Nightfall Protocol

Chapter 14: Signal

Sleep, when it came, brought no mercy.

Andrew dreamed of the morgue.

Not the version he half-remembered from the fractured hours before waking up in the alley — but a cleaner, crueller reconstruction his unconscious mind had assembled from the available pieces. Long corridors with fluorescent lighting that buzzed at a frequency designed specifically to unsettle. Steel drawers lining the walls from floor to ceiling, each one slightly ajar, each one breathing. His own footsteps too loud on the tile, announcing him to whatever was waiting around every corner.

And at the end of the corridor, standing with her back to him, a woman.

He called out but produced no sound. He reached for his weapon and found an empty holster. The woman turned slowly and her face was wrong in the specific, logic-defying way that dream faces are wrong — familiar and unrecognisable at the same time, her features rearranging themselves before he could pin them down into something he could name.

She opened her mouth.

The radio on the cot beside him crackled.

Andrew was upright before he was fully awake, hand on the M4, boots already on the floor. Three seconds of pure animal readiness before his brain caught up and identified the ceiling, the cell bars, the thin grey light pressing through the single high window above the cot.

Precinct. He was in the precinct.

He exhaled and picked up the radio.

The crackle sharpened and then a voice cut through, clear enough to stop his breath entirely.

"— this is Officer Mia Reyes, badge 2-2-7. I am broadcasting from the Eastside Community Centre on Hargrove Street. I have civilians with me, approximately thirty, including injured. I need any responding officers to — please, if anyone is receiving this, I need —"

The signal wavered.

"Mia." Andrew was on his feet, transmit button already depressed. "Mia, this is Callahan. I'm reading you loud and clear. Do you copy?"

A pause that lasted long enough for doubt to take root.

Then — "Andrew?" The professionalism cracked straight down the middle on the single word, and what came through underneath it was pure unfiltered relief. "Andrew, is that actually you?"

"It's me. I'm at the fourth precinct. Are you injured?"

"No. Scratches, nothing serious." A breath. "I've got thirty one civilians here, Andrew. Families, mostly. Six injured, two seriously — one bite wound that I've been monitoring, I don't know how much time we have on that. The building is holding but we've had contact on the east entrance twice in the last hour and I am down to my last magazine."

Andrew was already moving through the cell door and down the corridor as she spoke, radio pressed to his ear. He pushed through into the main room and found it operating at reduced capacity — four officers on through the night, Jack Mercer among them, sitting at the communications console with a coffee and the particular hollow-eyed alertness of someone who had decided sleep was a problem for a future version of themselves.

Jack looked up as Andrew came through the door.

"I've got Reyes," Andrew said, already pulling the city map from the incident board and spreading it across the nearest desk. "Eastside Community Centre, Hargrove Street. Thirty one civilians, two critical." He found Hargrove with his finger and measured the distance from the precinct with instinctive mental arithmetic. "Forty minute walk through open streets. Fifteen by vehicle."

"We have one operational car," Jack said, already standing. "The rest are either dead in the car park or we've lost contact with whoever took them out earlier."

"One is enough." Andrew keyed the radio again. "Mia. I'm coming to you. Forty five minutes, maybe less. What's your structural situation — how many entry points?"

"Main entrance on Hargrove, east side door, and a loading bay at the back that I've got barricaded with everything that isn't bolted down. The main entrance has been clear for about two hours." A pause. "Andrew. The news. Are you —"

"I know about the news."

"I didn't believe it for a second."

"I know that too." He folded the map with one hand. "Keep broadcasting every fifteen minutes so I can track your signal if we lose contact. Don't open any door until you hear my voice on the other side of it. Copy?"

"Copied." Another pause, shorter this time. "Please hurry."

Andrew clipped the radio to his belt and looked at Jack. "Wake whoever is most operational. I need one officer who can drive and shoot and preferably do both at the same time if the situation calls for it."

Jack was already moving toward the back corridor.

Andrew checked his ammunition with the systematic focus of a man who had fully processed where he was and what the night still required of him. Two full magazines for the M4. Two boxes of nine millimetre. He reloaded the Glock to capacity and returned it to the holster, then slapped the first fresh magazine into the carbine.

He was reviewing the map one final time when the doors to the main room opened and a face he hadn't expected walked through them.

She was tall, late thirties, wearing civilian clothes rather than a uniform — dark jeans, a heavy jacket, and an expression composed entirely of controlled urgency. She carried herself with the bearing of someone accustomed to being the most prepared person in any given room, and she was looking directly at Andrew with the focused intensity of someone who had been looking for him specifically.

"Officer Callahan." Not a question.

"That's right." Andrew straightened. "And you are?"

"Dr. Sarah Voss." She held up an ID lanyard briefly — hospital insignia, senior pathology department. "I was working a late shift at Mercy General when this began. I've been making my way here for the last three hours." She glanced around the precinct interior with sharp, assessing eyes. "I know what started this."

The room went quiet.

Andrew looked at her for a long moment, cataloguing — the steadiness of her hands, the directness of her eye contact, the absence of the particular wild quality that fear gave to people who were improvising their story as they went. She wasn't improvising.

"The outbreak," he said carefully.

"It isn't an outbreak in the traditional sense." She set a battered canvas bag on the nearest desk and unzipped it, producing a thick manila folder that had seen better days. "It was introduced. Deliberately. Into the hospital morgue's ventilation system, approximately eighteen hours ago." She looked up from the folder and met his eyes. "And the people who introduced it spent considerable time and resources before doing so making sure that if anyone ever traced it back to its origin point, your name would be the one attached to it."

Andrew's hand had gone very still on the M4.

"How do you know this?" he asked.

Voss pulled a single photograph from the folder and slid it across the desk toward him. It showed a corridor Andrew recognised with a cold, dropping certainty — the lower level of Mercy General, outside the morgue. A timestamp in the bottom corner read eighteen hours ago, almost to the minute. And in the corridor, partially turned away from the camera but identifiable by build and the specific cut of an expensive coat, stood a figure.

"Because I have the security footage," Voss said quietly. "And because that man has been systematically removing everyone who could corroborate what I'm about to tell you."

Andrew picked up the photograph.

He didn't recognise the figure in the expensive coat. Not yet.

But the lanyard hanging around the figure's neck was visible even in the grainy still — and the insignia on it was not a hospital logo. It was a government seal. Federal level. The kind of clearance that existed in the gap between official record and operational deniability.

Andrew set the photograph down.

Outside the precinct the dead city breathed its cold fog against the windows and somewhere two blocks away something moved through the dark with that familiar dragging, patient shuffling that he was learning to read the way you learn to read weather.

He looked at Voss.

"Start from the beginning," he said. "You've got until my officer gets the car started."

Voss opened the folder.