One hour earlier.
Nov. 2nd, 2006 01:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
secret_historySergeant Jean-Pierre LaFrance turned the corner from St. Marc street onto St. Catherine and began cruising along slowly. This wasn’t part of his regular beat, but he knew the area well enough and had been more than willing to cover for his buddy Thierry who’d called in sick that morning. He couldn’t blame the guy: police work was damned messy at best, and Thierry had gotten himself bitten badly by a little girl who was obviously so high she’d lost all conception of reality. There was no other explanation for biting a police officer. LaFrance hadn’t been on the scene, but he’d heard from Thierry’s partner that the girl had been demented, moaning and gurgling and foaming at the mouth like a wild animal, and that it had taken three officers to subdue her. Whatever drug she’d taken, it was potent enough for the usual sedatives carried by paramedics not to have any effect whatsoever. Shit, man. The kind of junk you could find on the streets was damned scary.
St. Catherine street wasn’t usually a bad place for a day beat. Sure, once you got further east there were all the prostitutes you had to look out for, and all the squeegee kids to be herded away from motorists who didn’t want their windshields cleaned. But here, a few blocks away from Westmount, things were usually pretty quiet. Funny how less than two kilometers of street could make such a huge difference. Down here it was all students from Concordia University and, to a much lesser extent, Collège LaSalle: young kids in faded jeans with backpacks and (increasingly) laptop cases scurrying to get to their classes on time, or standing in doorways, smoking and laughing, shivering in the cold autum air. They never seemed to dress warmly enough, he thought with wry amusement. Maybe they thought they looked sexier when they were freezing their asses off, or maybe they just forgot that, while it was warm inside, they’d have to smoke outside due to the new law that had come into effect in April.
LaFrance, personally, was all in favour of the new anti-smoking ordinance. He’d smoked a pack a day for half his adult life, but after he’d quit he found it almost impossible to be in a room where other people were smoking, or where someone had been smoking previously. It made him feel physically sick. Outside, the smell of cigarette smoke wasn’t nearly as bad.
St. Catherine during the day was never especially picturesque. The street really came to life in the evening, when the dirt and garbage that littered the pavement wasn’t as visible, and all the neon signs lit up, announcing tawdry peep shows and restaurants that had been around forever and probably harboured more cockroaches than anything else. Still, it had its own particular charm, and tourists flocked from all over the United States to the city that didn’t restrict the selling of sex to a red light district. It was perhaps a bit dubious for Montreal’s main selling point to be that it was the main destination for sexual tourism in all of North America, but LaFrance shrugged it off as being good for business. He was a practical sort, after all, and held no illusions about what life in a reasonably large city was like.
He passed the Faubourg, which people had decried when it was built for being so horrendously ugly, although now most people couldn’t imagine the block between Guy and St. Matthieu without the huge glassed-in turquoise-coloured facades, and cruised past the new Concordia building, which dwarfed everything around it for half a kilometer. So far so good. Thierry could damn well stay home in bed and nurse his bitten arm, so long as LaFrance didn’t have to deal with too many of his problems today. He was unaccountably tired today, and blamed it on the change in weather. At least it wasn’t raining today. It had been pissing cold rain for days, now, and that made for very depressing rounds indeed. He was also thankful he didn’t have to do any of this on foot, either: having to walk out in the cold wet rain would have been the last straw.
LaFrance reached over and picked up his coffee from his squad car’s cup holder. He took a careful sip, then when the hot liquid didn’t burn his tongue or palate, he took a larger swallow. Hot coffee was one of the consolations of his job: always plentiful, too. He kept a weather eye out for disturbances along the street, but it was three o’clock in the afternoon, so nothing caught his attention. The crazies either came out late at night or early in the morning.
A homeless man was asleep in a doorway. At this distance the man looked like a pile of grey rags, but LaFrance had long since learned how to spot the difference between a pile of garbage and a human being (although sometimes the difference was minimal, depending on how long the person had been on the streets). It was too early to tell the guy to move along, and truth be told LaFrance felt sorry for the poor wretches who wandered along St. Catherine like zombies out of a bad horror movie, shuffling along aimlessly, with nowhere better to go than straight in front of them. A lot of them had been released from mental hospitals like the Douglas because they weren’t considered a danger to themselves or others, but they invariably stopped taking their drugs after a while with no one to supervise them, and turned into what LaFrance privately thought of as the “walking dead.”
