Zombies! (Episode 4): The Sick and the Dead

by Ivan Turner

  Zombies! Episode 4 - The Sick and the Dead

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2010 by Ivan Turner

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  ***

  What has come before.

  Shawn Rudd, a high school senior in a hurry to meet up with his secret boyfriend, encounters a zombie on the streets of Brooklyn. With no hesitation, Shawn confronts the zombie, stabbing it and then bludgeoning it with a lead pipe. He then turns on the zombie's hapless bite victim, killing her with a blow to the head as well.

  Investigating the crime, Detectives Johan Stemmy and Anthony Heron are confounded and chilled by the fact that the man Shawn killed had been dead for twelve hours at the time of the incident. Their investigation takes them to the apartment of the Koplowitz family where they

  confront Mrs. Lucy Koplowitz, and her eight year old daughter Zoe, already zombies. Zoe bites Stemmy in the leg, thus infecting him. He dies hours later and Heron sees to it that he will never turn.

  A week later, a customer, of Push Ups gym, Karl Rappaport, becomes ill while working out and drops a weight on his foot. Abby Benjamin wheels him to the Sisters of Charity ER and waits for a doctor to attend him. While waiting, Karl dies from the infection. The doctors bring him straight back and try to revive him but to no avail. Minutes later, he awakens on his own. A nurse comes to help him only to be bitten by the zombie that he has become. Her wound is severe and it only takes seconds for her to die. Shortly thereafter, there are two zombies in the ER. While the chief of emergency medicine tries to get everyone out, a young doctor named Peter Ventura recognizes the threat and locks down the ER.

  The Sisters of Charity event causes a nationwide panic and people disappear from all of the major cities. But the panic is premature. The zombie infection doesn't spread like people fear. Within a couple of weeks, people begin to trickle back into their homes and their lives.

  Out of the clear blue, Lance Naughton comes to see Dr. Denise Luco, finding her submerged in her work. In an effort to pull her out of her funk, Naughton takes her to dinner. Their awkward encounter blossoms into an unexpected connection.

  John Arrick's date with his girlfriend, Suzanna, goes poorly. She'd sick and, when he suggests she see a doctor, she gets angry and storms out. Later she returns and stays the night. By the next night, however, she is very sick and it's clear that she's infected with the zombie plague. Arrick manages to get her to her own apartment and sits with her while the infection runs its course and steals her life.

  Awakening in the dark, Arrick is confronted by the zombie that Suzanna has become. They struggle their way into the bathroom but Arrick manages to fend her off, smashing her head against the bathtub. He struggles his way out of the apartment, soaked in her blood, and finds his way home. After a bout of cleaning and a shower, Arrick discovers the bite mark and realizes that his victory over the zombie is hollow and worthless.

  ***

  AT about four o'clock Sunday afternoon, John Arrick pulled himself out of bed so that he could go and get some water. It had been more than eight hours since the symptoms of the zombie plague had first begun to show. It had started with sneezing and coughing. Quickly, body aches had set in. He was almost forced prone by the pain in his back, which he had wrenched while fighting off his zombie girlfriend and subsequently cleansing himself and his apartment of the infection. All in vain.

  On Friday night, Suzanna, his late girlfriend, had come by for their date. She was already sick by that time and his mention of it had sparked a fight. She had left, but returned later and forced herself into his apartment. With no other options, Arrick himself had left his own apartment and spent the night and following day out. He returned Saturday night only to find Suzanna deathly ill. In hindsight, he felt that he should have fled the apartment, called the police or the health department, and gotten himself tested. At this point, all of that was moot. He'd done the chivalrous, if stupid thing. At Suzanna's request, he'd struggled her back to her apartment and stayed with her while she'd slowly died. After she'd turned, they had fought. Arrick had won the battle, braining her against the lip of her bathtub, but the victory had been hollow and short lived. Suzanna had bitten him.

  Every time his mind cleared enough for him to think about it, he laughed. Because, really, it was comical. Zombies. Zombie bites. Head shots. It was fiction! But the pain in his body and the pus filled, flaming red scratch on his thigh were not. His ebbing life was a reality from which he could not escape. As he stumbled out of the corridor and into the kitchen, he wiped his nose with his sleeve. A streak of red was left in its wake.

  He breathed in once.

  And breathed out.

  And then his nostrils filled up once again.

  John Arrick knew that his time was coming close. What horrors would he commit as one of the undead? Forgetting about the glass of water, he rummaged through a counter drawer and pulled out a yellow legal pad and a red marker. With weak teeth that were only hours from seeking the flesh of other humans, he ripped the cap from the marker and began to write in large shaky letters.

  BEWARE! ZOMBIE INSIDE!

