Epidemic of the Living Dead

by John Russo

“Go away, Ferdy . . . let me die . . . gonna croak anyway. I loaded myself with crank . . . figgered I’d use the gun . . . to make sure.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Fish. Me and Sissy Space-Out are gonna help you. Call the emergency room, Sissy.”

  But her attention was suddenly elsewhere. “Oh my God!” she blurted. “Look at all this friggin’ money!” She was standing by the kitchen table, which was piled with bundled-up bills and oodles of white dope in plastic bags.

  Fishhead mumbled, “Money don’t mean nothin’ no more. We’re all gonna turn into zombies.”

  Ferdy said, “I’ll take the money and stuff and hide it, Fishhead. I’ll only give the band their share.”

  With greater energy than before, Fishhead said, “You gotta kill ’em. They’re all gonna turn into zombies.”

  “What the hell you talkin’ about, Fish? You’re delirious. We’re gonna call the hospital and cut out.” He reached in his pocket for his cell phone.

  “No! Don’t call nobody!” Fishhead pleaded. “Just shoot me in the head.”

  “You’re talkin’ crazy, Fish! Here . . . let me help you sit up. We gotta get you walkin’. Put you in the bathtub and run cold water over you. Sissy, go get bags of ice.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Sissy babbled. “Did he OD?”

  “I don’t know. Call the freakin’ hospital, Sissy!”

  Fishhead yelled, “No! You gotta listen to me, Ferdy! The needles—they’re contaminated! And we’re infected!”

  “Who’s infected? Not me!”

  “Not you—’cause you wasn’t there when we used the infected needles. You and Sissy are safe. She ain’t been usin’ ’cause she’s pregnant.”

  “Well then, who the fuck’re you talkin’ about, Fish?”

  “Me and the band! All of us except you and Sissy! The zombie plague’s gonna start all over again, and it’ll be our fault!”

  Fishhead started to go into convulsions, clutching his heart and letting out a tremendous groan. Ferdy said, “Omigod!” Sissy watched, scared and repulsed, as Fishhead’s convulsions and screams built to a furious crescendo and he started struggling to get to his feet. Then, with a violent shudder, he collapsed and died, staring wide-eyed up at the ceiling, his heavy body now perfectly still.

  Sissy backed away. She ranted in terror, “We’re gonna die! We’re gonna die! We’re gonna die!”

  Ferdy hugged her and petted her, her bulging womb pressed against his stomach. “Calm down, Sissy. My head’s all screwed up. I need time to think. Fish said you and me are safe from whatever killed him. Good thing we didn’t use them damn needles.”

  Fishhead’s eyes started to blink. Then his left arm twitched.

  Ferdy pulled away from Sissy, his eyes wide, his face contorted in fear. She shrank back as he dropped Fishhead’s gun on the kitchen table and stared at the bags of dope and stacks of money. “Get some plastic grocery bags from under the sink,” he told Sissy. “I ain’t leavin’ any stuff for the cops to find.”

  “Cops?” she said. “We’re not gonna call them, are we?”

  “Somebody else will. Prob’ly in a couple days when Fishhead’s body starts to smell.”

  “He stinks already,” Sissy said.

  Meantime Fishhead was twitching even more. Then he sat up and started struggling to his feet. Sissy was too stunned to move. Fishhead lunged at Ferdy, spun him around, and tried to bite into his face. Ferdy squirmed, then kicked Fishhead in the groin. Sissy screamed, frozen in her tracks. Ferdy clawed for the gun he had laid on the table. Fishhead snagged him by his belt, then bit into his arm. Ferdy managed to grab the gun, whirled, and fired. The bullet hit Fishhead in the shoulder, and he reeled back—but immediately came at Ferdy again.

  Bleeding from the bite in his arm, Ferdy stepped back and fired the gun again, blowing Fishhead’s brains against the kitchen wall. Fishhead crashed to the floor, undead no longer.

  Ferdy fell back against the table, holding the smoking gun and staring at his bleeding arm.

  True enough, he hadn’t used the infected needles—Sissy was pretty sure of that. But now he was bitten! “Ferdy, what’re we gonna do?” she wailed. “Don’t try to move. I’ll try to find you a Band-Aid.”

