Frenzied - A Suspense Thriller Page 15

  “Let’s get back to the clubhouse,” Bailey said. “I need to run an examination on a friend of ours.”

  “Who?” Deacon asked.

  ***

  Back at the clubhouse, Jim paced in one of the conference rooms that the CDC had overhauled into a makeshift clinic. There was a narrow bed on wheels, and various monitoring devices sitting on tables and hanging from metallic stands. Deacon found it hard to imagine that only a day or so ago, someone had probably used this room to hold a discussion about catering a wedding reception. His life prior to today was beginning to feel like a dream—and Bailey wanting to run tests on Jim didn’t help.

  “You want to examine me?” Jim asked. Redness bloomed in his cheeks. “Why? I’m not sick, dammit.”

  “The doctor’s got a theory,” Deacon said. “Just hear her out, all right?”

  “It’s more of a gut feeling at this point, guys, to be honest.” Dr. Bailey slid on a surgical mask and a pair of latex gloves, and began to set out a series of medical instruments on a stainless steel tray. “I suspect the Screen on the Green event that took place last Friday is the key to what’s going on in South Haven.”

  “But I’m not sick!” Jim said again.

  “I haven’t determined exactly what happened there,” Dr. Bailey said. “Was it a pathogen in the food provided by one of the food trucks? Was a person or animal infected with a virus and passed it on to others present? I don’t know. But this event is the one thing that hundreds of residents recently attended, and there’s a fair chance that if we look there, we’ll find answers.”

  “Zack went last week,” Emily suddenly said. She looked to Deacon as if she were on the verge of tears. “My boyfriend, Zack. I don’t know if he’s infected, I haven’t been able to talk to him, but . . . he’s not behaving normally.”

  “I think it’s all horseshit, but I’ll play along,” Jim said. “What kind of tests do you want to do?”

  “Let’s start with a basic physical,” Dr. Bailey said. She glanced at Deacon and Emily. “Can we get some privacy please?”

  “Hell, let ‘em stay in, I don’t have anything to hide.” Jim waved his hand. “I want to get this over with.”

  While Deacon and Emily watched, Dr. Bailey guided Jim through a physical examination. She had him step on a scale to note his body weight. Afterward, while Jim sat in a plastic chair, she measured his heart rate and blood pressure. She checked inside his ears with an otoscope, and then used a penlight to peer inside both of his nostrils.

  She paused. “Your nasal cavity is inflamed. Do you have a cold?”

  Jim shrugged. “No. And I’m not a cokehead, either, so don’t get any ideas.”

  “All of the frenzied we’ve seen, they’ve got blood dribbling from their nose, like a slow leak,” Deacon said. “I’m no doctor but it’s something I’ve noticed.”

  Bailey asked Jim to tilt his head all the way backward so she could get a clearer look. Bending over him, she lifted the tip of his nose and peered deep inside.

  Deacon and Emily glanced at each other. The anxiety in her eyes matched the uneasiness that curdled his stomach.

  “You’ve got something attached to the lining of your nasal cavity,” Dr. Bailey said.

  “What?” Jim said, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “That’s bullshit.”

  “It’s miniscule, barely more than a speck, but it looks . . . well, it looks like a bug.”

  Chapter 20

  Alex walked to the meeting at the Sanctuary Book Shop.

  Without question, it was the most bizarre walk he’d ever experienced during his forty-plus years on this earth.

  The low, cloudy sky continued to shed a persistent drizzle. Alex had found a midnight-blue rain poncho in Wayne’s hallway closet, and slipped it on before he left the house. He considered taking the Toyota Highlander parked in the garage, too—the keys hung on a hook in the kitchen—but even on a day as strange and violent as that one, when he had revisited some of his old ways, grand theft auto held no appeal for him.

  So he traveled by foot. And, he saw things.

