Epidemic of the Living Dead

by John Russo

  CHAPTER 2

  Three months out of his third rehab, Ron Haley was back as lead guitarist for a mediocre heavy metal band called the Hateful Dead. They were onstage doing sound checks for a matinee performance at a defunct Catholic church that had been gutted and turned into a rock palace. Ron remembered when he used to come here as a child, while it was still a church. Now it was one of the “occasions of sin” that the church preached against.

  Even as he did his guitar licks, he knew he couldn’t remain drug-free if he didn’t quit the band. He wanted badly to scratch himself because he was wearing itchy, sticky ghoul makeup. Like other costumed bands such as KISS and GWAR, they had their own shtick, which was to impersonate flesh-eating zombies. They sported greenish-gray dead-looking skin and ghastly wounds molded in latex and streaked with gobs of artificial blood, and they screamed obscene lyrics at an ear-splitting volume, while four pierced and tattooed babes in string bikinis cavorted amid fake tombstones, grinning skulls, and severed body parts.

  Ron was wearing earplugs because his hearing was two-thirds gone and he didn’t want to lose the rest of it. He darted his eyes left and right, half-expecting Bill Curtis to stomp in with Pete Danko, Curtis’s boss, who always had a stick up his ass. Bill had cut Ron a break because they had been buddies in high school, but if Danko had handled the bust, no question “zero tolerance” would have been Ron’s fate. In the fifteen years since they graduated, Bill had built a straight life for himself while Ron had gone pretty far crooked, and Ron knew that Bill still might send him to the slammer if he didn’t stay clean. “Check into a treatment facility and keep me in the loop,” Bill had warned him. “You do the right thing, I’ll drop the charges against you to possession without intent to sell, and it won’t carry jail time.”

  When Ron got out of rehab a week and a half ago, he called Bill at the police station. “I’m finally getting my act together,” he promised. “I’m clean and I’m gonna stay that way.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Bill said sternly, “because next time I won’t bail you out.”

  Ron said, “I wasn’t always a degenerate musician, remember, Bill? I played in the band and you were on the football team, and I used to be in the Honor Society, same as you.”

  Ron ruefully recalled that before he got hooked up with the Hateful Dead, he had a strong social conscience and a belief that life was meaningful. He got a degree in music education and cherished a mild but attainable ambition to become a teacher and band director at Chapel Grove High School. He hoped to revive that dream by quitting the band after tonight’s gig and asking his girlfriend, Daisy, to marry him. She was one of the Hateful Dead dancing girls, and the only one who wasn’t a druggie. Ron hated to see her prancing around damn near naked just because the band and their fans demanded the titillation. He felt bad that he used to take her tip money from her for drugs. He had completed his third rehab, and he was three months clean, and he knew that the numeral “3” was a mystical number in the New Testament. He told himself that maybe hope, like death, came in threes. He wanted to live past thirty-three, his next birthday, the same age Jesus was when he died.

  Maybe if he married Daisy he’d go back to church, if he could somehow believe in it again. The Hateful Dead used to be his religion, but now, while he was clean, they seemed like a bunch of sick, toxic jerks. They couldn’t be much more brain-dead if they were embalmed. By acting like zombies, they were aping the plague, shaking their fists at it and pretending that life was meaningless. Death was taking over. The only creatures who would survive, for a while at least, were the undead. Ron wondered who the undead ones would devour when all the disease-free human beings were gone. What would the ghouls do when there was nothing more for them to eat?

  In the years prior to the plague outbreaks, Ron had worried much about issues like global warming, a concern that now seemed to take second or third place to the plague, even among environmental activists. This didn’t seem rational, but it showed how people could forsake the things they had formerly believed in once they were wallowing in fear. How would the plague matter so much if the earth were burnt to a crisp? Ron believed the scientists who warned that the temperature of the oceans was rapidly elevating to the point where they could no longer hold enough oxygen for fish to survive, and when oceanic life was eliminated from the food chain, human beings would die off too. But now we didn’t need global warming to destroy us. We were doing it to ourselves. The earth would become a dead planet all right, a planet of the undead. But only for a little while—till even the living dead would die of starvation without any live people to eat.

