Bloodsport: Z Sisters: Book 1 Read online

  “Huh,” Kaz said when I told her. She was staring at her phone screen. “Found something,” she said, and spun the computer around so I could see the screen.

  There was a post on a social media site called Nextdoor Burbank Hills. “Anybody know what was going on around Buena Vista this afternoon?” Kaz read. “Was there some kind of event at the studio? A premiere or something? Traffic was backed up for miles.”

  “Anyone answering?” I asked.

  “Not so far,” she said.

  “Check for Toluca Lake,” I said.

  She looked at me but didn’t say anything. She knew I was thinking about David again.

  David. We’d parted messily and angrily, and I hadn’t seen him in months. There had been times in those months when I might have been happy to think that someone had chewed his face off. When I had found out he was cheating with Cilla, it had felt like he’d torn my heart out of my chest with his bare hands.

  But we had been together three years, had bought the house, had made the plans. It was hard to just turn that off.

  We were two high-strung people in two high-pressure jobs and once we got past the “honeymoon phase,” we’d started to rub up against each other and not in the good way.

  Emergency medicine is tough, he’d said to me, implying I had no idea what a tough job was like.

  “I save lives every day,” he said. “You spend your days picking up after the human garbage because you were too lazy to go to law school.”

  You can imagine how well that conversation went over. That comment had been what started the fight that turned out to be the fight.

  David really did have a God complex. He’d done his residency at King/Drew, a troubled hospital that had eventually been closed down after a series of preventable patient deaths and some fine reporting by the L.A. Times on the horror show going on behind the scenes. It was a real “knife and gun club,” David had said and pointed out that he’d probably seen more blood in one day than I’d see in my whole career.

  Up until today, he’d been right.

  David was a flaming asshole, but I really hoped he was all right.

  I wondered if I should call Cilla again to see if she’d heard from him.

  Not my circus. Not my monkey.

  I looked over at Kaz and saw she was trembling.

  “It’s okay Kaz,” I said.

  “No, it isn’t,” she said, “It really isn’t.”

  She looked back down at her computer. “I saw a guy rip a woman’s face off,”’ she said. “I keep wondering if that happened to Lyle. I can’t stop seeing it.

  “I know,” I said. I’d seen the same thing. But oddly, the memory was starting to fa—

  “son of a bitch,” I said. “Emmet was right.”

  “About what?

  “He thinks we were injected with a drug that’ll make us forget what we saw.”

  And while we were processing that, the local news came on. The anchor had his “serious” face on, but I was only half listening until two photos popped up behind him. One was an unflattering picture of Sarah Gilardi that made her face look square.

  The other was a picture of Emmet.

  Chapter Seven

  “We begin tonight’s broadcast with the story of two Burbank detectives found dead a mile apart in what is believed to be a murder/suicide.”

  No. This could not be happening.

  “Emmet was hooking up with Sarah?” Kaz said. “Since when?

  “Since never,” I said. “Ssh.”

  The anchor threw the story to a field reporter who stood in front of Emmet’s 60s-era apartment building and intoned a lot of nonsense about “friends of the veteran detective” saying he’d been despondent since splitting with Gilardi, who was found dead in her car. Investigations, he said, were ongoing, but Gilardi’s wounds were consistent with the weapon found in Emmet’s possession.

  I grabbed Kaz’s phone again and dialed my captain.

  “What’s going on?” I asked without preamble, forgetting that I wasn’t calling from my phone and that his caller I.D. wouldn’t identify me.

  “Rose?” he asked, “where are you? Are you at home?”

  And something about that question pinged my radar. “I went out to eat with my dad,” I said. Kaz looked at me with a question on her face.

  “Call me when you get back to Kenwood,” he said. “We need to talk.”

  And then he hung up so abruptly I wondered if someone had taken his phone away from him.

  “Who did you call?”

  “My captain,” I said.

  “Why did you lie to him?”

  “Because he wanted to know where I was.”

  She looked dubious.

  “And then he said he’d be right over.”

  “Yeah, that sounds sinister,” she said. “So, your boss knows where you live.”

  “He asked me when I’d be back at the apartment on Kenwood. But I never got around to changing my address with personnel. So, he shouldn’t know where I live.”

  Kaz was quiet.

  I could feel the lasagna and garlic bread roll over in my stomach.

  “Is Dad’s address on file?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Who do you think killed Emmet and Sarah?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Could whoever it is be after you?”

  The very thing I was wondering. I really wish I knew where our dad was.

  “If Emmet wasn’t screwing Sarah, what tied them together?” Kaz asked, proving that she’d been paying attention to dad’s cop talks all these years.

  “I can’t think of anything,” I said. “Sarah thought Emmet was a total sexist pig.”

  “How many of us can say we never fucked a sexist pig?” she said and gave me a significant look. “And enjoyed it?”

  Sisters. They know your secrets.

  “No. Sarah was so angry at men after the divorce that she would have seen being with Emmet as a betrayal of her gender.”

  I tried to think of where the two might hang out together outside of work. Church? A bar? Book club?

  And then it dawned on me.

