by Doug Goodman
“Are you okay?” the officer asked. “Were you bit?”
“Yeah. In the back.”
She pulled down the blood-soaked tank strap and showed him the shoulder blade. He winced as he called it in. “I’ve seen maulings that don’t look that bad. Good thing your dog was here. He gave me just enough time to get here.”
Angie was sitting at incident command while an EMT applied antibiotic cream to her bite wound and wrapped a bandage around her shoulder when Jasper walked up. Swollen gray umbrellas hung upside-down under his eyes. Most of the sky had lightened up between the mountain peaks, and the sun was beginning its long hard glare. All but two of the patrol cars had cleared out.
“Maybe I should have sent in the robot,” Jasper said.
“There was no way to know for sure it was a zombie. Waylon is just a human remains dog. All he is looking for is a body.”
“Exactly, and if a robot gets bitten, I can replace its parts. You get bitten, and now I have to send you to the hospital to get looked at. I have to fill out about twenty forms because of you. I will have to answer to the county, and I may have to answer to the media. All ‘cause a volunteer got bit. God knows what would’ve happened if the damn thing’d been five inches taller and bit you in the jugular.
Jasper sat there a minute letting his words hang over her in uncomfortable silence.
“What do you want me to do?” Angie said. “I can’t stop zombies. Maybe if the police were part of the solution instead of punting to Animal Control, something could be done about it.”
“Hey, do you think I like funneling 15% of my budget to Animal Control? Why am I arguing with you? You’re a volunteer search worker, you’re not paid. I just won’t call you anymore. I’ll call somebody else.”
“Like who?”
“Like Joel.”
“Joel is allergic to half the shit out here. Besides, you want to keep me in your good graces. You like me.”
The lieutenant glared at her. “Once you get cleaned up here, my officers and this EMT are going to escort you to the hospital. You will go to the hospital, Angie. Either in your truck or in a patrol car. I don’t want to have to explain why we aren’t following procedures.”
After a moment, Angie asked, “Did you recover the bug?”
He nodded. She shuddered.
Sitting in the hospital for an hour gave Angie plenty of time to dwell on her mistake. Like the plastic molded chair she sat in, her memories were unfortunate, and she wished she could replace them. Maybe she could have kept Waylon closer. She should have worked him on lead. If he had been on lead, he would not have chased the zombie into the funeral home, and she would be at home asleep instead of sitting in the uncomfortable, cushionless chair. Even accepting that he was off lead, which was normal when working in thickets, if she had stopped Waylon at the door of the old brick building and let the officer handle the situation, she wouldn’t have gotten bitten, and she wouldn’t have to wait in the cold waiting room with the same Sisyphean news being reported over and over while her shoulder burned like electric ice.
Finally Angie lumbered up to the attendant’s station and complained that she had a dog waiting for her in the car on one of the hottest days of the year and was still waiting to be seen for a simple bite wound. This wasn’t a complete lie. Waylon was in the car, but the “car” was a pickup and Waylon was in his pen in the truck bed. He had plenty of shade, water, and even a fan blowing on him, so he was probably more comfortable than most people in the waiting room, but the attendant didn’t need to know that.
The woman at the attendant’s station rolled her eyes and said, “All the doctors are busy and visitors will be seen in the order that they arrive. Please have a seat.”
Angie looked around and noticed that most of the people in the small wait area were either staring at her or pretending not to. Something more than her outburst drew their attention. They were staring because she looked like she had just walked off the set of a horror movie. Her back still had mud on it, she wore a bandage over her shoulder, a few cuts crisscrossed her arms and face, and she looked like she hadn’t bathed in days.
“Are you okay?” an old woman in pajamas asked. “You look like you been ridden hard and put away wet.”
It didn’t help that the old woman was breathing with the help of an oxygen tank and had a giant reddened bandage hiding half her face. I look ridden hard? Angie sat back down, tried to pretend she didn’t exist, and pulled a few twigs out of her hair that she hadn’t seen.