  He saw a pack of dogs roam across the street, barely fifty feet away. There were over a dozen of them, comprised of various breeds, most of them wearing collars, all of them clearly infected with the same mystery illness plaguing many of the residents: eyes crusted with inflammation, blood dribbling from their nostrils. A burly, naked man walked with the dogs, like some dog whisperer from hell, leashes swinging from his thick neck like cheap necklaces. The man craned his head in Alex’s direction, sniffed the air as if testing for his scent, and then turned away as though Alex held no interest for him and his canine horde.

  Alex eased his hand off his pistol.

  Farther along, he passed a man cutting the grass of a front yard. In the past, the spectacle of a man trimming his lawn while it rained would have been only mildly interesting—but this man was as naked as the day he was born. He pushed the mower methodically back and forth, rain slicking his diseased skin, inflamed eyes focused on the grass ahead of him.

  Alex wasn’t sure if the guy noted his presence as he passed by. He was oblivious to everything except his lawn.

  Suddenly, Alex heard feet splashing through puddles behind him. He looked over his shoulder, hand reflexively moving to his gun.

  It was a trio of young women. They were jogging in the middle of the road. All of them had the lean muscularity gained only from a rigid attention to diet and endless hours of exercise.

  All of them were naked, too, their bodies mapped with festering lesions.

  If he were another kind of man, he might have ogled the ladies, snapped a photo with his phone, but he found no pleasure in what he was seeing. Quickly, he moved out of their path and lowered his head.

  None of the women paid him any mind whatsoever; he might have been merely a car parked on the street. But as they jogged past, bare feet slapping the wet pavement, he picked up snatches of their conversation.

  “Mile another . . . feel so good the burn . . .”

  “Wedding . . . lose pounds ten gotta . . .”

  “Said I was fat . . . asshole . . . size zero here I come . . .”

  Shaking his head, Alex kept walking.

  He didn’t understand what was going on with these people. Some of them boiled over in fits of uncontrollable violence, such as his wife, and the soldier. Others, like the man cutting his lawn and the jogging women, seemed harmless, but bent on mindlessly pursuing obsessive behavior.

  But he knew one thing for sure: all of them were sick.

  He wondered if he were sick, too.

  He didn’t have burning, crusted-over eyes, and his skin was normal, but he worried all the same that something terrible was happening to him.

  ***

  Alex arrived on the scene a full thirty minutes before the announced meeting, but he didn’t enter the Sanctuary Book Shop. Instead, he watched from inside his frozen yogurt shop, where he had parked a chair beside the large front window.

  Before making his presence known at the bookstore, he wanted to get some idea of the nature of the gathering.

  The town square was ominously quiet and empty for a Friday evening. Usually, even in rainy weather, the crowds would be out, armed with umbrellas and rain slickers as they trundled about the various shops. South Haven residents—those of them not sick anyway—must have opted to heed the emergency broadcast message to remain indoors.

  Alex had dispensed a swirled heap of vanilla yogurt into the largest serving cup that his shop offered, decorated it with a drizzle of strawberries and whipped cream, and ate it with a spoon while he waited. He hadn’t eaten anything in hours, and decided a blast of sugar and carbs would serve his body well.

  It felt strange to be sitting alone in his darkened store. He felt out of place, less like the owner and more like an intruder who had found a door open after hours and decided to help himself to a treat.

  After today, for multiple reasons, he would never again be able to go back to business
as usual.

  At a quarter to seven, people started to filter into the town square. From a distance, they looked normal, Alex noted with relief. They wore clothes and moved like regular folk. Many of them wore dust masks. Although the entrance to the bookstore faced the square, per the text message instructions, no one entered via the front door; they disappeared around the corner of the building, going to the back entrance.

  Alex finished off his yogurt, left his shop, and crossed the street.

  Standing at the end of a row of darkened storefronts, the front of the Sanctuary Book Shop was dark, too, the large windows covered with blinds. Alex went around the corner of the building, stepping around pools of water that had collected on the pavement.

