Lost Brothers – Chapter Two

NOT EDITED

Riley and Tara were in the middle of a call when Eli finally texted back. After dropping the patient off at the county hospital and taking a quick piss break, Riley found Eli’s texts gave him even more questions than the first one.

Eli: I’m fine

Eli: If you see something weird, trust your gut

Riley: You are NOT okay. What the hell is going on? Call me.

It had been almost three hours since then, and Eli still hadn’t read his text. Riley had even tried calling him in between dispatches, and he’d yet to get anywhere other than his damn voicemail.

Now, just a little after four that afternoon, Riley and Tara were sent out on another call: a squabble between roommates had turned violent, and they had both ended up falling out a window and onto the sidewalk below. One of them had gotten up, was aggressive, and was…

“Biting?” Tara asked. “What the hell does that even mean? You think it’s a typo or something?”

“Zombies,” Riley mumbled, his jaw tense. He adjusted his grip on the steering wheel, trying to force himself to keep his hands loose enough that his knuckles stayed skin-colored.

Tara snorted. “Yeah, zombies. Zombies or somebody drugged up on who the hell knows what.”

With Eli’s ominous message that morning, and the two that eventually followed, for the first time in his career, Riley hoped for a violent drug addict.

***

By the time Riley and Tara arrived at the scene, the police had already barricaded all entrances to the intersection with their cruisers. Neither paramedic had much more to say than a whispered, “Jesus Christ,” as Riley parked the ambulance. The makeshift barricades were one thing. The presence of LAPD police chief Jamal Pitman was something else entirely.

Before Riley could even open his mouth, Jamal held a finger up to his lips, silencing any words before they could surface. A moment later, he stretched out his hand, gently patting the air toward the ground, signaling for them to get down. Riley and Tara crouched down low and hustled over to Jamal, who was down on one knee behind the door of a police cruiser, his free hand wrapped around his pistol.

“What the hell’s going on?” Riley asked, his voice hushed.

“It’s been a hell of a day,” Jamal said simply.

“With this?” Tara asked.

Jamal leaned up slightly and looked over the hood of the cruiser before turning his attention back to the EMTs again. “We’ve had a lot of disturbance calls today. Fights at work, fights at the park, fights at home. Disturbances. Someone’s ended up bitten by the attacker in almost all of them, save for the two where the alleged attacker was shot dead. In all but one of the disturbances with a living attacker, they had long since fled the scene by the time my officers showed up. This one, though…” Jamal lifted a shoulder. “Two victims, both alive and screaming when officers arrived. Pinned down the attacker, got one cuff on, he throws off the officer, takes a bite out of his throat.” A pause. “The officer was dead pretty quickly, I’m told. I arrived shortly before you did. The original two… One’s dead. He died soon after the original officers arrived on scene. The second one’s quiet now, but she’s alive. I can still see her breathing.”

“We need to go in and help her,” Riley said, already rising to his feet.

Jamal grabbed his forearm and yanked him back down. “Consider this an active shooter situation. EMS does not go in until the area is secured.”

“Fuck that. She’s dying out there.”

“The rules are in place for a reason. You, of all people, should know that.”

There were a lot of things Riley could easily detach himself from. Brush them aside. Ignore them. Not feel the impact of them.

That was not one of them.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Tara asked, the words fuzzy through the numbing static.

“I didn’t mean it like that, and you damn well know it,” Jamal said through his teeth. “I have lost three men today. Three. And I have seven in the damn hospital. With those deaths and injuries, new rules will be implemented, just as Colby’s death resulted in this rule being implemented. That is how I meant it.”

The fuzzy static dissipated a little as Jamal grabbed Riley’s shoulder and gave it a sharp squeeze. “I’m sorry, Riley. Are you with us?”

Riley nodded, teeth digging into the inside of his cheeks. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Yeah, I’m here. I’m with you.”

“Good. I want you take a peek over this car. Just a little one. Look at our suspect.”

Riley searched Jamal’s face for any sort of hint or indicator of what he was hoping to accomplish, but there was nothing there. The elderly black man had nailed down quite a few tactics in his years, but the absolute blankness he wore like a mask was certainly one of his greatest achievements. At least, as far as Riley was concerned.

Tentatively, Riley leaned up just enough to get a good look at the scene on the other side of the vehicular barricade. A man in a torn dress shirt staggered around in the middle of the intersection, his hands and face slick with blood that Riley imagined wasn’t his own. The dead cop lay a few feet away from him in the middle of the road, blood pooled around him. The two civilian victims were on the sidewalk, the man entirely motionless, the woman chest rising and falling. Every now and then, her hand moved or she dragged her leg up toward herself a little before it fell down again.

Riley crouched back down, gaze on the street beneath his feet. Was this what Eli’s texts were about? Had… this already happened in New York? And what the hell even was this? “Narcotics?” Riley asked, forcing his eyes back to the police chief’s face.

