Cy entered the assembly room of the Lower Left Side precinct in the SVC District at 5 minutes before 0900. He'd gotten less than four hours of sleep after waiting on CSU at the sacs till 2 AM. From across the room he could see that the hypoglycemics had already ransacked the donuts to the crumbs of the curly glazed.
"All you joker's have a seat, will ya?" Said a big guy with a big belly and a big face at the front of the room. He wore a faded blue button down tucked in snug against his gut and a red tie that didn't make it to his navel. His metal, if he'd been wearing it, would've ID'd him as Major Michael Rophage of the Inter-Immunal Tactical Response Division.
Cy slid into a chair at the corner of a desk near the back by the exit. He liked to be first to the bathroom after the coffee racked his system. Everyone in the precinct did what they could to avoid that line of doody.
"Roll call's moot today. You all here?" Mike asked.
A grumbled hangover percolated through the ranks.
"Good enough," Mike said. "COMSTAT's postponed till next Tuesday. For those of you behind on your filings consider it an early Easter present."
One of the lifers hollered from near the front corner of the room something about Mike's wife's eggs. Mike threw his forearm under his elbow in the Bronchs vernacular of "stuff it up your a--."
"Alright, simmer down. This is where I got to get serious for a while," Mike said. The grin left his lips as fast as it came. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Cy noticed the boss looked more tired than his usual run down self.
"As some of you likely heard we had a murder last night. The call came in through the Nodes 'round nineteen hundred. Cy and a couple of the others on the upper cava route were the first responders. Cheers to you."
Meekly, Cy doffed his cap. The nods around him were gracious but mild.
"The techs spent the night going through the pros on file, but they got no matches. More calls came through on the gamma INF lines this morning. HQ is raising the threat level to red."
More expletives than whistles blew from the crowd, but the weight of the news landed on each one of them the same, Cy noticed. No one was reaching for their donuts now. It'd probably be half a day before any of them had time to eat again.
The stat level numbers came from up top; the boys in Limbic handled anything that had to do with coordination among the body politic. The highest Cy could remember during his 5 years on the job was an orange when an appendix burst during a vacation in the Cayman Islands. The antibiotics the local docs had pumped into the system interacted bad with some Retinol in the streets; Cy pulled three back to backs. He felt lucky that he made it.
A threat level red was damn near unheard of. Cy had heard some of the old heads around the drinking circle talk of a spell years back when an ear infection looked like it may have broken past the blood brain barrier, but even that was just scuttlebutt. Anyone on the force who told you a Red didn't pinch their butt hole was either lying or didn't have a butt hole that could cinch.
Major Rophage let the murmurs amongst his troops gurgle for a few moments before he brought the focus back with his arms. "As of now the suspect's unknown, but we're gonna be operating with the understanding that a profile's coming through by the afternoon. The last thing we need is a panic."
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Officer Nietro, Phill, raised his hand for Mike to call on him. When he did, Nietro asked if a panic would be worse than a bunch of alveolus cells getting popped by an ambush.
The room got tense. Cy could hear the last drops from the coffeemaker burning on the hot plate. Could smell them, too. The intake of breath Major Rophage drew was long and low. Cy put the odds at half that Mike would either break down crying or slap Nietro across the face with his own dop kit. Fortunately for all, and Phill most specific, Rophage chewed the inside of his cheek before responding. "Yeah," he said, his vowels drawn out as long as his under eyes were dark. "But the problem is we don't know what we're looking for. We can tell em all to watch their back, but for whom are they watching?"
Nietro shrugged, and the Major looked around the room at the eyes of his front line defense. Cy could tell the Major was asking as much as telling. He'd never seen the boss so hungry for an answer.
---
When the news came in Cy was ploughing through a plate at a standing counter off Vena Cava 1. The precinct had put him with a partner, a woman named Sharel, but she'd left 3 months ago for the baby. She'd said something about the marriage being off, but Cy tried not to listen too keenly. When he knew she'd be leaving he'd let the conversations run their course. He wasn't looking to open new ends that would just stay loose. Goodbye was hard enough without all that unresolved mush.
It was Nietro who told him about the forensics on the apoptosis the night before. Cy could still smell the insides of the body stinking up the hallways of its unit. It'd looked like an animal had tore into an entire family. There wasn't much left of the outsides short of some fat sticking to the walls. Everything that had been on the inside wasn't anymore. It was on the floor, out in the main thoroughfares, and on the bottom of his shoes.
"You hear?" Nietro asked, wiping a sheen off his brow after stepping into the shade. The temperature had been going up, Cy noticed. Phill made a gesture toward the cashier and said a number two.
Cy held out the bag of fries on his tray. Nietro waved him off. "Heard what?" Cy asked.
Nietro told him about the labs that said detritus at the scene showed a scuffle between a lysozyme and what looked to be an amino sequence for a glycoprotein. Cy didn't know what to make of it. He wasn't on the T-Beat yet, but he knew the clock was running down on a decision to move up or he'd be like Phill, stuck in the Marrows until his twenty-five.
"They're saying could be a rhinovirus," Phil said. Cy looked over his shoulder, suggesting Phil should keep it down. Nietro's face, Cy noticed, was two shades past giddy.
"You got a hard-on for this Red alert?" Cy asked.
Phill flicked him in the neck. Cy reacted late and nearly dropped his platter. "This could be the big-time, rook. A new antigen, no bodies on file, no genetic precedent whatsoever. The force hasn't seen something like this -- ever. At least not in our lifetimes."
"So what's the APB?" Cy asked. Nietro pulled out his hand terminal to check the bulletin.
"They're saying acid traces to proteins S, E, M and N." Nietro chuckled at the acronym.
Cy sucked his teeth and watched the cashier put Phill's order on a tray. He put his hand on Phill's wallet and said, "Let me get this."
"About time you treated," Phil said. Cy slid the change from the cash man into a plastic cup marked for tips. "Heard from Sharel?" Nietro asked.
Cy shook his head and sucked his finger where he caught it on his coat. He couldn't shake the thought of something hanging near the back of his mind. It was something from his last year at the academy before he shipped up to the Bronchs.
Looking at Phill, he said, "S protein. That stand for Spike?"
Phil shrugged, checked the bulletin for its finer print. "Yeah," he said, "Why?"
Cy couldn't say. He wanted to say something, but he just couldn't say. Not yet, at least. Phil may be right, though. This could be the big-time.