CURE (A Strandville Zombie Novel)

by Frisch, Belinda

  There was an undertone of secrecy between them.

  Jim smirked. “I have my own bed and everything. Anything else, Doc?”

  Nixon shook his head. “No, I think we’re all set. We’re about to head back downstairs.”

  “You sure you want to do that? This one looks like he’s seen a ghost already.” Jim scrunched up his aged face and the wrinkles folded into one another.

  Zach straightened up in the chair and lifted his chest, embarrassed by the fact that even an elderly man found him lacking. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Bad call on my part.” Jim clapped his rough hand on Zach’s shoulder. “Watch yourself down there, you hear?”

  * * * * *

  Miranda rolled down the windows of her black Ford Explorer and breathed in the crisp, spring air. It smelled of melted snow and mud and she loved the way it felt whipping through her ponytail.

  The gas light came on, the warning chime drawing her attention to the trip meter rolling 200 miles and the Strandville town line up ahead. Despite the town’s ominous name, it was every bit as peaceful as she imagined. Hers had been the only car for miles and she enjoyed a leisurely, sightseeing drive of modest houses and bustling farms—indicative of a simpler lifestyle than the city could have ever offered her. This was her do-over, her chance at anonymity. Her escape from the piteous stares and apologies.

  She adjusted the rearview mirror but there was, literally, no looking back. Boxes of things she didn’t entrust to the movers--things that belonged to the baby--blocked her view.

  “Hang in there.”

  She patted the dashboard and her stomach growled as she pulled into the parking lot of Porter’s, a mom-and-pop convenience store, to gas up. She stepped out on the crumbling pavement and gravel, opened the truck’s fuel door, and eyed the confederate flag-bearing truck that pulled up to the other side of the pump. Leonard Skynard blasted loudly through his open driver’s side window and she rolled her eyes at the stereotype.

  The driver was a filthy man with an unkempt, reddish beard and cut off jeans that exposed a particularly nasty skin problem. Non-healing ulcers covered his thick calves and oozed a yellow, syrupy fluid into his leg hair. His round, cirrhotic gut bulging out from under his too-small t-shirt gave him up as a likely alcoholic. Miranda took the kind of mental inventory needed to identify a suspect to the police. It was a new town and one could never be too careful. The redneck dry-humped her with his eyes and she bristled, returning a confident stare to let him know that he didn’t intimidate her. She was quite capable of handling him if she had to. Men in the city would have backed down, but not this guy. He spit out a gob of chewing tobacco-laced spit and wagged his eyebrows at her.

  “Sweet thang.” His dialect was something out of Deliverance.

  “I don’t think so.” Dirty old pervert.

  Miranda locked the truck and went inside to pay.

  The rickety front door creaked and a rusty old cowbell announced her entrance to the wood paneled, anything-you-could-want shop. This store had a butcher’s counter, a wall of coolers, windshield wipers, and Band-aids. A deli, a bakery, and an unsettling hardware selection of shovels, rope, and duct tape. Miranda tried to convince herself she’d adjust to the culture, that she’d gone hundreds of miles and not to some third world country, but when a heavy-set woman and her husband came in screaming behind her, she wondered.

  “I need to see Jack!” The woman shouted at the clerk--a pimple-faced boy whose eyes were barely visible through the curtain of greasy bangs--and then burst into tears.

  Miranda grabbed a bag of chips from the shelf and an iced tea from the cooler, checked the expiration date on both, and watched the escalating drama with curious interest.

  A short, heavy-set man wearing a blood-stained butcher’s jacket came from a back room.

  “How could you do this to us, Jack? How could you take it down?” The irate woman shook a missing person’s poster at him.

  The woman had lost her daughter.

  Miranda felt suddenly sick. She tapped her fingers nervously against the butcher-block counter while the clerk cashed her out and wished she could do something to help.

  No greater loss than that of a child.

  The clerk flattened the crumpled wad of cash she had handed him without taking his eyes off the hysterical woman.

  “I just…I don’t know where it went...” Jack pointed his thick finger at a corkboard on the wall behind him brimming with askew posters of dozens of missing women. “There are too many to keep track.”