A few minutes later, she was finally ushered in to see a doctor, who spent five minutes telling her about the importance of keeping the wound clean while he examined it.
“Do you feel any pain in your lower arm? Sometimes people react bad to the venom.”
“No,” she responded.
“Well, this isn’t the worst case I’ve seen today,” he said. “How do you feel?”
“I haven’t slept in a day, and I’ve been out running around all night. I could pass out right here.”
“Well, you’re not going to like this, but you’ve been bitten by a dead body, and clearly the skin has been broken. So the main concern is transfusion of Hepatitis C, but also AIDS. So I can’t just give you a simple antibiotic and a Benadryl. If antibiotics were soldiers, I’d be sending in not the platoon, but the entire army. And not just the army, but the navy, the marines, the air force—Everyone! That doesn’t come cheap. Tell you what, I am going to do something a little different. Earlier today I had a little girl in here who’d been attacked by one of those damned things. Her face, her arms—it was like a bear had mauled her.”
He pulled a few small packages out of his pocket. “I have some free samples. It is very strong stuff. Nothing generic. Consider it a thank you for doing what you do. These pills should take care of you, but if you develop any signs of infection—fever, itchy, reddened skin—you come back to me and I’ll fix you up. In the meantime, I want you to schedule an appointment to have some blood drawn so we can test you for Hepatitis C and AIDS. Do not worry. Rarely do these diseases transmit, but as a hospital, we have to cover our butts.”
Angie smiled grimly at the mention of AIDS. It was a well-documented health risk of tracking the damned, but she had known the risks.
She shook Dr. Rivera’s gloved hand. The man was maybe five feet tall, but he had an infectious smile and a desire to please reminiscent of her retrievers. Angie thanked him and tried to explain that she ended up hunting a zombie by accident, but that didn’t stop his campaign of profuse thanks.
Angie walked out of the doctor’s office with the free pills. She shivered in the hallway and wondered how hospitals always seemed to somehow import their air directly from the North Pole. On her way out, Angie happened to pass a room where a little girl, no older than eight, was getting stitches. The little girl’s face had been cleaned up, but she would have a toothy scar for the rest of her life.
Angie’s plan was to go home, feed the dogs, take the pills, and crash on the sofa because she didn’t have enough energy to make it to the bed. Then she looked down at her cellphone. She had a voicemail from Dr. Saracen. For a moment Angie debated ignoring the call, but that made her feel guilty, so she listened to the message, knowing it would only keep her further from sleep.
“Ms. Graves, this is Dr. Saracen. I am examining the amazing specimen that was brought in earlier from your search, and I need to talk to you about something fascinating. Could you come see me at your earliest convenience? Thank you.”
Angie put the phone in one of the pickup’s cup holders and started the engine.
Animal Control sat on the outskirts of town where the tall pines started to encroach on the roads. Angie pulled into the parking lot and parked on the newly paved blacktop. Old Animal Control vehicles that once upon a time were white but now had the red of Colorado clay permanently stained into the paint waited in line to one side of the lot for drivers who would never come. Toyotas, BMWs, and Chevys relaxed on the side closer to the
Animal Control building.
Half of the building was an amalgamation of decades-old concrete and steel pens for cats, dogs, goats, horses, and whatever other animals were reported in the county lines. The smell of bleach wafted from the kennels. Stray animals were still kept at the facility, even if control of that kind of animal was only a secondary function of the department now. Out of this old edifice grew a newer, shinier building like new shoots of mirrored glass foliage rising out of the pruned stumps of an old art deco oak. Angie felt her cool visage mocking her from the reflective glass. It knew where Angie was going and how much she reviled that place.
The Invasive Entomology Studies Lab was the very last room at the end of a long hallway. To get there, Angie first had to pass a line of front offices, locker rooms, equipment storage rooms, and conference rooms to the back of the Animal Control building. Why is it that you always have to travel farthest to the places you don’t want to go?