  In utter despair over what he was going to turn into, he said, “A Band-Aid ain’t gonna fuckin’ help.”

  CHAPTER 5

  At the police station, Pete Danko got in the squad car that Bill Curtis had checked out and said with a thin smirk, “I didn’t let Traeger’s young flunky off the hook till he admitted he sold the needles to a dope dealer, street name Fishhead, real name Logan Cronan. I got Cronan’s address out of him, but I also ran it by the DMV. Ran his sheet, too—breaking and entering, possession with intent, assaults, usually on women, and violations of restraining orders. He’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, just a nasty small-time punk. We’ve got to get our mitts on him. Don’t turn on your siren or he might skip.”

  “I never intended to,” Bill said.

  “You trying to be snotty?” Danko said.

  Changing the subject, Bill said, “I wish we could alert the public to what’s going on.”

  “No way!” Pete snapped.

  “Everybody’s in danger and they don’t know it,” Bill persisted. “Even our own wives. The Quik-Mart is on its lonesome out on the highway.”

  “Don’t you dare phone over there,” Pete said. “Its isolation should comfort you. The odds are way against any contact with an infected addict from town.”

  “We don’t have to spell it out for them,” Bill said. “Can’t we just tell them something’s in the works and they should be especially watchful?”

  “No, we can’t play favorites. If this shit blows up on us, we’ll have hell to pay if it’s found out we warned people close to us but not the general public.”

  “Maybe the general public is who should be warned.”

  “Can it, I told you! We’re not gonna cause a panic and regret it later.”

  Bill dropped the subject, but remained disgruntled. After a while he asked, “Do you think Traeger’s errand boy was being straight?”

  “Oh, yes,” Pete said. “He was very cooperative. You just have to know how to talk to these wimps. He was scared of me at first, but I schmoozed him and he opened up.”

  “What’s his punishment going to be?”

  “Dr. Traeger will suspend him without pay till we see how this whole deal shakes out. If we can put a lid on it, no harm, no foul. The young man didn’t intentionally do anything wrong, he just made a bad judgment call.”

  Logan Cronan, aka Fishhead, lived in the most run-down part of town, Bill knew, just from the address Pete gave him. He had made lots of busts around here. He parked the squad car without turning on any flashing lights. He and Pete looked around, then climbed rusty black stairs that led up to a narrow landing and a wooden door with faded and peeling paint. The jamb was splintered and the door came open when he shoved at it.

  “Shit!” Pete swore as he and Bill barged in.

  Bill didn’t see what Pete was swearing about at first because he wasn’t looking downward. He almost tripped over a pair of shoes, then saw that the shoes were worn by a big fat dead body with a hairy belly.

  “Fishhead, I presume,” Pete quipped as Bill caught hold of the kitchen sink to stop himself from sliding into a puddle of blood.

  They both drew their Glocks, figuring that whoever shot Fishhead could still be inside the apartment. Covering each other, moving quickly but on high alert, they looked under the smelly unmade bed and in each of the two dank closets in the bedroom and whipped open the grimy shower curtain in the bathroom. It didn’t take long to clear the place. It was devoid of human occupancy except for the drug dealer’s dead body. The corpse had a bullet hole in its temple and a weird spiderweb pattern emanating from an injection site in its left arm, which still had a necktie around it.

  Pete pronounced, “All clear.”

  Then they heard a squeaky sound from some
where, and it took Bill a breath or two to figure it out. He opened the door of the cabinet under the sink, and found a skinny little guy with a runny nose hiding there. Bill flashed on a true-crime book he had read in the army that said Charlie Manson was hiding that same way, under a sink, when he was finally captured. You wouldn’t think any grown man could fit, yet there this other guy was, his body scrunched around the drain pipes. He was emaciated enough to pull it off, probably from trying to live on nothing but crack and meth, and that’s why his nose was leaking and gave him away.

  Bill hauled him out of his hidey-hole, handcuffed him, and slammed him down onto a ratty kitchen chair with a cracked vinyl seat. He blanched as he looked down at Mr. Logan Cronan, aka Fishhead, lying on the smeary, dirt-caked linoleum floor with a bullet hole in his head.

