AUTHOR'S NOTE: I don't own anything you recognize. I wish I did. It would cut down on my commute significantly.

This story is fully written; expect regular updates until it's all posted.

WUMP WARNING: I know enough about medicine to gross out the weak-of-stomach, and I tend to be not-so-nice to characters. This fic contains a Flash Wump.

From the perspective of Barry Allen

After a light jog (200 or so miles per hour) to the neighborhood, I walked the last two blocks to the crime scene "regular human quickly" thinking Look like you're rushing—without RUSHING. That's it…act natural. The problem is, walking doesn't feel natural anymore. You know that feeling you get when you come off of a major interstate highway and have to drive at back-road speeds again after 3 hours at 75 MPH (I'm a scientist - 120 KPH)? That feeling like if you just lean forward you can make your car go faster without getting caught by the cops? Yeah. I have that feeling now ALL. THE. TIME.

Talking about cops…

"You're late." The captain says it without feeling these days. It's more a greeting than a rebuke. I'm late. The sun is out in the daytime. Each statement is as obvious as the other.

I followed my nose (literally - Eeeewww) to the center of the crime scene. Several thousand pounds of greasy garbage filled a large green truck - at least I think it was green at some point; they usually are - which had obviously been stopped half way through its crunch-and-munch cycle of smooshing another dumpster's worth of trash into its recesses.

The bare right foot of a woman protruded from the truck's maw, her blood leaking slowly down the bumper and mixing with dripping garbage grease to make a pink oily puddle under the bumper. Yup, that's right, ladies. I get to be a forensic scientist – you know you're jealous. I gloved up and approached slowly. I wish I could plug my nose or even breathe shallowly in these situations, but lately my body insists on pulling in massive amounts of oxygen in addition to unholy quantities of food. It's a not-so-lucky side effect of a meta-metabolism.

I glanced at the building whose dumpster had contained this woman. It was an average professional building; clerical workers, doctors' offices, and tax preparers. Their usual trash – mostly paper which should have been recycled, coffee pods, and take-out lunch packaging – had filled the remainder of the dumpster and now surrounded its grizzly addition in the outermost layer of the truck's nastiness.

It was a nice area of town, actually. Suits and skirts; professionals with 9 to 5 jobs and gym memberships they don't actually use. Not a place you expect a body dump. Had she been killed here? A crime of passion in the afternoon in midtown? An office romance gone bad?

I asked for the truck's crushing mechanism to be opened. Joe complied with a wince and a grunt of disgust. The truck's maw slowly opened with a squeal, fully revealing the body. I had to ignore the grotesque position the truck had left her in to see her as she had been before she'd died. One look and I knew this had not been an abrupt afternoon ending of an office romance. This woman hadn't been working in an office the day she'd died. She wore the torn remains of a pair of yoga pants and a T-shirt, rather than business casual gear. Her fingernails and toenails were polished, and her face made up lightly. She looked like we all do (like I did?) when I used to get sick and stay home from work. (I don't get sick anymore - and there's a lucky side effect of meta-humanism!) She looked middle-class and comfortable, in a spend-the-day-in-pajamas kind of way.

In fact…I looked more closely. She'd been beaten up by the truck more than a bit, but there were distinct signs that she had been sick lately. Very sick. The pallor was likely post-mortem, but there was no mistaking her red eyes, raw nose, and chapped lips. There was a hint of vomit smell, barely noticeable over the other scents surrounding her. Her purse, peeking out from under her back and coated in something best not defined, contained a mass of used, crumpled tissues. There were flecks of dried blood on some of them. This woman had not been in good health when she died. What sort of illness she'd had, the new coroner would have to figure out. I'm very happy to say that body dissection is not among my responsibilities. Ick.

I took a steadying breath and reached into the woman's purse, feeling the "something best not defined" squishing around my gloves. Joe turned away with a curl of his lips. I pulled the woman's wallet free and looked at her driver's license. Monica Rose, age 31. I gave her address to Eddie before bagging the ID.