He shuddered slightly as he caught sight of yet another lost soul scraping along the sidewalk, a middle-aged man wrapped in several layers of torn, dirty and no doubt smelly clothes, all of them that awful nondescript grey of clothes worn by the homeless, his feet encased in plastic bags that were no doubt the closest that he would ever get to owning winter boots. Pauvre âme, LaFrance thought. Poor soul. The man trudged along the sidewalk, feet dragging, looking nowhere but straight ahead of him. People were crossing to the other sidewalk to avoid him entirely, as was so often the case.
A shape hurled itself at the driver’s-side window of his squad car. Instinctively LaFrance slammed the brakes and was rewarded with the squealing of abused tires and the smell of burning rubber. A woman was hammering frantically on his window. He signalled to her to stop, then rolled down his window. She was shouting almost hysterically and pointing further ahead down the street.
“Venez vite! Il est en train de la tuer!”
Holy shit. Assault, or at worst, murder. He put a hand on the woman’s arm to get her to be still.
“Woah, calm down. Who’s killing who? Where?”
“Over there! By the Church!” the woman pointed. “We were just walking, and this homeless man just attacked us for no reason! He bit me, and I screamed and ran away, but Geneviève couldn’t get away and he’s killing her!”
“Okay, I’m going. Stay here and find a phone. Call 911!” He eased the squad car away from her, switched on his rotating lights, and reached for his radio. “Dispatch, this is Unit 11-06. I have a report of an assault taking place on St. Catherine near MacKay and am proceeding to the site now. ETA about one minute. Request backup.”
“Copy that, Unit 11-06, I’m hearing you five by five. Backup en route, ETA five minutes. Report back with particulars when you have them.”
“Roger that.”
Even before he reached the street corner, LaFrance could see that there was a major disturbance. A small group of people were clustered by St. James’ Anglican Church, and many of them waved frantically as they saw the police car approaching with lights flashing.
“Over here!”
“Par ici, Monsieur l’Agent! Venez vite!”
He sprang out of the car and shoved his way through the first few people in his way. After that the rest of the crowd melted away from him like the Red Sea parting for Moses. It was unsettling to meet so little resistance. Usually people stood around to gawk at whatever was going on, even if they weren’t trying to offer assistance. As the last few onlookers scrambled to get out of his path, he stopped short in his tracks, completely unprepared for what he was seeing.
A man was attacking a woman, but he’d never seen anything so brutal or savage or... simply put, inhuman, in all his days. He wasn’t sure if the man was homeless or not: certainly his clothes were dirty and tattered, but they looked as though they might not have been that way for very long, and the man was covered in blood and gore and some kind of disgusting black ichor. He’d managed to knock down a young woman, presumably the Geneviève that the first woman had mentioned, and was pinning her to the sidewalk. She was screaming and struggling, but no one had moved to assist her. Usually at least one man would have stepped in to try and drag her assailant away, except that no one seemed to want to approach the crazed man who was tearing huge chunks of her flesh away with his teeth.
He reached for his shoulder radio. “Dispatch, this is unit 11-06. I have an adult male, maybe in his thirties, attacking a woman. He has her pinned and is... eating her.” It sounded impossible even as he said it, but there was no mistaking what was going on.
“Say again 11-06? It sounded like you said he was eating her.”
“Dispatch, you heard right. We’re going to need at least two ambulances here. I’m going in now.”
“Copy that. I’m sending the ambulances now. Be careful, Jean-Pierre.”
“Copy that.”
He stepped forward, pulling his gun from its holster. “Hey! Toi! Arrête just là!” he shouted, aiming at the man’s chest and approaching cautiously. “Stop, or I’ll shoot you!” he shouted in English, in case the guy only spoke one language.
His words had no effect. He hesitated a fraction of a second, worried that he might hit the woman. Then he raised his service weapon and pulled the trigger, figuring that a gunshot wound was the least of her worries at this point. His bullet caught the guy just below the ribcage, tearing away a large chunk of flesh and briefly exposing a flash of white bone before blood obscured the entry wound. The man shuddered under the impact of the bullet, but kept gnawing at the woman’s shoulder, while she shrieked even louder than before.
“Tabarnac!” LaFrance swore, partly in wonderment and partly in frustration, and aimed the gun again, firing three times. All three times the bullets found a home in the man’s torso, and each time, though he was jolted by the sheer force of the bullets penetrating his flesh, he continued with his grisly business, moaning and gurgling in apparently savage pleasure as he mauled his victim.