  A thin man in baggy overalls set his hand on the woman’s trembling shoulder. “Beth, we have to go.”

  Miranda welled up with tears.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I’ll put it here, right here, front and center.” He ripped off two lengths of butcher’s tape and fastened the new poster to the meat counter’s glass, calming the woman just enough for her to notice Miranda.

  “Have you seen my daughter?” she asked. The smell of whiskey seeped from the woman’s pores.

  Miranda looked at the poster of 18-year-old Penny Hammond. Her chubby, pleasant face resembled her mother’s and she had a heartbreakingly radiant smile. “No, ma’am,” she said after a contemplative pause. “I’m sorry, I haven’t. I’m new here.” She knew the woman’s pain.

  “Beth, come on. Stop bothering the customers.” The thin man all but dragged her out the front door.

  The storeowner sighed with relief and nudged the clerk aside. “It’s not supposed to take this long to count out a customer’s change, Billy.” He finished Miranda’s order, but she was shaken and could tell he saw it. “I’m sorry about that. New in town, did you say?” He held out his bulky hand, attempting to soothe her with small talk. “Name’s Jack, Jack Porter.”

  “Miranda. Miranda Penton.”

  “Welcome to Strandville.”

  Billy moved on to mopping the aisle behind her. “You’re making a mistake coming here,” he grumbled.

  Jack shook his head. “I’m sorry about him. We don’t get too many people moving in, is all. I think what he meant to say is what brings you here?”

  “A job,” she said, preoccupied by the wallpapering of missing posters. All of the victims were young women, last seen within the year. Penny was one of the more recent, having only been missing for three months.

  Jack tried to distract her. “Must be one hell of a job to bring you all the way out here from the city.” His smile had sadness behind it.

  “How did you know I came in from the city?”

  “I know all the locals and we can spot city a mile away.” He handed her the change. “Take care of yourself, Miranda. Things in Strandville ain’t what they used to be.”

  4.

  Metal cages lined the perimeter of the lab. Stacked largest to smallest, they piled from the floor to about a foot from the ceiling. The stench of animal urine and feces made it hard for Zach to breathe.

  Nixon grinned. “This is what you came here for.”

  Zach scrunched up his face, confused. Not exactly.

  A man wearing a blue lab coat pulled on a pair of chainmail gloves and reached into a rattling cage. Whatever was inside growled, hissed, and went still when the intern sedated it.

  “Ben, come meet our newest member of Security.” Nixon looked down the barrel of one of three high-end microscopes and nodded, appearing pleased. “This is Zach Keller.” He introduced them without looking at either of them.

  Ben appeared to be in his thirties, even with the horseshoe-shaped bald spot on his head. “I’d shake,” he said, “but I don’t dare take my hand off this guy.” He held up a dusky, charcoal grey rat with milky white eyes and a long, hairless tail that draped over the back of his gloved hand. A large tumor-like growth protruded from behind its translucent ear and extended down his back like furry cauliflower.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Zach asked.

  Nixon leered. “We gave it cancer.”

  For all the people ever diagnosed with
the disease, the word, in Zach’s mind, belonged only to Allison.

  Ben tilted his head inquisitively. “Does he know?”

  Nixon took the rat from Ben and measured its tumor with a flexible measuring tape. “He was in the last delivery.”

  Zach couldn’t imagine the correlation.

  “It’s a lot to process.” Ben aspirated a half a cc of blood-tinged fluid from the tumor and the rat’s back legs twitched. “Think he’s about to wake up already. The sedative doesn’t last nearly as long as it used to.”

  Nixon shrugged. “Mark that down as side-effect one million and one.”

  Ben put the rat back in the cage and Zach raised his eyebrows, waiting for an explanation.

