Brian O'Grady - Hybrid

She reached for his shoulders and steadied him. When she touched his skin, he went rigid, almost as if she had given him a powerful shock. “Are you all right?” she asked and stood on tiptoe to look him in the eyes.

“Yes,” he said through tight jaws. She let go, and he slumped perceptibly. “What happened to Melissa?” As soon as he said her name, Phil knew. Some strange sense told him that she had died.

“She arrested, and we couldn’t bring her back,” Cat said softly.

Phil saw Dr. Lee running the Code that would end with an official time of death for Melissa Shay. He watched her cursing the implanted pacemaker and defibrillator that kept discharging. Every five seconds, the device jolted Melissa’s heart, and finally, the muscle stopped responding. In the end, a surgical resident was called to remove the device, but it was much too late. Her myocardium had been shocked to death.

The vision ended, and Dr. Lee was staring at him intently. “Are you all right?” she asked him again.

“I didn’t even know she had a pacemaker,” Phil said more to himself than to her. An unfamiliar feeling of loss stole over him.

“I’m sorry,” Catherine Lee said, and touched his bare arm.

A whirlwind of images invaded Phil’s mind. Unbidden and unwelcome, he saw Cat with other patients, and then with her husband. Phil was paralyzed with horror as he watched them make love in the shower. He felt like a degenerate as they enjoyed each other’s bodies in the privacy of their own home, and when he realized that parts of him were responding to the vision, he vomited.

Cat jumped back, but not in time, and the connection between them was broken.

Nurses arrived, and orders were given. He felt the IV in his arm sting as they injected him with Zofran. The powerful antiemetic agent began to cloud his thinking, but a part of him clung to the realization that he had been infected. His consciousness began to fragment, and he saw the tall, dark man staring into the eyes of a scared young man dressed in a uniform and holding a gun.

“Shoot him,” Phil said to the young man. “He’s going to kill you.”

Dr. Lee and the nurses stopped what they were doing and stared at the now unconscious Phil, waiting for him to explain what he had just said so clearly.

* * *

“Seventeen dead and fourteen wounded, all from some sort of explosion. The strange thing is that there was no fire, and none of them had any burns.”

Rodney Patton was relaying what he knew about the situation in Mescali to the mayor. “The FBI is fairly sure it was our guy Reisch. He’s using the name Lyon now.”

No one was certain what had happened or how Reisch had escaped. The single survivor who could speak said that he had been unconscious before the other guardsmen were attacked. He told the FBI that Reisch had reached into his mind and squashed it, an account uncomfortably similar to Yaeger’s. Rodney kept that part to himself. “They’re also fairly sure that he was shot. There was a whole lot of blood at the scene that can’t be accounted for. The state forensics team is working on it now.”

“Good, at least the bastard is hurt. That ought to slow him down some.” The mayor coughed loudly into the phone, and Patton winced. “Both the feds and the locals asked if they could borrow you for the day. Apparently, what happened yesterday was as close as this guy has ever come to being caught. I guess they think that some of that luck will rub off on them.” He laughed and then started into another coughing fit.

Rodney pulled the phone away from his ear until it was over. “They called me earlier. I’m leaving as soon as we are done.” Patton hoped that the mayor would take the hint.

“So let me get this straight. This Reisch is a German who worked for the Russians and then for himself.” He paused.

“Correct.”

“Then he finds his way here and starts to infect people with a virus that only two people have ever survived — him and Amanda Flynn. I remember meeting her several years ago. She had the most amazing eyes; she was also very pregnant at the time.”

Patton waited for the mayor to voice the obvious connection, but a long silence followed.

“So this virus is what’s been causing all the violence,” the mayor finally said thoughtfully. “Then why aren’t people dying by the hundreds, the thousands?”

“I’m just a cop, Mayor,” Patton said, trying to hide his frustration. This was the third time the mayor had asked that question.

“Yes,” the mayor said. “And you did a good job. I gave you a deadline, and you beat it. I won’t forget this, Rodney.” He hung up.

“Finally,” Patton said to himself. He had already decided that chief or not, he would not be giving the daily briefing to His Honor for several more days. He returned the phone to its receiver, and it immediately rang. “What?” he demanded. He needed to get over to Mescali as soon as possible, and the morning was being eaten away by phone calls.

“Chief, I have a man on the line who says he’s with the CIA. He claims to be your brother,” the desk sergeant replied quickly.

Rodney remembered the man’s name this time. “He’s my brother-in-law, Sergeant Thompson. Put him through.” He had to go a little easier with these men and women. They were starting to doubt themselves because of his overbearing nature, and timidity got people killed.

He listened as the connection was made. “Michael, how has your morning started?” he said after he heard background noise and his brother-in-law breathing impatiently.

“Busy.” It wasn’t impatience; it was excitement in Michael Weigel’s voice. “I’m sure you heard about Mescali. Our German friend was busy this morning.”

“I’m on my way down there in a couple of minutes. It was a Colorado Springs unit that he hit.”

“Sorry. Boy, you guys can’t catch a break. Okay, let me get right to it. I’m calling in the spirit of interagency cooperation, which means I’m authorized to talk to you. There are a lot of things happening that you don’t know about, and need to. Reisch is not working alone. He’s hooked himself up with some pretty bad people — Islamic terrorists. They somehow created a couple of different viruses, and with the help of Reisch, they’ve released one of them in Colorado Springs as a calling card. They have a list of demands that the president is reviewing. “

“Michael you know that most of that is on the news and we figured the rest of it out ourselves. Now, how are you federal boys going to help us?”

A pause that stretched to far followed. “We have no plans to intervene besides the quarantine.”

“So you’re just going to lock us in, and when the last of us keels over you’ll come in and bury us?” Patton said bitterly, and then regretted lashing out at his brother-in-law. Rodney knew that this decision could not have sat well with Michael. “What are they estimating as far as a death toll?” he asked.

“More than twenty thousand, but only if we can keep people at home.”

Rodney was embarrassed that his initial feelings were of relief. Twenty thousand dead, that was manageable, wasn’t it? Reflexively, a tiny fragment of his mind began to calculate the odds that he wasn’t going to be one of the unlucky twenty thousand, and his embarrassment intensified.

“There’s more,” Michael said. “We need Reisch alive.”

“Then come and get him,” Rodney said savagely and then instantly regretted his misplaced hostility. “I’m sorry, Michael. I know it’s not your fault.”

“No need to apologize,” Michael said as his brother-in-law and friend. “When you get over there, you need to let everyone know that this asshole has to be taken alive. I don’t care how alive, just so long as his heart is beating.”