Epidemic of the Living Dead

by John Russo

  By this time, about a dozen of the misbegotten creatures were mindlessly feasting on victims crawling on the gravel, writhing and screaming even as they were being devoured. Bill tried to spot anybody who had not been bitten yet and possibly could be saved. One young lady scrambled underneath a parked car, but three zombies were clawing at her, trying to grab hold of her and pull her out from under. Bill ran up and shot all three, then helped the girl to her feet. The car was unlocked and he pushed her in and locked it. He didn’t know why she hadn’t done that herself. Maybe it wasn’t her own car, or maybe she thought she’d be safer beneath it, since it had been known ever since the very first outbreak of the plague that the undead were capable of smashing their way through car windows.

  Bill and Pete worked together to kill the feasting zombies that remained in the lot. They also took care of ghoul-bitten people who would have turned into zombies had they not been dispatched with bullets to their brains.

  The two cops were nearly out of ammunition when at last their backup showed up. A SWAT team vehicle and three squad cars churned up gravel, and reinforcements leaped out. “We killed all we could!” Pete yelled. “But a lot of them got away! You’ll need to fan out and go after them!”

  “Anybody inside this joint?” the SWAT captain asked.

  “Don’t have any way of knowing,” said Pete.

  “We’ll have a look,” said the captain. “We’ll send search-and-destroy teams up and down the highway as well, and we’ll have choppers in the air, reconnoitering in a mile-wide sweep of the countryside.”

  Unbeknownst to the police, Ron Haley and his girlfriend, Daisy, had been fighting for their lives inside the Rock ’n’ Shock. Ron had been plunking coins into a soft-drink machine and punching buttons to get soft drinks for him and Daisy when they had heard what sounded like muffled gunshots—from down in the basement. There was always crazy shit going on around the Hateful Dead, so Ron shrugged, screwed a cap off a Coke, and handed it to Daisy.

  Then they had heard another shot. So they started toward the basement.

  Sissy Space-Out came running up the stairs screaming and brandishing a gun.

  “What the hell!” Ron cried. “Who did you shoot?” It went through his head that maybe Sissy had killed Hal Rotini for not wanting to marry her or at least accept paternity.

  “They’re turning into zombies!” Sissy screamed.

  Just then Road Kill came after her, up from the basement, baring his big yellow half-broken teeth.

  Right behind him were the other newly created “drug zombies”—Becky, Rhoda, Clay, Banger Bidwell, and Hal Rotini.

  Sissy wheeled around with the gun and blasted Road Kill in the shoulder. But he kept on coming till she shot him in the head. He went down, and Hal stumbled over him and fell.

  Banger shuffled past them in the narrow hallway and reached for Sissy, and then she squeezed the trigger of the revolver—and got only a click!

  She threw the gun at Banger and it struck him in the chest and bounced off. She turned and ran—and so did Ron and Daisy. With five zombies shambling after them, they scrammed down the hall, then split in opposite directions. Sissy locked herself in the ladies’ room. Ron and Daisy burst into the lounge that adjoined the stage. That’s when zombified Hal Rotini and zombified Becky, Rhoda, and Clay kept on going, out into the parking lot, and began to wreak havoc on the Hateful Dead fans.

  For a moment, Ron Haley thought he and Daisy might be safe in the lounge if he could barricade the place. “Hide behind the bar!” Ron shouted at her, then wheeled around and went to close the doors—but zombified Banger barged right in on him.

  Ron stepped backward and tripped over a mop bucket. In the nick of time, he picked up the bucket, swung it as hard as he could, and knocked Banger to the parquet floor. But Banger grabbed his ankle and pulled him down too. With Banger almost on top of him and trying to bite his face, he rolled up against a buffer machine. He felt the cord under him, the part of it that was snaking across the floor. He clawed at the cord till he managed to seize a section of it and wrap it around Banger’s neck. He didn’t know if a zombie could be strangled, but he desperately tried, pulling the cord as tight as he could. Banger, in his slow, dumb, zombified way, tried to claw the cord loose. Gnashing his teeth, he tried to bite Ron’s face—and came really close.

