by John Russo
Spaz and Blake would watch till the bitter end. They enjoyed this sort of thing more than Dr. Melrose did.
And besides, the doc had important work to do, and he didn’t want to neglect it.
He had to finish up some important experiments. Then he had to put himself and his entire enterprise into survival mode. Because there was little doubt that the police would soon be here in full force.
Tiffany came back down the corridor and said, “We’ve got to get rid of the patrol car they came in, Daddy.”
He said, “I know. The keys must be in one of their pockets, but Blake and Spaz can hot-wire it instead of bothering to look for the keys.”
Blake heard this and turned around, holding up the cops’ guns and asking, “What about these?”
“Hang on to them. I think they will come in handy,” said Dr. Melrose. “As a matter of fact, let’s hold back on sinking their car into the pond. It might come in handy for a tactical getaway.”
PART THREE
THE ESCAPE
CHAPTER 16
Sheriff Harkness had to carry out his raid on the Melrose complex ahead of schedule on an emergency basis because two men he had sent out there as a surveillance team reported that what appeared to be a preparation for an all-out evacuation, or something close to it, was underway under cover of darkness. And the other two men he sent out never came back.
Luckily, the sheriff had insisted on an around the clock surveillance, instructing the two men to spell each other in four-hour shifts and had issued them infrared spy gear including goggles and telescopes. Two nights in a row they had observed trucks and vans being loaded from midnight till dawn with labeled crates of office and laboratory equipment, and also dozens of multisized cardboard boxes that were not labeled but were numbered, probably so their contents could be checked off on a manifest.
The raiding party consisted of a six-man SWAT team and a dozen deputies under the command of Sheriff Harkness. Bruce Barnes was one of the deputies, and he, like everyone else, was worried about the possible fate of Jeff Sanders.
None of these men had any idea what they were going to encounter. But whatever it was, they wanted to get to the bottom of it if it turned out to be something illegal. The sheriff knew that if Doc Melrose really was orchestrating a pull-out, he might already be one jump ahead of the law. This might turn into a pursuit and BOLO—be on the lookout—instead of a detain and search mission.
This was a chilly October morning, and when the lawmen first arrived just after dawn, the sun had not finished burning off the fog. The grass was dewy, and the dark limbs and wet multicolored leaves of the trees glistened in the first weak rays of sunlight as the mist slowly began to lift.
To the sheriff and his men, it looked like the Melrose compound was deserted. If this was the situation, there would be no shooting. On the other hand, empty labs and offices would probably yield little evidence of any suspicious activity that may have occurred there over the months and years previous.
Sheriff Harkness was armed with a shotgun and a holstered sidearm, and he was also carrying a battery-powered megaphone. His plan was to get on the megaphone and call out to whomever was the honcho in there to shut the current off and immediately open the electrified gate, so he could go in to serve his warrant and hopefully carry out his search without any bothersome interference or, god forbid, foolish gunplay.
But the gate was already wide open.
By means of hand signals and whispers, the sheriff passed along deployment orders and, in a military-style maneuver, the men broke their ranks down into four-man squads that took turns covering each other, while one squad at a time crouched and ran through the open gate and through holes they had made with shears through other parts of the chain-link fence. In a matter of minutes, all the SWAT men and the deputies were deployed inside the compound, their guns trained on the various buildings and doorways, ready to open fire as soon as they were provoked or ordered to do so.
The sheriff pressed a button and spoke into the handheld megaphone, and his gruff voice boomed out all over the compound. “We are the police! We have you surrounded! Come out with your hands up!”
There was no response whatsoever. So the sheriff tried it again. “We are the police! We have you surrounded! Come out with your hands up!”
The sheriff was flanked by Deputy Bruce Barnes, who had performed so well in the outbreak sixteen years ago, and by two other deputies, Jerry Flanagan and Carl Ortiz, officers with just over ten years’ service, who were not on the job when the sheriff’s first run-in with Dr. Melrose had taken place. But they had no doubt that the stories they had heard about the incident were real. After all, they both had friends and family members who had suffered and died back then.