  CHAPTER 3

  As Dr. Traeger got on an elevator to descend to the basement of the Chapel Grove Medical Research Institute with Pete Danko, she was sure he would try to keep the lid on the situation, but if he sensed his own career in jeopardy he’d rather see her head roll than his own. He was a misogynist and a bully, in her eyes, but as necessary as a guard dog when it came to keeping the institute and its secrets safe and secure.

  Stepping off the elevator, he said, “When all this blows over, I’ll come back for another tour of the top floors. It’s my duty to stay up-to-date on everything that goes on up there.”

  He was referring to the laboratories where the undead were caged, treated, and studied. Experiments on them while they were still “living” had been illegal for the past five years, but the institute was still doing them, under the clandestine auspices of the Homeland Security Department.

  “Those needles getting loose could be our undoing,” Danko said. “If the shit hits the fan, I won’t be able to protect you from our superiors, much less the public, the right-to-lifers and the Congress. Since the fuck-up happened on your watch, you’ll have to take the fall.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” said Dr. Traeger. “That’s why I’m hoping to keep damage control local, at least for now, with your help. But what about Lieutenant Curtis? Can you control him?”

  “That’s why I’m keeping him close. If anything blows up in our face I can blame it on him. He knows that you do medical research here and your main mission is finding a cure for the plague, so he’ll be as zealous as I am about finding the missing needles. He has to do whatever I tell him, without question. Or else I can get rid of him—with extreme prejudice, as the old CIA used to say.”

  Dr. Traeger hated that she had to rely greatly upon Pete Danko’s ruthlessness. Privately she considered him a misogynist and a secret sociopath. He had been covertly inserted into his job as police chief, but in actuality he was an agent-in-place for HSD and was thus privy to what the Chapel Grove Medical Research Institute was all about. He knew enough to crucify her if push came to shove.

  “What’s our young culprit’s name?” he asked as they walked down a long concrete-block wall.

  “Jamie Dugan,” Dr. Traeger replied. “I feel sorry for him.”

  “Don’t,” Danko said. “He fucked up and now he’s going to pay for it.”

  “It’s still a pity,” said Dr. Traeger.

  “Don’t waste your pity on him,” said Danko. “We’re in a war against the plague, and if we weaken we’re doomed. So don’t go all weepy on me just because you’re a woman.”

  Dr. Traeger snapped, “Don’t give me your sexist crap. How many men could do the kinds of things I do here?”

  He didn’t answer her. Instead, he confronted a uniformed guard stationed by a steel door and gruffly asked, “Is our prisoner restrained?”

  “Not yet, sir,” the guard said as he unlocked the steel door and led them into a windowless, heavily padded, soundproofed room. “Hands behind your back,” he barked, and put handcuffs on young, bland-looking Jamie Dugan, who began shaking and perspiring even before the cuffs were clamped on his wrists. The guard pushed him down onto a steel chair that was bolted to the floor, then wrapped and locked a chain around his chest and shackled his ankles to two steel rings at the base of the chair.

  Dr. Traeger blanched and looked away as Jamie�
��s eyes darted nervously from Danko to her, silently pleading, making her feel deeply sad and guilty. He had worked at the institute for several years and she had always been cordial toward him, and now she wished she could show him mercy. But she knew she couldn’t show weakness in front of Danko.

  Danko turned to the guard and asked, “Do you smoke?”

  “Not in here,” the guard said. “Not allowed.”

  “Well, it’s allowed now because I said so. Light one up.”

  The guard pulled a filter tip from a half-flattened pack that was in his pants pocket, and lit it with a BIC plastic lighter.

  “Burn his left forearm,” Danko ordered.

