Dead Stop

  “Nah, not exactly,” he followed her demonstration with intent interest, “just some fairly basic field first aid. Stuff like that. So show me what I didn’t know.”

  “Uh huh.” She eyed him doubtfully then continued. “Well, notice how these threads seem to flow towards the back of the skull and then downwards. I’m betting…” She used the knife to cut out a piece of the brain and then set it aside. “Yep…looky here.”

  “What am I looking at, Doc?”

  “It’s not just on the outside of the brain, it’s penetrating into it. And mainly into the hindbrain areas, which are the most intact.” she tilted her head, concentrating, then cut deeper and lifted another piece out of the way. “Interesting.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it seems to continue on down the brain stem to the foramen magnum.”

  “The whozit?”

  “The hole at the bottom of the skull,” She frowned at the indicated area. “It’s especially thick here, and now it’s back on the outside again too. Hmmm…I wonder…” She inserted the knife into the mass.

  The corpse thrashed, causing Rachel to scream and both of them to dive away from it.

  Suddenly, the bathroom seemed a very small place. The veterinarian scrambled backwards in a blind panic, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and the flailing body. That resulted in her smacking into the wall and clanging the back of her head against the bottom of a urinal hard enough to see stars. The pain blinded her, filling her vision with exploding fireworks…but it didn’t slow her down from scrabbling under the nearby divider into a toilet stall.

  Any shelter in a storm.

  Rachel struggled to her feet, and immediately clambered up onto the john. She put her hands against each side of the stall for balance and froze in place. Her heart hammered in her ears. She took a few seconds to get her breath back under control, and for her vision to clear, then tried listening…

  Nothing.

  No sounds of fighting, screaming, or even feet shuffling to indicate what could be happening on the other side of that divider. Just the soft sound of the fan. Rachel strained her hearing for any clue of what might be going on.

  Still nothing.

  After a couple more seconds of silence she decided to risk making noise of her own.

  “Harley?” she called softly.

  “Yeah, Doc?”

  He couldn’t have sounded more nonchalant if he tried. She already had a pretty good idea what had happened…as impossible as it seemed…but the idea of him just waiting out there grinning about the event really ticked her off.

  “I’m guessing you’re okay?” she asked sweetly through clenched teeth.

  “Other than a mild heart attack, yeah.” At least it didn’t sound like he was laughing. “It looks like you hit a nerve on that thing. It ain’t doing nothing now. I think it’s safe.”

  “No,” she retorted. “Actually, it may not be safe. Here, take this.”

  Rachel climbed down and slid the pocket knife under the divider and back into the room. She heard the sound of his boots approach, and then stop.

  “Okay,” he answered. “But it ain’t doing nothing. Besides, I’ve still got the bat.”

  “Harley, listen to me.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want you to cut its head off.”

  “You want me to what?! Seriously?”

  “Yes.” She felt foolish as hell talking from inside the stall, but if the inkling of a theory she had forming was even near correct…if those threads were doing what she thought they were… “Can you do that?”

  “Sure…I guess,” she could hear the shrug in his voice. “If that’s what you want.”

  “That’s what I want.”

  “Okay, just a minute.”

  She heard him approach the body, then stop again. The tarp rustled, and she realized he was imitating her trick with the tissues and using it as a way to hold its head still without touching it. There came a surprisingly short period of rhythmic rustling of the tarp she knew had to be caused by him holding it against the things head while he sawed on the neck, then the clomp of his boots returning to the stall.

  “Okay, Doc. All done.”

  “Tell me you aren’t standing out there with the head in your hands.”

  “I’m not.” Now he laughed. “It’s down by the thing’s feet. What the hell, Doc?”

  “Sorry,” she grouched and came out the door of the stall. “I’m just rattled and jumpy. And I’ve got a real bad feeling about what I’ve seen so far.”

  “Fair enough.” Harley didn’t seem insulted and followed her back over to the now headless body.

  Rachel noted the head laying down between its feet and thought about asking Harley to move it so she could roll the corpse over and dissect the spine. Then a second idea occurred and she decided there was no need to bother. Retrieving Harley’s knife she pulled the thing’s arm out to the side and rolled up its sleeve. Making sure it’s hand laid palm down on the floor, the veterinarian then cut a long, slow incision down the back of the forearm. Once finished, she spread the dead skin apart and immediately spotted what she was looking for.

  “See that?” She pointed to thin grey and white line running between two blackened muscles.

  “Yeah.” His brow knitted as he stared into the incision. “What is it?”

  “That’s the radial nerve. But now it has a companion.”

  “The same stuff?”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “The same stuff.”

  “So what does it mean?”

  “Well, it means my first theory was correct. When I told Marisa earlier that something had hijacked these things nervous systems, I didn’t know how right I was. This stuff has both taken it over and replaced it at the same time.”

  “What do you mean, doc?”

  “I mean whatever this material is, it operates independent of the host at the same time it’s fusing with it. I’m afraid what it means to you is that you’re going to have to go behead all the other bodies in this store. This stuff can heal independent of injury done to the body, which means you’re probably lucky the thing you disabled earlier didn’t get back up when you and Marisa went into the store. I guarantee it would have at some point. ”

  “Aw, hell. Gladys and the other guy too?”

