Fires of Midnight

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Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Fires of Midnight
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For Toni
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sunday, 3:00 P.M.
 
“S
etting down now, Doctor.”
Susan Lyle nodded at the pilot and leaned back in her seat as the helicopter descended toward Edwin H. Land Boulevard.
The rotor wash kicked up dirt and debris on a normally bustling Cambridge thoroughfare that was deserted now save for the local and Massachusetts state policemen making a valiant effort to keep the milling crowds back. From farther up, those crowds had looked like a blanket draped over the adjacent streets, expanding continuously and rippling with motion as people poked and prodded their way forward to catch a glimpse.
She had determined the preliminary strategy based on a schema and map of the area faxed to her while in transit and relayed her instructions to authorities on the scene three hours before. In accordance with those instructions, the entire area around the Cambridgeside Galleria had been blocked off from the northern end of Charles Park to the entrance to the Monsignor O’Brien Highway to the south. The natural barrier of the Charles River cut off access from the west, and she could see police barricades all along First Street to the east. A ring of officers in riot gear guarded the primary mall entrance on the chance that anyone slipped through these apparently formidable lines.
The suspended traffic lights bounced as the chopper settled down in the center of Land Boulevard in front of the Royal Sonesta Hotel. Susan
saw a man in a state police uniform approach with one hand raised to shield his eyes and the other clamped on his hat. She climbed out of the chopper and started forward, watching the officer lower the hand from his eyes, clearly surprised by her appearance. She wore brown slacks and a cream-colored blouse beneath a light summer-weight jacket. Her blond hair bounced as she approached him, blown carelessly by the rotor’s slowing spin. Her skin was fair, her eyes a shade hovering between blue and green. She appeared to be of average height until she straightened her knees once free of the blade’s reach and looked the officer almost straight in the eye.
“Dr. Susan Lyle,” she said, right hand extended and voice raised to carry over the chopper’s whirring engine and the persistent hum of murmurs from the curious crowds. “Firewatch Command.”
“Captain Frank Sculley,” he returned, taking the hand she offered. “Got a command post set up in that park just across the street.”
“Have my orders been followed, Captain?” Susan asked as they moved toward it.
“Best as we could manage.”
“And the witnesses?”
“They’re still together.”
“On scene?”
Sculley gestured toward a trio of buses parked farther down Land Boulevard and enclosed by police cruisers. “I commandeered those from a tour group. Figured that was as good a place to hold them as any.”
“What about the hotel guests?”
“Trouble there. We lost some of them.”
“Some?”
“Dozens. Lots, actually. Guests from a wedding yesterday checking out. Sorry, Doctor. By the time I got here—”
Susan stopped on the sidewalk directly before the officers fronting the main entrance to the Cambridgeside Galleria. “They’ve got to be tracked down and isolated, do you hear me? There’s another chopper en route with men inside who can handle the details. I’ll want you to coordinate things with the hotel personnel.”
Captain Sculley shrugged.
Dr. Susan Lyle’s gaze drifted across Cambridgeside Place to a restaurant called Rayz on the Galleria’s ground floor, accessible via its own off-street entrance as well as from within the mall. “I assume that was open.”
“Until the local police closed it.”
“And the patrons?”
Captain Sculley said nothing.
“My instructions were to secure the perimeter, Captain,” Dr. Lyle snapped. “No one allowed out.”
“Too late by the time all your instructions came through. In case you haven’t noticed, things have been pretty crazy around here the last few hours.” Sculley gestured with his eyes toward a second restaurant on the corner of Land Boulevard. “But as near as we can tell, no one in Papa Razzi was affected at all.”
Susan remembered the schema. “No direct access to the mall, right?”
“No. What’s that mean?”
Susan didn’t respond. The less local authorities learned now, the better. Until just hours before, they had known nothing of Firewatch Command’s existence, much less the helicopter on constant prep outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Whoever was standing watch could be anywhere in the country within six hours of an alarm being sounded, whisked there in a jet that was fueled and ready twenty-four hours a day at Hartsfield International. In the five years since Firewatch’s formation, there had been only two such alarms before today: one false and the other easily passed off to a leak in a chemical storage tank a few miles from the afflicted area. If the initial reports were borne out, the Cambridgeside Galleria would mark the first incident potentially warranting full-scale-alert status. That decision would be Susan’s to make.
“How many people have actually entered the mall?” she asked Sculley. “I haven’t counted. The Cambridge patrolman first on the scene, the ninety or so witnesses we’ve got in those buses. Just about all of them came out of the parking garage before we sealed it off.”
“
About all
?”
“A few came out through the main doors.”
Sculley’s response scraped against Susan’s spine. “Then the doors were open.”
“Not for very long.”
“Have any of those who came through them displayed any effects or symptoms?”
“They only stayed inside long enough to see—”
“Just answer my question, Captain.”
Sculley’s neck turned slightly red. “Not that we’ve been able to detect, no.”
“And the equipment that was supposed to arrive from Mass General?”
“In that ambulance.”
Sculley gestured behind them toward the command post set up inside Charles Park, composed of nothing more than four squad cars enclosing a rescue wagon and a small mobile home painted in blue and white police colors. A table had been set up outside it from which a pair of officers were frantically deploying reinforcements to those areas of the crowd line that seemed ready to give. The garbled sounds of status reports filtered through the air, mixing raspily with the voices squeezing out of the walkie-talkie clipped to Sculley’s belt. Finally he switched it off.
“I’m going to assume, Doctor, that whatever’s in that ambulance is something the hospital keeps just in case somebody like you from out of town needs it.”
“That’s correct, Captain,” she said and started across the street.
Sculley stayed right alongside her. “Probably means lots of other hospitals are similarly supplied.”
“In every major city.”
“Like you were expecting this.”
“Prepared for it, more accurately.”
“You got your problems, I got mine. We got damn near a full-scale panic on our hands. I haven’t got enough men on detail to hold all these people back from the perimeter. Plenty have pushed their way through. A few got close to the mall.”
That got her attention. “But not inside.”
“No,” Sculley said, “not inside.”
“What about the National Guard?”
“Governor’s calling them up. It takes time.”
“And the media?”
“News blackout, as per your orders. There’ve been some leaks, rumors. You can’t keep word of something like this quiet. If you ask me—”
“I didn’t,” Susan said. “We do nothing and say nothing until we determine the level of contamination.”
Sculley turned his eyes toward one throng gathered at the back end of the park and another squeezed against the barriers across First Street as if they were waiting for a parade to start. “You wanna tell
them
that, Doc? Lots of folks in the crowd are next of kin to those inside. Parents mostly. Sunday at the mall, loaded with kids, you get my drift.”
“Why don’t we wait until we have something intelligent to tell them? Why don’t we wait until I’ve had a chance to inspect the inside?”
 