The sound of a siren behind him told him that his backup was here. He glanced back over his shoulder to see two junior cops running toward him, the lights on their squad car still flashing.
“Tabarnac,” one of them breathed as they caught up to him. “C’est quoi cette hostie d’affaire-là?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. The guy’s already taken four bullets and it hasn’t done anything. Maybe he’s high on PCP? One of you come with me, the other covers us, okay? We got to get him off her.”
“Got it.”
They went in cautiously, both their weapons trained on the attacker, who remained oblivious to their presence. The young woman had stopped screaming and struggling now and was only whimpering softly, her body shutting down in spite of her efforts to free herself. There wasn’t much time left before she went into shock and died. The crowd was ominously silent, not wanting to get too near, but unwilling to leave while the situation was still unresolved. The traffic had stopped all around for several city blocks, but surprisingly no one was shouting, no one was honking their horns. It was as though the whole neighbourhood was holding its breath while the policemen dealt with the madman loose in the streets.
“Ready? Now!”
LaFrance sprang forward at the same time as the other young cop, and each grabbed the suspect by one arm and hauled him bodily off the woman. The man growled and snarled and pulled hard against them, then turned his glazed look on them and snapped at LaFrance with gore-encrusted teeth. Before LaFrance knew it the horrible creature had buried his teeth in the policeman’s arm, ripping right through the fabric of his uniform and tearing a bloody gouge in his arm.
“Hostie!” he cursed, grabbing the man’s head and pulling him away. “Come on, let’s get him cuffed!” He kicked the man brutally in the back of the knees and forced him none too gently facefirst into the pavement and held him down while the other young cop pulled out his handcuffs. “You have the right to remain silent!” he yelled at the man, who was still growling and dribbling spittle and blood and bits of flesh onto the street where they mingled with the greasy water in a puddle left over from the rain. He rattled off the rest of the man’s rights, but wasn’t surprised when he got no response to the question of whether he understood his rights. The man was off his mind and probably pumped full of the worst kind of drugs.
“Calisse. C’est même pas la pleine lune!”he kept one knee planted firmly in the small of the man’s back while his temporary partner rushed over to see to the woman who had fallen completely and terribly silent. Everyone was going crazy lately, it seemed. Maybe it was time to consider early retirement.
Both young cops were kneeling next to the prostrate woman, trying to stem the bleeding of her numerous wounds as best they could. A siren in the distance told them that an ambulance was coming down from the Montreal General Hospital up the hill on Côte-des-Neiges road.
“Y était à peu près temps,” he grumbled under his breath.
It was surprisingly easy to keep his suspect down now. Whatever superhuman strength had possessed the guy while he was attacking the woman, it was gone now. Now he was just flailing and groaning and, most disturbingly of all, scraping large sections of his own flesh off in his struggles to get up again. It was like the guy couldn’t feel any pain at all.
“I think she’s dead,” one of the young cops said, looking for all purposes as though he might burst into tears. An idealist, then, probably fresh out of the Académie. Poor kid. Montreal wasn’t known for its violent crimes, and this was a hell of a way to get introduced to police work. LaFrance couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything this horrific.
“Keep working on her!” he called out. “Let the paramedics take over when they get here, but don’t give up. I’ve got this son-of-a-bitch pinned for now. We’ll get him to the station afterward.” He dug his knee harder into his prisoner’s back, not that the man could feel it, but it made him feel better. His arm was burning where the asshole had bitten him. Shit. It was probably infected, and he was going to have to replace his shirt.
The other cop gave a shout of surprise. “Holy shit, she’s alive! She’s moving!”
LaFrance turned in time to see the woman half-rise, and, with a choking snarl she lunged at her erstwhile saviour and buried her teeth in his thigh. The kid sprang away with a scream of pain and fear, then reached down and pinned her back to the ground with both hands planted firmly on her shoulders.
“What the hell?” his partner straddled the woman to keep her from moving. “What the hell is going on? She’s gone insane!”
“Hold her down!”
The ambulance pulled up, siren wailing and lights flashing, and the paramedics jumped out, stretcher at the ready. They stopped, perplexed, as they viewed the scene.
“Hey, mon doux!” one of them exclaimed. “So which one of them are we taking?”
