Chapter Fourteen
DOES AMERICA HAVE ENOUGH GUNS? Assault Weapons Bans and the Congressmen Who Hate Them [“The Economist” magazine, 1/05]
Stuttering flashes of light lit up the hospital’s windows as the SWAT teams moved through room after room looking for hostages and shooting anyone who looked suspicious. Bannerman watched from the back of a squad car, trying not to look every time he heard sub machine gun fire.
It was hard. “They’re in there shooting people, Vikram. Sick people. This isn’t law enforcement. It’s eugenics. And I can’t do a thing about it—I’m way out of my jurisdiction here and the local OIC isn’t taking my calls. FEMA doesn’t want to hear it until I’ve got a verified one hundred fatalities and the Governor’s office is doing its own investigation. They promise they’ll get back to me. So in the meantime I sit here and listen to people getting slaughtered. The alternative is to run in there and try to stop them with my bare hands, in which case they would decide I was a threat, too, and take me down.” The sheriff’s deputy had been quite clear on that last point. “I have never felt so helpless in my life.”
Vikram Singh Nanda held up one hand. The other clutched his ruggedized cell phone to an ear hidden beneath his turban. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said. “Okay.” He finished his call. “I am sorry, Bannerman. What were you saying just then?”
Clark looked up at the hospital and saw tear gas streaming from a line of open windows. “Forget it.” This was what happened when you put law enforcement teams in charge of what should be a military situation. It didn’t matter how much training or discipline they had—they just weren’t ready to psychologically handle a true combat experience. Just ask the Branch Dravidians at Waco. Even federal units were ill-equipped for a real fight.
“So I have news,” Vikram told him, trying to move on. “News you will not like.”
“We’ve found our warden?” Clark asked. This could be crucial. He had set his friend with the task of tracking down the elusive man but he hadn’t expected results nearly so quickly.
“He left an immaculate paper trail. And why not? He had nothing to hide. He was a man going away on vacation. He took a flight from Denver International Airport that arrived at LAX at three twenty-two on a Thursday. He rented a car, a Jeep Cherokee, from the Hertz counter and was later recorded purchasing gas at a service station in Petaluma. Two hours later he was seen biting a young woman on the neck and was subsequently gunned down by an officer of the law. His body was brought here, to this hospital.”
“Jesus fucked a duck,” Bannerman said. The first time he’d sworn in a month, probably, but well-deserved. You couldn’t ask for a cleaner timeline, for one thing—Vikram had always been thorough—but their luck in getting such a clear picture of the warden’s movements was far and away eclipsed by the story’s sheer horror.
The warden had been infected in Florence. Of that Clark had no doubt. He had flown through two major international airports, spreading his contagion to everyone in both terminals—and by extension the passengers and crews of every flight that left the airports. The germ could be on its way to hundreds of destinations by now. No, Clark reconsidered, the warden had a head start on them. The germ would already be at hundreds of destinations. Not every passenger on every plane would be infected, of course—no pathogen was that insidious—but if just one person on every flight had it… well, it had only taken one infected individual to turn the hospital into a war zone. Bannerman Clark had been operating under a protocol of containment—intending to quarantine every known location where the new disease manifested itself. That was impossible now. What had happened here, at the hospital, would already be beginning in cities around the planet. Starting with Denver. And Los Angeles.
Jesus fucked a duck, indeed.
Clark grabbed the bridge of his nose and pinched. He was trained for this. As part of his being named the RAID officer for Colorado he had been required to complete an eight-week course in crisis response to biological warfare incidents. It was time to manage this thing. Time to prioritize. What did he need?
“I need flight schedules,” he said weakly, and Vikram pulled a note pad from his pocket. “We at least need to start looking at epidemiology. I need crew lists and passenger manifests, we’ll track down as many people as we can—God, I hope none of those flights were headed to non-aligned states, we’d never catch them. I need to talk to the administrator for FEMA region IX and the local Guard CO, not just the AG, I—”
A flash-bang concussion grenade went off right inside the Emergency Room and Clark stopped in mid-sentence. He looked up to see SWAT teams pouring out of the hospital, their black Kevlar and their iridescent blue-blocker goggles making them look like demons pouring out of a crack in the side of Hell. Something major was happening.
“Naam,” Vikram breathed, taking his God’s name in vain but Clark thought maybe the time was right for that.
He opened the door of the patrol car and stepped out into the hospital’s loading zone. The sheriff’s deputy came marching toward him but he held up a hand for patience. He watched the SWAT teams fall into close ranks in two lines facing the emergency room doors at forty-five degree angles. They moved flawlessly, as a unit. As crazy as they might have become, as desperate, they had not forgotten their drills. They were assembling a perfect firing formation. A kill zone. They expected something big and bad to come out of the hospital at any second.
The doors opened and a skinny blonde girl walked out.
She had her arms up, trying to surrender. She looked terrified. She also had a truly gruesome wound on her neck and what looked like bloodstains on her chin and chest. Her lips were shaking. They were blue.
“Please,” she said, her voice thick with fear. “Please, don’t kill me.”
The SWAT team leader threw a hand signal at his men and the troopers swarmed her, some holding back to keep her in their weapons’ sights, others streaking in with riot control batons to knock her legs out from under her. They got her hands behind her, fastened together with a thin plastic zip-cuff. Expert hands frisked her, pulling open her white lab coat to show she wore nothing underneath. When it was established that she was unarmed two troopers grabbed her by the arms and yanked her away from the glass doors and over to a clear patch of ground by some shrubbery. The sheriff’s deputy loped over to look at her while the SWAT teams shifted position again to keep the doors covered.
Clark couldn’t help himself. He stepped in between the deputy and the girl. “The infected persons I’ve seen couldn’t talk. They were physically incapable of it,” Clark insisted. “You have to take this woman into custody. Certainly she needs to be monitored. You don’t need to hurt her. At the very least that’s going to end in a law suit. At worst it’ll mean criminal charges filed against you.”
“I’ve seen enough of them. I know what they look like and how they act. We can’t let even one of them get away.” The deputy nodded at his underlings.
The girl shivered and sobbed as a SWAT trooper leveled his weapon at her forehead.
“Who are you?” Clark asked her, trying to humanize her in the deputy’s eyes. He wouldn’t give up until she was actually dead—he owed her that much, after standing by and just watching the bloodshed all night. “What’s your name?”
“I… I don’t know,” the girl said. “I’ve lost my memory, I can’t remember!” She sobbed again. Mucus leaked from her nose and eyes. It was dark and thick with congealed blood. Oh, no, Clark thought, oh, no. He’d been wrong—she was one of them.
“Do it,” the deputy coughed. He turned away. The SWAT trooper clicked off the safety of his firearm and steadied it with his free hand, inspected the weapon to make sure it wouldn't jam.
The girl vanished. Right before Clark’s eyes. Or rather… he felt as if a particle of dust had fallen into his eyes and he tried to blink it away and when his vision cleared she was nowhere to be seen. She must have made a break for it. Yet when he looked around he saw only confused-looking men in riot gear. The SWAT trooper fired a few desultory rounds at the bushes where she’d been kneeling but clearly he didn’t know what to target. The deputy’s face was set like stone. Clark felt a flutter of panic in his stomach.
The girl had vanished into thin air.
