Nightfall Protocol:A Zombie Romance

Chapter Six

The sirens grew closer, painting red and blue across the alley walls in slow, rotating pulses. Within minutes, the area outside Medifi was crawling with response vehicles — some marked NPS, black and unassuming, others standard city police who had no idea what they were about to walk into.

A familiar figure broke away from the chaos and jogged toward us, tactical vest still half-buckled like she'd thrown it on mid-sprint. Captain Reeves. My commanding officer, and about the only person in this whole organization I trusted without question — or at least, had trusted, before tonight made me question everything.

"Ferguson." She looked me over fast, clinical, checking for damage the way she always did. "You're hit."

"I'll live." I gestured toward Mia. "This is Mia Reyes. She was inside when it started. She has information you need to hear."

Reeves's eyes flicked to Mia, assessing, then back to me. "Information, or a story? Because if she's press, we've got a serious containment problem."

"She's a friend," I said, sharper than I intended. "And what she has isn't for a headline. It's evidence that this wasn't natural. Someone did this on purpose."

That got her attention in a way nothing else could have. Reeves's expression didn't change much — it never did, that was half of what made her terrifying in briefings — but something behind her eyes sharpened, calculating. "Not here," she said quietly, glancing at the swarm of officers and paramedics filling the street. "Command vehicle. Now."

She led us through the controlled chaos toward a black unmarked van parked a block down, away from the flashing lights and the growing crowd of press vans that were already circling like vultures catching the scent of blood. Inside, the van was outfitted with more tech than most of the actual police cruisers outside — screens, comms equipment, the low hum of secure servers running background processes I didn't fully understand and had never needed to.

Reeves closed the door behind us, sealing off the noise from outside. "Talk."

Mia pulled the flash drive from its hidden seam, hands steadier now than they'd been back in the hospital. "Two nights ago, I overheard a meeting. Men in suits, not hospital staff, talking about a 'trial' and 'containment protocols.' They mentioned an organization — ORDA. I don't know what it stands for, but they sounded like they were expecting something like this to happen. Not hoping to prevent it. Expecting it."

Reeves took the drive, turning it over once in her fingers before plugging it into a nearby laptop. The audio that played back was muffled, distant, but unmistakable — hushed voices discussing timelines, "acceptable losses," and a phrase that made my blood run cold: "Ferguson's unit will respond. That's the point."

The van went silent except for the recording's tinny hiss.

"They knew," I said slowly, the pieces settling into place with sickening clarity. "They knew this would happen, and they made sure it was my unit that got the call."

Reeves's jaw tightened, a rare c***k in her usually unreadable composure. "ORDA isn't a name I recognize. But if they have knowledge of our response protocols, of your specific unit assignment, that means someone inside our own organization is feeding them information." She paused the recording, staring at the screen like it might offer more answers than it already had. "This goes beyond tonight, Ferguson. This goes beyond Medifi."

"So what do we do?" Mia asked, her reporter instincts clearly kicking into gear despite the exhaustion evident in every line of her posture. "We can't just sit on this."

"We don't sit on anything," Reeves said. "But we also don't move carelessly. If ORDA has assets inside NPS, then the wrong move tips them off, and whoever's feeding them information disappears before we can trace it back." She looked between the two of us. "For now, both of you stay quiet. No press, no official reports beyond standard incident documentation. I need time to figure out who I can trust with this."

Mia looked like she wanted to argue — the journalist in her clearly straining against the idea of sitting on a story this big — but something in Reeves's tone left no room for negotiation. She nodded instead, reluctant but compliant.

I caught Mia's eye as Reeves turned to relay orders through her comm, and for a moment neither of us said anything. There was something in the way she looked at me then — something that lingered a beat too long, something softer than the fear and adrenaline that had defined the last hour between us. I didn't have the bandwidth to parse it, not with everything else crashing through my mind, but I filed it away regardless, some quiet corner of my brain flagging it as something to think about later.

"You did good tonight," she said finally, quiet enough that Reeves couldn't hear over her own comm chatter. "You always show up, Ferguson. Every time."

"That's the job," I said, deflecting the way I always did when things got too close to something real.

"It's not just the job," she said, and there it was again — that flicker in her expression, gone almost as soon as I noticed it. She looked away first, back toward the laptop screen, back toward the evidence that was about to upend everything either of us thought we understood about tonight.

Outside the van, sirens continued to wail, and somewhere beneath the surface of a night that had already broken every rule I thought governed my world, something else was quietly shifting into motion — something neither of us had words for yet, but that neither of us could quite ignore either.