  There was some scotch tape in the drawer (he could do with some actual scotch instead). He ripped off four uneven pieces, the last one leaving behind a jagged trail on the cutter. Halfway to the front door, he stopped. What would he be when it was all over? Was it a complete death and then a reawakening? Would there be anything of John Arrick left in the body? He thought of Suzanna, of her empty eyes, and the hunger that had driven her to attack him. Certainly, she had seemed to be nothing more than an animated corpse, the soul having long since fled. But he was scared. He was so scared.

  When he got to the door, he made sure that the chain was secure, turned the deadbolt, and moved the end table up against it. He stood there for a few minutes, just breathing in and out through his mouth, praying, hoping, doing nothing. Then he turned himself around and marched back to his bedroom. On his way, he tried to drop the note on the kitchen counter but it slipped to the floor and he just didn't have it in him to pick it up. He completed his journey, the last he felt he would ever make as a living human being, and flopped his exhausted body onto the bed. He thought once about calling his mother, once about calling his brother. But in the end, he just closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable.

  ***

  REALITY came blundering back through Denise Luco's dreams during Monday's mid morning. She was in bed and she was at peace and she was dreaming of Lance. And then the zombie plague returned full force. There was Lance, infected, starved, hungering for her flesh in a way that was very different from their experiences of the weekend. She came awake with a start and realized that she wasn't in her own bed and she wasn't at home. At least she wasn't at the lab. After their intimate encounter Saturday night, Lance had pushed her to spend Sunday with him. Despite the overwhelming responsibility she felt, she was able to convince herself that a day off would do more good than another day spinning her wheels in the lab. Because it was in her nature, she played hard to get, but there had never really been a decision. And Lance had shown her a wonderful Sunday.

  Now it was Monday. She'd spent the night with him again, but today she would have to head back to the lab and immerse herself in the plague.

  She
was alone in the apartment. Lance had mentioned that he was going in early. She'd made him promise to wake her before he left but before they'd drifted off to sleep, he'd promised to break that promise. As she thought about it, she giggled a little bit, both delighted and embarrassed by her own girlishness.

  The moment passed.

  In an hour, she had to be at the lab and be Dr. Luco again. She needed to be a shark because she was meeting with lawyers today. Lawyers and bureaucrats and PR men. All morons. Yesterday, before anything else, Lance had gotten on the phone and started connecting the dots on the whole Head Shot fiasco. Head Shot was the new name of a popular cold and flu medication. It was the strongest anti-viral you could get over the counter and it really did work if you took it within eight hours of becoming symptomatic. With a cold. That they'd labeled it the "perfect defense against the zombie virus" was a travesty. And, oh yeah, a big lie. So Lance had made some calls to the health department. They had made calls to the representatives of the pharmaceutical company responsible for the manufacture and distribution of Head Shot. Denise had wanted a court order forcing an immediate recall. No such thing was going to happen on a Sunday. Even the press release she wanted had to be forestalled until Monday afternoon. Well it was Monday now and it was time for the wheels of justice to start grinding forward.

  Denise showered and dressed in a smart new outfit that Lance had gotten her yesterday. She would have gladly gone back to her apartment to get something to wear but he had insisted that she not leave his sight for one instant. She could have bought her own new outfits but he didn't allow that either. He was so different from everything that she expected. He was so very typical in many ways and yet he pulled it off without bluster. Though they had been working together on and off for a month, she felt that she had gotten to know him only in the last two days. And she was impressed. In fact, she could not ever remember a time when she had been as impressed by a man. As she buttoned up her top, she wondered if it was possible to fall in love in a weekend.

  She giggled again.

  But by the time she was out the door and into the street, Denise was put to rest and Dr. Luco had settled firmly into place. The meeting was in thirty minutes and she expected to arrive ten minutes early. The people from the health department would most likely be on time and the people from the pharmaceutical company would most likely be late. By all rights, the health department people and she should present a unified front but somehow she didn't think that would be the case. Bureaucrats one and all, she anticipated a boat load of red tape and nonsense. She surmised that it would only be a matter of time before she was so completely frustrated that she would have take a stand and bring out the big guns.

  She was ten minutes early. Almost to the second. The conference was being held at Arthur Conroy Memorial Hospital in upper Manhattan. It was where she kept her lab, where they had brought Detective Johan Stemmy when he'd been bitten, and every single victim thereafter. Her lab was in a bunker, literally a bunker, three stories beneath the ground. In case of contamination, the place could be locked down in under three seconds by manual switch or voice command. The voice authority required a spoken sixteen digit key code which she and four other doctors had committed to memory. The manual switches existed in every staff room, including the cafeteria. There were no windows. It took a keycard, a fingerprint, and an eye scan to get inside the complex. She wondered how Lance was always able to get in.