  “I didn’t kill him,” the captive junky whined. “But I know who did. I figured I could come here and swipe his stash, but it’s already cleaned out.”

  “Tell us what you know, and make it snappy,” Pete said. “We’ll see if we believe you.”

  “I didn’t do it!” the junkie said.

  “You got ID on you?”

  “In my back pocket. The left one.”

  “Get it, Bill,” Pete said.

  Bill didn’t want to do the distasteful task. The junkie smelled to high heaven. Grungy body odor, grime, and sweat. Bill held his breath and fished out a flimsy, half-rotted billfold that contained the junkie’s driver’s license. In the photo ID, he looked cleaner, less wild-eyed, and less scrawny, so it was likely taken before his addictions took total control of his life. The scruffy mustache and goatee weren’t as wild as his beard was now. His name was Jack Shaheen, brown hair and brown eyes, age twenty-nine, five-ten and one thirty-seven, home address Scranton, PA.

  Pete’s eyes scanned the license, and then he said, “Start talking, Jack. Don’t leave anything out. Make us believe you.”

  “You know who the Hateful Dead is?” Shaheen asked.

  “The Grateful Dead?” Pete said.

  “No, he means the Hateful Dead,” Bill interjected. “A fucked-up heavy metal band. I went to high school with the lead guitarist, Ron Haley. He’s trying to clean himself up.”

  “I’m one of their roadies,” Shaheen bragged. He grinned smugly, then said, “See that cooler under the table?”

  Bill glanced down and saw a red and white Coleman cooler like the ones used to transport organs for transplants. It was labeled Medical Waste—Hazardous Material. He dragged the cooler out, held his breath in expectation, and opened it. But it was empty. He exhaled and so did Pete, exhalations of grim disappointment.

  “That’s where the needles were,” Shaheen said. “But somebody got to them before I did. Got everything else, too. Unless Nerdy Ferdy done it hisself. But he’s not about to piss off the band. He’d suck their dicks if they asked him. One of the Hateful Dead band members, Hal Rotini, sent Nerdy Ferdy and Sissy Space-Out to make a score from Fishhead. We was all waitin’ for what they’d bring back. While they was gone, some of the guys was shootin’ up with the stuff left over from their last buy and usin’ some of the needles that Fishhead laid on ’em for a sweetener.”

  Bill was hit hard by the revelation that the band was already shooting up with the infected needles. He stared at Pete, who was also stunned to silence.

  “I sneaked outta there,” the junkie went on. “But like I said, some lucky stiff got here before me and done me outta a big score.”

  Pete shouted, “Where the fuck are they—these Hateful Dead motherfuckers?”

  In a whining tone, Shaheen said, “The Rock ’n’ Shock out on Lovedale Road. They’re givin’ a free afternoon concert to kick off their new CD tour. Lotsa fans was already linin’ up, smokin’ dope, boozin’ and raisin’ hell, when I split the fuck outta there.”

  “You’re coming with us,” Pete said. “We don’t have time right now to take you down to the station and book you.”

  “Book me for what!?” Shaheen cried.

  “Breaking and entering, attempted burglary and Murder One.”

  “But I didn’t kill the fat fuck!”

  “We don’t know that,” said Pete. “All we have is your word, Jackie boy, and your word’s not worth a damn to us.”

  Bill dragged the snot-dripping handcuffed junkie out the door and put him in the back seat of the squad car. Pete carried the hazmat container down to the street and locked it in the trunk. Bill figured he didn’t want it to be found by anybody else because it could be tracked back to the Chapel Grove Medical Research Institute. He squealed tires pulling out, and Pete told him to hotfoot it but don’t turn on the flashers or the siren.

  Bill asked Pete, “Do you want me to tell the desk sergeant that Fishhead’s place needs to be secured as a crime scene?”

  “No,” Pete said. “Hold back on that till we see how everything’s going to shake down.”

  But Bill couldn’t see how they were going to be able to proceed for long on the hush-hush. Just about anybody who came around might see that Fishhead’s apartment door was busted, then creep in and find his dead body. Maybe that’s what Pete wanted to happen. If somebody else reported it, he and Pete might never have any explaining to do.

