Dead Market

by Gary Starta

  McKean’s chain of thought gnawed at Brinkhaus. Yes, the virus would be spread in mundane ways, maybe through a water supply; but what he did not tell McKean was that the infection could be spread through contact with the infected, most plausibly via a bite. He really didn’t believe McKean could handle this. And even if he could, the man would no doubt begin asking about the two Guatemalan hit men. Were they terminated like Patient Zero or were they possibly still out there? The scientist reasoned the best way to pacify McKean would be to agree with him.

  “The government will help because they’ll be convinced this next evolutionary step is necessary for all our survival…as I said before…”

  “Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. So, what do I do in the meantime, while I assemble my conspirators?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe take in the Hemingway Home or perhaps the Butterfly Conservatory.”

  McKean rose from the table and plopped a twenty-door bill down. “I don’t know. Too many pensioners and homosexuals for me here… Hell, the clientele in here probably thinks we’re a couple, having a lover’s spat and all. I think I’ll begin some recon in Tampa. Put my team together there. Anyway, that’s where I believe James" home base is.” He flipped a card on the table. “You know where to reach me.”

  This man will never understand, but that’s all right. He’s a means to an end…

  Brinkhaus repeated the phrase to himself several times, hoping to curb his violent urges. Perhaps violence would always follow humanity through its evolution…but science must always try…

  After taking several paces from the table, McKean turned and came back, to say, “You’re a very unethical human engineer Mr. Brinkhaus.”

  Brinkhaus smiled but his eyes were vacant, “And you’re a very unethical ex-cop, Mr. McKean.”

  ***

  One month earlier…

  The lab wizards at Grayson Medical tweaked the blue pill known as Luxate to meet the wishes of Pharmacure President Frederick Gaines. Many at Pharmacure, Grayson"s parent company, still hoped the disease – dubbed Life: Two – might be corrected as well so its victims would not find themselves compelled to eat flesh and blood. Gaines hoped his pill would be marketed solely as a cosmetic necessity, to keep victims aesthetically acceptable to their families.

  But Pharmacure CEO Alan Eichelbaum was not in firm agreement. He suggested the pills revision to be a green light for unleashing Life: Two upon an unsuspecting populace. It would give families a stronger urge to feed Luxate to their dearly reanimated. One could only hope - Eichelbaum often joked - Americans would not find a flesh-eating brother or sister desirable.

  But Gaines did not find the matter humorous. He ordered Grayson researchers to tweak Life: Two – to remove its nasty habit. But to his chagrin, his lab rats weren’t that skilled to reengineer the disease. The disease’s creator, Karl Brinkhaus, had effectively flown the coop. Gaines could only hope Brinkhaus would return from his unannounced sabbatical with a solution. He would wait, despite Eichelbaum"s objections, for that solution a while longer. Grayson estimated Luxate only offered an eighty percent chance of curbing the hunger and that was far too dangerous a path for the pharmaceutical giant to tread upon.

  “It would be most desirable to remove the compulsion all together,” Gaines repeatedly argued to Eichelbaum – sometimes while they men were bored straight in boardrooms – other times drunk as skunks in pricey eateries. But Eichelbaum wanted to strike into what marketers branded to be a „dead market" ASAP.

  “We should only give a revision a few weeks more time. Then we must launch Life: Two.” In this particular instance, Eichelbaum was inebriated to the gills. Pharmacure President Frederick Gaines, on the other hand, purposefully faked his alcohol consumption to judge just how ruthless his CEO was. He believed a man’s most primal urges surfaced with alcohol. Coincidentally, the desire to become inebriated was borne from the same brain center as the one which produced cannibalistic hungers in test reanimates.

  “No, Alan.” Gaines was emphatic. “Our bottom line has to have its limits. We can’t profit from a disease which wreaks havoc on the hippocampus” – the part of the brain which houses its pleasure center. “Don’t you find it unconscionable that the same portion of the brain responsible for making us crave chocolate chip cookies makes our test reanimates desire bloody flesh?”

