Test of Bravery

4:02 a.m., Nov. 21 - Shepherd/Mount Pleasant, Mich.

Terrorist attack.

It was the first thing Brandon McClean thought when he was awoken after three hours of sleep immediately after finishing a double.

Driving the glistening, white-and-black patchwork of the snowy highway, it was still his chief theory.

He tried to suppress a grin. It wasn’t like he was happy about a terrorist attack, he insisted to himself, but the news coverage he’d seen when he was young of 9/11 – first-responders risking their lives to help people out of burning buildings, pulling people out of rubble, saving people who couldn’t save themselves – was the reason he’d joined the Michigan State Police.

Still, Brandon discussed with himself as he drove, a terrorist attack around here was pretty unlikely. He was living pretty far north of Detroit, the only thing for a few hundred miles that might be worth targeting, if you didn’t count the Dow Chemical plant in Midland (which he didn’t -- that area wasn’t densely populated enough).

And even Detroit wasn’t much of a target; the city was a shit hole anyway.

But something big had to be happening. Rick Powers had said so when he called to wake Brandon up.

General mobilization.

Had to be terrorists. What else could it be?

His scanner squelched. It always did as Brandon approached the station and came into range of the other cops on his force. He leaned down and turned it up, but static mostly prevailed with garbled words popping through only intermittently.

Then, clearly, “There’s lots of them and I don’t know where they’re coming from.”

Brandon recognized Laney Thoms, one of only three female officers at Post No. 38. Her voice was shaky, distorted by the radio.

“Say again location, two-one-one,” the dispatcher returned. Ira Serenson.

“Jesus, whatever’s wrong with these people, it’s bad. Like flesh-eating bacteria,” Thoms said. “They all look drunk or high and they’re not responding to warnings.”

“Twenty one, I need your location.”

“US 10—”

Eight seconds passed before Brandon realized Thoms wasn’t coming back. Ira called through the radio for the other officer to respond twice more, but silence was his reward.

Brandon snatched up his radio transmitter and clicked down the button.

“Base, this is five-five, what was twenty one’s last location?”

There was a pause, then, “Ballpark estimate has her right around MPPH. Given her last, she might be within a mile north.”

“Ten-four,” Brandon returned. “I’m heading over there before I report in.”

“Make it fast, five-five. We need you here.”

“Got it,” said Brandon, snapping the transmitter back onto the side of the radio.



He was there in less than ten minutes. His SUV bounced onto the darkened street, a little south of US 10, where the high school stood silently with white slopes building on its roof and window sills. He slid a little on the unplowed street, but with no other cars out, he didn’t worry, and just corrected the slight drift.

The first thing Brandon thought was that it was really dark. A second later, he perceived that the streetlights were out for about a block – a messed-up transformer or a chunk of the grid was out, he thought.

He clicked on the spotlight that was connected to his window and ran the scanning glare at low speed over the landscape. He didn’t see any sign of Thoms or her cruiser. He didn’t see sign of much of anything, but there did seem to be a lot of tracks through the snow along the side of the school.

Brandon’s car slid to a stop in the parking lot and he shut it down, but left the lights on, including the spot that was trained on the mess of tracks where he was headed. Stepping out of the car, he pulled on his coat, then grabbed his gun belt from the passenger seat. Other than that, he was still in his street clothes. Finally, he pulled a small flashlight from his glove compartment.

The wind was dying, but it was cold and the snow was relentless. Brandon wasn’t even alongside the big school before it was starting to coat his face.

The structure hulked in the darkness, motionless and frozen gray. He pressed a hand against icy bricks as he crunched through the snow, which was already up to his ankles.

The side of the school stretched for a long while, but finally he found himself at the corner. Brandon knew the school’s yard opened onto a football field that was surrounded by a track, but all he could see were the snow drifts building on the bleachers and the uprights poking into the brown-black sky.

The footprints in the snow curled sideways, heading directly for the bleachers, and Brandon could hear something indistinct in the darkness. He swung the light sideways; standing on the track was Thoms’ cruiser, a trail behind it leading toward him to a set of tire tracks about thirty feet to his right, which he’d missed.

Beside the cruiser was a hunched group of maybe five people, surrounding something that was propped up on the bleachers, but Brandon couldn’t see beyond them at whatever it was. He couldn’t see much of anything about the people from this distance, but something didn’t feel right and Thoms’ cruiser was there with no Thoms, so he drew his gun.

“Hey!” he shouted as he walked forward. “State police! Everybody on your feet!”

The group at first didn’t react under his flashlight or warnings. One of them looked up for a second, but then plunged back into the circle.

Brandon got the distinct impression they were eating something, like hyenas pressed tight around a carcass.

He shouted again, raising his gun. “Stop what you’re doing and get up now!”

This time, the one that had looked up rose to his feet with his back to Brandon. He moved slowly and Brandon guessed they were all high, like Thoms had said. It also crossed his mind that whatever was messing with these people could be connected to the terrorist attack.

The man started to turn toward Brandon, almost in slow motion. He moved strangely, as if everything wasn’t really working correctly, Brandon thought – like his joints were stiff and his muscles were organizing a mutiny. As he turned, Brandon’s light went to his face.

