Chapter 2

At 6:45am the next day, Thomas Everett was woken up by the sound of the alarm clock breaking the morning silence. He opened his eyes groggily then winced as the alarm beeped again, sending needles of pain deep into his head. His arm swept out from under the bed covers and knocked it to the ground. It landed on the carpet with a soft thump, beeped valiantly once more and then fell silent. Tom turned over in bed, expecting to see the familiar shape of his wife beneath the covers. There was a momentary flicker of surprise when he saw she was not there, and then he remembered.

Maine. Vicky was in Maine, visiting her parents. Tom would have come with her but the bastards in the police department wouldn't let him have the time off work. He rolled over onto his back and yawned, his head filling up with memories of the previous day.

Oh yeah, he remembered dismally, the cocktail of guilt sinking in. I killed a guy.

He sat back up and swung his feet onto the floor. He stayed that way for a minute longer, then stood up and went to get in the shower.

About an hour later he was fully dressed and getting ready to leave when someone outside rang the doorbell. Puzzled, he went and opened it, letting in a flood of mellow morning sunshine.

"Thomas Everett?" enquired the man who was stood on his front porch. He was wearing a white coverall like the kind worn by forensic teams and red-striped sneakers on his feet.

"Uh, yes." Tom said, still puzzled. "How can I help you?"

"My name is Lance White, Mr Everett." He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes, which remained shrewd and calculating. "I'm from the U.S. Public Health Service."

Sure, Tom thought for no reason at all. Sure you are.

"May I come in?" Mr White enquired politely, still smiling.

"Sure." Tom said, opening the door wider to let him in. As White stepped in, Tom saw there was a grey van parked across the street. He looked at it for a second longer, and closed the door.

Lance White was walking around the front room, looking with interest at the photographs on top of the fireplace.

"Is your wife in?" He enquired, pointing to one of the photos.

"I'm afraid not; she's visiting her parents in Maine." Tom explained, standing in the doorway. "She'll be gone until next week." But you already knew that didn't you? That was an unusually paranoid thought. Maybe the incident yesterday had affected him more than he thought.

"I see." Lance said, and looked back at the photos. "Any children?"

"No." Tom replied, wondering exactly where this was going.

Lance was nodding. "Mr Everett, we believe that Jonathan Anderson, the man who attacked you and your partner Joseph Harris yesterday may have been carrying a strain of rabies."

Tom said nothing. He felt rooted to the spot.

"Whilst we are aware that neither you nor your partner was bitten by this man, we feel it would be prudent to carry out some routine tests on you, just to make sure you haven't contracted this disease." White gave what he no doubt thought was a reassuring smile, but it turned out like something you would expect to see on a psychotic clown.

"I see," Tom said. He sounded calm enough, but a small sector of his mind, hidden away at the back of his brain was raving, Rabies! Rabies! Rabies!

"It'll only take a few minutes and once we're finished we'll be out of your way." White concluded.

"Right. Sure." Tom considered for a moment and then asked the question he didn't really want to know the answer to. "What happens if I test positive?"

"You'll be given the best treatment possible." White replied, not including that the only viable treatment in this case would be a bullet to the head.

Five minutes later, Tom was sat at his kitchen table, the sleeve of his shirt rolled up. A man in a white coverall was putting a needle against the inside of his arm. Tom looked away, feeling ill. He had been at his fair share of bloody crime scenes, but he still had no urge to watch the needle sink into his arm. He felt the needle come out of his wrist and looked back. It was now full of his-quite possibly infected-blood.

Please God no. But he doubted that God would comply just because he asked nicely.

The man with the needle carefully passed it over to another man, who injected it into a small plastic tube. The man then added several drops of some sort of clear liquid, before lightly shaking the plastic tube. Tom glanced over at Lance White, who looked oddly like a cartoon character sat on the washing machine in his white coverall.

The man with the plastic tube extracted some of Tom's blood and added several drops of it onto a small glass slide, before slotting it under a microscope. Tom sat still, barely even breathing. After what seemed like a year of eternities, the man looked back up.

"Clear." He said.

Tom's chest let go and he breathed a deep sigh of relief.

"Excellent," White said, practically leaping off the washing machine and enthusiastically shaking Tom's hand. "Isn't that great news?" He said, beaming.

"Yeah, yeah that's great news," Tom agreed, grinning in spite of himself, still feeling almost euphoric with relief. "So, what now?"

"We're done here." White said, gesturing around the kitchen. The two men were silently and efficiently packing their equipment back up.

"Okay, well…thanks very much."

"Just doing my job, Mr Everett." White said, grinning.

Tom walked him to the front door. "If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to contact us." White said, as the two men shook hands.

"Okay," Tom said. "Thanks again, man."

White tipped him a salute and Tom closed the door, amazed at how quickly that had all happened.