  Ron shoved and rolled out from under Banger and scrambled to his feet.

  He glanced back to make sure Daisy was still hiding behind the bar. He didn’t see her, so he thought that she probably was.

  Banger Bidwell pulled himself up by grabbing on to the buffing machine—and when he did, his fingers inadvertently brushed the switch and turned it on. The buffer pulled Banger off his feet with a thud and started running wild, whirling in wild circles, dragging Banger by the part of the cord that was still wrapped around his neck.

  Finally the buffer bounced through a tight spot between a concrete planter and a cigarette machine, taking Banger along with it and slamming Banger’s head into the planter with a loud jolt, cracking his skull open and spilling a part of his brain.

  Sickened, Ron gagged and backed away. He ran behind the bar and hugged Daisy and tried to think how he could make both of them safer.

  By this time, out in the parking lot Bill Curtis and Pete Danko had fought their own battle with the ghouls, and the SWAT team had arrived and was implementing cleanup. That’s when three people slinked out of the distant and dark doorway of the Rock ’n’ Shock and exposed themselves in the bright sunlight. They all had their hands up—two women and one man—and the man cried out, “Don’t shoot!”

  “Have you been bitten?” Pete demanded.

  “No, none of us!” the man yelled.

  “They don’t look too dangerous,” Bill said.

  “Please . . . don’t shoot. I’m p-pregnant,” one of the women stammered.

  She was wearing spandex and jeans, while the other one wore only a bikini.

  “Come on over here!” Pete called out. “Don’t try anything funny.”

  As they took a few steps with their hands over their heads, Bill became pretty sure they must be unscathed and harmless. But he realized, from newsroom footage, that with the recently dead it might be hard to tell. After they were undead for a long enough time, they were often bloody and rotted, hideously transformed and easily recognized as transformed creatures who needed to be feared—or shot and then burned.

  As the three of them came closer, Bill recognized one of them as Ron Haley, his former classmate who had become a druggie. Ron smiled sheepishly and said, “I been keepin’ myself straight, Bill. If I wasn’t I’d have turned into one of them things.”

  “You know this guy?” Pete said accusingly.

  “From high school.”

  “Man, you keep some weird company! You sure you belong on my police force?”

  Right then, as the young pregnant woman tried to sidestep past a “dead” zombie lying on the ground, he rolled over and grabbed her by her leg.

  “Hal! No!” she cried.

  But he pulled her down onto the gravel and took a bite out of her calf. Blood dripped from his lips as he chewed on a ragged piece of the girl’s skin. Bill shot him in his head. “Are you Sissy?” he shouted.

  She got to her feet, bleeding profusely from her right calf, and tearfully told him that he had just killed the father of her child.

  “I had to do it,” Bill said.

  The SWAT captain came up to Pete. “You wanna be the one to shoot her, or should I do it myself?”

  Pete said, “No, I’ll do it. I’ll wait till she turns.”

  Sissy screamed, “Please don’t shoot me! I’m going into labor!”

  Bill said, “We should try to let her deliver.”

  Pete stared at him and said, “You’ve lost your fuckin’ mind.”

  “You fuckin’ crazy?” the SWAT captain said.

  Bill really didn’t want to shoot a pregnant girl or watch someone else do it, maybe because he and his wife w
ere trying so hard to have a child of their own. But he didn’t think Pete would have any qualms about it, so he tried to convince the SWAT captain. “Get her to a hospital,” he pleaded. “It’s the humane thing to do. Maybe we can salvage something positive from this tragedy. You can do what you have to do after she gives birth.”

  The SWAT captain seemed to be wavering, on the verge of agreeing. But Pete was implacable. He was raising his pistol toward Sissy’s head when he was interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone. He listened, then said, “My wife! Ghouls are breaking into the Quik-Mart!”

  Bill felt a rush of terror and foreboding. If Wanda was in extreme danger, so were his wife and his father-in-law.

  The SWAT captain yelled, “Go! I’ll get this pregnant one to the hospital!”

