The Hungry Dead

by John Russo

  Melrose went on blathering, even though his voice was getting weaker and weaker. “I’m dying . . . I’m not going to . . . make it . . . to the hospital. It doesn’t matter, you see . . . my two daughters . . . will . . . carry on . . . my work. . . .”

  Taking in the full meaning of this, the sheriff instantly barked a gruff question.

  “What’re you driving at, Melrose? Your daughters will carry on what? Where?”

  “They’re . . . gone . . . you’ll never . . . catch them. . . .”

  One of the paramedics piped up. “Back off, Sheriff, please! Let us work on him. He’s too weak to talk.”

  Melrose said, “It . . . doesn’t matter . . . anymore.... I’m done for.... I injected myself. When I die . . . shoot me . . . or I’ll become . . . one of them.”

  “What the hell’re you talkin’ about?” the sheriff demanded. “You didn’t become one before, why would you become one now?”

  “The serum . . .”

  “What fuckin’ serum?”

  “Trying to . . . study them . . . find out why . . . they don’t die. The government backed me . . . at first . . . let me capture them . . . and keep them here. But later they wanted . . . to shut me down. But my daughters . . . will carry on . . . in a secret place.... You’ll never find it.... It’s under . . . the ground . . .”

  Enraged, Sheriff Harkness grabbed the dying doctor and shouted into his face.

  “Where? Damn you! Tell me where! Do some real good for humanity before you die!”

  But Dr. Melrose did not respond. He was a lifeless doll now, his eyes glazed over, staring up at the sun.

  Bruce pulled the sheriff back, and they both stared down at Doc Melrose’s corpse.

  The paramedics looked on in silence. One of them gave a futile wave of his blood-smeared, latex-gloved hand. The other paramedic shrugged and backed away.

  The sheriff said to them, “You guys better wash up real good and sterilize yourselves. This nutcase said he injected himself with some kind of wacky serum.”

  “Shit!” Bruce said. “All we need is for the damn plague to start up all over again!”

  The sheriff said, “Somehow we gotta track down Melrose’s daughters and put a lid on this thing once and for all.”

  “How’re we gonna find them?” Bruce lamented. “They could be clear across the county by now. We don’t even know how they’re traveling—plane, bus, or car. We have to run a check, see if there are any vehicles registered to the Melroses. If we could get a license plate number . . .”

  “Yeah,” said the sheriff. “Phone the station and get somebody busy on it. We gotta put out an all-points bulletin and set up road blocks as quick as we can. Don’t forget the train and bus stations, for god’s sake!”

  CHAPTER 19

  A battered old van with the image of a Confederate flag on its front bumper plate pulled into a rest area off a two-lane rural road. Its rear bumper bore two hateful slogans: PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN NAZI and DEATH TO JEW LOVERS. Drake was driving, and Bones was in the front passenger seat. They were both stoned on crack cocaine, and both had crude swastikas tattooed prison-style on their cheeks and foreheads and daggers with roses tattooed on their biceps with their mothers’ names on them.

  About a half dozen vehicles of various types were parked at the rest stop, which consisted of one building with toilet facilities and another with soft drink, coffee, bottled water, and candy machines.

  Bones and Drake sneeringly gave the once-over to a guy walking a dog and a couple of fat, frumpy women who did their business, got into their car, and drove off.

  What made them pull over at this particular rest stop was that they had spotted a trailer-truck logo consisting of the letters M and R inside a painted rose, and underneath the logo, in red letters, it said: M-R ELECTRONICS. And they were always looking to boost stuff they could turn to cash, so they didn’t even need to discuss this opportunity when it fell into their laps.

  As the two skinheads got out of the van, they stared at the trailer truck with greed in their eyes. But Drake shook his head ruefully and said, “Forget about it, Bones, we ain’t gonna hijack that rig all by our lonesome.”

  Bones said, “Shut up. You got brawn but no brains, Drake. That’s why I gotta come up with all the strategy.”

