The three archeologists looked again at the strange Etruscan lettering as if an answer lay somewhere in the writings of an ancient. "We sure as hell can't do what Esruad did," said Leonard. "What? Give up hundreds of thousands of lives to it, pray it goes dormant again? Attempt a removal? Send it off into ... into outer space or to the bottommost realms of the deep?"
"No, it must be housed in earth," said Stroud.
"What?"
"We don't know what kind of evil would be unleashed on the planet if it were to come into contact with salt water or even the vacuum of space. If Dr. Cline's experiments told me anything, it is that we must keep it away from water. Water only makes it airborne."
"What do you suggest, then?" pleaded Leonard.
"Esruad constructed a stone enclosure around the ship," said Stroud, "in what was an uninhabited land."
"Environmentally sound thinking," said Wiz.
"The best he could do in his day," continued Stroud. "We've got an obligation to do better, we with all our modern technology."
"Meanwhile," Wiz said acidly, "it's back and it's waited a long time for a meal."
Stroud nodded. "And it looks like we're it, unless we can find a way to beat it."
"Esruad couldn't find a way."
"I still have some yet to decipher," said Leonard. "Just thought you two ought to know what I've learned."
"Good work, Samuel," said Wiz.
Stroud agreed. "Yes, very good work."
Leonard went back to work. A worried Wisnewski took Stroud aside and asked, "How much of this do you think men like Nathan and Perkins and our Bill Leamy are going to buy? Before it is too late, I mean."
"Wiz, my friend, it may already be too late. If what Sam says is true, this army of comatose people will soon awaken to rise up against the rest of us, and we'll be forced to either destroy them or be destroyed."
"Imagine a sentient, diabolical being with the power to exact such tribute from the human race."
"Sentient, yes. Diabolical, yes, to every degree. And the worst of it is that it will turn us against one another, Wiz. That it will feed on humans is only the tip of the iceberg; that it will set in motion evil working through mankind for eons to come, this makes this thing from below satanic."
"We've got to find a way to fight back."
"Couldn't agree with you more."
"Cline's antidote, the stuff that helped Leonard ... is it the answer?"
"Afraid not. She tells me that it is only working in a small fraction of the cases. Most have succumbed too completely to be reached. It seems to help only in cases not too far advanced."
"So all these comatose people, all these madmen running about the city like wolves in packs ... it's all a fermentation process, and when the fermenting is done..."
"Then we'll see the city fall like a house of cards as men are turned against men, as the sacrifices begin."
-10-
At St. Stephen's Hospital in the middle of Manhattan, Dr. Kendra Cline and her assistants continued to work tirelessly on an antidote that wouldn't throw the victims of this plague into a catastrophic fit that, for some, had ended in death. Leonard had been the rare exception. She theorized that the protective wear and the fact he and Stroud and Wisnewski had been breathing untainted oxygen had gone far to combat the ravishes of the paralyzing disease. To date they had had only a handful of successes. Those who were infected simply were not responding to the treatment, except to die of it, which, as the grim word getting around the hospital had it, wasn't such a bad cure, given the alternative of a vegetative state.
All the hospital's equipment was strained beyond the limits.
She heard a noise outside the lab, some disturbance, people cheering. Her intercom buzzed. It was Mark, shouting, "We're seeing some activity in here, Dr. Cline. You'll want to come see for yourself."
"Activity? What kind of--"
"They're coming around, all of them, on their own."
"The comatose patients?"
"Yes."
"All of them?"
"Yes. Come quickly."
She could hear her staff cheering in the background. So why did she feel a cold wave of eerie fear grip her heart? There was something on the other side of her sane world, scratching with a satanic talon to rip sanity from her. She could feel it close at hand like the rush of the A/C whenever she sat below the vent. Like something trapped in the wall, scratching to get in ... or out.
