Chapter Text
It was weird how Karen had spent days and weeks agonizing over the ‘big’ life decisions. Whether to dump a cheating boyfriend. Which college to choose. Whether to move to another city. But the real earth-shaking choices, the ones that defined her, seemed to take place in a handful of heartbeats. The yank of a steering wheel and the clamor of glass — the lunge for a small black handgun on a table — and this.
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“Do you trust me?” he asked.
Frank had knocked on her door, not broken in. He was carrying three duffel bags in one hand, all menacingly deformed; in the other he held a leash. It was connected to the collar of a dark gray dog whose tongue lolled out as it looked up at Karen. Its tail was wagging furiously, clearly wanting to approach her, but held in place by discipline.
She had looked from Frank’s stony face to the dog’s shining eyes and said, “Come in.”
The slope of his shoulders loosened, and he obeyed. When he did, Karen had seen that he was also wearing a fat camping backpack. A nervous laugh escaped her. “You look like you’re carrying everything you own.”
“I am,” he’d said. And then he asked the question.
“I trust you absolutely for certain things,” Karen said, after a pause. “For others not at all.”
Frank’s face was a mask. “But do you trust that I’d give a whole lot to keep you safe, to keep you alive?”
Karen remembered hitting the floor as bullets split the air above her. Frank’s elbow had dug into the flesh of her arm, his jaw had knocked into the crown of her head. “Yes. I do. Frank, what’s going on?”
“I’m asking you to drop everything and come with me for a while,” he said. Finally she saw a trace of feeling under his face. It looked like fear. “I know it sounds like crazy stupid crap coming from a crazy stupid man, but I swear, Karen, something’s coming and I’m not sure what it is. It may be nothing but if it’s not, New York’s going to be the last place you want to be —“
“Okay,” she said, cutting him off. “Give me fifteen minutes to pack.”
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They loaded everything into Ben Urich’s old car. (“My last one blew up, we’ll have to use yours,” said Frank.) Karen started driving at around 8pm. Around midnight Frank said, “I’ll take over. Go to sleep. Max can take the front seat.”
When she woke up, they were in a small town named Logran, West Virginia.
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They checked in at a small inn. Frank went to sleep immediately after feeding his dog, telling her to wake him up if anything happened.
Karen looked down at him ruefully. She hadn’t been able to shake answers out of him while driving last night — he’d cryptically said, “Give me five days. Just five days. If nothing’s happened in five days, there’s no bad news, we go back, I say sorry a couple times, and you won’t see me again.”
“I do have a life, you know,” she’d said.
“Good thing you’re between jobs.”
She’d started in outrage, turning her head briefly. The lines of his profile had gone a little guilty. “I’ve just been keeping an ear out, know how you’ve been doing. That’s all.”
There hadn’t been much conversation after that — Karen hadn't asked what he’d been doing since she’d last seen him, and he hadn't seemed inclined to chat.
She took Max and went downstairs to see if there was anywhere she could get breakfast. She didn’t linger, returning to the room as soon as possible — it was a little ridiculous, but she didn’t like the idea of Frank, once the most wanted man in America, being left alone sleeping. She ate a scone and drank her coffee in the room, reading the news on her computer, as the sun inched across the sky.
The days passed uneventfully. On the second day they took Max to a nearby state park and ambled around for the entire day. On the third Karen got a call from Foggy, and dissembled when he asked where she was, telling him she was with family. He happily rambled about his first case at HC&B upon prompting, and after a conversation of careful redirection Karen hung up, feeling drained and ashamed. More lies. More divergence from the person she wanted to be, the life she wanted to have.
It didn’t occur to her to warn Foggy of anything; the three days in Logran had been boring but idyllic, with nothing noteworthy in the news except a plane crash in the Mediterranean and a new kind of superflu spreading in China. She had already chalked everything up to Frank’s paranoia, and would have insisted on returning if it weren’t for the fact that… well, she was actually kind of enjoying her vacation. Logran was a boring town, but boring wasn’t always bad. She liked walking Max with Frank trailing behind her (looking for threats that never materialized). She liked the sprawl of green trees, the easy parking, the clean air. She liked settling into sleep and hearing Frank’s breathing in the other bed, punctuated by the occasional snore of the dog.
The tension and adrenaline of the night she’d left New York, already surreal, began to seem a little laughable. Frank himself had started to look sheepish and self-deprecating.