  “I’m afraid so,” She laid a sympathetic hand on his arm. “You saw the trucker Stacey calls Buddha Boy outside.”

  “Yeah,” Harley sighed. “Crap…”

  “I know, I’m sorry.” She patted his arm then pulled back her hand and turned her attention back to the corpse. “But now it’s time to solve mystery number two. Why the hell are these things eating at all?”

  “Because they’re zombies and they woke up hungry? What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” she muttered as she ripped open the corpse’s shirt, exposing a grey chest and abdomen, “that outside of Hollywood, ‘zombies’ don’t make sense. The pancreas deteriorates into a puddle of digestive enzymes not long after death, and literally digests the rest of the organs in the lower abdomen. Embalming only slows the process, not stops it. There’s a reason the ancient Egyptians used to pull the organs out of their dead before mummifying them.”

  “Damn,” Harley looked at her with respect. “How do you know all this?”

  “Believe it or not,” Rachel chuckled, “they teach us ‘animal doctors’ a thing or two in college as well. Heck, sometimes they even let us read books.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I know, no problem. The point is, the corpses we’ve seen tonight shouldn’t have any internal organs to speak of…at least not below the diaphragm. So there should be no point in them eating anything…yet they do. I wonder why that is?”

  Harley shrugged and said nothing.

  “Well,” she muttered and placed the knife at the bottom of the corpse’s sternum, “it’s time to find out. This might not smell very good..

  She braced herself
for the stench, and pushed the blade into the corpse’s belly. The embalmed muscles were stiff, and it took a surprising amount of effort on her part to force it all the way in. Then using two hands on the handle, she braced herself and pulled downward, slowly slicing through the cadaver’s abdominal muscles until she reached its groin.

  “Whew!” Rachel wiped her brow then starting folding herself two large pads of toilet paper. “That was harder than it looked. Now, let’s see if we can figure out what makes these things tick.”

  Taking a pad of tissue in each hand and holding them like potholders, she pushed them into the incision and pulled it wide. It opened with a wet, viscous ripping sound magnified by the tiled walls.

  A second later both Rachel and Harley peered into the exposed cavity.

  “What the hell?” Harley muttered. “It’s just more of the same stuff! Only it’s not white.”

  The body’s abdomen appeared to be stuffed with pink cotton candy.

  “Actually, this is beginning to make an ugly kind of sense,” Rachel murmured and used the knife to probe into the mass. A few seconds later, she retracted the tool with a dark lump impaled on its blade. She examined it for a couple of seconds, then closed her eyes and scraped it off against the monsters leg.

  “What was that?”

  “That,” she took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly, “was a piece of Gladys. It was being directly absorbed through the cell walls of the biomass, which is why the stuff is pink. And that pretty much tells me what it is…”

  “It does?” The tall young man leaned back and looked at her in surprise. “What is it, Doc?”

  Rachel looked down at the dissected corpse for a second, her face a mask of incredulity, then looked back at him.

  “It’s a fungus, Harley,” she said it as if she could barely believe it herself. “It’s a goddamned fungus!”

  ###

  “A fungus?” Deke frowned. “You mean like a mushroom?”

  “Not exactly.” Rachel leaned back against the sink, ruefully aware that once again all eyes in the kitchen were on her. “A mushroom is a fungus, but most funguses aren’t mushrooms. They can look like a lot of things…from mushrooms, to furry patches of bark…microscopic cells…or like this stuff….cotton or hairlike roots. There are all kinds of them. And now it seems we’ve discovered a new type. One that can animate a corpse, and can also be passed from killer to victim.”

  “Lucky us,” Grandpa Tom growled. “So not only do we have to worry about all the dead people from the cemetery up the road, but everybody they killed too. Christ! How many have they killed here so far?”

  “I have no idea,” the doctor sighed, “but it’s probably safe to assume the big monster who killed Gerald ain’t the only one out there.”

  “So who all do we know is dead or missing?” Harley asked as he watched out the diamond shaped window of the kitchen door. “Maybe we can build a rough idea from that. We can exclude Gladys and the customer in the store…I don’t want to go into it, but I made sure they won’t be getting back up. And we can be pretty sure Gerald ain’t going to be either. Holly is a possibility, but since that just happened it will be a while.”

  The room went quiet as people turned the question over in their heads.

  “There was Arnold, Leon, and Tomas working out back,” Marisa stared at the ceiling, “and we saw Lizzie…err Libby…walking back there too.” The raven haired waitress winced at using the nickname on the prostitute when she realized the woman must have died horribly back there. “And there were five or six rigs lined up.”

  “So, about ten.” Harley nodded. “I’ve been counting and I keep coming up with a count of around forty of these bastards, so we’re talking about a twenty five percent increase in their numbers if all those people get up. So far, we’ve only seen one though.”

  “Well, you aren’t going to see Arnold, Tomas, or Leon,” Stacey said in a quiet voice. Once again her face took on the tight look from earlier and Deke pulled her in close beside him. “They were…all over the garage back there. Those things tore them to pieces.”