  “She’s working on the murder case.” We all were. The chief was getting so much heat on that case that the rest of us had to turn up our A/C.

  “The headless bodies?” Kaz asked.

  “The headless bodies,” I said. “All really fit. All of them with a burn mark in their armpits. Some kind of special military unit?”

  Like the guys in the cheap suits who’d been at the station earlier.

  Like Mac. I had a wild thought.

  Whatever happened to --?”

  “Travis?” my sister interrupted, following my train of thought before I’d even got the question out. “I think he’s still at JPL.”

  She grabbed her phone back. “Want me to call him?”

  I thought about it for a minute. I hadn’t been on the phone very long with my captain, but he could run the phone number in half a second and know who it belonged to.

  “I don’t think it’s safe,” I said. “Are you connected to him online? Is he on Twitter?”

  Kaz was already tapping away at her phone.

  “Okay,” she said. “I can DM him. What do you want to know?”

  “Ask him if he’ll meet us. Any Starbucks between here and JPL, but preferably on this side of the 405. Tell him we’re buying.”

  “He doesn’t like you,” she said.

  “Feeling’s mutual,” I said.

  “and he’s gotten worse,” she said. “He’s sure the mothership is coming for him any day now.”

  Who knows? He could be right about that. If there were coming for anyone, it would be him.

  How did Kaz know I was thinking about Travis Vo out of all the people she knows? He’s the only one who might have some clarity on the really fit CDC guys and maybe even the dead bodies we had found. As far as I know, the information about Ian Sydney’s identification hadn’t been made public, so I knew sha
ring that tidbit with him would be a great conversation opener.

  Travis showed up at a Starbucks on the west side of the 405 about forty-five minutes later. It was so late we had the place to ourselves. That was good. I really didn’t want anyone overhearing what we were talking about.

  “Kaz,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “Roz,” he said, nodding to me and sliding into a seat opposite us with some sort of coffee milkshake and a slice of lemon cake.

  Don’t call me Roz.

  “Is this about the headless bodies?”

  I wasn’t even surprised that he knew this. “Sort of,” I said.

  “I knew it,” he said happily. “Did they really have tattoos on them?”

  “Might have,” I said. “But whatever was there was been burned off.”

  He chewed thoughtfully. Travis is an ex-journalist who now makes tons of money creating oddball reality shows for the UFO/ghost-busting crowd. I’d once found him and Emmet in the backyard at the Toluca Lake house during a party, sharing a joint and talking conspiracy theories.

  Emmet. I could feel tears coming and blinked them away.

  Almost as if he could read my mind, Travis said, “I’m so sorry about Emmet.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “We’ve identified one of the bodies,” I said.

  He nodded. “And found out he was already dead,” he said.

  I gaped at him. “How did you know?”

  He gave me a pitying look. “I did a show on the Z Squad two years ago. Heat came down to quash it, so it never aired.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  He took a big, noisy slurp of his coffee concoction.

  “three words,” he said, and it was my turn to show off my skills at deduction.

  “Secret government experiment,” we said at the same time.

  “No,” Kaz said.

  “Oh yes,” he said.

  “The military invests a lot in its soldiers and sailors and airmen. Lot of time, lot of money, lot of training.”

  I nodded.

  “But soldiers keep getting killed and all that investment goes to waste. So, at some point, some bright scientist at DARPA or wherever thought, ‘this is not cost-effective’ and the next thing you know, there’s a secret government program tasked with finding a way to …repurpose…these dead guys.”

  He turned to Kaz, “And before you ask, yes, right now it’s just guys.”

  “Repurpose,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Resurrect.” He finished off his coffee with one epic suck. “They called it the Z Soldier Protocol. A supply of recycled soldiers they could throw back in the meat grinder without retraining.”

  “It sounds like a movie,” I said.

  “A horror movie,” he agreed. ‘But at least they wiped their memories. Saved them that pain, poor bastards.”

  “Z for zombies?” Kaz said, “are you kidding?”

  “It probably started out as a joke,” Travis said, “but then it was just too perfect, so it stuck.”

  “How’d they do it?”

  “Not completely sure,” he said. “Chemicals, stem cells, monkey glands, nuclear batteries. Whatever it took. But there was a problem.”

  “Who could have predicted there’d be a problem?” I said.

  “The process they used was toxic. It could bring the soldiers back to life and for a while they’d be fine. But all the chemicals and hormones and other shit they pumped into them rotted their brains. And eventually, they all erupted in something that looked like roid rage. Only on steroids, so to speak.”

  “You’re saying they attacked people?”

  “Oh yeah. Which actually worked out pretty well for the military. They were like berserkers on the battlefield. It’s one thing to fight a faceless enemy with drones and high-altitude planes. Death comes out of the sky. But being confronted by a monster that can rip you to pieces is another level of effed up entirely.”

  “So, kind of like Captain America?” Kaz asked. “Do they have super powers?”

  “Does Captain America have super powers?” Travis asked. “He’s got the neat uniform and all, but I was never actually clear on what he can do other than throw his shield like a discus.”