She also had to pass the robotics support room where the robots were stored and maintained. Angie could not resist stopping and stealing a look through the windows. There weren’t any complete robots in the many bays, but a few legs were neatly stacked up against the wall. Each one ended in a padded hoof and was big enough to support a small horse.
The Invasive Entomology Studies Lab was next to the loading/unloading docks. Angie did not have an access card, so she knocked on the lab window. A few seconds later, Dr. Saracen appeared and pressed the button to open the outer door for her. He was in his early fifties, with the gruff peppered beard and demeanor of a grandfatherly Airedale terrier. The rubber lining squeaked as the door opened.
“Mind your hat,” Dr. Saracen saidinside the lab.
Angie did not quite hear him. She was taking a deep breath and steadying herself against what she was about to experience. As she took a few steps forward and the outer doors shut behind her, a set of fans blew her hat off. She picked it up and pushed through the second set of doors, entering the nightmare room. The hermetically-sealed doors puckered shut like the light going out in the world so all the bad things could come out.
The Invasive Entomology Studies Lab was similar to an insect house at a zoo, except where the insect house was mostly set up to amaze and entertain viewers, the IESL was designed to store the worst bugs imaginable. Just walking into the room and being surrounded by all those bugs in their cages made Angie clench her fists and hold her arms close.
The room was covered with wall-to-wall plastic containers. Each container held a different crawling or flying nightmare. Large wolf spiders, fire ants, mantises, and bees and hornets that flitted their wings at Angie. Most of the containers were filled with wasps. Monster-headed, big-bodied, sinister-eyed black and yellow wasps. It took a special kind of person to not run screaming out of the lab. It took an even more special kind of person to work there eight hours a day.
Dr. Saracen was that special kind of person, an Alice Cooper of scientists. He wore thick, black-rimmed glasses and a surgeon’s cap with flaming tongues more commonly found on 1950s hot rods. The Harley Davidson Shovelhead in the parking lot belonged to him.
“Good morning,” Dr. Saracen said. “Would you like some coffee? I bought it at Starbucks.”
Angie reached for the coffee the way backpackers reach for a burger or Coke after a few days in the wilderness. The object was real and familiar and grounded her in an otherwise untethered reality. “You know how to bribe me, Henry. You really know.”
“You’ve been up all night and a good portion of the morning. You deserve a break, as the jingle goes, but I wanted to show you the raison d’etre for your escapades before you went to sleep.”
Dr. Saracen led Angie to a plastic see-through container. In it was the head of the zombie she had encountered earlier that morning. Half the skull was missing. Briefly, Angie remembered the officer’s shot that had removed the other side of its face.
“Gee, for me? You shouldn’t have, Henry.”
Something stirred behind the zombie. Angie knew what it was, and her heart sank. She put her Starbucks down before she dropped it.
“Jesus. It’s still alive?”
“It’s one of the largest insects in the world,” Dr. Saracen said. “Certainly longer than a goliath beetle or giant weta. As far as wasps go, only the tarantula hawk comes close. The giant crimson wasp is almost too large to sit in the palm of your hand, a distinction shared by only a small minority of insects.”
While Angie watched, a bright crimson appendage prodded the hair at the top of the head. A thin red and black insect, almost like a six-inch-long ant with disproportionately long legs, crawled on top of the head and perched there, coldly watching them. At the end of its bulbous abdomen was a long, thin stinger like the harpoon of an alien species. The wasp gently poked and prodded the human head. Angie felt that venomous stinger poking and prodding at the door to her deepest fears, fears that were being wakened from the dark recesses of evolution and returned to her brain.
“You gotta kill that thing,” Angie said. She took a step back.
“It’s no threat to us, Angie.”
“Are you kidding me? Look at the size of its stinger!”
“I want to give it to you, Angie.”
“Give it to me? Have you lost your mind? No way, Henry!” She took a few more steps back, like the final girl in a slasher film who knows what is lurking in the closet or under the bed and decides it is better to turn and run.