It was covered in red, all over the lower half of it. Bits of stringy flesh still hung from the man’s jaws. He made no sound and Brandon saw next that the man had no pupils – cataracts or something had hazed them into egg-white blobs set in his head.

“Jesus,” Brandon breathed. He didn’t know of anything, biological, chemical, or radiological, that did that to the eyes.

He stepped sideways to focus the light down in the middle of the circle. More people were getting up now and he could see clearly exactly what they’d been devouring – Thoms. She was dead, torn apart from what he could tell. Brandon dry heaved, swinging the light away.

They were headed toward him now, all of them, but still pretty far off. He raised his gun again and shouted, “Down on the ground, right now!”

When no response came, he fired a shot into the air, to no effect.

He heard crunching to his left and spun the light that way. The bleachers stretched closer to the building here, and there were three more of them, leaning into the stands, stretching their hands in.

As if to catch something beneath the seats.

But these new ones were already abandoning what they’d been doing to start after Brandon. They shuffled along slowly, and he could see these three new ones were more hurt. They were bloody and injured, but not bleeding. They were so awkward and unnatural that Brandon couldn’t understand what had happened to them.

There was some kind of scream, and something blurred out from under the bleachers, streaking past the bloody people and ripping through the snow toward him. Brandon swung the light and his gun over, ready to kill this new horror – but he didn’t. It was a kid. She was screaming and tears were streaming down her face.

“Help, please!” She shouted as she passed the three that had been after her. They reacted slowly, reaching for her after she was well past them.

Brandon didn’t even think. He squatted as the girl came running up – she couldn’t have been older than five or six – and scooped her up as he came back to a standing position. Then he backed up.

“I’m a police officer,” Brandon muttered, as means of allaying the girl’s expected fear of strangers, but she wept openly and he realized it didn’t matter who he was as long as he was taking her with him.

He had his back to the wall of the high school. He was walking backward, away from the small, slow-moving mob that was headed his way, but he wanted to head another twenty feet to his right, toward the path back to his car. He looked over his shoulder toward it, then asked the girl, “Where are your parents?”

Sobbing, she leaned back slightly – she didn’t want to pull away from him – and pointed toward where he was heading. Brandon turned to see an indistinct black redness in the snow in the distance, and two more bloody people (victims?) stumbling his way. They were already nearly on them.

Brandon trained his gun on the closest of this new pair and shouted, one last time, “Stop!”

He saw no hesitation, though, and he told the girl, “Cover your ears,” and as she did so he, fired at the first of them.

It was definitely a hit, because blood and bits of flesh exploded from the impact in the man’s upper chest. But the man was barely fazed, stopping only slightly from the energy of the bullet. He kept walking.

What let’s you take a bullet and keep going? Brandon’s mind demanded.

He fired again. Four more shots. The first two missed. The third slammed into the man’s neck, whipping his head back from the impact. This didn’t even slow him.

When Brandon fired the fourth shot, rational thought was on hold and he already was on the move, backing toward the building. The bullet clipped the man’s knee, which buckled, and he fell into the snow. The others continued on, and it took a long time, but the man eventually started to pick himself back up and keep on toward them.

Now the three groups were converging. The ones that had been after the girl were closest, on his left, pinning him to the building. The ones to the right, where he’d shot, had been joined by the five that had been eating Thoms.

There were lots of them and nowhere to go.

Risking putting his back to them, Brandon turned toward the building. There was a door about twenty feet along the wall near the bleachers. It had been broken open about a month earlier by some students who’d been looking to steal computers, and they’d dented the door. The lock had been replaced, Brandon knew, but the door was still weak.

He went to it quickly, still carrying the crying girl, whose sobs were subsiding under her growing fear.

“Hold on, sweetie,” Brandon told her, trying to sound comforting, and he took three steps back from the door and then rushed forward and kicked it as hard as he could.

It gave but Brandon fell, rolling so the girl landed on top of him. A burst of pain exploded from his ankle to his knee and he cried out, and then another sharp blast hit him in the shoulder as he slammed to the linoleum of the high school floor.

The girl scrambled out of his grip and got on her feet. Brandon winced and grabbed at his ankle.

“C’mon!” she shouted, taking his other hand and pulling.

The victims were almost to the broken door now. The flashlight lay beside him and Brandon could see plodding ankles and stained knees in the thinning stretch of light just outside the door.

He rolled, pushed himself up, and got to his feet. His ankle felt like millions of pieces of shattered glass were running through the veins and Brandon thought he was probably hurt much worse than he realized. But he was pumping adrenaline and despite the pain, he hobbled up, grabbed the kid and left the light, and started moving as quickly as he could into the school.

He felt a strange exhilaration and he couldn’t help thinking of a photo he’d seen of a New York firefighter carrying a little girl out of a building. The feeling mixed with the chemicals his body was using to get him out of danger and Brandon felt excited and alive.

Even hurt and carrying the girl, Brandon was much faster than their attackers. By the time he’d rounded two corners, he thought he’d lost them completely. He slowed, starting to feel the pain in his leg.