  “Strategize all you want if it gets your rocks off, but ain’t no way we can pull it off without plenty of help.”

  “We got smarts and we got the element of surprise, don’t we? And we got somethin’ else.”

  “All we got is two handguns.”

  “And a bag of sugar in our grocery bag,” Bones said with a sly grin.

  “Sugar?” Drake said quizzically. “You shittin’ me?”

  “Ever put sugar in somebody’s gas tank, Drake?”

  “I never done it, but I know what it’s supposed to do—freezes up the engine and makes it grind to a halt.”

  “Well, not exactly,” said Bones. “My piece of pussy looked it up for me online. Turns out sugar sludgin’ up the engine is a buncha horseshit. But what it can do is gunk up the fuel injectors, which is good enough for us, Drake. This big rig here’s gotta be loaded with electronic shit we can fence or put to good use. Get me the bag of sugar and keep a lookout while I do the dirty deed.”

  Drake loitered near a tree where he could seem innocent while Bones unscrewed the fuel cap on the big rig and poured in all the white stuff in the bag. By the time he was finished with this, two truckers came out of the toilets and stopped to buy cans of soda, then headed for the rig.

  Bones managed to get the fuel tank capped in time not to get caught. Then he and Drake loitered a short distance away, waiting to see which way the trailer truck would head after it pulled out.

  Bones said, “Let’s hurry up and take a piss. If we’re lucky, their engine will go kaput in a lonely enough spot.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Sally and Marsha rode their horses across a meadow to the edge of a pond where they dismounted and let Sparky and Perky dip their heads and drink.

  Sally said, “I should be heading back about now. Dad really wants me to help him today.”

  “Oh, he can get along by himself,” Marsha said with a fond smile, thinking about her husband, “even though he makes doing inventory sound like a major military campaign. He just likes to have you at his side, that’s all. Even when you were married, he loved when you and your husband would come to visit us. Remember?”

  “Yeah, I could tell,” Sally said.

  “We both missed you more than we liked to admit,” Marsha told her. “So we’re glad to have you back, even though the circumstances were nothing we would’ve wished for.”

  “I understand, Mom. I really do,” said Sally. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay. I’m determined to get my life back together and move on.”

  “Spoken like a truly spunky daughter,” Marsha said, and they both laughed.

  “It’s nice to know you believe in me,” Sally said. “It helps give me strength.”

  “You’re the one of the strongest women I know,” her mother said. “Deep inside, I mean. As a child you were willful—and a handful! But the willfulness morphed into strength. I’m the one who should know. I’ve lived with you since before you were born.”

  “Mom, don’t pull that one on me,” Sally said. “You didn’t psych me out while I was still in the womb!”

  “But pretty quickly thereafter,” Marsha maintained. “Don’t forget I have a degree in child psychology.”

  “Which you never used very much,” Sally squelched.

  CHAPTER 21

  In their beat-up van, Bones and Drake cruised slowly on the wooded rural highway, hoping to spot the big rig disabled and ripe for a hijacking.

  Drake grumped, “Ain’t gonna work. I don’t see a shittin’ thing. That bag of sugar didn’t do the trick. Maybe somethin’ else woulda worked out for us, some wallpaper paste or somethin’.”

  “Who the hell carries around freakin’ wallpaper paste?”
Bones jeered. “What really pisses me off is I ain’t gonna have no sugar for my coffee if this scheme backfires.”

  “Or for my Cheerios,” Blake interjected. “I like Cheerios, but they gotta be sweet.”

  “Fuck you and your Cheerios,” said Bones, and they both laughed.

  Blake kept on driving, only halfheartedly expecting to see a busted-down big rig. But Bones kept peering around intently, staring into clumps of trees and out into fields as far as he could see, and he even tried to see if any grass was mashed down as if a vehicle had careened off the road.

  He kept this up for a long while, till finally he let out a whoop. “Ho! What’s that over there, Mr. Naysayer?”

  “Nothin’,” Drake said. “Pure nothin’. Zilch in fact.”