  A ghoul blocked Bill’s way, stepping out from behind an SUV parked next to the squad car. It was Jackie Shaheen, the drug addict. Bill realized he should have locked him in the car. Now Shaheen was bitten and transformed, but still wearing handcuffs, a sick leer on his twisted, ghoulish face.

  Pete shot Shaheen in the forehead, and Bill gasped as he yanked open the driver’s-side door to the squad car. They jumped in, peeled out fast, and raced to the Quik-Mart. Half a mile down the road they pulled up in front of it and Bill slammed on the brakes. The glass front of the place was smashed in and shadowy figures could be glimpsed moving around inside. The two cops ran up and shot two of them in the head and they went down hard, blocking the way so that Bill and Pete had to step on them to get past. In an aisle full of canned goods rolling around on the floor, two zombies were hunched over Lauren’s dad, tearing him to bloody pieces. Lauren came at them crying and screaming, beating them on their heads and shoulders with a broken broomstick.

  Wanda, Pete’s wife, was a few steps away, frozen in panic and dread—because the ghoul facing her was her own teenage son, Jerry! She was helplessly pleading with him as she backed away, but he kept coming at her, his arms reaching out as if he would hug her—but of course he wanted to bite into her cheek or neck. She backed away even more, and in that moment Bill shot the two ghouls who were devouring Lauren’s dad. She fell into his arms in a tight, tear-ridden embrace, and as her pregnant belly pressed against him he experienced a pang of wonder as to why they really would want to bring new life into this hideous world. It crossed his mind in the heat of the moment that maybe he should be the one to dispatch Jerry, just to preserve Pete from that particular horror.

  But Pete didn’t hesitate. He shot his own son in the head.

  After Jerry went down, Pete pointed his pistol at Wanda. Welcoming her death, she sank to her knees and pleaded with him, “Go on, Pete, shoot me like you did our son. I don’t want to turn into one of those things!”

  Bill tore himself loose from Lauren’s embrace, peered closely into Wanda’s eyes, then quickly scrutinized her arms, legs, and the rest of her clothed body, as much as he could see. Finally he yelled, “No! Don’t shoot her, Pete! She hasn’t been bitten!”

  “Thank God!” Pete said, taking his sobbing wife into his arms even as she struggled to pull back from him, saying, “I want to die, Pete . . . I want to be in heaven . . . with Jerry. . . .”

  Over Wanda’s shoulder, Pete gave Bill an odd stare, trying to silently convey something to him. But what? A nod of permission to do what his wife was asking him to do? Or maybe he was silently trying to make sure Bill would grasp the necessity of keeping quiet, for the time being, about the stolen hypodermic needles and the part they may have played in this, the most recent ghoul ram in the United States.

  CHAPTER 9

  Dr. Traeger’s heart pounded and her breath came in ragged gasps as she watched the aftermath of the outbreak unfolding on television. She was sorely afraid that if she didn’t go to prison, she might simply be made to disappear. Perhaps she would spend the rest of her days in a secret Homeland Security sanitarium. Or else she might be made to inhale gas from a stove or be hanged from the rafters in her own home, a faked suicide that no one would question. If she had any doubts about that possibility, she had only to recall what Pete Danko had done to Jamie Dugan in the soundproof room in the basement of the institute.

  She watched the TV in her office with the sound muted by closed captioning because she was on hold for a Skype conference with Homeland Security officials who feared that everything she was doing at the institute would now come to light in an earth-shaking way.

  The TV report was taking place in front of Chapel Grove Hospital. The misspellings and butchered syntax of the closed-captioning annoyed her, even in the midst of her despair. A SWAT captain was telling how he had managed to get a pregnant ghoul-bitten young woman to the maternity ward. Badly shaken, he confessed that after she gave birth he had to dispatch her. “I had no choice. I had to prevent her from coming back,” read the closed-captioning. The reporter’s captioned response to him was her assurance that what he had done was no longer a crime since it was a measure that was vital to the defense of our nation.

  In the background behind them on the TV, Dr. Traeger caught glimpses of mutilated corpses that were being piled up in the hospital courtyard. From an earlier report she had learned that drug addicts who had been thought to have OD’d had actually been in the beginning stages of the plague when they arrived at the emergency room, and when they died they became “reanimated” and attacked other patients. Some wandered outside with IVs hanging out of their arms, and were gunned down by policemen and civilian volunteers.

