Scott Sigler - Contagious

She handed him an ice cream bar.

“Yes, Chelsea,” Ogden said. “I’m ready.”

Officer Carmen Sanchez had a bad feeling about this one. A report of bloody snow and two bodies. He felt grateful for the subzero temperature. Morbid, sure, but dealing with a frozen body was preferable to finding one that had cooked in Detroit’s summer humidity for a few days. Sometimes these calls were crap, but after ten years on the force you got a hunch for which ones were the real deal. Sanchez had that hunch now.

The cruiser’s bubble lights flashed as his partner, Marcellus Ridder, pulled off to the side of Orleans Street. Headlights illuminated chewed-up snow.

Snow streaked with frozen red. Streaks that led toward a fence and the trees beyond. And just past the torn fence, two bodies—one black, one white.

Neither of them moving.

Ridder put the cruiser in park and grabbed the radio handset. “This is Adam-Twelve, responding to reports of bodies on Orleans Street,” he said. “We have two men down. Send ambulance and backup immediately. We’re examining the scene.”

A ten-year-old boy had seen the bloody snow, found the bodies, then walked to a gas station and called the police. What a ten-year-old boy was doing up at four in the morning, Sanchez didn’t want to know. Strict parenting didn’t always happen in these parts.

Ridder put the handset back in its cradle. They both got out of the car, guns drawn and pointed at the ground. Ridder knelt behind the cruiser’s open driver’s-side door, while Sanchez did the same with the passenger door.

“Police! Do not move!” Sanchez screamed in his loudest cop voice. “Stay where you are! If you can hear me, kick your right foot!”

Their caution probably seemed silly to most people, because both men looked very, very dead, but this much blood meant weapons, probably guns, and Detroit police do not fuck around with something like that. Either one of the men might rise up at any second and start shooting.

“I said move your right foot!” Sanchez screamed. That’s the way it usually went—Ridder did the driving, Sanchez did the yelling. To each his own special skills.

“We gotta check them out,” Sanchez said. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Ridder said.

“I’ll take the white guy on the left. Go!”

Sanchez scooted around his door and moved toward the prone white man. He kept his gun pointed at the ground but angled forward, so he would only have to raise it a couple of inches should the man pop up with a weapon.

The Caucasian corpse was overweight, with a frost-lined red beard and brown eyes that stared blankly into nothing. The eyes had frozen open. A small bloody hole dotted the right side of his throat. His shirt, especially the collar, looked stiff with frozen blood.

Still-wrapped Big Macs littered the area.

Ridder knelt next to the black guy.

“This guy’s dead,” Ridder said. “No pulse, cold to the touch.”

Sanchez reached down to feel for a pulse, fingers probing under the beard, feeling the fat man’s neck. The skin was cold and firm, but not stiff—the man hadn’t frozen solid yet. Sanchez felt the jawline, reached under it and pressed.

Then a sound like a soft cough.

The sensation that his fingers had popped something, a small bubble.

A thin cloud of gray lifted up and away from the man’s beard.

Only then did Sanchez see it—little blisters on the corpse’s neck, hands, even some on the forehead. He’d popped one, and this gray powder shot out and drifted through the air like fine pollen.

“Aw, fuck, ” he said. “What the fuck is this?”

He backed away from the corpse, left arm bent, left hand held away from his body. He flung his hand, snapping his fingers outward. The powdery substance flew from his skin and floated in the air.

Ridder looked at him. “What the fuck happened, Chez?”

“This guy has blisters,” Sanchez said. “I think I touched one. It popped like a puffball or something. Fucking gross !”

He holstered his pistol “Get the first-aid kit. Oh man, this is so fucking nasty. Fucking asshole probably has AIDS or something. It’s a fucking AIDS blister. I should have been wearing gloves.”

Ridder ran to the cruiser and opened the trunk. He pulled out the first-aid kit.

Sanchez stopped and looked at the hand for a second, wondering if he actually felt what he thought he was feeling. He was. It wasn’t his imagination, his hand felt hot. Real hot.

“AIDS doesn’t have blisters,” Ridder said as he took a clear plastic alcohol bottle out of the kit.

“Yeah? Then why does this fucking burn ? Hurry up!”

Ridder doused the hand with alcohol, then handed Sanchez some gauze.

“Wipe it off,” Ridder said.

“Oh, ya fucking think?” Sanchez wiped at the hand.

Ridder opened a belt pocket and pulled out surgical gloves.

Sanchez looked at the gloves in Ridder’s hand as he continued to wipe his skin. “That’s not going to fucking help me now, you asshole.”

Ridder took a step back. “Well, I don’t want AIDS.”

“You said AIDS doesn’t have blisters!”

“I don’t fucking know, okay?”

The burning sensation grew. Sanchez had vacationed in Jamaica once, with his second wife, and while swimming had put his left hand through a jellyfish. That’s what this felt like, a persistent stinging/burning pain that steadily increased.

“Oh man,” Sanchez said. “That was so goddamn sick. Shit, this burns.”

Ridder stared at the hand. “Uh, Chez,” he said. “Remember this morning’s

Ridder stared at the hand. “Uh, Chez,” he said. “Remember this morning’s briefing? About that shit in Gaylord?”

Sanchez stopped wiping. His eyes widened in fear.

“Flesh-eating shit? You think I got that flesh-eating shit?”

“I don’t know, man,” Ridder said. “Just relax.”

“ You fucking relax!”

“Look,” Ridder said. “We’ve got that test kit, that swab thing. Go use it on that guy.”

“Me? I think I’m fucked up enough here.”

“Well, if he’s got it, then you already got it,” Ridder said. “Why the fuck should I get it?”

Flesh-eating disease… was that supposed to burn? If not, what did burn? This came out of a dead man’s skin, for God’s sake.

“Dude, this hurts, ” Sanchez said. “You’ve got gloves on, just check him!”

“No fucking way. Let the paramedics do it, they’re trained for that stuff.”

Sanchez could already hear the sirens. The ambulance would be here within minutes, but he couldn’t wait. He had to know now. “Come on, man,” he said. “Just do the test.”

He took a step toward Ridder. In the blink of an eye, Ridder was backpedaling, drawing his weapon and pointing it at Sanchez.

“You stay the fuck away from me,” Ridder said. “Stay right there!”

Sanchez did just that. His own partner, drawing down on him. This was messed up. This was how people got shot. “Okay,” he said. “I’m not moving. Just relax, Ridder, and stop pointing that gun at me.”

Ridder didn’t stop, not until the ambulance arrived and the paramedics took over.

Margaret and Dew sat in the computer room, watching the flat-panel screens. Note to self, Dew thought. Never let the sentence “How can it get worse?” enter your mind again.

Murray had just sent the live feed from Detroit’s Channel 7 News Eye in the Sky. The screen showed a road that ran parallel to a strip of snow-covered trees. Looked like an abandoned railroad track that had long since grown in. Near an area where the old track ran under an overpass, Dew saw a pair of unmarked blue semi trailers.