  There was an access road at the rear of the building that served all of the businesses located along that side of the town square. The back door of the book shop was propped open. A tall, barrel-chested man with a floppy fringe of white hair stood at the doorway. He wore a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, displaying a pair of well-muscled forearms; rumpled jeans, and work boots. A holstered pistol rested on his hip. He also wore a dust mask and he was distributing them to those entering the shop if they weren’t already wearing one.

  Alex recognized him as the owner of the bookstore. Stan.

  “Alex?” he asked when Alex drew near. Watching Alex closely, as if scrutinizing him for signs of infection, he nodded in the direction of Alex’s shop. “You own the frozen yogurt shop across the way.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Thanks for answering the call. Put this on.” He offered Alex a dust mask. “Did you tell anyone about this meeting?”

  “Everyone I’ve seen until now has been sick, so no.”

  Stan nodded gravely. “We’re on the side of liberty. There may not be many of us but our cause is just. Head on inside and we’ll get started in a few minutes.”

  Alex slipped on the dust mask and threaded inside the bookstore. About a dozen folding chairs had been arranged around a mahogany lectern, and most of them had been filled. Alex recognized several faces, in spite of the masks everyone donned. They were people who owned businesses in the community. Stan, he realized, must have sent his meeting invitation to a phone distribution list of business folk in South Haven.

  Alex eased into a chair. There was little conversation amongst the group. Everyone looked exhausted, sad, or anxious. Alex wondered how many of them had lost loved ones, such as he had, to this strange illness plaguing their community.

  A few minutes later, at seven o’clock sharp, Stan came inside and stood at the lectern. He pulled away his dust mask, letting it rest at the bottom of his blunt-edged chin.

  “Thanks all of you for coming,” Stan said. He had the deep, mellifluous voice of a radio show host. “Our time may be short so let’s get down to business. People in South Haven are getting sick. It started yesterday as far as anyone knows. It seems to be some strain of virus, more on that later. Our children, our spouses, our neighbors—everyone knows someone who’s been affected. We don’t know why, but the virus is turning them into people we don’t recognize. It’s in their eyes, on their skin. Most of all, it’s in their brains.”

  “Right,” someone said.

  “If there’s a cure we don’t know what it is. When you encounter someone sick the only sensible alternative is to get away from them. Not all of them are violent, initially, but they can suddenly turn homicidal with little provocation.” He paused, and his blue eyes got misty. “I had to leave my wife because she tried to gut me with a wine bottle opener.”

  Alex thought about Melissa, coming at him with barbering shears, and felt his chest tighten with emotion.

  “Now the CDC is on site: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as they call themselves.” Stan paused, favoring them with a gentle jes’ folks smile. “Don’t be fooled by appearances and fancy acronyms, friends. This is an agency of the federal government. They are going to cage us inside South Haven with a federally-ordered quarantine. They will get full military support to enforce it. Anyone who tries to leave South Haven will be shot on sight.”

  There were a few gasps in the room, expressions of disbelief.

  “But I’m an American citizen,” a woman said. Alex recognized her as the owner of a barre studio on Main. Her hair was pulled back into a severe bun and with her red-rimmed eyes, she looked as if she hadn’t slept in days. “They can’t hold us here against our will and kill us if we try to leave!”

  “Is that what you believe?” Stan shook his head sadly. “I promise you, friends and neighbors, once quarantine is declared, all of your precious rights as an American citizen will be promptly suspended. We will be under martial law.”

  “What are we supposed to do?” Alex asked. “From what you’re saying, it sounds like we’re stuck dealing with this, whether we’re sick or not. Do you have an escape plan or something?”

  “No.” Stan shook his head firmly. “We don’t run. We have businesses here, all of us. Most of us live here, too. We fight for our freedom. The government created this virus. It’s a biologically engineered weapon they originally designed to infiltrate terror cells in the Middle East.”