T
he Racal II space suit was a poor fit, a generic medium when Susan could better have used a small. It was portable and contained a battery-powered air supply for use in the expected or likely presence of biohazards. The suit itself, apart from the helmet and air system, was also disposable—a necessity in events when rapid deployment usually meant the lack of elaborate decontamination procedures. The original Racal suits had been bright orange in color, but had been changed to white to attract less attention to the presence of emergency personnel in potential hot zones.
Susan had pulled it up over her pants and blouse inside the police mobile unit, then checked the miniature camera built into the helmet just over the faceplate. The camera’s controls were located on a transistorized remote that could be affixed to either wrist with a strap. She fastened it over her left sleeve and made sure it was operational before exiting the trailer. Sculley was waiting when she climbed out and escorted her
through the park to the security line set up before the Cambridgeside Galleria’s main entrance.
“Anything I can do while you’re inside?” he offered.
“I left a radio in the mobile unit for you to monitor my transmission. If something … happens, your good judgment will be put to the test.”
“We’re in this together, Doc.”
Susan nodded and snapped her faceplate into place. The line of police fronting the entrance parted to provide passage across Cambridgeside Place. She slid between a pair of sawhorses set behind them and approached the vacuum seal portal that had been installed in front of the glass doors beneath a huge, glitzy sign reading GALLERIA.
The thick, airtight plastic of the prefab unit wavered a bit in the wind. There were two additional off-street entrances to the Galleria and both had been similarly sealed and were also under heavy guard. The “door” to the vacuum seal was actually a zipper running up the plastic. Susan stepped inside and then resealed it before proceeding through one of the glass doors onto the first floor of the Cambridgeside Galleria.
She activated the camera’s wrist control and made sure to rotate her helmet sideways as well as up so the tape would capture the entire scope of the mall. Later, computer enhancement and magnification would be able to lock on to and enlarge any specific point or area her rapid inspection might miss. The microphone built into her helmet sent a delayed, scrambled transmission to Firewatch Command, which would evaluate her analysis and take over the decision making should transmission break off suddenly.
The first bodies appeared almost instantly, stretched out on the floor as if clawing for the doors. Outside, Susan had managed to remain detached when Sculley broached the issue of the victims and their next of kin. At that point they were nothing more than theoretical concepts. But now those victims, or what was left of them, had become a reality. She felt her throat clog up and her breath quicken.
She imagined the mall as it normally was, bustling with patrons strolling about the floors, shopping bags in hand. Quiet music in the background maybe, clacking of heels against the tile floors. The shoppers were still here, all reportedly in the same condition as the grouping she hovered over now. The result was an eerie stillness that turned the air heavy, absent of sound save for a mechanical grinding she recognized as what, in bizarre counterpoint, could only be the mall’s still-functioning escalators.
Susan forced herself to move on deeper into the Galleria’s first floor, entering its atriumlike center formed by girders and glass. Three spiraling floors encompassing over one hundred stores. She noted their familiar names as she continued but didn’t register them. A pair of kiosks had been toppled over by the last of those struggling to flee, spreading stuffed animals and glassblown creations all over the floor. The sun streamed down
through the roof, reflecting off the glass and casting an eerie glow over the scene. To Susan it looked like an express elevator to the great beyond that had broken down from the overflow of passengers.
She was aware of each breath echoing in her helmet as she advanced. The rhythm of her heart came as deeper, quicker riffs in her head, seeming to expand the confines of her helmet with each throb. The worst came when she reached the back end of the first floor containing a food court. The litter of bodies turned it into an obstacle course she was reluctant to venture into. A clumsy misstep leading to a fall could result in her Racal II suit being torn, creating the very real risk of infection from whatever had caused all this. Her initial estimates, based on what she had seen by the time she was ready to move on, put the count of victims in the seventeen-hundred range conservatively.
“Condition of remains confirmed,” she said into the microphone located just below her misting faceplate. “Confinement of exposure confirmed. Fatality rate from exposure on first floor … one hundred percent. Proceeding to second.”

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