other, but Ami rolled with the strike and drove the crown of her head hard into the EMT’s solar plexus. The guy moaned breathlessly, dropped onto his side. Ami drew her legs up, feeling the broken bones scraping fragmented ends against one another, clenched her teeth and hoisted herself up on her one good leg. The cop was reaching for his taser—or was it his gun?—but Ami moved faster, threw a punch at his nose and exploded the cartilage in a fountain of thick blood. There was no use telling them. They wouldn’t listen.
Not until it was too fucking late.
Ami pogo-sticked over the blackened grass, the EMT crying bloody murder behind her, huffing and groaning as she closed the distance between her and the last carrier of Leon’s special friend. People were shouting all around her now and men came scuttling from the circus-crazy lights of the emergency vehicles, demanding she stop were she was.
“She’ll kill you all,” Ami rasped. No one heard her.
A barrier formed quickly—two paramedics standing tall in front of the woman as a firefighter and a woman in no uniform at all lifted the gurney at either end. Though she was sure her knee was about to give out, Ami hopped two more paces and drove an undercut into one man’s paunchy stomach while the other reached to grab her. She scratched at his face and he seized handfuls of her torn shirt and they went down together, growling and snatching at one another.
“Get her, get her,” someone panted, like it was a schoolyard fight.
The men reached the melee, and one of the policemen drew out his handcuffs. Another nervously fingered the grip of his sidearm.
“What the hell happened here?” a firefighter asked of no one in particular.
“Fuckin’ PCP,” the nervous cop offered, a foregone conclusion. “It’s always drugs.”
Ami found herself yanked away from the paramedic, no longer the main threat, and thrown roughly to the ground. A knee jabbed into the small of her back and her broken leg twisted half-way around. She screamed. The cop cuffed her wrists behind her back.
“Stop—she’s sick! She’ll infect you, all of you!”
“We know, we know,” one of the policeman jeered. “But we got to deal with the vampires in the school first, and the aliens who abducted the president.”
He laughed wetly. Ami started to cry, which only made her angrier. She didn’t want to break down in front of these people.
“I’m not crazy,” she sobbed, her mouth full of loamy soil and dead grass. “That woman is contagious. I’m not crazy.”
The prick only lasted a second, but she didn’t see it coming. They’d injected her with something. That, with the cuffs and the knee still in her back, and she was done. Soon enough Naila’s body would be discovered, and if the pattern held nobody would believe her about that, either.
“Don’t worry,” a nasally voice poured into her ear. “We’re going to the hospital. They know all about sick people there.”
Talking to her like she was an idiot, an addict in the throes of panicked delusion.
“They don’t know about this,” she grunted.
“Sure they do.”
Ami turned her head, slowly as to not alarm the men holding her down, and whimpered when she saw Bess. The dog was sitting up, panting and whining. A firefighter was scratching her chest, down on one knee. She looked anxious. She seemed to want them to understand, too.
A roaring crash interrupted her thoughts; a column of flame shot up from the school’s roof as the second floor collapsed onto itself in a shower of sparks and timber and billowing smoke. A squadron of firefighters backed away from it in a hurry, their massive hoses still aimed uselessly at the blaze, and the man with Bess swept her up in his arms, away to safety.
He ran right by Ami, right by where the woman on the gurney had been, loaded into a waiting ambulance by now. In the light of the fire, she could see how unnaturally green the dog’s eyes were.
She screamed.
And, not too long after that, the drug she was shot up with took its hold, and Ami dropped into deep, dark-blue sleep.
Ed Kurtz is the author of A Wind of Knives, Control, Dead Trash, and the forthcoming crime novel The Forty-Two. His short fiction has appeared in Thuglit, Needle, Shotgun Honey, Beat to a Pulp, and numerous anthologies. He lives in Texas where he is at work on his next novel. Find Ed online at www.edkurtz.net