On the fourth night, Karen turned on the radio while Frank was driving back from the diner where they’d just had excellent quesadillas, and heard that dozens of hospitals across the nation had just been placed under quarantine. Four were in New York. “…not a flu virus,” the dashboard crackled at her. “Hospitals all over the country have been receiving an influx of flu patients — of course, it’s the season for it, but a fraction of these patients seem to be devolving into a violent delirium, and have been filmed attacking their nurses or family. Such a video was leaked earlier today, prompting several others like it over the country to receive increased attention…”
“Zombies,” Frank said, and Karen snorted, thinking it was a joke.
“Treatment is uncertain, but thankfully the disease doesn’t seem to be lethal — all patients, while not lucid, are being held for observation in hospitals across the country. Some experts are worrying that this is a new prion disease, but this is unlikely to be the case, as the transmissibility of this condition fits that of the common flu. The CDC has just released a statement that affected patients should be calmly but thoroughly restrained and brought to a list of designated hospitals, which are listed in full on their web page, at…”
“They’re lying.” Frank’s voice was curt.
“What?”
“…people experiencing high fever and tremors should also go to these designated centers, as well as those who were in contact with the blood and saliva of affected patients. Remember not to panic: the disease is not fatal, and there is a report that a patient in New Mexico has made a complete recovery.”
The radio jockey moved onto sports, and Karen turned off the radio. “Frank, what’s happening?”
“The night I came to get you,” Frank said, “I was after this sleazebag who was involved in human trafficking. He’d come back earlier that week from Thailand, had a little girl with him. Kept her locked up in his bedroom, she was gagged because she wouldn’t stop making noise.”
Karen felt sick. “Did you —“
“Went to get her, yeah,” Frank said softly. “Watched him for two days making sure there wasn’t anyone else. Wasn’t sure if there weren’t other kids, locked up somewhere no one knew about, starve to death if I got him straightaway. But there wasn’t. So that night I followed him into his house, kicked down the bedroom door, guns blazing, all that…”
He pulled into the lot of the inn and parked. Neither of them got out of the car. Karen’s hands were knotted up in her lap as she waited for Frank to continue.
“The kid, her hands were tied together still. She was on the bed, so was the scumbag, he’d moved her to rape her I guess. The gag was on the floor and the man was already dead. His guts were all out over the sheets. And she was eating it off the bed.”
Karen glanced down at her knuckles — they were white.
“Didn’t know what to do.” Frank shrugged. “When she saw me she tried to get at me, except she was still sort of tied up and she just ended up on the floor kicking and wiggling. She was making these noises. Like croaks or groans. I bugged out. It was the creepiest fucking shit I’ve seen since… not the scariest, or the most violent, but. Didn’t know what to do. Called the cops, pretended to be a hooker the guy had called over, just told them what I’d seen. They told me to stay on the scene. Told them I would, then I bailed. Watched from the roof of the building over to see if they got that kid out okay. But it wasn’t the police or an ambulance that came, it was people in yellow hazmat suits. They were in and out in thirty minutes, carried both of them out in stretchers. I went down later, pretended to be a rubbernecker, and found out everyone in the building had been told the guy had OD’ed. I broke into the apartment again, and found the sheets and clothes and most of the mattress in that room burned — they’d disabled the fire alarm and just destroyed it there and then. Vented it good, too, didn’t smell much.”
“So something highly dangerous, infectious… in the most densely populated cities in the world —”
“The police knew who to send,” Frank said. “I think they’ve been getting these reports for a while. They’ve been trying to cover it up, get it under control — for a while now, I think. It just went public today. And that’s bad, that’s really bad news.”
“My family,” Karen stuttered, “my friends —“
“It’s not too late,” Frank said. “Call them up. Bribe them. Convince them. Hell, maybe even tell them the truth, if you think they’ll believe it. Tell them to get out of town, pack clothes and food that’ll last, head for sparely populated areas. If they’re already in one, stockpile food and hunker down.”
Karen was already pulling out her phone. Her hands were shaking. Frank’s palm closed over them. “Take a minute,” he said. “Breathe. Panic at them only if panic is the way to get them moving. Gotta be stone cold if it's not. Think of what you want to say, the best angle to come at them from. The best way to unstick them even briefly from their comfortable lives.”
She emitted a shaky laugh. “You just asked me to trust you, that was all it took. How did you know I would, that I wouldn’t call the cops or call you insane or ask for a better explanation?”
“Didn’t,” he said.
A heartbeat. Another one. Karen felt her pulse slow down. Her mind leapt to greetings, explanations, as she turned on her phone.
“Dial now,” said Frank. “Start with the one you care about the most. Then move down the list.”