Jamal shook his head before offering a shrug. “I don’t know. If it is, it’s nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

Riley knew what the implication of that particular statement was. If the rumors about Jamal were true, and he was pretty sure a fair share of them were, then the man spent his free time working with the mob. If anyone would know about the drugs being pumped into Los Angeles and surrounding areas by thugs and gangsters, it’d be Jamal Pitman.

His lack of certainty wasn’t exactly any more reassuring than any of the other ‘comforting’ moments of Riley’s day thus far.

“I’m going.” Riley nodded off toward the street. “Whether you come or not, I’m going to her, and I’m going to stop the bleeding.”

Tara grabbed his arm. “I’m sorry, did you see the same shit I saw? You’ll get yourself killed.”

Riley pulled his arm from her grip. “Then they’ll make a new rule because of me, and I’ll finally get to see Colby again.” He grabbed Tara’s kit and slid across the hood of the cruiser before she could stop him.

“God fucking dammit,” Jamal said through his teeth.

Riley hustled over to the female victim, doing his best to stay quiet and low. It wasn’t until he knelt beside her that he realized Jamal had followed him. Riley raised a questioning brow in his direction.

“If another man is dying on my watch, I’m going down with him.”

Riley nodded and held out a fist, which Jamal stared at for a moment before tapping his own against it. Riley laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Ma’am, can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” she whispered, her eyes closed.

“Good. What’s your name?”

“Molly.”

“Okay, Molly. My name’s Riley. I’m gonna get you taken care of, okay?”

Molly only nodded.

Riley pulled on a pair of gloves as he glanced up at their unsub, still wandering the intersection, bloody fingers twitching at his side. “Molly, where does it hurt?”

She licked her dry lips. “Everywhere. B-but my leg and my shoulder a-are the worst.”

“You wanna tell me what happened?” Riley asked as he dug through the kit for his trauma shears.

“When he fell from the window, I was walking past. H-he fell on me. I think I broke my leg. And then, he…” Her brow furrowed for a moment, eyes still closed. “He got up, and for a moment, I-I almost thought he was just gonna walk off the fall and help me, but he bit me. He threw himself at me, grabbed my shoulders, and bit me. A man yelled at him, kicked him off of me, and then he…”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to try and relive any more of it.”

“Thank you.”

Riley squeezed her arm. Shears in hand, he cut her pant leg. Her skin greeted him with visible bones. Compound fractures of the tibia and fibula. He glanced up at Jamal before leaning to the side for a look at her neck. Two fingers hooked through the collar of her shirt, he gently pulled it back. The wound was near the area where the shoulder and neck connected, a little closer to her shoulder than her neck. The man had ripped out a genuine chunk of skin and meat, his teeth marks distinct and curved on both sides of the wound. It wasn’t very deep, and placement-wise, she was about as lucky as a woman who’d served as a cushioned landing for a man could possibly be. The bleeding had already mostly stopped on its own, the blood clotting and congealing enough to be tacky, which had made peeling her shirt back a slow and thoughtful process.

But the skin around the wound was discolored, faintly gray. He had certainly seen his share of necrotizing wounds, but never one so quickly after the wound occurred.

“We need to get her stabilized and in the ambulance now. You have my back?” Riley asked.

Jamal nodded. “I’ve held worse positions.”

Riley couldn’t help but snort. “If even a third of the shit they say about you is true? Yeah, I’m sure you have.”

At that, the old man almost cracked a smile. Almost.

While Riley stabilized the bones in Molly’s leg and dressed the shoulder bite, Jamal kept a close eye on the wandering man, eyes occasionally flickering toward the dead officer in the street.

“Don’t think about him right now, Pitman,” Riley said. “I need you here.”

“It’s not… that,” Jamal said slowly. “He’s… started breathing. I can see his chest moving.”

“You’re imaging it.”

“I assure you, Monroe, I am not.”

Riley taped down the gauze on Molly’s shoulder before lifting his head, ready to tell the police chief he was simply reacting to trauma, whether he liked it or not. But there it was, clear as day — the dead boy in blue was fucking breathing. “Molly, we need to get you up. Chief Pitman and I are going to pull you to your feet, you’re going to keep all weight on your good leg, and we’re going to move. Are you with me?”

Molly nodded.

“Jamal?”

“I’m with you.”

Eyes flickering back and forth between Molly and the breathing officer, Riley and Jamal hoisted her to her feet. Halfway back to the police cruiser barricade, the officer pulled himself to his hands and knees. His eyes locked with Jamal’s, and as he let out the most horrific scream Riley had ever heard, he bolted upright, like a track star out of the starting blocks, and sprinted toward them. Jamal clocked him with the butt of his pistol, right in the nose, before driving a foot into his gut and kicking him down. “Run.”

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