Quarantined (8 page)

“Great,” said Chunk. “Thanks, Doc.”

“Sure,” said Herrera, but without a trace of irony. “No problem.”

“So somebody shot her while she was wearing her spacesuit, and then stripped her?”

“Looks that way,” Chunk said.

“Why?”

“Who knows,” he said. “Doc didn’t find any bruising around the vagina. And there was no semen in her, so I guess we can rule out any freaky postmortem stuff.”

“Thank God.”

“Yeah.”

Chunk drove us across the Arsenal Station parking lot and through the security desk. Two baby-faced patrolmen with machine guns waved us through.

“But why strip her? Why bring her back here? Why not just dispose of the body out in the field somewhere?”

“I don’t know,” Chunk said. “Maybe it’s somebody who works out of Arsenal and can’t be away too long, somebody whose absence would be noticed. They stripped her so that she could blend in with all the other bodies coming out of there.”

“That would make sense,” I agreed. “After all, the killer would have to have access to toe tags, and only authorized people are allowed on the floor.”

“True,” he said. “It narrows the field at least.”

Ground zero, the GZ.

All the homes in the GZ were vacant and scrawled with graffiti. The yards were overgrown with barnyard grass and sunflowers. Hardly a window anywhere was left unbroken. Morning sunlight lanced through the oak trees. Startled pigeons erupted from a hole in a nearby roof.

Those streets felt haunted. Death seemed to leer out at us from the shadows.

Chunk and I felt like infidels, drifting through the quiet streets where some terrible, flesh-consuming religion was born.

The Metropolitan Health District required all personnel entering the GZ to wear protective clothing. Chunk and I wore gray hooded plastic jumpsuits that crinkled when we walked and trapped heat close to our bodies. Even before we stepped out of the car, sweat soaked through our clothes. Our breathing sounded labored and difficult through the gas masks, even though it really wasn’t. I learned to get used to the gas mask early on.

Outside the car, the
MHD
had posted orange warning handbills on every light pole and abandoned car in sight, many of the bills so sun-bleached they appeared almost white.

We had no plan other than to systematically explore every street in the five square miles around the Produce Terminal.

It turned out to be a more difficult task than we’d thought. Long ago, perhaps in the twenties or thirties, judging by some of the houses we saw, the area around the Produce Terminal had been quite nice. We saw quite a few large, two story Queen Anne-style homes that had fallen into tragic disrepair and had since been carved up into multiple apartments, and an equal number of one story bungalow and Craftsman-style homes. And in between those—stuffed in, really—were an unbelievably large number of leaning shacks and add on sheds that made the place look like a hive. Overgrown alleys crisscrossed every street, and in some places the vegetation was so thick you could barely tell there were homes hiding behind it.

We went slowly, and wound through street after street, looking for anything unusual.

“Look at that,” Chunk said, and pointed at a street sign swaying gently in the breeze from an overhead stop light cable.

The fifteen hundred block of Matamoras Street, I read, and a knot formed in my throat.

That was the real GZ, the very street upon which H2N2 found its first victims. Somewhere down that street was the home of Mrs. Villarreal, whose chickens were San Antonio’s equivalent of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

Chunk slowed the car to a crawl and we turned down Matamoras, both of us tense, alert, and more than a little frightened.

Suddenly Chunk stopped the car—harder than he needed to. I almost went into the windshield.

I lurched forward, my hand on the dashboard to stop my momentum.

“You see that?” he asked.

Ahead of us, parked in the grass in the shade of two large oak trees, was an old
EMS
wagon. The Fire Department’s decals had been peeled off, though their outline remained.
Converted, by the looks of it.

“Do you think it might have been left here?” I asked him. It wouldn’t be the only costly piece of City equipment abandoned by the roadside in the early days of the war against H2N2.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Let’s go take a look.”

We parked and approached the ambulance on foot. Chunk checked the cab while I checked the side and back doors.

“Locked,” he said.

“Yeah. Back here, too.”

“Can you see in the windows?”

I tried to look through the vent windows in the back door, but my gas mask made it hard for me to get a good angle.

