Epidemic of the Living Dead

by John Russo

  Novels by John Russo

  EPIDEMIC OF THE LIVING DEAD

  THE HUNGRY DEAD

  UNDEAD

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  EPIDEMIC OF THE LIVING DEAD

  John Russo

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  About the Author

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by John Russo

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  eISBN-13: 1-4967-1667-5

  eISBN-10: 1-4967-1667-1

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: September 2018

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-1666-8

  PROLOGUE

  On the morning of his daughter’s eighteenth birthday, Bill Curtis stepped off the elevator on the fifth floor of the Chapel Grove Medical Research Institute. He was only fifty years old, but tired, discouraged, and used up from the stress and anxiety of the past several years. In a fluorescent hallway devoid of any human presence, he pressed a waist-high metal wall plate, causing a steel door to swing open, granting him entrance to a lockdown ward, then he turned to watch the doors swing shut so none of the patients could sneak out. His daughter was not ambulatory, not allowed to walk around unsupervised, ever. She would be brought to him in chains for his visit.

  At the security station he showed an armed guard the birthday present he had brought for Jodie, a tiny gold locket on a delicate gold chain. The guard opened the locket to ascertain that there were just photos inside, no capsules or powders that might be poisonous.

  “The chain is too fragile to strangle anybody,” Bill pointed out.

  The guard said, “You still have to leave it with me, sir. I’ll see that she gets it after you’ve gone.”

  “I wish it had come in a little jewelry box so I could’ve wrapped it with a ribbon and bow,” Bill said.

  “A short red ribbon or a piece of red yarn would’ve been permissible,” the guard said. He eyed Bill sympathetically. “You know the drill. Go ahead and have a seat in the alcove.”

  “Thank you,” Bill said, because he was being excused from normal procedure, which was for all visitors to be escorted by a guard who then stood over them till they were done visiting. But he was more trusted than others, not just because of the gold badge clipped to his belt, but also because everybody knew he had saved a lot of lives here in Chapel Grove during the town’s first attack of the undead.

  He pivoted and walked down a short hallway, then sat on a gray steel chair in front of a window of thick shatterproof glass with a little black speaker mounted chin high. Jodie would talk to him from the other side, if she felt like doing so. They would not be able to touch. He wished that someday she might want to press the palm of her hand against his, separated only by the one-inch thickness of the glass, as some patients or even prison inmates would do.

  He waited only a few minutes before Jodie was escorted by an armed guard in a tan uniform to her seat on the opposite side of the glass barrier. She was wearing a faded gray sweatshirt and baggy maroon workout pants. Her wrists were handcuffed and her ankles were shackled, the chain between the shackles just long enough to allow her to walk rather than hobble.

  After she sat, the guard stood back, careful not to get close enough for her to lunge and bite or try to loop the short, thick handcuff chain around his neck. Watching her warily from behind, he gave Bill a thumbs-up to assure him that she had been fed her meds: a powerful tranquilizer, plus a dose of the life-giving fluid that she so unnaturally craved.

  Bill had to struggle to hold back tears every time he saw her like this. His wife never came to visit, because she could not bear it. Yet she still cared deeply about Jodie, every bit as much as he did. He hated to be here but he came once a week, not just because of his sense of duty but because his love for her persisted in spite of what she had become.

  He used to wonder how some parents could love their homicidal sons and daughters and forgive them or refuse to believe in their guilt. But now he and Lauren were those parents. They had poured their hearts and souls into the raising of their daughter, and they had delighted in Jodie’s maturing toward womanhood after suffering life-threatening childhood allergies that had led to several brushes with death. She had appeared to be doing well for a while, and they had entertained hopes of becoming a happy little family. That was before an enigmatic, insidious mutation of the plague had taken over Jodie’s body and soul.

  “Hello, honey,” he managed to say, keeping his eyes focused on her face and her startlingly blue eyes, always so bright and innocent looking.

  From the other side of the glass, she smiled sweetly and said, “Hello, Daddy. Thank you for coming to see me.”

  Her pale golden hair and unblemished countenance seemed almost angelic, but he reminded himself that her innate beauty was as deceptive as her soft, beguiling voice. He knew she was probably playing him, on the vague chance that he might eventually be the tool that could persuade her doctors to release her into his custody.

  He said, “I brought you a necklace. For your birthday. They’ll give it to you later.”

  “Fuck you and your necklace,” she whispered, still smiling as sweetly as before, even as she had allowed her horribly nasty side to come out. She licked her pink tongue over her lips, and he knew how satisfied she was that she had hurt him deeply with mere words.

