March 30, 2011; 3:00 AM:

“It looks like they’re starting to come to.” came a disembodied voice, as my groggy mind started to clear. I opened my eyes, and tried reaching for my service weapon, only it wasn’t there, and a searing pain shot through my head, sharpest at the two points at the ends of my optic nerves. I fell back... into a bed?

Previously on The Cop, The Villain, and The Wet Work:
Officer's Thom O'Meara and Bill Wilson were patrolling downtown when a bank alarm was tripped. They and Officer Katrina O'Reilly and her partner, who were patrolling the old west end, responded and were ordered to blockade the bank's parking lot. SWAT was still five minutes away when a scrawny white man and four bruisers left the bank and entered a vehicle belonging to "Michael's Scents and Potions". The sirens for the SWAT team were just becoming audible when a green-brown gas was emitted from the van, knocking O'Meara unconscious. Where is O'Meara awakening to?

“Settle down there, cowgirl! You’re safe, you’re in the hospital.”

Again with the girl crap. How many times do I have to tell people I’m not a girl! “I...” I started to croak out, then tried again, “I’m not...”

“Easy now!” the voice said, and then there was a small blip as an intercom was engaged. “Need a nurse in room 204. Bring water.”

“I’m... not... a girl...” I finally managed, just barely a whisper, and the “a” may as well have not been uttered it was so quiet.

“Nonsense, Mara, other than that nasty ass attempt at a beard you insist on trying to grow, your body screams girl. And a damned hot spitfire of a girl too, if I do say so myself.” the doctor said, his very voice grinning.

“D... Doc... Dr. Jameson?” I managed to squeak out.

“At your service.” he said, and even though I still couldn’t open my eyes, I could HEAR the mock bow. “Damned nasty business that poisonous gas you and Bill inhaled. Damned lucky it knocked you cold, or you’d both be seeing Jesus right about now.”

“K... Kat... rina?” I rasped out, just as the nurse finally got there and held the cup of water to my mouth and told me to sip it gently.

“I think it’d be best if you rest for now...” he said, with a quality to his voice which told me that I wasn’t going to like what I was going to find out. He was right though, I was completely exhausted. But I needed to know one more thing. “B... Bill?”

“Bill’s fine, and in the next room over. He didn’t wake up quite like you did, but he’s not had the same experiences yet... His life signs normalized and he just went into a regular sleep.”

With knowing that my partner, at least, was still alive, I fell into a fitful sleep. My dreams were filled with laughing phantoms, spraying strange gases and dumping strange liquids all over. Taunting me, calling me “little girly”, all the while.

March 30, 2011; 1:00 PM:

When next I awoke it was in a much more subdued state, but when I opened my eyes, I was at least able to see without the searing pain from the first time. Dr. Jameson was there again, and so was the Chief this time.

“So what the hell happened out there?” I asked, immediately getting both of their attention.

“Dr... If you could please switch off any electronic surveillance in this room and leave us for a few minutes?” the Chief said. “I’ll let you know when it’s OK again.”

Damn. If the Chief wants this kept classified, I really seriously suspect I’m not going to like it.

Once Dr. Jameson had complied, the Chief got started. “The events last night...” So, I hadn’t lost more than the rest of that night and perhaps half of the day, since the sun was still shining into the room and I happened to know the entire 200 wing was on the eastern end of the town’s hospital. “...was not an isolated occurrence.”

No shit Sherlock. There’s no way you’re making that much fuss, nor that the crook would be able to get away with it in spite of it, in a town this size, without knowing something ahead of time. Heck. O’Reilly and I were probably the best cops the town had, and they made sure to put our beats right where we’d be able to respond quickly when the call came. I may not be a rocket scientist, but I am a cop.

“A few days ago we were alerted by Homeland Security that a man by the name of Samuel Michaels, wanted in most of the states back east, was suspected to be in Idaho, and that they had reason to believe he might come pay us a little visit.”
Now, the town where I grew up and was now a cop was extremely remote. The nearest city of note being Rexburg, a Mormon college town just north of Idaho Falls, and even that was a good hour or so away to the southeast. If the passes were clear. There’s only one reason someone would come to steal something out of a bank in this town, and that’s if they were after something specific.

“What was it? What did he steal?” I demanded.

“Patience, Thom.” he said. Whoa. Someone on the force calling me my real first name, this had to be important.

“This Michaels has been very busy in the past year or so. His business, Michael’s Scents and Potions was about to go bankrupt, and he was getting desperate. He began cooking up various drugs and other chemical compounds of a not-so-legal sort to make up for a lack of a more legal customer base. An FBI drug trafficking case raised some flags at Homeland Security because some of the drugs were not of a... conventional... recipe. This sparked an investigation that eventually led back to Michaels.

“Michaels apparently realized he was in it deep and began cooking up a completely new recipe: A poisonous gas that attacks every single nerve in the human body. The gas received its debut when Homeland raided his store. As soon as they opened the doors, nearby video surveillance being conducted by a second team reports that a green-brown gas literally enveloped the entire area around the building. Everyone on the task force died instantly. Several gawkers who stopped to look later died of complications from severe nerve damage. The only reason you and Bill are still alive is because your bodies apparently shut down before you inhaled too much of the gas, or so Jameson tells me.

“The next time Michaels showed, he was leading a gang of street toughs like a puppeteer does a string of marionettes. A bank alarm went off at a Wells Fargo in Philadelphia, straight down the US Route 1 from his home in NYC. Video surveillance showed a man matching Michaels description enter the bank and walk up to a banker where he appears to be opening an account. When Michaels received the intro packet, he lifted it up high enough that it could be seen over the windows outside...”

The Chief continued to relate to me how Michaels came to be in our town, stealing from our bank. Apparently, something he discovered on his raid back in Philly led him on a chase to try to find the lost city of Atlantis.

“Wait, didn’t we have an old coot who lived here claimed he knew the location of Atlantis?” I interrupted.

“Exactly. And that is what eventually led Michaels here. The man we knew as an ‘old coot’ was once a prominent anthropologist with the University of Philadelphia, and apparently had left clues in a safe deposit box back home before leaving everything to chase after Atlantis himself.”

“Why would you come inland to chase after Atlantis, wasn’t the lost city supposed to be an island out in the Atlantic?”

“An island yes... Where exactly it was that this island was located... there’s about as many opinions on that as there are people who’ve looked for it.”

“Hm... So why would this Michaels guy want to find Atlantis anyways? He doesn’t strike me as the sort who goes gallivanting off for explorations sake alone.”

“Just how much do you know about Atlantis myth?”

“Oh! They were supposed to have had ridiculously advanced technology!”

“Yes.”

“So we come back to my original question, why was that anthropologist living here, and why did Michaels come here... Is Atlantis nearby?”

“You must not have paid that much attention to what the coot was always saying... not Atlantis, descendants.”

“Hm...” I said thoughtfully, and then my mind did that thing you know, where when you’re thinking about one thing too hard, it goes and completely changes the topic on you.

“Hey... so what about O’Reilly?”