Doctor Plague

Detective Reepa Garima found herself staring into the silvery-gray eyes of the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan’s Texan chapter. He was dead.

Murdered to be exact.

His face was frozen in the grip of terror. As if he’d seen a ghost.

The dank smell of bile and slowly rotting flesh hit her nose like an assault. Rows upon rows of bodies lay in crumpled heaps in the grass, like knocked over tombstones lit only by the head beams of squad cars and the moonlight.

“I wonder if they saw his face through the flames,” Reepa said, pointing out the sooty remains of a bonfire to her partner, Shiloh Teodoro.

He nodded gravely, his deep set brown eyes shining eerily. “Like a phantom straight out of someone’s nightmare.”

Reepa shivered. The bonfire was well out now. Her hot breaths sent patterns of mist in the frosty air like smoke from a joint. She sure could have used one right about now. She’d definitely be rolling a big fat one after this. It was the only way she could deal with some of the fucked up things she’d seen in this city. And she was only twenty-seven.

The Houston Police Department had been inundated with calls that afternoon. Husbands, lovers, and sons that had gone out the night before and were now nowhere to be seen and couldn’t be reached on their cell phones. Almost as if they’d been swallowed up by a black hole.

At first it was just some students and young professionals. Have you tried calling their friends? Maybe they went on a bender? But that changed rapidly when they started hearing about missing government officials and even some of their own. Texas’s finest. That certainly put a bee in the Commissioner’s bonnet.

The only lead the police had was coordinates from a Google Maps tracker provided by the wife of one of the missing. She just wanted her tender, loving, racist husband back. Was that so much to ask?

Apparently so.

Reepa studied the barn looming ominously in the background, red and derelict. If buildings could talk, she thought to herself.

They already had a prime suspect.

The grisly scene was akin to a spate of recent murders where the deceased were all found poisoned and foaming at the mouth.

Zak Hague was thought to be the man responsible. He was a renowned African American scientist whose son was shot dead by a cop who allegedly thought he was dangerous. Said cop got off with a mere slap on the wrist and Dr Hague lost his mind with grief. He killed the guilty cop by injecting him with a toxin that caused paralysis and a slow and painful death. No one in toxicology could figure out what the poison was. When administered to the human body, it somehow became chemically untraceable.

And that wasn’t the weirdest part. Dr Hague committed the murder by stabbing his victim in the neck with a cane whilst wearing a sinister beak-like mask reminiscent of the Plague Doctors of the 1600s. It was all over the grainy black and white CCTV footage like something out of a horror movie.

It was brutal. An execution. A sacrifice.

But it didn’t stop there.

Since then, Dr Hague (or Dr Plague as they referred to him at the precinct) had continued to murder every single Texan cop accountable for the death of an innocent black life, and he’d never been caught. Sure he’d been taken in for questioning several times, but the only evidence they’d ever found against him was purely circumstantial.

He was an Ivy League college graduate with a higher IQ than Albert Einstein. Nailing him wasn’t ever going to be easy.

The death toll within the black community dropped dramatically after Hague began to clean house, and the public began to hail him as some sort of superhero. They said he was ridding Texas of a plague. The scourge of society. He was setting an example.

Then why was he wearing a mask? The authorities wanted to know.

Reepa looked around her at the pointed white hats with punched in eyeholes that were strewn haphazardly on the ground.

Clearly, we all wore masks of some description.

The KKK meeting was by far Dr Plague’s most ambitious feat to date, and it certainly looked to have been a success. Reepa counted forty-two dead. No survivors. She wondered how long he’d spent planning this. The rigorous, gruelling training regime he’d had to undergo. Lurking in the shadows, waiting patiently for the opportunity to strike.

A kill like this was not a crime of passion. This was cold. Calculated. The work of a clear and meticulous mind. And she couldn’t help but feel a perverted kind of respect for his scrupulous attention to detail.

She watched as Shiloh pried a cell phone out of a corpse’s hand. Rigor mortis had set in. He used a gloved hand to swipe right to access the camera roll. The most recently filmed video was still available to watch.

Reepa held her breath as Shiloh pressed play. It was from last night.

They huddled over the screen and watched in morbid fascination as two crosses were set on fire next to the once towering bonfire. But the ululating and excited cheering were soon cut short. A man in black stepped out of the shadows and put out the flames with a powerful fire extinguisher, and the KKK began to panic.

“He must be wearing night vision goggles,” Reepa said, trying to keep the awe from rising in her voice.

Snippets of Dr Plague’s attack were captured when bursts of random gunshots lit up the dark. It looked as if he was picking the clansmen off one by one, like cattle.

Amidst the screaming, and the swearing, and the Oh God help me’s was the sound of maniacal laughter as the beak masked avenger knocked his victims to the ground and forcibly stabbed them in the neck with the point of his cane. He came at them in a machine-like frenzy. Nightmare and reality merged together smoothly, as if sewn by an expert seamstress.

“And the third horseman was Plague,” Shiloh murmured, crossing himself absent-mindedly.