  Nine minutes after she arrived, the men from the health department arrived. The first was a fat old man named Alan Lochschenborgh. He was a health department representative that Luco had met before. They had been introduced, shaken hands, and gone their separate ways. Her limited experience with him gave her no clue as to how he would handle the conference. In his company was an attorney named Mikael Seaver. Seaver was young and handsome, almost as handsome as Anthony Heron though not nearly as intimidating. Seaver wore his inexperience on his chest. Though well groomed, she could detect a faint line of sweat at his hairline. When he shook her hand, it was tentative, encrusted with anticipation. Luco wrinkled her nose in disgust. This attorney was going to make their job a lot harder. She was sure the people from the pharmaceutical company would send their best.

  And they did. They sent their best and their most obtrusive. Luco and the two men from the health department had already taken seats in the large conference room when their opponents walked through the door. Lochschenborg and Seaver had taken seats next to one another while Luco had chosen to sit apart. The men from the pharmaceutical company took seats opposite their counterparts. The teams surrounded her.

  "Good morning," the first of the two men greeted them. He had a wicked bright smile that highlighted his round face. He wasn't nearly as good looking as he thought he was but his overinflated sense of self seemed to work for him. He was exceptionally well groomed, wearing a grey suit with just the barest hint of pinstripes. A dark dark dark red tie hung from his neck, outlining a pinkish shirt. It cried out, real men wear pink. He introduced himself as Louis Juarez, representing the public image of Candid Pharmaceuticals. The other man, much more stolid, wore a standard blue business suit with a matching tie. There was nothing exceptional about Joseph Solomon, attorney at law, beyond the rock solid stance he took against all things that did not coincide with the best interests of his client, the aforementioned Candid Pharmaceuticals.

  Everyone shook hands.

  Everyone smiled.

  Everyone was a friend to everyone else.

  And then it began. Mostly, the lawyers bandied back and forth. They spent the better part of forty five minutes discussing Head Shot and why, legally, they should or shouldn't be forced to implement a recall. The representative, Juarez, stayed mostly silent. It didn't take long for Luco to realize that his job was to observe the proceedings and spin everything properly so that Candid didn't come out looking like the bad guy in all of this. To his credit, Lochschenborg fought the good fight. He was loud when he needed to be and rational when the situation called for it. He offset Seaver's inexperience with his own knowledge and understanding of the the game. But after forty five minutes, Luco became impatient. She was caught between the need to get back to work and the need to make sure that Head Shot was pulled from the shelves. Another five minutes and she was sure that her side was losing this battle. Seaver's incompetence was so blatant it almost seemed intentional. And he kept looking over at her as if trying to see if she approved of him. She didn't. And she waited just long enough for him to say There just doesn't seem to be any legal reason to force a recall before interrupting.

  "Excuse me," she said to them, but not in the polite way that asks for an allowance of the interruption. She said it in more the way people say excuse me to alert morons to the fact that they are, in fact, morons.

  Four heads turned in her direction.

  "Dr. Luco?" Lochschenborg addressed her. "Do you have something you'd like to add?"

  From her purse, she pulled a small bottle of Head Shot and presented it to them. She looked at Juarez, rather than at the hired lawyer. "Your label says that your product is a defense against the zombie virus. Do you have any research to back that up?"

  "Ma'am," said the laywer. "There's a disclaimer on the bottle indicating that no definitive research has been…."

  "Have you done any research?"

  "We're not at liberty to say."

  Seaver shook his head. "Unfortunately, Dr. Luco…"

  "You shut up," she said. "I don't think you people recognize the severity of this situation. Mr. Juarez, Mr. Solomon, your ignorance, and the ignorance of your company is astounding. Somebody like you, Mr. Juarez, deciding on a marketing ploy with absolutely no information is criminally irresponsible. There is no zombie virus. It's an infection. We treat it with antibiotics and even they have very little effect. Your medicine probably isn't even strong enough to treat the symptoms."

  At least Juarez seemed affected by her remarks. Probably, his discomfort was due to the fact that he cou
ldn't readily see his way clear to explaining how a pharmaceutical company could suggest an anti-viral for a bacterial infection. But the lawyer was one step ahead of him. "Unless I'm mistaken doctor, you haven't trademarked the zombie plague and therefore can't really speculate on what it is Head Shot is designed to treat."

  This floated about the room for a moment. It passed through the minds of each individual present and was interpreted differently. Seaver was impressed with the legal loophole Solomon was suggesting. He learned something. Lochschenborg felt defeated by the constant barrage of litigious blather that prevented him from doing his job, which was protecting the public. Juarez was actually trying to reconcile the conflict between what was his job and what was clearly the right thing. Dr. Luco was stunned.