The hard lines of what was happening and what I thought was happening had grown fuzzy while I slept, and it was almost as if my long sleep was reluctant to let me go.
“It’s okay, honey,” said Junie. “Don’t force it. Don’t fight it.”
When I looked at her, she was not Junie. She was a corpse, withered and burned. The shadowy man with the blurred face stood beside her chair. The only part of his face I could see was his mouth. He was smiling, smiling. Big white teeth.
“You’re a self-righteous thug, Ledger. I’m going to take it all away from you. Everything you have, everything you love. All of it.”
“Who are you?” I croaked.
He reached up and dug his fingers into the gray swirl of nothingness that was his face and slowly peeled it off, revealing it to be a mask.
The face beneath the mask was my own.
I screamed.
And woke up.
“It’s okay, Joe,” said Junie. Again. Exactly the same way, except this time when I looked at her she was alive and whole, and she was alone.
I blinked and I was alone. Her chair was empty and the light falling through the window was gray.
“Please.” Not sure whom I was talking to or what I was asking for.
There are times, when my inner psychological parasites are at their worst, that I wonder if any of my life is real. Maybe I never survived the trauma of my teen years, when my girlfriend Helen and I were attacked by a gang. I was beaten nearly to death and she was brutalized in other ways. Maybe I never lived past that day. Maybe this is all some kind of purgatory. Or maybe my body survived but my mind snapped. There’s a lot of evidence for that; I could build a case. After all, the things I’ve seen and done since possess the qualities of nightmares. Zombies, vampires, mad scientists, secret societies, clones, genetic freaks. Has the world gone mad or was I batshit crazy? Or some combination of both? Doubt of that kind is a terrible thing. It holds a match to the high explosives of paranoia and then everything you believe in, everything you trust, goes boom.
“It’s okay, Joe,” said Junie’s voice. I turned toward her once more, blinking tears from my eyes. Except it wasn’t Junie. It was Rudy Sanchez.
My friend.
My shrink.
Fellow veteran of the wars. A fellow traveler on the fun-show ride that was the Department of Military Sciences and the fight against terrorism in all its many forms.
“R-Rudy…?” I asked, doubting this. Doubting him.
“Good morning, Cowboy,” he said.
“Am I alive?” I asked.
He smiled. “You are. And thank God for that.”
I looked around. It was the same room but something was different. The flowers on the table looked older. There were more cards taped to the wall.
“Where’s… where’s Junie?”
“I sent her home to get some sleep,” said Rudy. “She was completely exhausted. She’s been here every day.”
Every day. Not sure what that meant. Not yet.
“Top? Bunny…?”
He nodded. “They made it through. Thank God for that, too. They’ll be fine.”
Made it through. It was meant to be comforting, but somehow it wasn’t.
“The rest of the flight crew is fine, too,” he added. “They didn’t get it as bad.”
Get it.
It.
I licked my dry lips. “What… happened?”
Rudy took too much time girding his loins to deliver bad news. I know him, I know his face, so there was no chance he was going to say something I wanted to hear. He pulled his chair closer. He looked haggard. Unshaven and unkempt, and Rudy was always a meticulous man. The kind of guy who would take time to trim his mustache and comb his hair before leaving a burning building. Not now, though. He looked like he’d been mugged with enthusiasm, dragged by his heels through an alley, and kicked awake by homeless people. He smelled of sour sweat and too much coffee.
“Joe,” he said, laying a hand cautiously on my shoulder, “you’ve been in a coma. You understand that?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sleeping-fucking-beauty. How long?”
“Two weeks,” he said.
That hit me really damn hard. Two weeks? Gone. Simply erased from my life.
I said, “Tell me.”
He did. It was the flu. Not just any flu, not SARS or MERS or anything like that. This was what you might call “old school.” The simple truth was that Top and Bunny and I were infected with the Spanish flu. Yeah. That one. Or at least a mutated strain of it. The disease that swept Europe, Asia, and North America in 1918 and ’19. During that outbreak over five hundred million people were infected, and of those one in five died. Eighty to one hundred million people. Dead. It remains as one of the worst pandemics in human history, with only the Black Plague having verifiably killed more people.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, fighting to sit up. “Didn’t they cure that shit like forever ago?”
“Not exactly,” said Rudy. “It ran its course but there were complications. This was the end of the First World War, whole populations were displaced, and medical services were taxed and…” He stopped and waved his hand. “It doesn’t matter. Yes, there are vaccines available for this and other strains of avian flu; however, the particular strain that infected you and your men was, until now, unknown to science. It looked like the Spanish flu and even acted like it in laboratory tests, but there were subtle differences, including the presence of unknown forms of bacteria that somehow bonded with the virus. That presented Dr. Hu’s medical team — and a great number of experts we consulted — with a genuine challenge. Not that it will give you much comfort, Joe, but books and papers will be written about it.”
“Um… hooray?”
“You should probably buy Will Hu a beer. You’ve become his favorite lab rat.”
I tried again to sit up, and failed. “I feel like I’ve been mugged by the Hulk. How bad am I?”
“Weak,” he said. “Once you were out of danger they transferred you here. At Mr. Church’s request they began some muscle massage, passive movement, and a few other therapies to slow the rate of muscle atrophy. You’re going to have to take it very slow, though, and be very careful. You’ll need a lot of rest and a lot of physical therapy.”
“Fuck that. I want to get the hell out of here. Right now.”
“You’d fall on your face.”
“Then get me a wheelchair and a protein shake. Come on, Rude, I need to talk to Church. Houston—”
“Houston is a tragedy, Joe, but it’s being handled. I’m sure Mr. Church will fill you in.”
“Good. He can do that at my office. Where are my pants?”
“You wouldn’t make it to the door. You’ll need time, therapy, and some medicines before you’re fit to walk.”
“Don’t bet on it.” I swung my legs out of bed and went to stand up. The room took a half spin and I could feel myself falling backward. When I woke up Rudy was eating a fish taco off of a paper plate. It was full dark outside.
“Did you have a good rest?” he asked, dabbing at sauce on his mustache.
“Fuck you,” I said.
He smiled and took another bite.
“For a doctor you’re not a very nice man,” I told him.
“You are incorrect. I am well known for my courteous bedside manner.”
I wanted to say something smartass. Nothing came to mind. I tried to blink my eyes clear.
The room was empty.
Rudy was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Harry Bolt knew how to steal a car. It was one of the things he did very well. He found a Volvo that looked old enough not to have an alarm, jimmied the door, and hot-wired it. Violin slid into the passenger seat with the suitcase tucked into the footwell behind her. Her clothes were smudged with soot and they glistened with blood. Some of it was hers.