Frenzied - A Suspense Thriller Read online

  All of the lights had been shut off. The foyer and areas beyond were dense with shadows.

  Although Deacon didn’t see any staff, piano music filtered from the partly opened ballroom doors, across the wide expanse of the foyer. The music was almost comically off-key. It jangled Deacon’s nerves.

  “That’s a terrible rendition of Moonlight Sonata,” Emily said. “Speaking as someone forced to master it at the age of ten. It sounds like whoever’s playing has had way too much to drink.”

  Deacon noticed that Dr. Bailey was holding some sort of recording device, the gadget about the size of a deck of cards. Her eyes were wide and alert.

  “We’re wasting time,” Officer McBride said. He strode away from their group and approached the ballroom doorway. “It’s only some staff getting drunk, no doubt. I’m going in there to bust up these shenanigans.”

  “Hang on, kid,” Jim said, but the officer ignored him.

  Deacon hung back, and the rest of the group kept their distance, too.

  Badge in hand, Officer McBride stood on the ballroom’s threshold and shouted: “Roswell Police Department! Identify yourselves!”

  Deacon had to hand it to the kid, he had balls. He’d been like that, too, during his rookie days on the force, and even for some time after, until he’d had the experience that sharpened his awareness of his own mortality. A bullet clipping your heart tended to shift your perspective.

  But as if a switch had been flicked in the ballroom, the music instantly ceased. Deacon waited for someone to speak, in the meek tones that ordinary citizens used when addressing the police, but he heard only scattered gibberish. It raised the hackles at the back of his neck.

  “. . . playing keep . . . playing keep . . . playing keep . . .”

  “. . . cops for us coming . . . for us cops . . .”

  “. . . not our kind . . . not our . . .“

  Something inside the ballroom screeched. It was a sound a wild animal might have produced, and it wasn’t a cry of fear, or retreat. It was a shriek of primal rage, and hearing it made Deacon want to turn tail and flee the building, but he stood firm.

  “What the heck is that?” Dr. Bailey asked.

  The piano music resumed. Playing at a more frenetic cadence but no less sloppy, keys being struck carelessly.

  “That’s it!” Officer McBride drew his service revolver and plunged inside.

  “Dammit, kid,” Jim said, and went after him.

  Drawing his Glock, Deacon moved forward, too. His heart whammed, undoubtedly on the brink of exceeding the safe zone his cardiologist had advised, but a rush of adrenaline powered his muscles.

  He arrived at the threshold of the ballroom and squinted into the shadows.

  The area was huge, and a couple dozen round tables and lots of chairs had been arranged in preparation for some upcoming affair. On the other side of the room, opposite the doorway, Deacon glimpsed the grand piano, and its seated player: it looked like the clubhouse manager, a middle-aged woman he’d met many times. She had a quick smile and was always gracious with his team.

  She was hunched over the piano keys playing as if her existence depended on it, faster and faster.

  There were others present, too.

  Three people were gathered on the square, middle section of the ballroom set aside for dancing—and they were dancing. Two of them, a man and a woman, were performing a strange dance that had a vague relation to a classic waltz. It was difficult for him to know what exactly they were doing because he was distracted by the spectacle of both of them being entirely naked.

  “What the fuck?” Jim asked, in a whisper.

  The third member, a petite young woman with long jet-black hair, wore a tight red dress. Barefoot, elevated on her toes like ballerina practicing pointe technique, she spun in a circle on the corner of the dance floor. Spinning, spinning, spinning, hair wreathing her face. An ordinary person might have lost their balance, but the woman whirled with the practiced grace of a dancer or gymnast.

  She is a gymnast, Deacon realized. He recognized the young lady’s face. A year or so ago she had participated in the trials for the Olympics, and the community had made a big deal about it, had held viewing parties and draped a congratulatory banner across Main Street.

  No one was safe from the scourge tearing through South Haven.

  He and Jim edged forward into the room, Bailey and Emily close behind.