LaFrance jerked his head at where the other two policemen were trying to keep the woman subdued. “Start with her! Watch out, she’s trying to bite people.”
They nodded and made their way over, and once again the crowd parted before them without so much as a murmur. “What’s going on, anyway?” one of them asked, as they set to work, first securing her mouth with a leather gag they normally used for epileptics.
One of the younger cops shrugged. “Damned if I know.”
Okay, that's the last complete section for now. Stay tuned for more zombie-related excitement!
St. Catherine street wasn’t usually a bad place for a day beat. Sure, once you got further east there were all the prostitutes you had to look out for, and all the squeegee kids to be herded away from motorists who didn’t want their windshields cleaned. But here, a few blocks away from Westmount, things were usually pretty quiet. Funny how less than two kilometers of street could make such a huge difference. Down here it was all students from Concordia University and, to a much lesser extent, Collège LaSalle: young kids in faded jeans with backpacks and (increasingly) laptop cases scurrying to get to their classes on time, or standing in doorways, smoking and laughing, shivering in the cold autum air. They never seemed to dress warmly enough, he thought with wry amusement. Maybe they thought they looked sexier when they were freezing their asses off, or maybe they just forgot that, while it was warm inside, they’d have to smoke outside due to the new law that had come into effect in April.
LaFrance, personally, was all in favour of the new anti-smoking ordinance. He’d smoked a pack a day for half his adult life, but after he’d quit he found it almost impossible to be in a room where other people were smoking, or where someone had been smoking previously. It made him feel physically sick. Outside, the smell of cigarette smoke wasn’t nearly as bad.
St. Catherine during the day was never especially picturesque. The street really came to life in the evening, when the dirt and garbage that littered the pavement wasn’t as visible, and all the neon signs lit up, announcing tawdry peep shows and restaurants that had been around forever and probably harboured more cockroaches than anything else. Still, it had its own particular charm, and tourists flocked from all over the United States to the city that didn’t restrict the selling of sex to a red light district. It was perhaps a bit dubious for Montreal’s main selling point to be that it was the main destination for sexual tourism in all of North America, but LaFrance shrugged it off as being good for business. He was a practical sort, after all, and held no illusions about what life in a reasonably large city was like.
He passed the Faubourg, which people had decried when it was built for being so horrendously ugly, although now most people couldn’t imagine the block between Guy and St. Matthieu without the huge glassed-in turquoise-coloured facades, and cruised past the new Concordia building, which dwarfed everything around it for half a kilometer. So far so good. Thierry could damn well stay home in bed and nurse his bitten arm, so long as LaFrance didn’t have to deal with too many of his problems today. He was unaccountably tired today, and blamed it on the change in weather. At least it wasn’t raining today. It had been pissing cold rain for days, now, and that made for very depressing rounds indeed. He was also thankful he didn’t have to do any of this on foot, either: having to walk out in the cold wet rain would have been the last straw.
LaFrance reached over and picked up his coffee from his squad car’s cup holder. He took a careful sip, then when the hot liquid didn’t burn his tongue or palate, he took a larger swallow. Hot coffee was one of the consolations of his job: always plentiful, too. He kept a weather eye out for disturbances along the street, but it was three o’clock in the afternoon, so nothing caught his attention. The crazies either came out late at night or early in the morning.
A homeless man was asleep in a doorway. At this distance the man looked like a pile of grey rags, but LaFrance had long since learned how to spot the difference between a pile of garbage and a human being (although sometimes the difference was minimal, depending on how long the person had been on the streets). It was too early to tell the guy to move along, and truth be told LaFrance felt sorry for the poor wretches who wandered along St. Catherine like zombies out of a bad horror movie, shuffling along aimlessly, with nowhere better to go than straight in front of them. A lot of them had been released from mental hospitals like the Douglas because they weren’t considered a danger to themselves or others, but they invariably stopped taking their drugs after a while with no one to supervise them, and turned into what LaFrance privately thought of as the “walking dead.”
He shuddered slightly as he caught sight of yet another lost soul scraping along the sidewalk, a middle-aged man wrapped in several layers of torn, dirty and no doubt smelly clothes, all of them that awful nondescript grey of clothes worn by the homeless, his feet encased in plastic bags that were no doubt the closest that he would ever get to owning winter boots. Pauvre âme, LaFrance thought. Poor soul. The man trudged along the sidewalk, feet dragging, looking nowhere but straight ahead of him. People were crossing to the other sidewalk to avoid him entirely, as was so often the case.