  Eichelbaum"s head bobbed. He waved a dismissive hand and drained his glass. No, Gaines thought in suffering silence, apparently, you do not.

  Chapter 3

  “I can’t lose you, officer. Hang on!”

  Coroner Hector Gonzalez gently rocked the downed officer as if he were a baby, cradling Derek Burnham in his arms. As he did this, he held his bloodied smock over the man’s wound. Bitten in the neck, in the same manner Det. Comiskey had been, Burnham had lost a considerable amount of blood. Not as much as expected, though; eerily similar, the same lack of blood loss Burnham experienced mimicked Chomsky’s. This only conspired to spook the coroner further as he waited out the longest seconds of his life for the EMT"s. Just what is going on here? Any hope of blaming an animal for the death of Comiskey-his first death- was fleeting; the manner of the attacks too similar to ignore. Just what would he tell the paramedics…?

  The whoop of a siren indicated their arrival. Gonzalez squirmed and wriggled to hand the fallen officer off to a red-haired man in a light gray shirt named Duncan. The posturing was intended to minimize conversation as much as it was to comfort the victim. The paramedics eyes spoke volumes to Gonzalez: just what the hell is going on here? Gonzalez believed that’s what the man’s eyes said. The professional nature of the man’s position, however, would not let his mouth verbalize it.

  Duncan spoke to his colleague Morris, with eyes still fixated on Gonzalez. “He’s suffered penetrating trauma. I’ll need the emergency tourniquet.” He said to Gonzalez, “It’s good you kept the wound above the heart…Doctor…?”

  “Uh…I’m Gonzalez. The man…over there…attacked him. Bit him…” The coroner pointed absently towards the remains of Comiskey. He knew the gesture was equivalent to a UFO nut pointing to the remains of a contrail. The remains were there, but they were too insubstantial, too intangible to be hard proof.

  “Wait a minute,” Duncan said. “I heard over the scanner a man died this morning from a neck bite. If that was the man, then how did he do this…?” Gonzalez licked his lips, eyes shifting; he found no voice to answer.

  The second man wrapped a red banded device about Burnham’s neck as the other took his pulse.

  “I have to say,” Duncan said, “I don’t think there’s much we can do here. There’s no pulse.” He rummaged through a bag and produced a defibrillator. After adhesive paddles were in place on Burnham’s chest, the machine bombarded him with electrical waves. The vice officer flipped up and down, as if a fish out of water, but to Gonzalez’s eyes, Burnham appeared more like a zombie, or a thing that had once been human but had its core stripped away.

  The coroner daydreamed, picturing Burnham on the rise, lumbering about as Comiskey did, thirsting for the very thing which was dripping from its neck.

  One part of him filled with guilt over what he let happen. He had been the one that brought Burnham here. He wished for salvation, but not resurrection. He had experienced what Comiskey had become. Conflicted to say the least, Gonzalez concluded Burnham’s passing would be for the best. There was a good chance Burnham was infected with whatever Comiskey suffered from. The part of the brain which somehow rationalizes the worst of fears told him it would be for the best. Yet, how could the worst be for the best?

  “He’s gone,” Duncan said to his colleague. The other man glanced at his watch to pronounce the time.

  Minutes passed before Gonzalez could speak. By then, officers had arrived. He would fill them as best as one could when faced with science fiction, not science fact.

  Finally, after what seemed like
hours later, the „enhanced" crime scene had been re-catalogued and re-documented. This time, Gonzalez would release two bodies. Comiskey had reached the point of no return, the coroner thought, glancing at the pieces of the man’s head now bagged into plastic containers. The rest of Comiskey had been placed in a van, one especially designed to transport corpses to the city morgue. Rest in peace, Bobbie the Commie. Gonzalez requested the paramedics take Burnham’s body to his morgue using their own vehicle. “It’s kind of cramped in here,” he explained, “and I would like to ride with the body.”