Chunk was trying to look through the side windows. I turned around to tell him I couldn’t see anything, when I saw a man walking towards us from between two houses. He was dressed in the same kind of suit and mask we wore, though his fit better. He carried two dead chickens in his left hand, holding the dead birds by the feet. There was a pistol in a clamshell holster on his right hip.

“Chunk.”

Chunk turned to me, saw me looking somewhere else, and followed my gaze to the man.

Neither of us had our weapons. They were secured in the trunk.

The man saw us and stopped. We looked at each other for a moment before he held up the chickens and motioned for us to step away from the ambulance.

We both stepped back toward our car.

When we were far enough back, the man went to the ambulance, removed two red biohazard bags from a side compartment, and dropped a dead chicken into each bag. Once they were secured, he unlocked the side door, stepped inside, and disappeared for a moment.

Chunk and I glanced at each other.
What in the hell’s he doing?

Chunk shrugged.

The man was inside the ambulance for almost a minute. When he finally came out, he rinsed his gloved hands in blue disinfectant liquid he poured from a cooler on the side of the ambulance, shook off the excess, and then approached us.

He didn’t even give us a chance to speak. “This is a restricted area,” he said, his voice bristling, like he’d just caught us watching TV on his couch in the middle of the night. “What are you doing here?”

I could see the top half of his face through the goggles of his gas mask. He was an older man, late sixties, maybe, with liver spots on his forehead and deep rutted crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, which even through the mask I can tell were intensely focused.

He stepped right up to Chunk and stood chest to chest with him, not two feet between them. There was almost a foot of difference in their height, and maybe a hundred pounds, both in Chunk’s favor, but the smaller man didn’t seem to notice the disadvantage. He just stood there, gloved hands on his hips, waiting for a reply.

“Well?”

Chunk was taken aback by the old man showing him attitude, but he recovered quickly.

“I was about to ask you the same question,” he said. “I’m Detective Reginald Dempsey with the SAPD’s Homicide Unit. This is my partner, Lily Harris.”

“Homicide?” The man looked at both of us in turn.

“Homicide,” Chunk said. “Who are you?”

“I’m Dr. Walter Cole,” the man said, regaining a little of his superior edge. “I’m with the Metropolitan Health District.”

That explains the ambulance, I thought. He’s using it as a rolling laboratory.

The man stared at Chunk. “What in the world is
SAPD
Homicide doing in the GZ, Detective?”

“How about you telling me what you’re doing with a gun, Doc,” Chunk countered.

Cole glanced at the weapon on his hip. He reached for it, but stopped with his hand on the grip when Chunk raised a fist to knock him out if he drew it. He continued to pull it out, but more slowly, and made an obvious show of handing it to Chunk, butt first.

Chunk took it from him.

“I use it on the chickens,” Cole said. “I have to collect a lot of specimens, and this way is quicker than the traps.”

Chunk looked the weapon over, holding it so that I could see it. “Browning Hi Power,” Chunk said. “.22 caliber bull-nosed target pistol. Walnut grips. Blued barrel. That’s an expensive weapon, Doc.”

Chunk ejected the magazine and cleared the chamber, then handed it back to Cole. Cole took the weapon back and slid it into the clamshell. He put the magazine and the ejected round into his pocket. “It pays to use the best,” he said.

“Why are you killing chickens, Doc?” The way it sounded, Chunk was teasing him, though I know him well enough to know that that’s just Chunk’s way. It was an honest question.

Cole didn’t seem to realize that. To him, Chunk was a big dumb cop insulting him.

“It’s complicated,” he said, with obvious sarcasm.

“Try me.”

Cole sighed, like we were a big waste of his precious time.

“I am mapping the antigenic shift of the original strain of H2N2 in order to prove that not one, but three, highly virulent strains of the virus are at work here. First I find and kill chickens from various parts of the GZ. Then I perform a test on them to determine whether or not they are infected with the influenza virus. If I detect the virus, then I compare my new sample with the genetic fingerprint of archived samples and attempt to extrapolate the direction of the antigenic shift.”

All of that was said in a matter of fact tone, but it was obvious that he was trying to talk over our heads, just to prove the point, I guess.

Chunk cocked his head to one side doubtfully. “I see,” he said.