  The guard did it, and Jamie sucked in his breath with a soft whimper that doubtless would have been a scream if he had not controlled himself. Dr. Traeger tried not to be squeamish, but she flinched when she smelled hair and flesh burning. She told herself that, as distasteful as this extreme measure was, it nevertheless had to be implemented because Pete Danko needed to find out if Jamie was hiding any additional information that might lead to the retrieval of the missing needles.

  “I already told you the truth!” Jamie yelled, tears flowing down his cheeks.

  Danko said, “Keep going with the cigarette burns.”

  Jamie’s screams got louder and more pitiful while multiple burns were administered one right after another on various parts of his body. Meanwhile Danko just stood there, looking on expectantly, as if his victim might blurt out something valuable due to the continuing torture, without even being asked any follow-up questions.

  It was a long and agonizing process for Dr. Traeger as well as for the prisoner. She had to watch blisters being raised all over Jamie’s arms, legs, and face, making him cry and scream worse than ever. Still, he didn’t give in, and she wished he would so the torture would end. She became convinced that Danko would learn nothing more of any value. She felt sorry for Jamie. She had always thought of him as a polite and pleasant young fellow. She was stunned when he finally started whining through his tears, confessing to much more than he had told before.

  “My wife was gonna divorce me because of my gambling. We were gonna have to file bankruptcy. I sold the needles and some of her jewelry to a street dealer they call Fishhead.”

  “Fishhead?” Danko scoffed. “Surely you can make up a better name than that, Jamie!”

  “It’s the God’s truth! Please let me go,” Jamie pleaded.

  “Burn his left nipple,” Danko told the guard.

  The blistering, burning flesh brought forth the loudest screams that Dr. Traeger had ever heard. She wanted to put her hands over her ears but she didn’t want to earn Danko’s scorn.

  “Do the right nipple,” he told the guard.

  “No . . . please!” Jamie cried out. “Logan Cronan! That’s his real name! I swear!”

  “Anything else you want to tell us?” Danko asked.

  “That’s all I know,” Jamie whimpered.

  “Burn the right one,” Danko said once again.

  The guard did it, and Dr. Traeger thought she would faint from the agony and sound of Jamie’s screams. But no further disclosures came out of the young man’s mouth.

  Danko drew his pistol and said, “Stand back.”

  Dr. Traeger was already backed against one of the padded walls, wishing she could melt into the padding. The guard stepped back as far as he could in the eight-by-ten-foot room. Then Danko shot Jamie in the head, the report only slightly deadened by the soundproofing.

  The young man sagged in his shackles, blood pouring down his cheeks and neck.

  Dr. Traeger was appalled. She absolutely couldn’t take it anymore. “Do you really think all this was necessary?” she blurted in a hoarse gasp.

  “I had to be sure he was being truthful,” Danko said nonchalantly. “Get rid of him. Feed him to some of your special patients. They need to eat, don’t they? He’s perfect for their carnivorous diet.”

  “His wife will report him missing. I’ll be one of the first people she tries to call, even before she calls the police.”

  “Stonewall her. I’ll do the same. That’s why I’m the police chief.”

  Although they were both cogs in the big wheel of the Homeland Security Department and the United States government, Dr. Traeger considered herself to be more highly principled than Pete Danko. He seemed to enjoy killing and creating carnage. Nothing else could explain why he hadn’t ordered the guard to strangle Jamie, instead of making such a horrible mess. He had probably gotten addicted to gory messes when he was in the Middle East war zones. He acted as though his ability to torture and kill unflinchingly made him a superior being. Dr. Traeger had little doubt that in the army he must have tortured many of his captives and had probably shot some of them dead. She believed that he liked that sort of thing even more when she was obliged to witness it, so he could watch her fidget and flinch and work hard to hold back her tears.

  She was deeply disturbed by what she had just witnessed, but she knew she had to push it out of her mind. Her experiments at the institute must continue. The fate of the human race depended upon it. Devastating outbreaks of the plague were still happening. Religious people thought it was punishment from God, Christ, Allah, or Buddha, while moderates and atheists believed that it was an unfathomably incurable disease that might eventually be cured with a vaccination of some type, as with smallpox or polio. As a dedicated scientist in the vanguard of the intense effort against the plague, Dr. Traeger was heartened by the fact that AIDS had once seemed just as unfathomable, just as impossible to defeat, yet it had yielded to dedicated people of her calling.