Wisps of fog still crept among the cinder-block buildings. And here and there the fog was heavier, as if purposely hiding something—at least it seemed that way to some of the lawmen who were creeped out by the place in spite of their need to be brave and alert.
Sheriff Harkness was making up his mind whether to let his voice blare out over the megaphone one more time or whether he should just move forward with a handpicked squad while the rest furnished cover.
But before he made his mind up, three shambling figures emerged from a thick pocket of fog between two of the cinder-block buildings and started shuffling toward the sheriff and the deputies who were flanking Harkness protectively.
“Holy shit!” Carl Ortiz cried out.
And Jerry Flanagan took a faltering step backward, as if he had been hit with something. “Christ! What are they?” he blurted.
“Zombies!” Bruce Barnes said as calmly as he could. But he was rattled. It seemed like a déjà vu moment to him, and a very scary one at that. “Fucking zombies,” he repeated, muttering it to himself.
The three undead beings shuffled toward the sheriff and his flanking deputies, and there was no doubt that they were quite decayed and dead-looking but somehow still “living.” One was a red-haired woman in a flower-print housedress, and the two others were middle-aged men wearing olive-green jumpsuits of the type usually worn by workmen, such as carpenters or plumbers.
“Fuck! It’s happening all over again!” Bruce cursed.
Sheriff Harkness held back on giving an order to fire. He wanted the undead creatures to get closer first. But suddenly shots rang out anyway, and two of the zombies went down, hit in the head by bullets—the woman and one of the “carpenters.” The one still on his feet had been shot in his chest—a big gaping hole appeared there—and he reeled backward and almost fell, but somehow he did not go down. He just kept on coming.
And behind him a half-dozen more zombies appeared, venturing out from behind the buildings.
“Fire at will, men!” the sheriff barked over the megaphone.
A volley of shots rang out immediately, and the “carpenter” zombie who had been shot in his chest took a high-powered shot to his head that splintered his skull and splattered his brain, and what was left of him fell down hard onto the gravel.
Loud gunfire echoed throughout the compound, and several more zombies bit the dust. “There are some over there tryin’ to crawl through the hole you guys cut in the fence!” the sheriff shouted to a squad of SWAT men. “Go after ’em! Don’t let ’em get away! If they make it into the woods, we might never catch up with ’em!”
The squad moved off, efficiently aiming and firing, and the sheriff watched them kill three more zombies, and he nodded his approval. It seemed to him that the situation was close to being under control—unless there were more zombies inside the buildings.
But things weren’t quite over yet, and a female zombie was coming at the sheriff behind his back, and he almost didn’t hear her because of the spates of gunfire. At the last second, he wheeled and swung his shotgun into action just in time to shoot the sneaky zombie in the face. She dazedly covered her face with her hands as she sank slowly to her knees, then she toppled sideways.
The sheriff stood over h
er and saw the damage made by the shotgun pellets—holes like little BB marks in her partially decayed facial skin, but not a direct hit. She was still breathing, emitting an eerie rasping sound. He drew his .44 Magnum, aimed between her eyes, and dispassionately squeezed off a round. This time she was blown away for good, ghoul brains and gore soaking into the earth.
Breathing hard, Deputy Bruce Barnes came up to the sheriff while he was taking time to reload his Winchester, the same one he was using sixteen years ago. “I think I spotted more of them ducking behind those two tar paper sheds over there,” he said. “We better check it out.”
“You, Jerry, and Carl come with me,” the sheriff responded.
Weapons at the ready, they proceeded around the side of the main cinder-block building and toward the two sheds Bruce had mentioned. Even though they expected to encounter something, they were still startled to find three zombies crouched over someone’s half-devoured remains. The zombies looked up like pack animals ready to protect a kill. They were chewing and drooling, their faces streaked with blood. They were too satiated and too lethargic to even make much of an attempt to get away.