  The paramedics glanced at each other but appeared too flabbergasted by the morning’s events to protest. Gonzalez was glad of that. He doused the curiosity of the investigating crime scene workers as best as possible by suggesting further speculation as to what caused „Chomsky’s rise from the dead" could only be ascertained through lab analysis. “The quicker we transport, the quicker we’ll have answers,” he said to them, pretending to ignore their body language. They grunted and shook their heads without shame. They thought they had seen it all, Gonzalez surmised, and up until this morning, he thought he had as well.

  Maybe lab analysis could explain why he incorrectly pronounced Comiskey dead from the neck wound. That had to be it. Human error... He had made a mistake, but one that could be explained with analysis. An analysis might exonerate his error, proving that Comiskey never really died the first time. It wouldn’t help Burnham now…or would it…? Gonzalez forced his eyes away from the gurney which held Burnham. He swore if he glanced at the body too long, he would see a hand flex, or possibly a leg move. Again, Gonzalez argued with his own mind, reflexes occur even after death…

  He wished the paramedics would hurry and transport Burnham away from here. Perhaps some weird mojo exclusive to this area had been responsible. Great, who am I kidding? I’m not behaving very scientific for a doctor, am I now…? Gonzalez was sure the family would love to story as they gathered about the holiday dining table. Mm…yes. A nice story to recount just before dinnertime…well, if you were planning on a fast that is…

  He rode in silence with the body in the back of the van, partitioned off from the driver’s area. A rabid animal, a crazed drug addict, a blood thirsty zombie…? It scared him to think that the last possibility was most plausible.

  The paramedics let it all hang out once in the van.

  “I mean, you’re telling me a dead man-almost exsanguinated from a bite mark-rises and shares his trauma with a man who was a colleague and friend? Do you believe this, man?” Morris said to Duncan, and to perhaps his own personal God.

  “We’re not paid to believe, Morris.”

  “Oh, come on. You’ve tried to rationalize this. You’re too obsessive compulsive not to. So, do you really think Comiskey only played dead, then for some unexplained reason, was compelled to wreak blood lust upon the first human vessel available?”

  “It’s doable. If he had ingested some drug, or was forced to ingest some substance, it is possible his body mimicked the signs of death. No pulse or heartbeat. Then as it wears off, he returns to possibly the state he was in prior. Perhaps, he was infected by whatever bit his neck. It made him rabid, let’s say for argument’s sake. So maybe he was given some sedative to delay the violent reaction. By who, I can’t say.”

  “You’re damned right you can’t say. It’s not believable. If someone were to bite this man, and those marks do seem to be from human teeth, then why would this crazed person, most likely infected to behave vicious and animalistic, be humane enough to have the sanity to administer a sedative? Is this some do good vampire or zombie you’re talking about, Duncan?”

  “Couldn’t be a vamp if the biting was done at dawn and if Comiskey was turned into one, he was clearly able to function in daylight. From what the coroner told investigators, Comiskey seemed too agile to be a zombie.”

  “You’re pulling my leg. I see you reading those fiction novels at lunch. You think that shit can come true. But I saw your face when we arrived. You had no intention of believing what your eyes were showing you.”

  “What I’m saying is that I’m reasoning out the possibility of fantastical creatures. I think one fucked up human, possibly affected by some drug or disease, did this to Comiskey. And then Comiskey, in turn, became ill.”

  “So, if I’m to follow your domino logic, what’s to say the man laid out in the back is really dead?”

  “We worked on him. He’s D-E-A-D.”

  “I don’t know, now. I’m not quite sure...” Morris found it impossible to keep a smile from tugging at his lips or the temptation to continue the teasing. “I heard of a man coming back 47 minutes after being pronounced dead. Maybe we didn’t try hard enough…”

  “You’re being facetious, Morris.”

  “I thought I was just living in the moment.”

  “You’re a dick, Morris. Let’s just hope our next call isn’t as nearly as interesting.”

  They rode in welcomed silence as they traversed the Cross Town Expressway, the shortest route to the city morgue. Ghost stories of Ybor City haunted Morris, despite his claims that all science fiction, especially the novels Duncan liked, was bullshit. Thoughts of El Chupacabra, a creature which sucks blood, pervaded Duncan’s mindset, contrary to the fact that the creature supposedly hailed from Puerto Rico and preferred goats to humans.