  Rachel considered that and realized she had been missing the obvious.

  “You know, now that you mention it, I might have been wrong. You’re probably not going to see any of the initial victims,” she mused aloud. “These things woke up hungry, and there are a lot of them. They probably pretty much devoured all the people they first ran into. But by the time they got to the big guy, they must have already eaten a bunch of people and weren’t so hungry. They still chewed a pretty good bit out of him too…but he might be the only one.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Harley replied. “Because he bothers me. He’s not just bigger and stronger; I think he operates on a different level than the others as well. I don’t like the way he occasionally looks around. None of the others do it, only him.”

  Rachel thought about that for a moment too.

  “It may be due to him having a fresher nervous system for this stuff to work with,” she theorized. “He might be more advanced than the rest of them. The way he acted when he attacked Gerald and Holly would certainly suggest it. He went right to the driver’s side door and smashed in the window instead of scrabbling at it like the others.”

  “Okay then,” Harley looked around the kitchen, “in that case I think we need to find a way to block this door. The one to the store locks, but this one doesn’t. Somebody might want to think about organizing a quiet run up front to the store while it’s still dark and pulling all the food they can get back here.”

  “Is that safe?”

  “We don’t have a lot of choice. We also need to knock out this hallway light so it doesn’t shine through every time the door is opened and catch something’s attention. I also recommend no more trips out of here unless it’s to the bathroom, and be sure and go before dawn. I think the rain is already starting to ease up as it is so these things are going to be able to see inside soon.”

  “How long is it till dawn anyway?” Rachel rubbed her eyes and stifled a yawn.

  In the last few hours she had been in a fight for survival at the back door with man-eating monsters, raced to stop one man from bleeding to death, tended four other wounded people, consoled one half hysterical young woman, and performed her first autopsy on the body of a human being. She was exhausted. And the truly frightening part was the knowledge she was one of the last uninjured and healthy people in the room.

  The cuts on Harley’s forearms were superficial, the result of grappling with the monster in the store, and he ignored them. Marisa’s foot injury seemed minor, but Rachel knew it hurt and could be a problem if the girl had to move fast. Deke’s shoulder was worse from punching Gerald, and the doctor knew the muscle probably needed to be stitched up to prevent it from tearing even further. Stacey’s arm lacerations were painful but not debilitating, but the massive bruise on her ribs had to hurt. And Grandpa Tom…

  …she was way over her head with that situation. Whatever happened to the old trucker was probably going to happen, and she could do damn little for him. He looked a lot better, but she noticed he still hadn’t found a reason to get up off his crate yet. He needed a hospital…now. The same held true for the little janitor, lying bundled on the floor.

  So if something happened to Harley or Marisa…it would be time for Dr. Rachel Sutherland, DVM to put on her action hero cape.

  But until then, she could really use a nap.

  “It’s four in the morning, doc.” Stacey pointed over at a time clock on the back wall. “It will start to lighten up in about two hours. Sunrise won’t be for almost another hour afterwards though.”

  “Okay then,” Rachel realized Harley had just left the delegation of chores to her, “then we better make the most of it. Stacey, can you and Deke sneak up to the store and start bringing food back here?”

  “Sure. C’mon, Deke.” The two headed down the back hallway, hand in hand.

  “Tom?” she turned to the old trucker on the crate, “I don’t
want you to push yourself, but I could use some of that male handiness with mechanical stuff I’m sure you’re just brimming with. Everything big in this kitchen looks bolted down, and I would appreciate it if you would just kind of look stuff over and see which you think would be the easiest to get loose and be used to block the door. Can you do that?”

  “No problem, Doc.”

  “Well Harley, that leaves…hey! Where are you two going?”

  Harley had already started down the hallway towards the store, escorted by Marisa and her bat.

  “I’m…err…” he spared a quick glance at Marisa, “…we’re going to get a better look at things. There is a storeroom next to the coolers on the store side, and I wanted to check it for tools and stuff. Then I intend to find out more about what we’re up against. When I was dragging those bodies into the store cooler I noticed some rungs set in the wall going up to a hatch in the roof.”

  “Is this wise?” She folded her arms and fixed a level look at him.

  “It’s actually my specialty, doc. I know what I’m doing. Besides, I’ve got Marisa watching my back.”

  “Fine,” Rachel sighed, “if you’re going to be out there then put some extra effort in looking for a way out of this place. There’s something I didn’t say earlier because I didn’t want Deke and Stacey to hear it, but I think you two need to know this.

  “Oookaayyyy…” Harley and Marisa stopped and looked at each other, then back at her.

  “Gerald may have been right about something else, too,” the veterinarian continued. “This stuff may infect living people as well.”

  “Mierde!” Marisa hissed, “Are you serious!?”

  “Yeah,” Rachel looked from one to the other, “It would be slower, because we have something dead people don’t…an immune system. And it would probably depend on the seriousness of the initial exposure, such as being wounded by one of these things. But there is a good chance we’ve all been exposed to one degree or another.”

  “But you’re saying,” Harley frowned in concentration, “that those of us who were actually clawed by those things have the greatest risk.”