  He swallowed hard
, unable to speak because he did not want to say anything that might further damage any vestige of her remaining humanity. He was not a believer in prayer, so he could not pray; all he could do was wish that somehow, someday, the plague and its insidious new manifestation inside his daughter might be fully understood and cured. Whatever had made Jodie this way, he desperately hoped that science, not religion, could eventually exorcise it. But much of the time his faith in the scientific effort being put forth here at the institute wavered and seemed almost futile, and he tortured himself with angst-filled visions of what might have been, in his life and the lives of his wife and daughter, were it not for the evil that, unknown to him, was already festering eighteen years ago while Jodie was still innocently growing inside Lauren’s womb.

  CHAPTER 1

  Eighteen Years Earlier

  For Bill and Lauren Curtis, as for many others in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the joy of budding parenthood was tempered by their dread of the plague. Again and again, it had struck in dozens of communities all across the United States, turning decent people into mindless cravers of live human flesh. There were no vaccines, no cures. No one knew where it would strike next. It would flare up and be put down with guns, bombs and torches, then lie dormant till it struck somewhere else, with random, maddening frequency. Bill was a dedicated police officer, sworn to protect his friends and neighbors. But he knew that they might suddenly turn on him. Or he on them.

  Lauren had tried to talk him into moving to Pittsburgh, forty miles away. But they both knew that the big cities were no safer than the small towns. So they stayed in Chapel Grove, Pennsylvania, where they had both grown up. The birth rate had shot up in recent years, as will happen when people are so scared that they will grasp at any affirmation of life.

  Bill glanced lovingly at Lauren. She was washing breakfast dishes, and her swollen womb made her stand a foot back from the sink. She was into her seventh month now, and wanted badly to have a baby, even though she was scared to bring it into a plague-ridden world. Her first two pregnancies had ended in miscarriages. This time, she almost didn’t dare to be hopeful. Her ultrasound test had revealed that she was going to have a baby girl. She wanted desperately to make it through a full nine months. She was afraid to jinx herself by decorating the spare room before the infant was born healthy and coming home.

  Bill was proud of her for sticking to a healthful diet throughout her pregnancy. A petite ash blonde, she not only ate the right foods but also performed daily exercises recommended by her obstetrician. A passion for fitness was one of the things she and Bill had in common. She did her routine in the spare room, which, if all went well, would soon be transformed into a nursery, and he did his at the police gym where he could use state-of-the-art machines. At six-one and one-eighty, he was lanky but athletic looking, with light brown hair, a craggy face, alert brown eyes, and a dimpled chin. When he and Lauren were dressed for a night out, people often beamed at them and said they were a handsome couple.

  Bill knew life hadn’t been easy on his wife while he was in the army. He had survived two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and she had lived in fear of getting a dreaded MIA or KIA letter from the Defense Department. He still carried a small piece of shrapnel in his right thigh from an IED explosion, too close to the femoral artery to be removed by a scalpel. After he was wounded, he was offered an opportunity to become a training officer, but instead he came back home and enrolled in the police academy. In five years on the job, he had done well to rise from patrolman to lieutenant, yet Lauren kept wishing he’d quit and do something else.

  As he was wolfing down his eggs and toast, in a hurry to get to the police station in time, his cell phone rang and it was his boss, Captain Pete Danko. “Don’t sign in. Meet me at the Chapel Grove Medical Research Institute.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Some hypodermic needles have been stolen.”

  “Is that a big deal?” Bill asked.

  “Don’t ask questions, just get there.”

  Annoyed at not being filled in more, Bill grimaced as he plunked his cell phone on the kitchen table, and Lauren shot him a worried look. “Not a murder or a bad accident,” he told her consolingly. “Only a petty theft. I’ve got to meet up with Pete.”

  “That man pushes you around too much,” she said. “I wish you could find another job.”

  “Well, I don’t like working with him, but if something bad happens, I want to be where I’m needed.”

  “That’s what scares me, Bill. You’d risk your life for other people, and I don’t want to be a widow or a single mother.”

  “This town is safer than most towns,” he said, and swallowed the dregs of his coffee, which had gone cold.