  “Infected,” Deacon said in a low voice to Bailey. “Every one of them. They’ve got the red eyes, the inflammation. The wacky behavior.”

  Nodding, Bailey continued to record, sweeping her device across her field of vision.

  “What the heck is this?” Officer McBride moved toward the trio. “Cease this foolishness and identify yourselves!”

  The gymnast screamed, head thrown back, mouth wide. It was the same nerve-shredding howl as before, and Deacon wanted to clap his hands over his ears.

  But then things got really crazy.

  The gymnast stopped her revolutions. She rushed Officer McBride, moving in a crimson flash. The startled cop went to raise his gun, but she vaulted off the floor and leaped onto the shelf of his shoulders, locking her muscular legs around his neck and grabbing his head in her hands.

  McBride let out a choked cry of surprise and tried to pry her off. Screaming, she twisted his head with savage force. Deacon heard bones crack as the man’s neck snapped like a pretzel.

  A weak cry bubbling in his throat, McBride sank to the floor.

  Jim yelled and started firing the Mossberg.

  The woman did a somersault onto a nearby table with breathtaking agility. Glasses crashed and shattered against the floor. The woman did a backflip onto another table. She crouched like a tigress and regarded them with wild eyes, the blisters on her face seeming to glow like embers.

  “Out . . . out . . . out!” she screamed.

  She leapt again, and snagged the chandelier. She swung on it as if it were an uneven bar, dress rippling through the air.

  “Get under the tables!” Deacon yelled, but both Emily and Bailey had already taken cover under a nearby table, the tablecloth partially hiding them from view.

  The waltzing couple was charging them, too. They snarled like rabid beasts.

  The manager continued to play the piano, fingers flying.

  Deacon grabbed a nearby chair and hurled it at the naked dancers. It hit them full on, breaking their charge, and they staggered back drunkenly.

  Jim fired at the gymnast. She flipped away from the chandelier, spinning through the air and landing on another table. As the shotgun boomed, chips of plaster rained down over them, but the woman scrambled so rapidly from one table to the next that he couldn’t hit her. Issuing that blood-curdling scream, she bounded out of the ballroom and vanished in the shadowed foyer.

  “Shit!” Jim shouted.

  The dancing couple swung around and dashed in the opposite direction. They broke through a set of double doors at the other end of the room.

  The manager kept playing the piano, oblivious to the abandonment by her pack mates.

  “Can we secure her?” Dr. Bailey asked, indicating the woman.

  Deacon glanced at Jim, who nodded, bits of plaster in his beard.

  They cautiously approached the woman. Deacon withdrew the pair of plastic handcuffs from his belt.

  “Ma’am,” he said, slowly. “Please come with us. We don’t want to hurt you.”

  She didn’t even look in their direction. She bent over the keyboard and muttered her gibberish mantra, her hair in her eyes. Her fingers were a blur on the keys.

  “Playing keep . . . playing keep . . . playing keep . . .”

  “We need you to come with us,” Deacon said. “You aren’t well. We’ll help you.”

  “Playing keep!”

  When Deacon touched her arm, she snarled and snapped at him like a feral cat, and he pulled away his hand just in time to avoid getting bitten.

  “Christ, we should let her keep playin
g the damned thing,” Jim said. “She’s not going anywhere and she isn’t violent like the others.”

  “What do you say, doc?” Deacon asked Bailey. “This is your show.”

  “We can keep her under observation in here, so long as she doesn’t try to hurt anyone and she lets us take a blood sample.” She glanced around the room. “I’ll need to establish negative pressure. Since there were three other infected individuals in this area there could be contaminants in the air.”

  Deacon wished he had been wearing a dust mask. “Fair enough.”

  “Maybe I can persuade this lady to play a different, easier song,” Emily said. She chuckled, half-heartedly. “She’s been butchering Beethoven.”