She was suddenly aware of an ominous silence outside. She got up and rushed to the monitoring room, where she stood frozen with the others this side of the glass that separated them from the walking zombies on the other side. What was at first thought a remarkable, unprecedented medical phenomenon was fast becoming a nightmare. The people whose limbs worked, who had snatched out their IVs, dragging them along behind, unfeeling, unthinking and unseeing, stared back at the fully living with green-hued eyes that bored through them. The jubilation of Cline's staff had ended abruptly with the realization that these zombies had the use of their limbs and muscles but not their minds. It was clear that they were like so many marionettes, their bodies manipulated by unseen hands.
They raised their hands and arms in unison and pounded with all their combined weight against the thick glass partition, which resounded with a barrel noise as it held. They brought their combined force against the glass a second time, a third, a fourth, as the interns, nurses and doctors watched in horror.
The zombies, on the fifth attack against the glass, used their heads along with their forearms, bloodying themselves in their relentless obsession to break through. The glass shattered but held at first, a spider's web of crackling lines now masking the horror somewhat, snapping Kendra and the others out of their awe-inspired helplessness.
"Call for help! Mark, get on the phone!" she shouted.
"Who do I call? Orderlies won't touch these guys."
Tom shouted from his phone, "It's happening on every floor, every isolation ward!"
"What?"
"Every comatose patient is walking out of the hospital."
The glass was hit again and again and it began to crumble. Some men and women who tried to subdue the flood of zombies were grabbed and lifted and carried before the army. Mark and Tom uselessly threw hefty notebooks and chairs at the front of the line, trying to slow their progress as they ushered everyone back. Mark grabbed Dr. Cline, pushing her through the door.
Once everyone who was able had gotten beyond the door, it was locked behind them, but suddenly the door was being rammed. The zombies attacked it without letup again and again and again.
"I've got to call Stroud," Kendra called out, racing back into her lab, but there she saw that some of the zombies had opted for a second way out of the isolation ward, having battered through a wall, using the bodies of some of her dead staff as their battering rams. She raced from here, and now the zombies were coming through the locked door of the monitoring room, the bodies of other blood-soaked men and women used as battering rams dropped before them and trampled underfoot.
The zombies made for the corridors, the stairwells, the exits, and before them ran the staff.
Kendra found nurses cringing behind a desk on the floor below who told her they'd telephoned police, but that the same thing was happening all over New York, at every hospital and clinic that had taken in victims of the plague, that they were all moving and killing as they went.
From the windows they saw a flood of zombies amassing in the streets going blindly toward some unknown destination. "Like an army of mindless insects," said one of the nurses from a window on the twenty-ninth floor.
"Where are they going?" asked another.
Then it dawned on Kendra exactly where the zombies were going. Their goal had to be the pit at the Gordon Construction site. Gordon meant to bulldoze over the pit, having changed the design of his massive tower, but something in the pit had other plans.
She raced for the phone and dialed Stroud at the Museum of Antiquities. It se
emed to ring forever before Wisnewski answered it, and when she pleaded for Stroud, he told her that Abe was just getting some much-needed sleep.
"Wake him, dammit! This is important, Doctor."
"What's happened?"
"Please, I must speak to Stroud."
It seemed another eternity before Stroud got on the phone. She almost screamed. "There's something terribly wrong going on out here, Stroud!"
"What's wrong?"
"Our comatose patients ... all got up--" Her voice was out of control.
"Then your antidote is working!"
"No! No, it isn't! They're--they've attacked us."
"Attacked?"
"En masse! They've become like--like zombies, Stroud, and it's happening all over the city, and--"
"Easy, easy--"
"--and they're all heading for the pit, toward Gordon's damned hole!"
"Christ, it's happening."
"What?" She was suddenly confused. "You expected this?"
"No, not so soon, anyway. This thing must be incredibly powerful."
"Gordon's people must be warned, and Nathan's--"
"Gordon's people?"
"Don't you see, it's got to do with Gordon's people back at the construction site."