Without a word, the sheriff and his deputies blasted them down.
Then the lawmen approached closer to the erstwhile feast.
And even though the face was chewed up, they still recognized the dead man.
“Oh god,” Jerry said, “that looks like—”
Carl said, “Jeff Sanders.”
“It is him,” Bruce said, sadly shaking his head. “He must’ve got himself caught spying, and they fed him to these things.”
“Then they cleared out,” said Sheriff Harkness. “They knew we were coming. That’s why none of their vehicles are around. Dollars to doughnuts all the buildings are gonna be empty. Dr. Melrose and his crazy crew are long gone.”
Just then a shot rang out, and Carl Ortiz was shot in the chest. He screamed and fell dead as the sheriff and his two remaining deputies took cover behind the tar paper sheds, looking to return fire.
Another shot rang out, and this time the muzzle flash called attention to a sniper on the roof of one of the buildings. He peeped from behind a chimney, and the lawmen cut loose with a heavy volley.
The sniper ducked out of sight. But not without getting spotted long enough to make out that he had a rifle and was wearing a white lab coat.
The sheriff and his two surviving deputies waited tensely with fixed gazes, ready to fire if the sniper peeped up again.
They heard some of the other deputies and SWAT men coming toward them in the distance, drawn to the situation because of the the gunfire now that other areas of the compound were mostly silent.
All of a sudden the sniper peeked around the side of the chimney and squeezed off three rapid rifle rounds.
This drew heavy return fire from the three lawmen.
The sniper screamed and fell behind the chimney, and his rifle dropped and clattered down below him on a brick walkway.
For a long moment, all was still except for the cautious footsteps of the approaching SWAT team and the other deputies.
Then a weak and whimpering voice came from the sniper up on the roof. “I’m hurt bad . . . I’m bleeding . . . I surrender . . . come and get me . . .”
“Damn it. Who the hell are you?” Sheriff Harkness shouted.
“Who . . . do you . . . think? I’m . . . Dr. Melrose.”
CHAPTER 17
On the morning of the raid against the Melrose Medical Research Center, a young divorcee, Sally Brinkman, and her mother, Marsha, led their horses out of the big barn on their family farm thirty miles south of Willard. The calm, dewy beauty of the sunrise was conducive to relaxing and forgetting their troubles. The morning was a mite chilly, but they both had on warm riding britches and tan leather jackets.
Little did they know it, but this was the calm before the storm. They had no idea of the death and destruction that was about to be visited upon them. Sally smiled as she patted and stroked her horse, Sparky, a three-year-old palomino, and Marsha behaved similarly toward her own mount, Perky, a dark brown mare with a white star-shape on her forehead.
Both women loved their horses and delighted in riding out together to roam and casually inspect the eighty acres that they owned. They mostly grew corn there on part of the acreage with the aid of a tenant on a farm nearby, who was paid for the use of his time and tractor.
Sally was in her late twenties, but she retained the spunky personality that had made her so rebellious and hard for her mother to handle during her teenage years. Marsha understood well these qualities in her daughter because when she was growing up she was the same way. They both had mischievous grins and a perky way of tossing their blond ponytails with a quick jerk of their heads, and sometimes they looked so much alike they almost could be mistaken for sisters. They were sometimes amusingly called “my beautiful hellcats” by Henry Brinkman, husband to Marsha and father of Sally, who came from the house carrying a lunch bucket and heading for a pickup truck parked by the barn. At fifty-seven, he was still lean and physically fit, and Sally thought it was nice to have such a good-looking father. He was handsome in her eyes, even though others might not have thought of him that way because of his craggy, darkly tanned face, thinning gray hair, and deep-set brown eyes that often scrutinized people with a probing no-nonsense stare.
Settling herself into her saddle and stirrups, Sally called out, “Where’re you going, Dad?”
