Free Quarantined by Joe McKinney Page A

clamshell holster on his right hip.
    “Chunk.”
    Chunk turned to me, saw me looking somewhere else, and followed my gaze to the man.
    Neither of us had our weapons. They were secured in the trunk.
    The man saw us and stopped. We looked at each other for a moment before he held up the chickens and motioned for us to step away from the ambulance.
    We both stepped back toward our car.
    When we were far enough back, the man went to the ambulance, removed two red biohazard bags from a side compartment, and dropped a dead chicken into each bag. Once they were secured, he unlocked the side door, stepped inside, and disappeared for a moment.
    Chunk and I glanced at each other.
What in the hell’s he doing?
    Chunk shrugged.
    The man was inside the ambulance for almost a minute. When he finally came out, he rinsed his gloved hands in blue disinfectant liquid he poured from a cooler on the side of the ambulance, shook off the excess, and then approached us.
    He didn’t even give us a chance to speak. “This is a restricted area,” he said, his voice bristling, like he’d just caught us watching TV on his couch in the middle of the night. “What are you doing here?”
    I could see the top half of his face through the goggles of his gas mask. He was an older man, late sixties, maybe, with liver spots on his forehead and deep rutted crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, which even through the mask I can tell were intensely focused.
    He stepped right up to Chunk and stood chest to chest with him, not two feet between them. There was almost a foot of difference in their height, and maybe a hundred pounds, both in Chunk’s favor, but the smaller man didn’t seem to notice the disadvantage. He just stood there, gloved hands on his hips, waiting for a reply.
    “Well?”
    Chunk was taken aback by the old man showing him attitude, but he recovered quickly.
    “I was about to ask you the same question,” he said. “I’m Detective Reginald Dempsey with the SAPD’s Homicide Unit. This is my partner, Lily Harris.”
    “Homicide?” The man looked at both of us in turn.
    “Homicide,” Chunk said. “Who are you?”
    “I’m Dr. Walter Cole,” the man said, regaining a little of his superior edge. “I’m with the Metropolitan Health District.”
    That explains the ambulance, I thought. He’s using it as a rolling laboratory.
    The man stared at Chunk. “What in the world is SAPD Homicide doing in the GZ, Detective?”
    “How about you telling me what you’re doing with a gun, Doc,” Chunk countered.
    Cole glanced at the weapon on his hip. He reached for it, but stopped with his hand on the grip when Chunk raised a fist to knock him out if he drew it. He continued to pull it out, but more slowly, and made an obvious show of handing it to Chunk, butt first.
    Chunk took it from him.
    “I use it on the chickens,” Cole said. “I have to collect a lot of specimens, and this way is quicker than the traps.”
    Chunk looked the weapon over, holding it so that I could see it. “Browning Hi Power,” Chunk said. “.22 caliber bull-nosed target pistol. Walnut grips. Blued barrel. That’s an expensive weapon, Doc.”
    Chunk ejected the magazine and cleared the chamber, then handed it back to Cole. Cole took the weapon back and slid it into the clamshell. He put the magazine and the ejected round into his pocket. “It pays to use the best,” he said.
    “Why are you killing chickens, Doc?” The way it sounded, Chunk was teasing him, though I know him well enough to know that that’s just Chunk’s way. It was an honest question.
    Cole didn’t seem to realize that. To him, Chunk was a big dumb cop insulting him.
    “It’s complicated,” he said, with obvious sarcasm.
    “Try me.”
    Cole sighed, like we were a big waste of his precious time.
    “I am mapping the antigenic shift of the original strain of H2N2 in order to prove that not one, but three, highly virulent strains of the virus are at work here. First I find and