  Her Skype conference finally booted up. The first to speak was the ranking board member, Colonel William E. Spence, a tanned, craggy-faced man who was all soldier. Her first clue that Homeland Security might be disposed to treat her leniently came when he started off by asking, “How did the delivery go?” With a sharp intake of breath, she at first thought he was referring to the baby delivered by the pregnant ghoul-bitten young woman at Chapel Grove Hospital, but was relieved when she realized that he meant the delivery of the convicted serial killer Carl Landry to the institute. Pleased that nobody was jumping down her throat right away, she felt her spirits lift and she said, “It came off without a hitch.” Colonel Spence had always been one of her staunchest advocates, a career soldier with a West Point pedigree. He had ruthlessly dealt with enemy forces in Afghanistan, and often quoted the proverb that “desperate times require desperate measures.” She emulated that same attitude, because otherwise she couldn’t bear her own guilt.

  The others present on Skype were Captain Pete Danko and Major Steven Thurston. At times, the major had been Dr. Traeger’s adversary. Like Colonel Spence, Thurston was a career soldier, but ROTC, not West Point, so he didn’t command the same respect as Spence did, and he knew it. He would most likely follow Spence’s lead in whatever decisions had to be made, including whether she was to be exonerated in the matter of the missing needles. She figured that if the two officers of higher rank were swayed in her favor, then Danko would follow suit. Her ace in the hole, she hoped, was that HSD would have a strong desire to suppress any hint of their own culpability. They were already under fire for using truth serum and illegal interrogation methods on American citizens, and they were scared of getting any more heat. And what had happened today wasn’t ordinary heat, it was a potential conflagration.

  Colonel Spence said, “Dr. Traeger, it is our considered judgment that the Chapel Grove Medical Research Institute should issue a worldwide report stating that the current outbreak of the plague was spread by drug addicts using old needles that must have been infected by a decade-old epidemic in some town other than Chapel Grove. This will tally nicely with your initial briefing of Captain Danko and Lieutenant Curtis.”

  Major Thurston said, “We can state publicly that we haven’t precisely tracked down where the needles came from, but are working hard to solve the mystery. So much is unknown about the plague that ignorance is our greatest ally.”

  Colonel Spence said, “That’s true. Who can really question what we say anyway?”

>   “I agree,” said Major Thurston. “But even so, Captain Danko, I’m worried about your man, Bill Curtis. Don’t you think he knows too much?”

  “Well, he only knows what he’s been told. He’s not a scientist, he’s a layman. I can control him. And I can eliminate him if I have to.”

  “Satisfactory,” said Colonel Spence.

  “Yes indeed,” said Thurston. “All the needles found at the nightclub and at that drug dealer’s apartment have been destroyed. For good measure, we should burn the club down and totally sanitize it.”

  “Good idea,” said Spence.

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Danko.

  Dr. Traeger said, “I can draft the language of my news release for proper approval before I release it to the media. If I have to go on television, I won’t deviate. If things get too sticky, I’ll stonewall, claiming issues of national security.”

  “Of course,” said Colonel Thurston.

  Dr. Traeger liked the way this discussion was going. Nobody was being accusatory toward her. Instead they were treating her as a colleague and a coconspirator, and they were all bent on working together to deflect blame.

  Captain Danko said, “As you gentlemen know, in the midst of the carnage and confusion, four babies were born to mothers who came under attack in the maternity ward at Chapel Grove Hospital. The surviving spouses were told that the infants were stillborn, which of course is not true, but their final disposition hasn’t been decided yet.”

  Dr. Traeger said, “We were worried at first that the infants may have been infected in the womb, but blood tests, tissue samples, and brain scans showed us that they’re perfectly healthy. Their mothers had to be killed, for obvious reasons, and we discussed euthanizing them as well, but decided it would be not only immoral but irresponsible. We need to study them as they grow up to find out if they might be carrying a genome that might mutate as they grow older. I feel that anything is possible, in light of what has already happened.”