“Down to the saloon.”
Marsha wasn’t saddled up yet, and she half turned with one foot in a stirrup and said, “So early, Henry? You don’t have to open till noon.”
“I want to finish taking my booze inventory, Marsha, so I can maybe figure out how much was stolen by the bartender I had to fire last week. The damned thief! Such a baby face, you’d almost think he’s not even old enough to tend bar, but he was sly enough to be stealing us blind!”
“Don’t let it aggravate you so much,” Marsha said. “He’s not the first bartender you had to can.”
She swung herself up into her saddle and got comfortable in her stirrups.
“Too many folks with sticky fingers,” Henry groused. “I oughta sell the damn place! But nobody’ll buy it ’cause it barely ekes out a profit—thanks to all the chiseling bartenders. That’s why I’m so glad you’re back helping me out, Sally.”
“You know I’ll be there right at six, Dad.”
“Want me to drive back and pick you up?”
“No need,” said Sally. “I can walk over there on a nice day like this. It’s not even a mile.”
“I know,” Henry said. “I still jog to the saloon and back three days a week to try to keep my stomach flat. But right now I’m gonna ride. See you later, honey.”
He climbed into his truck, started it up, and pulled out.
Sally and Marsha watched him go, then trotted their horses out of the long driveway and across a field.
Sally said, “Dad keeps finding ways to say how much he needs me. I think he’s trying to make me feel better about my divorce.”
“Well,” said Marsha, “he wants to make sure you know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you need to, till you get yourself back on your feet. You do realize that, don’t you? Your father and I are both with you all the way. To tell the truth, we never liked the way Michael treated you, but we kept our mouths shut. I have to say we were glad for your sake when you decided to leave him.”
“He didn’t treat me all that badly, Mom. We just grew apart. He didn’t abuse me physically or anything. I wouldn’t have let him get away with that. I would’ve punched him out!” The way she was talking amused both her and her mother, and they both chuckled over it.
“Well, he wouldn’t have dared hit you!” Marsha jibed good-naturedly. “After all, he knew you took judo classes!”
“Jujitsu.”
“Okay, jujitsu.”
“There’s a difference, Mom.”
“I’m sure there is, honey.”
“Take your time, honey, and be sure,” Marsha said. “You could always go back to working for those lawyers.”
“But I found out I hated paralegal work. It was so boring! I need to find something more adventurous, or at least more involving. But I don’t know what.”
Sally had quit her paralegal job as soon as she got pregnant, and she was looking forward to being a stay at home mom. But the pregnancy ended with a miscarriage, and somehow that put the capper on her disappointing marriage to Michael Stotner. Whereas she had thought he was so debonair and exciting when she first met him, she had come to dislike his smugness and his braggadocio. He was a faithful husband, but not a caring or attentive one. He was too much into his exaggerated image of himself as a hotshot movie producer, even though he only produced TV spots and sales films of an unremarkable variety; nevertheless he thought, or wanted to think, that they were impressive.
“You and Dad have been great,” Sally told her mom. “But don’t worry too much about me. One thing I’ve learned is that nothing in life is absolutely sure.”
They rode in silence across the field.
CHAPTER 18
The sheriff ordered his men to make a bonfire out of the zombie corpses, same way it had been done during that other outbreak. They doused the pile with gasoline and touched a torch to it, and instantly it turned into a huge, blazing pyre.
Some distance from the smoke and flames, Sheriff Harkness and Deputy Bruce Barnes stood over Dr. Melrose, who was lying on a gurney near the rear of an ambulance while the two paramedics applied emergency measures, trying to stop the blood flow from the doctor’s chest wound and treat him for shock. They knew the irony was that going into shock would slow the blood flow down, but in itself, it would probably kill him. So they had exercised their best judgment, and they felt they were doing the best they could, even though their private opinion was that Melrose deserved to die right here instead of sticking the county for the cost of a long, drawn-out trial.