"But we had an agreement with the mayor that--"
"All bets are off. You've been so secluded at the museum that you don't know what's going on. Gordon's calling the shots now."
"Dammit! The fool has precipitated this. Damn him!"
"Gordon's planning to bulldoze the site and--"
"Seal it off? Dammit, don't those fools know that this thing is not in the pit any longer, that it's among us! In us! If we seal the site off, we seal our own fates. Where is Nathan in all this?"
"I don't know ... Gordon's overseeing the work."
"Where are you?"
"I'm at the hospital! I was on my way to see you when--"
"Are you all right?"
"--all right? My patients are walking out on me like so many zombies, Abe!"
"But you're physically all right?"
"Yes, yes, but--"
"Good, then do what I ask."
"Whatever you say."
"That concoction you put together for Leonard. It may be our only hope at this point. Is there any way to transport as much of it as possible to the construction site?"
"Yes, but ... but why?"
"We may have to use it, Kendra."
"Use it? On the zombies?"
"It may be our only hope. Those zombies as you call them are bent on destroying us, Kendra. Don't ask me how I know this, there isn't time. Just trust me."
"You'll need some way to inject the antidote--or should we now call it poison?"
"For any of those who come to the pit, consider it poison, I'm afraid. And yes, anything you can do about injecting literally hundreds ... please bring your tools and your ideas. I'll meet you at the site."
Kendra got on the P.A. system and gathered what remained of her staff and debriefed them as quickly as possible. She asked for volunteers to go with her to the Gordon Construction site carrying the necessary materials Stroud had requested. Only Mark and Tom volunteered.
"All right," she said, "we'll need all the protective gear we can gather up. We'll need all the syringes and dart guns we can find, and we'll need every ounce of the ... the so-called antidote. Everyone else remaining behind, I want you to go into producing more of this poison. It may be the only weapon we have against those zombies. And don't roll your eyes at me. I know these zombies were people once, but at the moment, they will kill you in order to see their ends met. Now, do as I say."
Very soon after this Tom Logan and Mark Williams had loaded a medical van in the parking lot with all the materials at their disposal, and they were now racing for the Gordon site and the fearful pit where they would link up with Abraham Stroud.
Abraham Stroud tried desperately to stop the mammoth machines at Gordon Construction from moving in to seal off the mysterious Etruscan ship. But police, ordered to control the strange, growing crowd of zombies and madmen that had encircled the construction site, dragged Stroud away from the dozers and to James Nathan. Not even the C.P. was listening to any more rhetoric. He shouted at Stroud, "It's time we took action!"
"Blindly? Stupidly?"
"Any damned way we can get it!" His anger and his words were a mirroring of the feelings of almost all of the citizens of New York City. Thus far, the evil was dividing them, one against the other, as sharply as a meat cleaver. Stroud continued to argue. "But we're going to need access to the damned pit, to the ship! Nathan! We're close!"
"Not close enough," came a sharp-edged voice beyond Nathan. It was one of the construction guys, the boss from the look of the man. He pointed skyward. "Here comes Sir Arthur now."
It was a helicopter with the markings and blue and white colors of Gordon's company. The foreman said, "He's going to be pissed off it hasn't been done."
"I don't give one shit about your boss's feelings, McMasters!" shouted James Nathan, making certain everyone within earshot understood that he was acting on his own here, and not as Gordon's puppet.
Stroud tried again to reason with Nathan. "We're going to have to go back inside ... to face this thing," he said.
"You'd do it, too, wouldn't you, Stroud?"
He looked Nathan in the eyes and held them in his steely gaze. "Damned right I would, if I knew we had a chance of beating this thing."
"Even if you go down with it?"
"I'll take my chances."
A silence settled over the two men even in the roar of the approaching chopper and several ambulances that parted the crowd and stormed through the gates.
"We'll need to reenter at exactly the same place."