Outside, White walked out onto the sidewalk and looked around the street, no longer grinning. He looked like he was thinking carefully. All was quiet, but as far as Lance White was concerned, it was the calm before the storm. The silence was rippled by a faint whine coming out of the west that soon turned into a full-throated roar. White looked up into the sky and saw a jet fighter scream over the street at treetop level, loud enough to rattle the windows of the nearby houses. White watched it go before heading back to the van. He was grinning again.


"And Sandra talked to one of the doctors at the hospital," Joe was saying as they were on patrol an hour later. "He said they couldn't have been testing for rabies that way."

"So what were they testing for?" Tom asked, keeping his eyes on the road as he drove.

"I don't know," Joe admitted. "But whatever it was we didn't have it, so we don't have to worry about it, right?"

"Right." Tom replied. Wrong.

There was a convenience store with a gas station in front on the intersection of 87th and Cottage Grove. Tom was about to suggest pulling in to fill up the tank (and maybe get a doughnut) when he saw that some kind of disturbance appeared to be taking place. Several people were stood around it, and Tom saw with unease that another squad car was parked in front of it. Seconds later a gunshot rang out and the small crowd bolted, fleeing back across the parking lot.

Tom and Joe exchanged a glance, and Tom turned on the siren and swung the car neatly into the stores parking lot. The crowd, which had reassembled at the very edge of the sidewalk, their curiosity apparently outweighing their fear, moved aside uneasily to let them through. Tom parked the squad car behind the first, and both men got out.

"You'd better get backup on the radio, man." Tom said, taking his gun out of its holster and flicking off the safety. "And get those people out of here."

Tom moved up to the front door of the store, his gun pointing towards the ground. He crouched by the entrance and poked his head round the corner. It was relatively big convenience store, with four aisles that ran up towards the cash register. In the one aisle that Tom could see lay a dead man in a police uniform. There were streaks of blood on the floor that looked horribly bright and jaunty in the fluorescent lighting. A crash came from the back of the store as something was knocked over and an angry yell echoed up the aisles. Tom felt goose bumps rise on his arms. There was something familiar in that sound.

"Jesus, son of a bitch is a cop killer." That was Joe, who had joined him on the opposite side of the door, his gun also out. "Backup's on the way. You want to wait for it?"

Tom shook his head and looked back inside the door. He could hear something moving back there, maybe more than one thing. He could remember going to see Jurassic Park as a teenager and thinking the whole film was pretty dumb. The only thing that had scared him had been the dinosaurs that had one huge claw on each foot. The Velociraptors. Those fuckers were fast. Now it was them he imagined, prowling the aisles at the back of the store, nosing their long snouts among the spills tins of food, their claws clacking dully against the floor.

He ran through the options in his mind. Whoever they were, they had already killed one cop. Somehow, Tom didn't think shouting "Freeze! Police!" would do any good in this situation. If they came out now, they would kill him and Joe and then escape. If Tom and Joe caught them off guard however, they might be able to disarm the robbers, or at least kill them before they hurt anyone else.

He held up one finger to Joe. Wait, the gesture said. Joe looked at him quizzically, but stayed where he was. Tom jogged back to the squad car, listening out for the sound of approaching sirens. There were none so far. It looked like they were going solo on this then.

Tom opened the car door and reached under the dash, retrieving the Remington pump-action shotgun that was clipped there. Tom checked to make sure it was loaded and ran back to the store, stowing his pistol back in its holster as he went. Joe's eyes widened slightly at the sight of the shotgun. Tom shrugged and cocked his head towards the door. Joe nodded and the two officers crept inside. The fluorescent lights made the situation more surreal, shining sanely down on the damage. The knocked over shelves, the spilled drinks, the coke fridge with a single bloody handprint smeared across it. Something bad had gone down here, and Tom was starting to suspect it was more than just a robbery.

Joe pointed at himself and then down the far aisle. Tom nodded; he would take the aisle at the far end of the store and they would flank whoever was crashing around at the back of the store. Tom crept around the far aisle, ready to discharge the Remington at a moments notice. There were two more bodies back here, a man and a woman. It was really a hell of a lot of trouble to go through just to rob a large convenience store wasn't it? His fingers were leaving marks of perspiration along the barrel of the shotgun. If anyone came round the corner of the aisle now, Tom would blow their head right off. He reached the end of the aisle, the shifting sounds closer now. Whoever was making them was right around the corner. He hoped to God that Joe was in position at the other end of the store.

He tightened his grip on the shotgun, whispered a quick prayer to whoever might be listening, and shouted "Now!"

He stepped out from behind the aisle and what he saw appalled him, sickening him to his stomach and making one irrefutable statement stand out in his mind, flashing out like a neon sign:

This was not a robbery.