Wincing, he asked the girl, “Can you walk?”

She nodded and he lowered her down. The girl immediately grabbed his hand tightly. She still looked terrified and he thought that being in that state couldn’t be good for her. He holstered his gun as they went through a set of heavy metal fire doors, and as they closed, he snapped up the bolt that went into the ceiling. There was no sign of the attackers.

“I locked it,” he told the girl as he leaned against the wall, letting himself slide down. “We’re safe. I need to rest a minute.”

The girl stayed on her feet, looking up and down the hall and through the windows in the doors. Brandon winced as he dragged up his pant leg – sure enough, his ankle was turning light purple and starting to swell, up into his calf. His knee was all right though, so he was able to reach his foot to loosen his boot.

The girl finally sat down beside him, but kept her distance, still nervous, her muscles jittery and tense as if she might have to bolt at any moment. Brandon thought he ought to calm her down.

“What’s your name?” He asked, trying to sound more relaxed than he felt.

The girl looked at him, hesitant. She looked at the gun, then back at him. Finally, in a whisper, “Are you really a police man?”

Brandon smiled. He shifted his weight, trying to protect his ankle, and dug his wallet from his back pocket. He flipped it open before the girl to reveal his state police badge.

“Don’t worry,” he said as he did this. “Everything’s going to be fine. My car’s out front. We’ll just go out there and drive to the police station.”

He didn’t quite know how to ask the next part, but he needed to know if there was anyone else who might need help.

“Do you have … any other family? Was anyone else out there with you?”

The girl’s eyes went vacant, and she shook her head, staring at the floor. “Just my mommy. My daddy and her are divorst.”

She paused again, looking at her hands and at the floor. Then she whispered, as if divulging a closely guarded secret that might help others find her, “My name’s Shannon.”

He grinned again. He felt like everything was going to be okay in the long run. He reached out a hand for her to shake. “You can call me Brandon.”

Shannon took the handshake with her tiny hand, moving her arm tentatively. It was then that Brandon realized the girl wasn’t wearing a coat. Even inside, it was cold – their breath hung in the air like tiny storm clouds.

“Come sit by me,” he told her, extending an arm. “You look like you’re freezing, and I need somebody little to help me stand up when we leave here.”

He could see she was starting to relax. She smiled a little, and pulled closer to him. Brandon wrapped his arm around her shoulder and could feel her shivering.

“We’ll let you get warmed up and then we’ll get out of here,” he said cheerily.

Brandon closed his eyes. The girl’s breathing was slowing against his chest. He smiled to himself. He was pretty good at this, he thought. He was going to get them out of here.

The school had its emergency power setup on from the outage, which meant every fourth big fluorescent in the ceiling was lit from a backup battery, but it was enough that they could see mostly what was around them. Brandon kept his eyes open, though he believed they were out of danger from the worst of it. Those … things – he couldn’t call them people – they might pursue, but they seemed slow and dumb. He was confident he and the girl could easily get to the car, and he had an idea of how to get out of the school, as well. It only involved backtracking a little.

He shifted. “All right, sweetie, we’ve got to go.”

Shannon got to her feet quickly, while Brandon had to prop himself against the wall and rise in tiny increments. When he was finally at full height, he looked down at the girl. “You okay with walking?”

She took his hand again but nodded. Brandon stepped forward and leaned toward the door, looking out the tiny windows. They afforded him little vantage, really, but it was enough to get an idea of the mostly dark hallway – empty.

He guessed if they were out there, he’d see or hear something. But the hall was dark and silent, so he reached up and pulled the deadbolt back down, which drew home with a sharp, loud click!

Brandon turned back to Shannon. “We’re going to go through this door, and there will be a hall right there on our left. That way,” and he pointed to where the junction was ahead of them. “Go down there and then at the end of the hall is a right turn. The door to the front should be down there. Got it?”

Shannon gave two brisk nods. Brandon turned back to the door, his hand on the cold steel handle.

His eyes met the glass and on the other side was a half-destroyed, bloody face, sneering at him.

He cried out and the door bucked toward him, slamming Brandon in the forehead and sending him backward, falling to the ground.

He was dazed only for a moment. Brandon hit the linoleum hard on his tailbone, but he was already scrambling as best he could to get back up as the doors opened. With his uninjured foot he gave the right door a hard kick and it snapped back, hitting one of them. Hard.

But they were through and there was shrieking and by instinct Brandon reached out, catching Shannon’s hands in each of his as she was being pulled through the open door. He kicked at it with his hurt ankle, refusing to give up traction with his unhurt left foot, but pain shot through him and he nearly lost his grip on the girl.

She cried out, terrified, as a gray hand pulled over her face.

“Brandon!”

Then his grip gave way and the door fell back. She was gone.

Brandon hit the linoleum again, off-balance from the sudden loss. “Shannon!” he screamed. “Shannon!”

He could hear her cries through the door. They sounded distant and choked. Three seconds went by and the sound of her cries died off and he started sobbing. He thought of the firefighter carrying the child.

Then the door bucked open again, and Brandon got to his feet and turned toward the darkened hall, running as fast as his hurt ankle would allow, never looking back.