  She sighed and said, “Text me later so I’ll know you’re okay.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

  He kissed her good-bye, then headed for the institute on a two-lane blacktop shimmering in the morning sun. The woods and green fields all around looked so peaceful and pleasant in the orange light of dawn, it was hard to believe that the plague was a constant threat. In the face of it, people still had to go on with their daily lives. In about an hour, Lauren would head for the Quik-Mart on the other side of town, where she worked for her father, along with Pete Danko’s wife, Wanda. The extra money helped Bill and Lauren pay bills and set aside money for a bigger and nicer house for the baby to grow up in, and Wanda’s extra money helped the Dankos pay for their son’s college tuition. It was a terrible thing in Bill’s eyes that the normal goals and aspirations of ordinary families were now tinged with dread.

  He arrived at the Medical Research Institute just as Pete did, and they slid into side-by-side parking slots. He got out of his three-year-old Malibu and Pete got out of his shiny new Mercedes. Pete was fifteen years Bill’s senior, and in the army had been a major while Bill had been a sergeant; now he was the police captain, and Bill was his lieutenant. Pete had never shed his military bearing. His buzz cut was shaved to the bone around his ears, and his black suit, black shoes, and solid black tie might as well have been a uniform. He shot Bill a disparaging look for coming here in denim jeans, tan blazer, and open-necked yellow shirt, none of it against regulations, but not the way Pete thought his “inferior officer” should dress. As they walked toward the glass double doors of the gray concrete institutional building, he said sternly, “I’ll do the talking. I know the director.”

  They signed in and were directed to Dr. Marissa Traeger’s office by an armed security guard. She sat behind a gray steel desk, and they took seats on steel folding chairs facing her. She had a rectangular face, a prominent nose, and brownish-gray shoulder-length hair. When she laid her wire-rimmed eyeglasses on her desk blotter, Bill saw that her brow was furrowed and there were dark, puffy bags under her eyes. She said, “Gentlemen, I’ll come straight to the point. We’re facing a bad situation. A dozen hypodermic needles were stolen from us, and I have good reason to believe they’re contaminated with the pathogen that causes the plague.”

  “How sure are you of that?” Bill asked.

  “Let me do the talking,” Pete said.

  Dr. Traeger blinked at the severity of Pete’s demeanor, but went on to answer Bill’s question. “The needles were sent to us by a rural police department in West Virginia, after they were discovered on a dusty evidence shelf. They were collected during an outbreak ten years ago, so we knew they couldn’t teach us anything we didn’t already know. I consigned them to a hazmat disposal facility, but this morning I was told they never arrived. I confronted the orderly who made the run and made him think he wouldn’t be prosecuted if he told me the truth. He broke down and admitted that he had dashed into a convenience store for cigarettes and left the Jeep unlocked for five minutes, and when he came back out the hazmat container was gone. If the needles are shared by drug addicts, we could be facing an epidemic.”

  “Why would you have thought this orderly was trustworthy?” Pete asked accusin
gly.

  “He qualified for a secret clearance. And he’s been here three years and never failed any of his urine tests.”

  Pete said, “Rounding up addicts and quarantining them, or even just rousting them without a warrant, would be against the law and might cause people to panic.”

  “I realize that,” Dr. Traeger agreed. “I’m hoping you can recover the needles if you act quickly.”

  “Was your man parked in a high-crime area?” Pete asked her.

  “He swears he parked on a nice side street downtown,” she said. “But that’s no excuse to leave the vehicle unattended, especially without locking it up.”

  “Where is he right now?”

  “I made him wait in the basement, figuring you’d want to interrogate him. For God’s sake, track down the missing needles and get them back, and don’t let this incident leak out.”

  Bill shuddered inwardly, trying to take in what he had been hit with. He had left home on a bright and peaceful June morning, as near to “normal” as one could get these days. Now it was a day imbued with a weary malignant dread. He had reassured Lauren that he was only going to investigate a petty robbery. But instead it had turned into something that could wreak utter devastation if he and Pete couldn’t stop it in time.

  Pete turned to him and gave him orders. “Head for police headquarters, and I’ll meet you there in a while. Sign out a squad car for us to use. If I can get something useful out of the orderly, I’ll fill you in when we meet up.”

  Bill thought he should have been allowed to be present while the orderly was being questioned. Maybe Pete didn’t want any witnesses. He had been an interrogation officer in Iraq when harsh, illegal things were done to prisoners, and he sometimes boasted of his successes, with sly hints that he had used his own “unique talents.” Whether or not Pete had actually engaged in any illegal practices, Bill really didn’t know. But he resented being treated more as an underling than a colleague. And he felt that he was capable of handling cases of much greater importance than the petty burglaries, car thefts, and domestic assaults that usually went down in Chapel Grove.