Dr. Saracen put a blanket over the case. With the wasp gone, at least visually, Angie breathed out. She didn’t realize she had forgotten to breathe. That wasn’t like her. She worked with dead bodies and lived out alone in the woods. She had dealt with bears and snakes and most things that would make people shit their pants.
“Sorry. I really need some sleep.”
“I know you do. But I’m not a mad scientist, Angie. I have an idea, and I think you can be part of the solution for finding and killing these things.”
“Can I say no?”
“Of course you can.”
Dr. Saracen led her to another plastic cage.
“If there’s another zombie head in there, I’m walking. I don’t care how much coffee you bought me. Your hall of horrors gives me the creeps enough as it is. How do you work here and not get the willies?”
“You always know where you are when it comes to bugs,” Dr. Saracen said. “There are no gray areas. They are a lot like you in that way. You’ve always been pretty straight-forward.”
She didn’t know what to do with a complement from the strange man who worked with wasps, so she smiled politely. “Thanks, I think.”
He pulled out the plastic container and set it on the table. “This is the emerald wasp, ampulex compressa. It is the source of all our woes.”
Dr. Saracen went to an aquarium in the corner of the room and opened a small screen window at the top. Inside lay egg cartons full of cockroaches. He grabbed one roach with a pair of tongs, closed the lid, and took the cockroach back to the cage. He opened a door and dropped the cockroach into the cage.
“The wasp stings the cockroach in the neck, inhibiting its escape reflex. Then it steers it, like a zombie, back to its burrowing hole. The zombified cockroach is complicit the entire time. Once inside, the wasp lays an egg on the cockroach and then leaves.”
“That is disgusting,” Angie said, “And that’s coming from a person who trains dogs to find dead people.”
“You haven’t heard the really heinous part—the most important part. The larvae feed on the cockroach. They live off it for four to five days until they are ready to pupate.”
“I’m going to puke.”
“The cockroach is still alive as the larvae eat it from the inside out.”
“Ew. Ewww. Dr. Saracen? Do you kiss your wife with that mouth?”
“Mrs. Saracen was born with a genetic defect that made her overly sensitive in the lips. I never kiss her there.”
Angie waved her hands in front of her. “I feel like
I’ve driven into some strange TMI nightmare. I don’t want to learn anything more from you.”
“It is a nightmare, Angie, and it is disgusting, but you have to hear this because people like you and I understand the value of these facts no matter how much we wish we could unlearn them. These things,” and he went back to the cage of the giant crimson wasp “Are essentially supersized emerald wasps. Instead of cockroaches, though, they attach themselves to dead bodies. They sting the heart, causing it to convulse and pump. Then they sting the submandibular gland located at the base of the mouth. The venom reacts with the enzymes there, so that when it bites someone like you, it stings like a hornet’s nest. After all that, they fix their stinger to the cerebellum, and use it to ‘drive’ the corpse. This makes sense because the cerebellum is where body motion, both somatic and automatic, is controlled. But here’s what isn’t being reported: these wasps don’t lead the dead bodies to their burrowing hole, and they don’t lay eggs in them. We know this because we find the zombies discarded later, with holes in their necks from where the wasp was controlling them.”
“So if not the dead body, then what?”
“It hasn’t been proven yet, but based on the modus operandi of the emerald wasp, we suspect the dead body is being used as a vehicle to catch other people and turn them into pupae food. If that is true, they would be stealing the elderly or preferably children, who are easier to control.”
The image of a little girl with a toothy scar on her face came to Angie. “You got to be kidding me, Henry. Why isn’t anyone reporting on this?”
“It’s an unrealized theory that would panic people unnecessarily. Nobody has found a burrow yet. This is where I think you could help us, Angie. Train a dog to track zombies. You could find the wasps before they take anyone. You could find their burrows.”
“Why not use the robots?”
“Robots are prioritized to catching zombies, and between that and repair, they don’t have time for this kind of work. It may seem otherwise, but the world is still behind the curve on these things.”