  The pounding from the back of the van broke the silence.

  Morris witnessed the fist clubbing upon the Plexiglas partition.

  It happened as Duncan negotiated a hairpin curve, the winding roadway which would serve as an exit off of the Cross Town Expressway. For the EMT"s, the roadway would serve as a more final exit.

  As the van began to tip, Morris’s last words to a police dispatcher was: “It’s trying to come through the window…”

  Whatever Morris was referring to, didn’t make it to the driver’s area. The van had been all too willing to let gravity pull it sideways, to its extreme right, then launch it over a guardrail where it careened down a grassy slope. About thirty seconds later, a passing motorist witnessed flames.

  “You’re not going to believe this, doctor.”

  Gonzalez’s first thought: What more couldn’t I believe today…?

  The driver of the van, the coroner’s transportation assistant, had called Gonzalez’s cell. The only means of communication as solid metal separated the driver from Gonzalez and the remains of Robert Comiskey.

  They might as well have been separated by a black hole.

  Things couldn’t get any more surreal for Hector Gonzalez, a doctor of science, now coerced by some force of the universe to think with emotion rather than logic. He panicked in response.

  “We’ve got to get there. Are we nearing the exit?”

  “Doctor Gonzalez, I’m not sure why you want me to take you there. First responders are already on the scene, it sounds bad. I don’t know how we can…”

  Gonzalez cut his assistant off. His voice filled with rage, void of rationality.

  “TAKE ME THERE, NOW!”

  Gonzalez out of the van before his assistant could cut the engine, bulldozed his way past line officers. They were guarding the portion of roadway where the ambulance had taken flight for the briefest of moments before meeting its demise at the bottom of a hill.

  “Let me through, let me through.” He railed at the officers and the sawhorse markers they trusted to keep sane people at bay.

  Dr. Gonzalez did not sound sane now. “I’ve got to see him. I’ve got to see that he’s there.”

  A burly officer corralled Gonzalez in a bear hug.

  “There’s no one to see,” the burly man said. Finality punctuated each of the officer’s words.

  “Oh, I see.” The doctor’s panting drowned out by an arriving ladder truck, summoned no doubt to extinguish the last of the fiery embers emanating from the charred ambulance below.

  Gonza
lez was sure the EMT"s had perished. He couldn’t be so certain about Burnham, though. Not after this morning…

  His mind raced. The guilt broadsided a need to put a troubling nightmare to rest.

  He had surely killed these three people today…well maybe not Burnham… He couldn’t stop seeing the vice officer’s hand twitch in his mind. Legs scrabbling for purchase, an arm extended, teeth bared in hunger…

  He had to be sure Burnham had indeed died. Despite the guilt he felt over his death.

  As Gonzalez watched a plume of water extinguish fire, he reasoned Burnham was an officer after all. He lived with danger each day. He was only partly responsible for his fate. But the EMT"s, they had no chance of saving Burnham-in the conventional sense. And to make it worse, he had requested they transport the body to the morgue. In hindsight, he had only sprung more holes in a leaky boat.

  He had to salvage the Titanic he had unwittingly launched. He had to make sure there would no more collateral damage. To do that, he had to be certain Derek Burnham had not walked away from the scene. He would need assistance to be sure. It was imperative Burnham’s remains were in the wreckage below. He would not rest until he was sure. It was a matter of life and death…

  Chapter 4

  “An internal investigation will continue Dr. Gonzalez, one based upon your eyewitness accounts. But as far the press and public are concerned, this case is closed.”

  Tampa Police Chief Christina Palmieri sat across from Gonzales, hands folded and resting on her mahogany desk. So neat and tidy…Gonzalez thought, wondering if he were maintaining a cool exterior because inside his blood was boiling, he was sure of it. How the hell could she close this case? The perpetrator is still out there…That’s one helluva loose end!