  The conversation was getting off track. “What we saw today looked more like that chimp attack ten years ago,” I said. “Remember, it pulled a woman’s hands off and chewed her up so bad she had to get a face transplant?” I shuddered even as I thought about it. A lot of people think chimps are cute. I am not one of them.

  “I remember,” Travis said. “The chimp’s name was Travis. You’re right, their attacks are a lot like that. I’ve seen video. It’s horrible.”

  It would be. Just reading the accounts of the attack had been enough to give me nightmares.

  “I even had clips for the show,” Travis said. “Of the attacks. They were pretty hard core.”

  “How come the show never aired?” Kaz asked.

  “I told you. People made calls to people who could make the call to keep it off the air.”

  “Why didn’t you upload it somewhere?” I asked.

  “Fire in the studio. I didn’t have cloud backup. Everything was destroyed.”

  “Convenient,” I said.

  “Wasn’t it? But that’s not the worst part,” he said.

  I really wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the worst part.

  “It’s contagious.”

  “The rage? How?”

  “Something in their bite transfers a protein, like Mad Cow Disease,” so anyone who comes in contact with one of these Z soldiers is about ninety percent likely to start manifesting the symptoms too.”

  “There was an incident today,” I said. “In Burbank. A guy came into St. Joseph’s and ripped off a doctor’s face.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And then the E.R. apparently got rushed by friends of his and there were more waiting outside. Hundreds of people were hurt. And they’ve been sent to hospitals all over L.A.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “If there were two hundred of these Zees and each of them bit a hundred people and they bit a hundred people…” Kaz was tapping in numbers on her phone. She looked up, horrified. “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah,” Travis said. “I’ve done the math. We’ll be into Walking Dead territory in weeks, if not days.”

  “But you said there’s a lag,” I interrupted. “So there’s still time to stop it.”

  “Maybe, if they went to full disclosure and quarantines and extreme measures. How likely do you think that is?”

  I thought of the shot I’d been given. I thought of the people carrying phones and computers out of the police station. If there’d been other outbreaks like this, it would take…an army…to contain it.

  And the collateral damage would be considerable. “I think Emmet and Sarah were killed because they were working on the headless victims case.”

  “Were you?” Travis asked.

  “Yes,” I said, because really, keeping the lid on a weird murder case was no longer my top priority. “But here’s my question. If they knew you had the story and they went to all the trouble to destroy your studio, why didn’t they kill you?”

  “Rose,” Kaz protested but Travis didn’t even blink.

  “I bluffed them. Told them I had it stored in a zillion different places under CIA grade encryption. I might have mentioned WikiLeaks. They backed off.”

  “How far did they back off?” I asked him, suddenly paranoid again.

  “Enough to let me lead my life.”

  I read body language pretty well and there was something about Travis that suddenly looked off to me.

  “Let’s go Kaz,” I said, standing up.

  “Roz,” Travis said, “don’t be dumb.”

  “You little weasel,” I said. “Are you wearing a wire?”

  He smiled, not even bothering to deny it. “Tracker.”

  “What did they promise you?” I asked.

  “Second chance. I’ve got prostate cancer. Terminal.
They promised to make me a Z.”

  “I should kill you right now,” I said. “Blow your head off so they won’t be able to do that.”

  “You could, but you won’t,” he said. “I told you the story so you’ll understand. We need the Z Soldiers. A modern-day fighting force for modern-day fights.” He looked around the empty coffee shop.

  “They’ll be coming for you, Roz. Convince them you understand how things are. I’d hate to see something bad happen to you.”

  “Travis,” Kaz said. “Rose hates to be called Roz.” And then she dumped her coffee on him.

  We left him sitting in the shop, wiping himself down with paper napkins that disintegrated and left paper shmutz all over his t-shirt.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “We go back to Dad’s and try to figure out what to do next.”

  I had no idea. Unlike in the movies, our family didn’t have a secret cabin on the lake we could retreat to. Our grandparents were dead, so hiding out with them was out. We both had passports and I had a little money stashed away but in these post-9/11 times, crossing borders would not be easy and if this shadowy government agency wanted us, they’d find us.

  Chapter Eight

  Back at Dad’s house we went into tactical mode. I didn’t know his neighbors very well, but I did know that this was a nice, quiet suburb where things that were out of the ordinary got noticed. Like when you were parking with your boyfriend at two a.m. Both Kaz and I had been busted for that by insomniac Mrs. Toohey walking her ancient pug in the middle of the night. The same ancient pug. It was the dog that would not die.

  But having observant neighbors was a good thing. It meant anyone (anything) coming after us probably didn’t want to make a big noise and that was good. We planned to make a lot of noise.

  The property had a wall around it, but it was only a little over five feet high and Kaz and I had both learned to scale it when we were teenagers. It wouldn’t be a challenge at all for someone with military training.

  The trick would be holding out until we could get reinforcements. I ran through the list of the people I knew that I thought I might be able to convince to join us. We needed to get the truth out to someone, but confidence in the news media had been eroded by a steady stream of criticism and Russian troll farms planting fake stories and I knew anything we said would sound utterly crazy. Until people started dying from these so-called “bath salts” attacks.