  But Bill was even more worried about his wife and the baby she was carrying, now that he knew for sure that the needles had fallen into the hands of a dead drug dealer. It was almost for sure now that people were going to shoot up with them. And he and Pete might not be able to prevent an outbreak of the plague.

  CHAPTER 6

  Dr. Traeger paced in her office, worried that Pete Danko, ruthless as he was, wouldn’t be able to stop the worst from happening. He knew about the black spiderweb patterns, and that would help him find and single out anyone who had already been infected. He would promptly dispatch them, even if he had to do so over and above the objections of his lieutenant. And if he must, he would kill Bill Curtis, staging it as a friendly-fire accident or else claiming that Bill had been bitten and needed to be shot.

  In her tenure as research director here at the institute, Dr. Traeger had discovered some critical factors about the way the infection behaved, whether caused by direct injection into the bloodstream or by a bite. It could take people from a few minutes to several hours to become ill, then die and “come back.” The period of incubation depended upon their metabolism and the status of their immune systems. Furthermore, those who got the disease by injection developed the telltale spiderweb pattern, while those who were bitten did not.

  The fact that some people could hold the infection at bay for longer than others was a hopeful sign for Dr. Traeger. She thought that if this latent period could somehow be prolonged by means of some kind of medicine yet to be discovered, it might furnish the key to a cure. And if all citizens could be inoculated, even if they weren’t totally immune and still got the disease, it would provide enforcers like Pete Danko a longer grace period to ferret them out and kill them.

  She understood herself well enough to realize that her fervor to end the plague forever was fueled by an outbreak that had almost claimed her, forty-odd years ago when she was only five years old, hiding under the cellar stairs while her mom got torn apart. In utter fear, she had to stifle her cries and whimpers as flecks of blood and pieces of flesh struck her face. She was rescued and the ghouls got shot by police, but it was too late to save her mom, so the rescuers shot her in the head. After that, her father having been killed in an auto accident before she was born, she now was an orphan.

  Badly traumatized, she was placed in foster care and put through years of psychotherapy. In school, the other children chanted, “Ghoulie Girl, Ghoulie Girl! Gonna getcha, Ghoulie Girl!” She was virtually ostracized, a loner with few friends. But she was also unusually bright and ambitious, and she earned a raft of scholarships that carried her through high school, college, and medical school. Her record of depression, clinical anxiety, and panic attacks was expunged when she reached adulthood, otherwise she would have been inel
igible for the directorship of the Chapel Grove Medical Research Institute. Now in her mid-forties, she was driven by her mother’s terrible death to discover the mysterious causes of the epidemic of the living dead.

  She couldn’t push her worries about the stolen needles out of her mind. If they couldn’t be recovered, and if they caused an outbreak of the plague, her experiments would be shut down, and she’d be living in shame, even if she were allowed to live.

  So badly shaken that she could scarcely concentrate on her duties and responsibilities, she had to turn on the TV in her office and watch a newscast that was vitally important to her, should she somehow be able to avoid total disaster. An execution was going forward in Texas. Carl Landry, a convicted serial killer who had spent seventeen years on death row, was finally going to die by lethal injection. The governor had denied last-minute clemency. Crowds outside the penitentiary were carrying signs and chanting slogans. News coverage went on and on, till finally a female newscaster announced, “The infamous Carl Landry has been pronounced dead and a hearse bearing his remains has departed to an unknown destination.”

  Dr. Traeger knew what that destination actually was. And she knew that the serial killer was not really dead. Not yet.

  Up until five years ago, during open outbreaks of the plague, specimens of the undead were routinely collected “live”—and were subjected to tests that might lead to a cure. But five years ago, the ACLU and the right-to-lifers, who had long been banded together to get those kinds of experiments banned, succeeded in getting a law passed in Congress that gave them what they wanted. The Supreme Court upheld the law and its basic premise that plague victims were not criminals but were sufferers from a bizarre disease that was not yet fully understood, and as such they still retained their basic human rights under the Constitution. Therefore they could not be wantonly used as lab animals.

  As long as the Supreme Court continued to uphold this unfortunate law, Dr. Traeger feared she would be stymied. To her, the stupidity was on a par with the ban on stem cell research, which prevented research that could have cured many ordinary diseases less horrible than the plague but still needing to be eradicated.