Reepa almost joined him. It was terrifying to watch, but also glorious at the same time. His dark and violent raptures.

“God help us, please!” The owner of the phone implored desperately. “He’s slaughtering us!”

But God did not listen. Then it was his turn to die.

“No! Oh no! Jesus, God, no!”

He screamed in pain and hit the ground with a sickening and final thud. And the camera continued filming in his shaking, dying hands before his body finally gave up the ghost and his phone ran out of storage.

Shiloh exhaled loudly. “I can’t believe that was the last thing he ever saw. The last thing the Captain…” He broke off. “I mean, I know he was a clansman and all, but he didn’t deserve to die like this. No one does.”

Reepa felt her lips purse as if she’d just bit into something bitter. “Just bag the phone and let’s keep looking for clues.”

They split up and began to scour the scene. They hadn’t seen the Captain’s body amidst the carnage yet, and she was secretly glad. She wasn’t sure how she would react.

She squatted as low as she could go and began to examine the ground around a cluster of bodies near the burnt wood of the bonfire. The smell of the dead was somewhat more bearable underneath the pleasant charred oak scent.

Using her phone as a torch, she saw something in the foliage glint up at her in the darkness. She picked it up and held it to the light. It looked like the needle of a syringe, only much thicker.

And it was still juicy.

Reepa bagged it on auto-pilot, all the while wondering if it contained remnants of the untraceable poison. And if so, would it be enough evidence to warrant a search in Dr Hague’s lab in order to determine if he was the one who’d created it? Could this piece of metal be the key to putting him away for good?

Frowning deeply, she pocketed the weapon and was just about to call for Shiloh when a voice she didn’t recognise spoke to her from the shadows.

“Well if isn’t the Garim Reepa. Your reputation precedes you,” he said.

Reepa’s nostrils flared involuntarily. She hated that nickname. Some smart ass coined it at the precinct because she was so good at cracking homicide cases. They were the only cases that gave her peace to resolve, so she poured her heart and soul into them and had an intimidating success rate.

“And you are?” She said, trying to maintain decorum. How much had he seen?

“Agent Seth Halloran, FBI. We’ll take the case from here.”

Reepa felt her back stiffen in protest. “Is that so?” She said.

“I’m afraid so,” Halloran continued. “This is outwith your jurisdiction now, detective. So why don’t you and your partner run along home. That is, if you have no evidence to disclose?”

Reepa hesitated for the briefest of seconds, but it felt like an eternity to her. Had Halloran picked up on it? She tried to keep breathing at regular intervals. “Detective Teodoro has a cell phone with video footage of the massacre. But other than that, no evidence.”

“Okay,” Halloran said. “You are dismissed, detective.”

Reepa felt her nose break into a light sweat and she was grateful it was dark. She turned on her heel and walked slowly towards her car.

“Detective,” she heard Halloran shout behind her.

She turned around deliberately unhurriedly. “Yes,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.

She watched as Halloran walked towards her purposefully, his lips set into a grim, hard line. “This is somewhat awkward,” he said.

Reepa felt her knees buckle. He’d seen her. She was fucked.

Halloran cleared his throat. “I hear that your Captain, Paul Burden, is amongst the deceased.”

“Yes,” she squeaked.

“I am sorry to hear that. But despite his obvious prejudices, I hope you won’t forget the good work he has done for the people of this city.”

Reepa nodded. It was all she could manage.

“Good,” Halloran said, sounding more human. “That was all. Have a good night.”

Reepa watched him fade into the shadows and continued the long walk to her car. And finally she was able to breathe again. The oxygen filling her lungs almost made her giddy, and it reminded her of how she’d felt that very afternoon.

It was almost religious, the feeling of exultation that had coursed through the airways of her mind when she’d heard the news of Burden’s untimely demise. She’d felt the flicker of youth in her tired bones.

Hail Dorothy! The wicked witch was dead.

She remembered it like it was yesterday. It was a dark and stormy night. Or maybe it wasn’t. Who the fuck knew? There weren’t any windows in the Captain’s office. Only family photos and certificates hanging on the walls, winking down at her like glass eyes while he repeatedly raped her and told her how much he liked her long, brown legs.

She’d stared so hard at his certificate of merit that the writing had faded into unintelligible scrawls. Like a foreign language. At some point she’d been so out of it, she was even sure she’d seen the words melt into a face. A face that was laughing at her from behind the jagged edged frame.

It had been innocent enough, but wasn’t that the way it always started? Like the stats say, 90 percent of rapes were committed by someone you knew.

He’d invited her in for a drink. It was late at night and she’d been working on a case at her desk. She’d just been promoted to detective, and was young, keen, and eager to please. And he’d taken advantage of that. He’d spiked her bourbon, and when he was done with her, he’d buttoned up her shirt, smoothed out the creases in her skirt, dragged her back to her chair, and propped her in it like a ragdoll. That was the last time she’d ever worn a skirt.

Maybe now she’d wear one to his funeral.

It seemed that justice had been served. Straight to the neck.