  “How do you know that?” someone asked.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Stan said, his voice booming. “That is what our government does. They spend billions of dollars annually on weapons R&D, like any other world power. I was in the Army, in my less-enlightened youth. I know how they operate. They’ve always wanted to create the perfect biological weapon. This virus is the handiwork of the government scientists.”

  “If you’re right,” Alex said. “How do we fight for our freedom against the military? We don’t have the people, the weapons.”

  “We’ve got our minds.” Stan pointed to his skull. “And our courage.” He tapped his heart. “In times of civil unrest, the forces of resistance have always managed to prevail so long as they utilize their God-given strengths. I have a plan, friends.”

  Alex found himself leaning forward in his chair. In his peripheral vision, he noticed others were intensely focused on Stan’s message, too. He wasn’t sure he believed that the government was behind this, and Stan still hadn’t supplied any evidence of his claim, but in the absence of any other theory, maybe they had to go along with it.

  “What do you think we should do?” someone asked.

  A smile flickered across Stan’s face. He took a quick sip from a bottle of water.

  Very slowly, he began to lay out his plan.

  Chapter 21

  “It’s a tick,” Hannah announced.

  Hannah’s CDC team, as well as Deacon, and the others, had gathered in the main conference room that they were employing as their command post. Most of the group stood, eager to hear her findings. Jim, bless his heart, sat on a chair in the corner, a towel pressed to his no-doubt aching nose.

  She hadn’t enjoyed using the speculum and the tweezers to extract the tiny tick from Jim’s nasal cavity, and the arachnid had been tightly attached. It had required a determined—but delicate— effort to pry it loose. The bug’s barely-visible legs had wriggled as she placed it on a glass tray, and Jim’s nose had immediately begun bleeding from the puncture wound.

  Other than the bleeding, Jim hadn’t shown any signs of infection. Hannah was hopeful that they had removed the parasite before it had wrought any permanent damage to his nervous system.

  She had placed the tick under a microscope and performed a rudimentary layman’s analysis, combined with some quick reading of online resources, hoping for an instant explanation—which, not surprisingly, she hadn’t found. In her line of work, solutions never came that easily.

  “I don’t have a strong background in entomology or parasitology,” she said to the assembled gathering. “None of us do, which is why I’m working to find us an expert who can give us more information. But I know this much, and perhaps some of you do as well: a tick is an ectoparasite. They feed on blood, primarily from mammals and birds. The
y move through four life cycles: egg, larva, nymph, and adult. In the larval stage, a tick will have six legs; it grows an additional two legs in the later phases. The tick we’ve found is a larva.

  “Ticks transmit a range of diseases. Most of you are probably familiar with Lyme disease. Symptoms of Lyme disease? Fever, headaches, fatigue, eventually leading to joint pain, swelling, and other complications. Some of the same initial symptoms we’ve seen with the individuals in South Haven, but for obvious reasons, what we’re dealing with here is different than Lyme disease. In my initial research, I haven’t found anything like what we’re seeing, and that’s why we’re going to talk to an entomologist who can tell us what we’re facing.”

  Hannah paused. A mixture of hope and worry glistened in the eyes of the group watching her.

  “Have we isolated the infection site?” a member of her team asked.

  “Our working theory is that there was a social event in the community on Friday, July 8th, called Screen on the Green, in the town square. The town square contains about two acres of grass and shrubbery, and on the night of the event, I think the grass was infested with tick larvae. Larvae could have attached themselves to people and animals—dogs, apparently—unseen.”

  “We’re talking about hundreds of these things, aren’t we?” Deacon asked, raising his hand from the back of the room. “We treat common areas with insecticides pretty regularly during the summer. How the hell did the grass wind up crawling with so many of them?”

  “We don’t know,” Hannah said. “We’ve got to answer that question. I’ll need some members of our team to visit the town square and try to collect samples.”

  “A bug like this, that causes so much damage,” Deacon continued. “Doesn’t make any sense for it to suddenly show up, here, in a spot that’s gonna be full of people one particular evening.”