  Nixon shifted his weight and leaned on the metal lab table bolted to the floor. “About a year ago, six patients with unexplainable illness were air lifted here from a remote area of Haiti. Three of them were family--a father, mother, and their son. Two were male researchers sent to investigate the young boy that died and spontaneously resurrected in front of half of his village. It was as if he were a zombie, though I hate that term. Sounds more like a monster movie than an illness. We studied the biologicals, the disease’s process, and its effects. These people are cannibalistic walking dead. At least, they appear to be. I call them ‘infected’ because they are, in fact, infected by a ravenous, all-consuming virus. One that might save Allison’s life.”

  Zach remained quiet as he connected a series of wayward dots that formed no clear picture. Zombie. Virus. Cannibals. Rats. Baby. It was an unsolvable puzzle.

  Nixon examined a specimen under the microscope and scribbled down some notes. “Here, take a look. This is a slide of Allison’s tumor cells, from the one in her liver.” Zach looked at the magnified image of the disease destroying his wife, though he couldn’t have said that’s what it was if Nixon hadn’t told him. The cells had been stained and looked more like one of the images used to test for color blindness. “We learned early on that the infection, the virus we’re dealing with in the infected, thrives on oxygen-starved cells. Larger tumors, like Allison’s, lack organized blood capillaries. They develop oxygen-starved centers and the virus attacks the cancer cells from the inside out. Like a smart bomb. It doesn’t affect regular cells because they’re oxygenated.”

  Zach held his hand to his head, the information slowly digesting in what he assumed was an inaccurate way. “But what happens if you put the virus into someone? Is there a cure for that?”

  The formerly sedated rat charged its cage door. It gnashed its needle-like teeth around the cage bars and clawed its skin until it bled. Zach stepped back, startled.

  Nixon never answered his question. “Ben, you better get that.”

  Ben drew up another dose of the sedative with shaking hands.

  “Ben, hurry.” He seemed to be enjoying Ben’s panic.

  Tufts of rat fur danced in the air like feathers from a pillow fight. It was bleeding, badly, and the oozing darkness quickly soaked it through.

  Though Nixon was still smiling, he now massaged his forehead with both hands. “Come on.” A look of frustrated restraint washed over him, like this was all a test and Ben was failing it.

  The rat fell to its side and shred the meat of its throat with its claws. Ben was too late. The litter tray beneath the now lifeless rat filled with blood.

  Ben opened the cage door timidly. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” He prodded the rat. It didn’t move. “Shit!” He slammed the door closed and it bounced back hard, slamming into the cage next to it and waking its sleeping victim. “I can’t believe it. Do you know how hard I’ve been working on this? It’s the only one on the new treatment.”

  The treatment meant for Allison.

  Nixon slipped on a pair of examination gloves, lifted the rat’s chin, and assessed the extent of the damage. Every visible blood conduit was frayed and disconnected. “It’s a shame. It looked like the tumor was on-track to be cured.” His mood vacillated between anger, amusement, and annoyance. The pitch of his voice changed, his expressions running the gamut. He opened another of the small cages and pulled out another cancerous rat. “We’ll have to start over with a new subject. See, Zach, science is three steps forward, ten steps back. Ben, hand me its next dose.”

  “What is that?” Zach asked.

  “It’s a diluted, genetically altered version of the virus. We weakened the formula, and well, who knows what happened with that one?” Nixon’s brow furrowed and his voice got deeper.

  Zach noted the Jeckyll and Hyde change.

  Ben mopped up the mess in the mutilated rat’s cage, shaking his head back and forth with disappointment. He set the corpse on the exam table. Nixon snatched it up. His eyes narrowed and glimmered with twisted pleasure as he wrung the rat’s neck and pulled its head away from its body. He was like a child with a broken toy whose further destruction made no matter. The clicking and crunching of small bones compounded the moist sound of tearing flesh and a chill raced up Zach’s spine. Nixon tossed the two pieces of rat into the medical waste bin marked incinerator and said, “We can never be too careful.”

  5.

  Miranda pulled into the narrow driveway of her new Strandville home and tried to put the anxiety of what happened at Porter’s behind her. A tiny old woman, her landlady she guessed, appeared at her truck window. She smelled of moth balls and wet cat food.

  “Hello, Miss.” The woman’s improperly glued false teeth chattered.