She didn't look 31. Illness makes us all look older, I guess. She looked worn and thin. There was a note in her purse as well. "Thursday, 2 pm, Dr. Gillmore." I looked up at the building's sign and then at Joe. "She had an appointment this afternoon in the building."

Joe nodded, copying the note. "Partner, you want to go talk to Dr. Gillmore?"

The two hustled away from the truck and slipped under the police tape so quickly I could almost see streaks of light behind them.

I turned to bagging the body and collecting the torn shreds of her clothes and samples of the trash surrounding Monica Rose. And of the "something best not defined." Can't forget that…

From the perspective of Joe West

"Dr. Geulyana Gillmore (can't anyone spell anything normally anymore?) had an office on the second floor of the building. The sign read "Internal Medicine", and the waiting room had a bunch of sick-looking men and women sitting in it. That smell of industrial-strength disinfectants you get in all doctors' offices was actually kind of a nice change after the stink outside. Eddie and I both took big old breaths to clear out the garbage smell as I walked to the desk and showed the clerk my shield.

"Dr. Gillmore is with a patient right now," the young woman reported. "Do you wanna take a seat?"

I didn't, but I sat anyway. Eddie paced. His nose wrinkled. "I hate going to the doctor," he mumbled as he came my way. "Shots."

"Shots?" I chuckled. "What are you, six?" He scowled at me and paced away again.

One of the patients began coughing loudly, unable to stop. Eddie's eyes opened wide. The patient had flecks of blood on her lips. Something nasty going around?

I repeated the question out loud when we finally met Dr. Geulyana ("Call me Julie") Gillmore after almost an hour of sitting and pacing in the waiting room. "Is there something bad going around right now?"

'Julie' responded with a shrug. "There's always something bad going around." She glanced at a folder in her hands, letting us know she was really too busy to talk to a couple of cops. "Anything in particular you're curious about?"

Eddie obviously wanted to get this interview over quickly. "Yeah, something that makes you cough up blood in the waiting room."

"Ah," she nodded, looking up from the folder. "Yes. It's a flu. At least I think it is." She looked far more eager than she should have. "It's really severe this year. But don't worry. It's not Ebola or anything."

Ebola hadn't actually occurred to me until just then. Thanks for that image, doc. "Isn't flu supposed to be a winter kind of thing?" I asked her. "It's almost June."

"Oh, yes. This strain is very interesting."

Right. Scientific types are creepy, and I do include Barry in that category sometimes. I love him, but he's WAY too interested in "interesting" stuff.

Eddie tried – and failed – to not shiver. He pulled out a photo of the woman in the truck. "Is Monica Rose one of your patients?"

Julie was back to all business. "Without a warrant I can't answer that. Doctor-patient confidentiality. HIPAA regulations. You understand."

"HIPAA doesn't apply when the person is dead." I bluffed.

She called me on it. "Yes it does. Get a warrant. If there's nothing else?"

Eddie couldn't get out the door fast enough. When it closed behind us, he let loose the whole-body shudder he'd been holding in. He looked like he was dancing away from spiders. "God I hate doctors."

I was already on the phone looking for a warrant for our corpse's medical records. Twenty minutes on the phone got me run around by every assistant DA in Central City. I was seriously tempted to get Barry to call Felicity Smoak to hack the doctor's records, or maybe Laurel Lance could send a warrant from Starling? This was getting us nowhere.

"They've got to have sent the body to the morgue by now. Let's go talk to the coroner and then see what Barry has."

From the perspective of Eddie Thawne

Barry had a crazy theory. I don't know why Joe looked surprised. Barry has a crazy theory about once a week. Now that I know what I know about Barry, I can't really blame the guy.

We fought our way through forty minutes of midtown traffic to the morgue, got nowhere with the new coroner ("I've sent what I have to the station already. Don't you people talk to each other?"), and then scraped through another half hour of stop-and-go to the station. Freakin' traffic.