A shape hurled itself at the driver’s-side window of his squad car. Instinctively LaFrance slammed the brakes and was rewarded with the squealing of abused tires and the smell of burning rubber. A woman was hammering frantically on his window. He signalled to her to stop, then rolled down his window. She was shouting almost hysterically and pointing further ahead down the street.
“Venez vite! Il est en train de la tuer!”
Holy shit. Assault, or at worst, murder. He put a hand on the woman’s arm to get her to be still.
“Woah, calm down. Who’s killing who? Where?”
“Over there! By the Church!” the woman pointed. “We were just walking, and this homeless man just attacked us for no reason! He bit me, and I screamed and ran away, but Geneviève couldn’t get away and he’s killing her!”
“Okay, I’m going. Stay here and find a phone. Call 911!” He eased the squad car away from her, switched on his rotating lights, and reached for his radio. “Dispatch, this is Unit 11-06. I have a report of an assault taking place on St. Catherine near MacKay and am proceeding to the site now. ETA about one minute. Request backup.”
“Copy that, Unit 11-06, I’m hearing you five by five. Backup en route, ETA five minutes. Report back with particulars when you have them.”
“Roger that.”
Even before he reached the street corner, LaFrance could see that there was a major disturbance. A small group of people were clustered by St. James’ Anglican Church, and many of them waved frantically as they saw the police car approaching with lights flashing.
“Over here!”
“Par ici, Monsieur l’Agent! Venez vite!”
He sprang out of the car and shoved his way through the first few people in his way. After that the rest of the crowd melted away from him like the Red Sea parting for Moses. It was unsettling to meet so little resistance. Usually people stood around to gawk at whatever was going on, even if they weren’t trying to offer assistance. As the last few onlookers scrambled to get out of his path, he stopped short in his tracks, completely unprepared for what he was seeing.
A man was attacking a woman, but he’d never seen anything so brutal or savage or... simply put, inhuman, in all his days. He wasn’t sure if the man was homeless or not: certainly his clothes were dirty and tattered, but they looked as though they might not have been that way for very long, and the man was covered in blood and gore and some kind of disgusting black ichor. He’d managed to knock down a young woman, presumably the Geneviève that the first woman had mentioned, and was pinning her to the sidewalk. She was screaming and struggling, but no one had moved to assist her. Usually at least one man would have stepped in to try and drag her assailant away, except that no one seemed to want to approach the crazed man who was tearing huge chunks of her flesh away with his teeth.
He reached for his shoulder radio. “Dispatch, this is unit 11-06. I have an adult male, maybe in his thirties, attacking a woman. He has her pinned and is... eating her.” It sounded impossible even as he said it, but there was no mistaking what was going on.
“Say again 11-06? It sounded like you said he was eating her.”
“Dispatch, you heard right. We’re going to need at least two ambulances here. I’m going in now.”
“Copy that. I’m sending the ambulances now. Be careful, Jean-Pierre.”
“Copy that.”
He stepped forward, pulling his gun from its holster. “Hey! Toi! Arrête just là!” he shouted, aiming at the man’s chest and approaching cautiously. “Stop, or I’ll shoot you!” he shouted in English, in case the guy only spoke one language.
His words had no effect. He hesitated a fraction of a second, worried that he might hit the woman. Then he raised his service weapon and pulled the trigger, figuring that a gunshot wound was the least of her worries at this point. His bullet caught the guy just below the ribcage, tearing away a large chunk of flesh and briefly exposing a flash of white bone before blood obscured the entry wound. The man shuddered under the impact of the bullet, but kept gnawing at the woman’s shoulder, while she shrieked even louder than before.
“Tabarnac!” LaFrance swore, partly in wonderment and partly in frustration, and aimed the gun again, firing three times. All three times the bullets found a home in the man’s torso, and each time, though he was jolted by the sheer force of the bullets penetrating his flesh, he continued with his grisly business, moaning and gurgling in apparently savage pleasure as he mauled his victim.
The sound of a siren behind him told him that his backup was here. He glanced back over his shoulder to see two junior cops running toward him, the lights on their squad car still flashing.
“Tabarnac,” one of them breathed as they caught up to him. “C’est quoi cette hostie d’affaire-là?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. The guy’s already taken four bullets and it hasn’t done anything. Maybe he’s high on PCP? One of you come with me, the other covers us, okay? We got to get him off her.”