“Yes,” Cole said, sneering. “Of course you do.”

I stepped in at that point so that Chunk wouldn’t squash the poor man.

“Dr. Cole, we’re here investigating the murder of Dr. Emma Bradley. What we’re looking for—”

“Who did you say?”

“Dr. Emma Bradley. Do you know her? She was with the World Health—”

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “Yes, I know. The World Health Organization. She works with Dr. Myers and that fat, disgusting French woman at the Arsenal Morgue.”

“That’s right. How well did you know her, Dr. Cole?”

“Well, I,” he began, but faltered. “Not well, I guess. By reputation, mostly. Whenever I go to Arsenal, it’s Myers I prefer to deal with. He’s a bit of an eager pup, but at least he’s not as full of himself as the rest of those people.”

“You said you know her by reputation, doctor. What exactly does that mean?”

“Excuse me?”

“What was her reputation? Do you mean her professional reputation, or was there something else?”

“She’s Laurent’s trained pit bull,” he said. “From what I hear, she was supposed to be the bright light of the bunch.”

“You don’t sound impressed,” I pointed out.

He shrugged. “Dr. Laurent and I have fundamentally different views on the nature of this epidemic. She believes that her people need to focus on developing a live virus vaccine for the primary strain of H2N2. And there’s a chance—a chance, mind you—that in six months they’ll have a vaccine that will minimize the impact of the disease among the local population. But I believe they’re ignoring the real danger.”

“Really? What’s the real danger?”

I could hear him breathing through his gas mask, sudden, deep inhalations, like he was hunting for the right words. Finally, he said, “Did you know we lose 36, 000 Americans a year to influenza? I mean, not counting what’s going on here in San Antonio.”

I shook my head.

“We do. It’s a staggering number. And the really scary thing is most of those deaths are to mildly virulent strains of the flu. Pedestrian stuff, at least compared to H2N2. What we’ve experienced here in San Antonio over the last few months is the most virulent strain of the flu ever seen. That’s the strain Dr. Laurent and her staff are trying to produce a vaccine for. But I have found evidence here, in the chickens wandering these yards, of two newly reassorted strains of H2N2 that make what we’ve seen so far look like the common cold.”

“You reported your findings?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve reported my findings.”

“And?”

“And the problem is simple prejudice.”

He said it like it explained everything, which of course it didn’t.

“I don’t understand, Dr. Cole,” I said.

He let out a frustrated sigh. This was an old argument for him, something he’d explained and complained about more times than he cared to remember. He pointed over our shoulders. “You see that orange warning notice on that light pole over there?”

“Yeah,” I said. The
MHD
warnings were everywhere. You couldn’t turn around without seeing one.

“If you read the last warning, it says ‘Stay away from strange and foul smelling areas.’ That was added at the insistence of our fearless leader, Mr. Martin Klauser. The man’s not even a doctor, for Christ’s sake. He heads up the public health agency of the seventh largest city in America, and the man has no medical knowledge whatsoever. He’s a homeopathic adviser, if you can believe that. He got his job because some city councilman owed him a favor. And now that idiot is overseeing
this
crisis. He put that warning on that notice because he still believes that diseases are caused by miasmatic vapors and not viruses. He’s made the
MHD
a laughingstock in the medical community. Dr. Laurent and her staff see that kind of corruption and stupidity, and they think it must automatically extend to me as well. They don’t even listen to what I have to say.”

“But if you have proof?”

“Yes, I have proof. But they won’t even look at it. And meanwhile, the chickens in the GZ are shitting out little virus bombs all over the place. When the grackles come back to San Antonio in November, they’re going to eat that shit from the ground and absorb one or even both new strains of the H2N2 virus. When that happens, the walls around this city won’t do a bit of good. The grackles will take those new strains into rural northern Mexico, where there are no doctors, no hospitals, no resources to implement a quarantine.

“There’s nobody but about 10 million poor as dirt Mexicans down there. They won’t even have the resources to report the pandemic until it spreads so far out of control we’ll never be able to deal with it. We’re not going to be talking deaths in the thousands either. Not even in the tens of thousands. When those grackles hit northern Mexico, we’re going to see deaths in the millions.