"Why's that?"
"I can't say."
"Something else you're not sure of?"
Stroud merely sensed the importance of keeping open the pit. Once it was shut, he was certain the disease that had steadily infected thousands would only increase, multiply and quadruple, spreading on forever.
All around them along the copper dam supports, the fences and the barricades, an army of zombies stared down on them, and their numbers were swelling and threatening, an explosion of human bodies bent on the destruction of anyone who was not among them.
They stood in absolutely frozen poses all around the site, looking like the stone soldier statues that once guarded the Great Wall of China. A sound began to emanate from the army of zombies, an ominous chant that made the hair on the back of the neck stand on end. "Ommmmmm-uuuuuu, ommmmmm-uuuuuu, ommmmmm-uuuuuu..." Again and again, over and over, combating the rotor blades of the helicopter as it settled downward.
"See what I mean, Nathan?" Stroud shouted above the din, still trying to convince the other man of the futility of blowing the hole with a bazooka or covering it with mortar. "The thing is not inside there. It's out here, with us. It is us!"
Nathan stood mesmerized at the sheer numbers of zombies lining his streets. Shaken, he looked to Stroud for guidance. "What do we do?"
"Now you're talking. Order those dozers to cease and desist." The men on the dozers had stopped of their own accord when the zombies had begun to chant. So loud and piercing was the cry they sent up that it could be heard over the roar in the cab of a Cat. Nathan quickly dispatched some of his men to stay the dozers completely. He did so as Gordon, a tall, impressive, gray-to-silver-haired man, rushed at them, shouting.
"What is the meaning of this, Nathan? Can't you clear this area? Get these people out of here! What're your men doing there?" He saw that the men on the dozers were being forced off by the policemen, and he really lost his temper. "Goddammit, Nathan! I have just come from your boss, and he is in agreement with me! Do you understand? Damn you!"
"Covering over the pit and sealing it will only worsen the situation, Gordon!" Nathan shot back at him, equally loud and angry. "I've got to do what my scientific advisory team says. If that goes against the wishes of the
mayor, then the mayor'll just have to can my ass! Meantime, please stay out of the way. This is a police affair."
Gordon was so livid he had gone white-faced. "We shall just see about that!"
He stormed off, presumably to find a telephone. The man seemed both blind and deaf to the fact he was, like the others, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of potentially dangerous people infected with the evil incarnated from the ship. Stroud wondered momentarily what Esruad would have done at a moment like this, no doubt fighting the ignorance and fear and hatred of his own people in the year 793 b.c. Then he saw Kendra and her people rushing about, distributing syringes filled with her chemical weapon.
"There, Commissioner, is our weapon. Tell your men to use it."
"They're policemen, for Christ's sake. If these ... people ... attack, my men will go for their guns."
"Listen to me! We do know now something about what we are dealing with here, Nathan, and conventional weapons will not destroy this thing any more than bulldozers might."
"All right ... all right!" Nathan got on his bullhorn and told his people to arm themselves with what the doctors were passing out. "Use the syringes as your weapon in the event any of the ... the diseased people come at you. There are more of them than we've got bullets for, anyway."
"A few shots'll scatter them!" shouted one of the uniformed men.
"Use the medicine!" he shouted back as one of the zombies clambered over the fence and fell, got up and was met by a cop with a syringe who, afraid to touch the sick man, jabbed at him with it before plunging it into him. Others were coming over the fences, which were beginning to give way. The first man injected began to quake and gurgle and roll about the ground before his body was lifted and pounded on the earth by invisible hands. He was dead.
"Christ, they're coming in!"
Nathan uselessly picked up the bullhorn and shouted at the uncaring, unhearing mass of humanity at the fences encircling them. "It's no good!" he finally shouted, seeing another section of fence come down. "It's no use!"
Shots broke out as frightened police fired on the crowd pushing inward along one wall of the fence. Some of the shots were effective, others not.
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