“Got it.”
They went in cautiously, both their weapons trained on the attacker, who remained oblivious to their presence. The young woman had stopped screaming and struggling now and was only whimpering softly, her body shutting down in spite of her efforts to free herself. There wasn’t much time left before she went into shock and died. The crowd was ominously silent, not wanting to get too near, but unwilling to leave while the situation was still unresolved. The traffic had stopped all around for several city blocks, but surprisingly no one was shouting, no one was honking their horns. It was as though the whole neighbourhood was holding its breath while the policemen dealt with the madman loose in the streets.
“Ready? Now!”
LaFrance sprang forward at the same time as the other young cop, and each grabbed the suspect by one arm and hauled him bodily off the woman. The man growled and snarled and pulled hard against them, then turned his glazed look on them and snapped at LaFrance with gore-encrusted teeth. Before LaFrance knew it the horrible creature had buried his teeth in the policeman’s arm, ripping right through the fabric of his uniform and tearing a bloody gouge in his arm.
“Hostie!” he cursed, grabbing the man’s head and pulling him away. “Come on, let’s get him cuffed!” He kicked the man brutally in the back of the knees and forced him none too gently facefirst into the pavement and held him down while the other young cop pulled out his handcuffs. “You have the right to remain silent!” he yelled at the man, who was still growling and dribbling spittle and blood and bits of flesh onto the street where they mingled with the greasy water in a puddle left over from the rain. He rattled off the rest of the man’s rights, but wasn’t surprised when he got no response to the question of whether he understood his rights. The man was off his mind and probably pumped full of the worst kind of drugs.
“Calisse. C’est même pas la pleine lune!”he kept one knee planted firmly in the small of the man’s back while his temporary partner rushed over to see to the woman who had fallen completely and terribly silent. Everyone was going crazy lately, it seemed. Maybe it was time to consider early retirement.
Both young cops were kneeling next to the prostrate woman, trying to stem the bleeding of her numerous wounds as best they could. A siren in the distance told them that an ambulance was coming down from the Montreal General Hospital up the hill on Côte-des-Neiges road.
“Y était à peu près temps,” he grumbled under his breath.
It was surprisingly easy to keep his suspect down now. Whatever superhuman strength had possessed the guy while he was attacking the woman, it was gone now. Now he was just flailing and groaning and, most disturbingly of all, scraping large sections of his own flesh off in his struggles to get up again. It was like the guy couldn’t feel any pain at all.
“I think she’s dead,” one of the young cops said, looking for all purposes as though he might burst into tears. An idealist, then, probably fresh out of the Académie. Poor kid. Montreal wasn’t known for its violent crimes, and this was a hell of a way to get introduced to police work. LaFrance couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything this horrific.
“Keep working on her!” he called out. “Let the paramedics take over when they get here, but don’t give up. I’ve got this son-of-a-bitch pinned for now. We’ll get him to the station afterward.” He dug his knee harder into his prisoner’s back, not that the man could feel it, but it made him feel better. His arm was burning where the asshole had bitten him. Shit. It was probably infected, and he was going to have to replace his shirt.
The other cop gave a shout of surprise. “Holy shit, she’s alive! She’s moving!”
LaFrance turned in time to see the woman half-rise, and, with a choking snarl she lunged at her erstwhile saviour and buried her teeth in his thigh. The kid sprang away with a scream of pain and fear, then reached down and pinned her back to the ground with both hands planted firmly on her shoulders.
“What the hell?” his partner straddled the woman to keep her from moving. “What the hell is going on? She’s gone insane!”
“Hold her down!”
The ambulance pulled up, siren wailing and lights flashing, and the paramedics jumped out, stretcher at the ready. They stopped, perplexed, as they viewed the scene.
“Hey, mon doux!” one of them exclaimed. “So which one of them are we taking?”
LaFrance jerked his head at where the other two policemen were trying to keep the woman subdued. “Start with her! Watch out, she’s trying to bite people.”
They nodded and made their way over, and once again the crowd parted before them without so much as a murmur. “What’s going on, anyway?” one of them asked, as they set to work, first securing her mouth with a leather gag they normally used for epileptics.
One of the younger cops shrugged. “Damned if I know.”
Okay, that's the last complete section for now. Stay tuned for more zombie-related excitement!