  Miranda smoothed her wind-tangled hair back into a low ponytail and opened the car door slowly enough for the woman to shuffle clear of it.

  “You must be Iris,” Miranda smiled and stepped out of the SUV. At only five feet two, she wasn’t used to people being shorter than her. The top of Iris’s head barely came up to her shoulders.

  “And you must be Miranda.” Iris grabbed Miranda’s hand and her aged skin was like silky crepe paper over the knotty bones of a much larger woman. Her hunched back forced her gaze downward and she twisted her head to look at Miranda’s face. “It’s so nice to meet you. I’ve been looking forward to having a tenant again.” Her voice quieted and her next words seemed a reluctant confession. “It gets so quiet here…lonely, sometimes.”

  Miranda patted the old woman’s shoulder. “Well, I’m here now.”

  “I’m sure glad of it.”

  Miranda went around to the rear of the truck and dug past the pile of boxes for her camouflage duffel bag. Iris followed, close enough to be considered under foot.

  “I’d gladly help you take your things up,” she said, “but I haven’t been up those stairs in the ten years since my Ralph died.”

  “No worries,” Miranda said, half-thankful already for the steep stairs to the upstairs apartment that was now hers. “The movers will take care of things when they get here.”

  “That’s good. No need for a woman to do heavy lifting.”

  “Right, that’s what I’m paying them for.” Miranda stopped short of offending Iris’s 1920’s sensibilities by telling her what job she’d come to Strandville to do.

  Iris reached into the pocket of her shabby, cotton bathrobe and handed Miranda two keys on a silver ring. “I’m not sure if you’ll need a spare.”

  Miranda didn’t respond to the obvious information fishing. “You always need a spare,” she said and hoisted the duffel bag onto her shoulder. She closed the back of the Explorer and headed for the stairs.

  “Dear,” Iris called after her.

  Miranda turned and swept back the bit of hair that fell from her ponytail. “Yes?”

  Iris shuffled over to her and handed her a stack of stapled papers: a lease agreement, a personal information request sheet, and consent to a credit check that seemed too late, considering. “I mailed you a copy,” she said, “about a month ago.”

  Miranda vaguely remembered seeing them, but didn’t admit it. “I’ll get these back to you this evening.”

  “Don’t let the one get to you. I like to know who’s living over me and w
ith a single gal like you in a place like Strandville, it’s in your best interest to leave me someone to contact in case of emergency.”

  Even the old landlady knew about the disappearances.

  Miranda wasn’t halfway up the narrow stairs before Iris called after her again.

  “Miranda?”

  She chalked the pestering up to the newness of having a tenant, the loneliness of a woman riding out the end of her years, and tried to not look annoyed. “Yes, Iris?”

  “Would you like to have dinner with me?”

  A butterscotch tabby cat rubbed against Iris’s legs and purred. Miranda couldn’t help but wonder how many more were inside, how many stacks of wet cat food cans filled Iris’s pantry, and, with that in account what, exactly, dinner entailed.

  “Not tonight, but thank you. I really do need to get settled.”

  Iris turned to walk away, and this time Miranda stopped her. “Hey, Iris?”

  “Yes, dear?” She beamed from the acknowledgement.

  “How about you give me a rain check on dinner? I’ll cook.”

  Tears of happiness settled in the lines around Iris’s eyes. “Sounds delicious.”

  Miranda hadn’t even said what she’d be cooking.

  * * * * *

  Allison sat propped up in bed, half asleep and half watching T.V., when Zach walked into her room. The day wore him down and seeing her looking weaker than she had only hours ago made him wonder if he was being selfish trying to save her. He pulled a chair up to her bedside and sat hunched over, his chin resting on the railing.

  “Hey, beautiful.” He smoothed her black hair into a rough version of the bob-style that framed her formerly stunning face and reached for her hand. The weight she’d lost over the past several months sharpened the appearance of her bone structure and made the soft lines of her cheeks harsh. Jaundice yellowed her skin another shade darker to the color of honey mustard.

  She rolled her head toward him, her radiant blue eyes a stony gray under the overhead fluorescent light.