  Deacon, Jim at his side, went to check on the young cop. McBride lay sprawled between a couple of chairs, head twisted at an ugly angle, dead eyes staring at the ceiling.

  “Just a kid,” Jim said. “Fuck.”

  Deacon knelt beside the body, and closed the dead man’s eyes.

  It wasn’t the first corpse they had seen that day, and his gut told him that more were coming.

  A lot more.

  Chapter 17

  Dr. Hannah Bailey was in, to put it mildly, unfamiliar territory.

  What she had witnessed in the clubhouse ballroom defied all of her training and experience. As a woman of science, she was as bewildered as she would have been if someone had given her irrefutable proof that the world was truly flat, Bigfoot really was roaming in the Rocky Mountains, and Elvis Presley was alive and working as a pit boss at a casino in Tupelo, Mississippi.

  But she didn’t have the luxury of withdrawing into quiet contemplation while she re-oriented herself to this bizarre new reality. Although she was thrown badly off balance by what she’d seen, she still had a job to do, and every minute mattered.

  Deacon and Jim had searched the rest of the clubhouse and verified that the sick, violent individuals who had attacked them had vanished. No less than ten minutes later, Hannah had gathered her team in a clubhouse conference room, and they began setting up their equipment and making plans for their investigation. None of them had witnessed what she had seen in the ballroom, which probably worked to her advantage, for the moment. They could focus on following standard procedure and not worry about whether they were losing their grip on their sanity.

  As the lead EIS officer, her main priority was to methodically walk her team through a critical series of steps. None was more important than the first one.

  Step one: determine an outbreak is occurring.

  It was an obvious step, but she couldn’t go any further, couldn’t build a case definition, until they had addressed a long list of questions and effectively verified the diagnosis. The questions they had to answer, primarily, were: Who? What? Where? When? Why?

  They had some basic assumptions about the answers to each of those questions, some more detailed than others. Who? Well, from what they had learned thus far, the residents of South Haven were impacted. What? They were still working on that, but it seemed to be an infection that caused flulike symptoms, which gradually evolved into deranged, obsessive, frequently homicidal, behavior, which clearly meant adverse neurological impacts. The exact nature of the infection and how it was transmitted were still unknowns. Where? Since South Haven residents were infected, the source most likely would be found somewhere on the community grounds. When? Within the past twenty-four hours.

  Why?

  No freakin’ clue.

  But they were going to find out. They would start with the woman they had under observation in the ballroom, who had continued to play the piano in an off-key cadence since their arrival. Hannah had directed her team to establish negative room pressure in the ballroom as best they could, to prevent possibly contaminated air from escaping and guard against cross contaminations from room to room in the clubhouse.

  “You seem to be holding up okay,” Deacon said, approaching her after she had assigned various tasks to her team. “Looks like you’ve given everyone their marching orders.”

  The security guard commander impressed her. In spite of the real-life horror show they had been sucked into only a short while ago, he had never lost his composure. She wondered about his background. He didn’t fit the profile of what she’d expected when she learned he was a security guard. She had expected him to be only minimally helpful, but he had taken charge of the situation and kept them safe.

  She’d have to keep him around as long as he was willing to help. It sure didn’t hurt that he was easy on the eyes, too. Under any other circumstances . . . she pushed the thought away and focused on the business at hand.

  “I’ve learned in these investigations that it’s important to stay focused and keep moving forward.” She began striding back to the ballroom; Deacon kept pace with her. “We’ve got to go through all of our protocols, check all of our boxes. We can’t afford to ignore anything or we risk missing a crucial detail.”

  “How long have you been doing this sort of work?” he asked.

  Hannah had learned that with some people, such questions were a means of attempting to subtly discredit her, to highlight what they assumed was her youth and inexperience. With Deacon, however, she sensed that he was genuinely interested in learning about her background.

  “Twenty-two months,” she said. “The EIS post is a two-year fellowship program.”

  “Helluva way to wrap things up.”