  “The hell it is! That’s a truck track, stupid! Right there off the berm! The fuel lines musta froze up while they were comin’ down this hill, and they went outta control.”

  “And disappeared into thin air?”

  “How the hell should I know? They musta skidded back onto the road.”

  “Then where in the fuck are they, Herr Reich Marshal?”

  “Look!” Bones shouted. “Way out in that field! Our fuckin’ windshield is so filthy I almost didn’t see it.”

  “I see it now,” said Drake, braking and stopping. “A fuckin’ telephone pole is cut in two, and the wires are down, man! And there’s the rig—jackknifed into a cell tower!”

  “Pull off! Let’s go lend a hand to the poor unfortunate souls,” Bones said with mock sympathy.

  Bones took a long-barreled semiautomatic pistol from under the passenger seat, worked the slide to make sure a round was chambered, then screwed on a silencer.

  Drake humped the van out into the bumpy field and for part of the distance up a broad swath of power company right-of-way, where he had to circle around the splintered telephone pole and the downed cables, till he finally stopped about about twenty yards from the tractor-trailer rig. He reached under the driver’s seat of the van for his pistol, which was the same make and model as the one Bones had, and he screwed on the same kind of silencer.

  “Don’t show your gun yet,” Bones cautioned. “If they’re carryin’ weapons of their own, they might just blast away at us without askin’ any questions. Let’s play it sneaky.”

  They got out of the van, didn’t shut the doors so they wouldn’t make much noise, and crept toward the cab of the truck with their silencer-equipped pistols tucked in their waistbands under their black leather jackets.

  When they got closer, they could hear moaning, which pleased them because they wanted their prey at least partially disabled. The big rig had crashed head-on into a large cell tower The cab was smashed in, and the windshield was shattered in two head-sized places as if human heads had smacked into those spots. Both doors of the cab were sprung open, but not all the way. The guy on the passenger side was clearly dead, his skull crushed and caked with blood.

  The driver was moaning, and these were the moans that Bones and Drake had first heard. “He ain’t breathin’ very loud,” Drake said. “He ain’t gonna make it I don’t think, but let’s make sure.” He put his pistol, silencer and all, right up to the driver’s temple, and squeezed off a round that made only a little pop.

  Bones did the same thing to the other trucker.

  “Haw!” Drake scoffed. “You call yourself some kinda brain. How’s come you just wasted one of our expensive Teflon bullets on a dead man, Bones?”

  “To make absolutely sure, Dummkopf. What’d they preach at us when we trained with the Aryan Brotherhood? Thoroughness. See the job through down to every detail. Don’t let yourself take for granted your enemy is out cold or dead. Take the time to make sure—that way he ain’t gonna spring up big as life all of a sudden and take you by surprise. Let’s get humpin’. We gotta load our van with all the electronic stuff we can manage. Then get our sweet asses outta here.”

  “Wait a minute. I wanna try somethin’,” Drake said, and he yanked out his cell phone and tried to dial a number. “Dead,” he said. “Like I thought. This sucker took out the power lines and the cell tower, Bones. Anybody we wanna rob ain’t gonna have no contact with the outside, and if they got a security system of any kind, it probably ain’t gonna work.”

  “That’s good to know,” said Bones, “for future reference. But it cuts no ice with what we gotta do right now.”

  He reached into the cab and yanked the key out of the ignition, then led the way to the back of the trailer truck. He got the big back door unlocked, and as it started to lift, he and Drake started to hear strange nonhuman-sounding voices. And those voices were making sounds of anger and hunger—weird, slavering noises.

  Bones and Drake jumped back, startled, and looked at each other momentarily, their eyes widening with sudden terror.

  They both knew at once that whatever they tried to do to save themselves would be too late.

  Zombies were pouring out of the truck . . . hungry . . . drooling . . .