  Unfortunately, the true nature of her experiments had to be concealed, and she had to depend on Pete Danko in the event of any threatening occurrence. She relied on him like an abused woman relies on a husband who beats her, at bottom knowing that his very cruelty is what makes him an efficient protector. She wished that her work was done, so she could free herself from him, but for now there was no choice. If she asked her superiors to replace him and he found out about it, he’d turn on her like a snake. In his effort to take her down, he might even destroy all that she had accomplished.

  Her mission was to find a cure for the plague, and she had to be relentless about it. But her methods would be considered crimes if they were made public. She considered herself an unsung hero. She knew she was never going to be as famous as Louis Pasteur, who discover the cure for smallpox, or Jonas Salk, who invented the vaccine that cured polio, because she could never openly reap any accolades. She was tormented by her knowledge that the most devastating disease known to man might be conquered by a woman, not a man, and the world would never know.

  CHAPTER 4

  Sissy Space-Out followed Nerdy Ferdy as he climbed rusty fire-escape stairs on the outside of a building with cracked stucco. She reached the landing as Ferdy knocked on the flimsy warped door of a second-story apartment above a dollar store. Sissy, nine months pregnant, stood there breathing hard and bouncing from one foot to another, her arms folded over a bulging belly encased in green spandex. She didn’t want to make the dope run. After all, she hadn’t used any since she became pregnant to Hal Rotini, one of the Hateful Dead band members. She hoped that if she helped make the score, Hal might treat her nicer, might even consider marrying her and accepting fatherhood—a vague, hopeful wish that she knew was probably doomed to failure.

  Ferdy yelled, “Open up! You in there, Fishhead?”

  Sissy said, “He could be lyin’ in there OD’d.”

  She heard a groan. Then more groans.

  Ferdy pounded on the door again.

  Another groan came from inside, scaring Sissy badly.

  Ferdy yelled at the door, “Fishhead? It’s Ferdy and Sissy, man! Let us in! You all right, dude?”

  Sissy said, “I don’t wanna find him dead and have to deal with the cops. Why can’t we just cut out?”

  “Because Hal would be pissed. Come on, Fishhead, open the damned door!” />
  Sissy murmured, “You guys call me Sissy Space-Out. You think I’m dumb.”

  “We don’t think you’re dumb, we think you’re spaced out, and you are. So shut up. I’m bustin’ in.”

  “You ain’t no muscle man, Ferdy. You’ll bust your shoulder.”

  He rammed his thin upper body into the door, then doubled over, holding his shoulder and moaning, “Ow . . . ow . . . ow!”

  Angry now, he reared back and kicked at the door with his engineer boots. It took him three or four kicks, but finally the door gave way, banging against the interior wall, and he hung onto the jamb to stop himself from falling.

  Sissy could see past him now, and her mouth gaped open when she saw Fishhead sprawled flat on his back, glassy-eyed, on the floor. He had a necktie cinched around his left arm, and a needle was lying on the floor. The apartment would have been dark except for three lit candles on the kitchen table. Ferdy and Sissy had to step over an overturned garbage can as they squeezed in. She put her hand over her nose. “Peeyew! It stinks in here! He stinks! Is that why they call him Fishhead?”

  Ferdy didn’t answer her. He jumped back because Fishhead had a gun and was trying feebly to raise it to his own head. But Ferdy snatched it away.

  Weakly, Fishhead mumbled, “Gimme . . . back . . . my gun.”

  Fishhead’s chubby face was ghostly white and flecks of foamy saliva were on his lips. But the thing that shocked Sissy the most was a spidery pattern of thin black veins that radiated from the fresh needle mark on his left arm. She said, “Eeeuw! What is that ugly black webby thing?”

  “God . . . I don’t know,” said Ferdy. “What—what’s wrong with you, Fishhead?”