  She offered a brief smile. “Tell me about it.”

  “You have any theories yet?” he asked.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it, never read of anything like it,” she said. “But we’ve got only minimal data at this stage. As we research we’ll build our case and I’m confident we’ll get a handle on it.”

  She sounded more confident than she felt, and she wondered if Deacon was going to call her bluff. But he only leveled his head in the direction of the police officer’s corpse, which two members of her team wheeled on a gurney down the clubhouse corridor. Per her instructions they would transport the body to their isolated, ad-hoc lab in the clubhouse to draw blood and perform other testing.

  “I don’t know what the hell I’m going to tell that kid’s boss. Or what we’ll tell his family.”

  “I know this isn’t easy.” Hannah shook her head. “But we can’t tell them anything right now. Except that he’s gone. We have to assume that physical contact with the woman who attacked him may have transmitted the infection. We can’t release his remains and obviously we can’t share any information yet on exactly what happened.”

  “Right,” Deacon said. He bunched his fists on his waist. “Jim and I got your team here and you’re getting down to business, which is great. What else can we do to help?”

  She paused for only a beat.

  “I shouldn’t say this now,” she said, “but don’t allow anyone else into South Haven. And don’t let anyone leave.”

  “Oh?” he asked, eyebrows lifted. “We discussed this before but it was only between our little group. Are we talking about an official quarantine now?”

  “I think we’re moving to that point,” she said. “I’ll have to call my director and he’ll have to run it up the ladder—there are local, state, and federal officials that have to sign off. I’ve never been personally involved in a case that requires quarantine, but it’s a serious step. I think we’ve got sufficient cause to implement it here. With what little we already know it’s clear that we’re dealing with something that poses a major threat to public safety, and we’ve got to contain it.”

  “Folks aren’t going to like it,” Deacon said. He pursed his lips. “Nope. This is the Deep South. People buck against the government telling them what to do. You aren’t from here, are you?”

  “I’m from New Jersey,” she said. “Camden.”

  “I thought I caught a Jersey accent. Well, I’ve been here my whole life. You tell these folks they can’t go anywhere and you’ll have a fight on your hands. What you’re saying makes sense
to me, of course, but it’s gonna lead to trouble.”

  “It’s for the good of everyone. If you can loop in your staff at the gates and ask them to start gently recommending that people stay put, or stay out, that’ll be the start, until we can get an official order in place.”

  “I can do that, and one better,” Deacon said. “South Haven has an emergency broadcasting system. We call it Code Red. We can broadcast a recorded message to every residence and business in the community. Text messages, too. You record the message, I’ll get it sent out to folks.”

  “That’s perfect,” she said.

  “When we get to the official quarantine order, what comes with that?”

  “I would expect military enforcement,” she said. “The National Guard, maybe? It’s not my decision, and honestly, it’s rare for a case to require such extreme measures.”

  He nodded. “What else can I do?”

  “I’ve got to take a closer look at our piano player in there, draw some blood and run other tests,” she said. She gave him a small, quick smile that felt more flirtatious than she had intended. “Mind watching my back?”

  If he had thought she was flirting with him, he didn’t let on.

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  ***

  Deacon hung nearby while Dr. Bailey examined the clubhouse manager. He tried not to show it, but he was pleased that the doctor had requested his company, and he got the feeling that she wanted to keep him around as this ordeal played out.

  He was more than happy to oblige. He couldn’t remember the last time he had met a woman like her.

  Stay focused on the task at hand, he reminded himself. This isn’t a date by a longshot.

  Both he and the doctor had slipped on surgical masks, gloves, and shoe covers. Meanwhile, the manager continued to play the piano, oblivious to their presence. Deacon wasn’t sure of the song, but it sounded like some classical tune, badly botched. Was she going to keep playing until she passed out from exhaustion?

  Dr. Bailey had yet to touch the woman, but she had edged closer to her. She was taking photographs with a small camera.