  Perhaps Drake and Bones had heard of Dr. Harold Melrose, or maybe they had read about him when he was in the news so much, sixteen years ago. If so, in their final moments it may have dawned on them that the logo with the rose and the letters MR stood for Melrose. And the big rig wasn’t really carrying any electronic equipment. Instead it was transporting zombies. Lots of them. Including the huge long-term zombie called Barney, who had always been one of Dr. Melrose’s favorites. He wasn’t one of the first ones out of the truck though; he was too bulky and slow-moving, and others got out ahead of him, which probably saved his “life.”

  Drake and Bones managed to shoot some of the first ones out. But at first they failed to use head shots. So the zombies they shot weren’t always seriously hurt. They just kept coming.

  Three of the zombies came out together, and they even bore a resemblance to one another: a man, a woman, and a teenage boy in neat and clean clothing, as if they were going on a picnic or a trip to the movies. These were newly created zombies, new recruits to the ranks of the undead—and they each had puncture wounds in their necks—and of course Bones and Drake didn’t have time to notice this or to even care about it.

  Bones shot the teenage boy, Stevie Mathews, in his head, and that was the end of Stevie. He and his parents had been transformed when Tiffany and Victoria Melrose drank their blood last night.

  Albert got hit by a bullet that Drake fired, but it was only a flesh wound that grazed his skull.

  Meg wasn’t hit at all by any of the gunfire. But a zombie next to her got shot in the head and went down, and in her newly zombified state this did not faze her much.

  Utterly panicked by the ferociousness of the attack they were under, Bones and Drake belatedly tried to run. But they were choked, pummeled, tackled, and bitten, their legs pulled out from under them.

  Then they were swarmed over by hungry ghouls, including Meg and Albert, who took their first satisfying bites of live human flesh.

  Bones and Drake kicked and thrashed and screamed at the tops of their lungs, but not for long.

  Their screams were overwhelmed by slavering, chomping sounds and then slowly and with utter finality, the screaming faded away forever.

  CHAPTER 22

  Sheriff Harkness sat behind his desk puffing on his pipe, and Bruce Barnes was in a chair facing him. They were trying to make sense of what they had been through this morning and figure out what had been accomplished, even though the serving of the search warrant hadn’t panned out the way they had thought it would. Now they needed to decide what their next moves ought to be.

  Mulling it all over, the sheriff said, “Melrose’s claim that the government backed him at one time was nothin’ but poppycock. Probably had a little grain of truth in it, but basically a lie to cover up a guilty conscience.”

  Bruce said, “I don’t believe he had a conscience.” Seems to me he was a rogue scientist, a loose cannon. It’d be nice to know that the government wasn’t involved with a nut like that.�
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  “Well,” said Harkness, “when the plague broke out sixteen years ago, he was one of the so-called scientific experts wrackin’ their brains tryin’ to dope it out and find a cure—but they never came up with anything except cockamamie theories. Meantime pea brains like you and me put an end to it the old-fashioned way—gunned ’em down and burned ’em. Everybody hoped that’d be it—it’d go away like the bubonic plague and never come back. The eggheads were told to stop all their experimenting and dispose of any of what they called ‘infectious biological material’ that they still had in their labs. I guess the politicians and the big brass were a tad squeamish about using human beings like lab animals, even human beings that weren’t quite human anymore. They decided it was best to cremate them and hope the plague never came back, even though nobody knew where it had come from in the first place.”

  “But apparently Melrose wanted to go on,” Bruce said. “Why? What do you think he was on to?”

  “You got me,” said the sheriff. “Probably nothin’. Or maybe somethin’. There’s always been a lot of babble in the tabloids about secret laboratories where the army is studyin’ zombies, tryin’ to figure out why they can’t be killed with just a body shot.” He chuckled at this. “It’d be a helluva advantage for guys goin’ into combat, wouldn’t it? But I don’t know what good it woulda done Dr. Melrose.”

  Bruce said, “How did he keep them alive for so long? They would’ve had to eat, wouldn’t they?”

  “Well, unfortunately, we know what happened to Jeff Sanders, and he might not have been the only one who was fed to those things. But it’s hard for me to picture Dr. Melrose kidnapping and killing people to use them as zombie feed.”