The kid (yeah, I know he's in his 20s. He still looks 12.) was waiting for us when we arrived, with copies of the preliminary autopsy results the coroner wouldn't give us, a computer printout, and what looked like vomit in a test tube. Shudder. He greeted us with that goofy 12-year-old grin of his and handed us each a copy of the printout.

"She's not the only one."

Joe sighed, collecting himself and raising that eyebrow of his. The guy has the patience of a saint. "She's not the only what Barry?"

Barry jumped, skipped a beat, and continued as if he'd just noticed that we hadn't, in fact, had the first half of this conversation already. "Sorry. She died of pneumonia – probably because of the flu; the ME found flu virus in her nasal cavity – and she isn't the only one." He pointed to the printout, which seemed to be a list of names. "Someone's killing people with the flu."

I rolled my eyes. I try to be as patient as Joe is with the kid, but it's just… He's… you know… Barry. "OK, number 1; people don't die of the flu. They eat chicken soup and whine a lot. Number 2, If people do die of the flu, it's not murder. It's not even our department. If that's the cause of death, we're done here. Number 3, when people aren't murdered, they don't end up in dumpsters."

Barry was smirking. He can be so freaking condescending sometimes.

"What?"

"Eddie," Joe was looking at me with one of those patient looks he usually reserves for Barry, "you just went around in a whole circle."

"I did?"

"You did." Barry nodded, now trying not to smile. He saw my face and swallowed the expression completely. "Well, basically. One, people do die of flu – more people died of flu in 1917 then died of the bubonic plague in the whole 14th century, and most of those people were healthy adults before they got it."

"And 2 and 3?"

Joe answered. "Contradicted each other."

I scowled at him.

Barry completed the circle, "You said 'When people aren't murdered, they don't end up in dumpsters.' And Monica Rose did end up in a dumpster." He pointed again at the printout. "The people on that list were dumped too, and look at the dates."

I looked. There were 12 names on the printout, spanning about four months. Each was around 30 years old, and each had been found on the street in what would be considered 'body dump' fashion. Each was autopsied, and the cause of death for each was listed as either 'pneumonia' or 'influenza'. They'd been found almost exactly once per week as if their deaths had been scheduled; though four weeks out of the 17 saw no bodies found. Most of the bodies we had found had been dumped on Thursdays, though two were on a Friday. The pattern of a serial killer is unmistakable. This pattern said we're still missing some bodies.

The coroner's office had investigated each corpse, and had ruled each a tragedy; a young life ended by natural causes. If it hadn't been flu, I would have agreed with Barry completely. But… "How the Hell do you kill someone with the flu?"

Barry looked confused at my question. "Same way you kill with any other poison."

"Yeah," stated my partner. "Except this murder weapon is contagious. And we were in that doctor's office."

My skin started to crawl. "What the Hell do we do about a contagious murder weapon?"

"I say we call the CDC." answered our forensic scientist.

From the perspective of Barry Allen

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta Georgia has some of the best laboratory equipment and lab technicians in the country. Since Central City only had found a few cases of the virus so far, they didn't send anyone all the way out to the west coast; but since at least 12 of the cases we did have were dead, they put a rush on testing to learn what type of flu our fair city was getting. I had the results of their diagnostics at eleven o'clock the next morning; three hours after the samples arrived "by currier."

If you're wondering, it's a LONG run to Atlanta and then back here.

I looked at the results on my computer screen, trying to suppress rising worry. While copies of the email spooled out of my printer, I re-read its second, all important line. It said,

NOVEL HPAI H7N3 STRAIN "CENTRAL CITY"

That may not mean anything to you, but the last line of the email says everything you really need to know if you're wondering about what was going through my mind at that moment. That line said "An outbreak response team from Atlanta will arrive in Central City tomorrow morning at 9:35am. All exposed or suspected exposed personnel should self-quarantine immediately and be identified to the team upon their arrival."

I glanced at the samples of vomit and blood sitting in my lab refrigerator.

"Crap", I said aloud, picking up the phone.

CDC's going to LOVE me.