by Zombie Eyes
Leonard continued, stopping at one point to place a finger on one word of the parchment that looked to Stroud like the tail feather of a bird. “This creature has the power to blow storms into the minds of men, and to become a parasite in the brain.”
Stroud wondered for a moment if Dr. Leonard had gone mad. He didn’t know how much of Leonard’s spiel he could believe. “Whoa, wait a minute, Dr. Leonard. Are you trying to say that the Etruscans understood the physiological mechanisms that this demon used against them, and is now using against us? That they had the capability to assess—”
“Apparently the author of this did,” said Leonard, poking his finger in the direction of the document under the magnifying glass. Stroud stared at it for some time and then a word on the page leaped out at him:
Mysterious Photograph
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The word seemed to have some meaning for Stroud, but he wasn’t sure why. It was the last word on the document. He asked Leonard to translate it.
“That is the name of the author, a soothsayer or some such.”
“I see.”
“Not very often do we get such a document signed,” said Wiz.
“What is the name?”
“Well, it lines up like this,” said Leonard, showing him the written translation, which read:
ESROUD
Stroud stared dumbstruck at the name: Esruad. “Are you sure? There’s no mistake?”
“It would seem the name has significance,” said Leonard.
“You might say so. Weitzel spoke the name just before he died. He called me Esruad. You also, Dr. Wisnewski, when I first came to you in the psychiatric ward. Do you recall?”
Wisnewski shook his head vigorously. “Not at all.”
“There seems to be something important in the name. Does it say what this man Esruad did during the plague time?”
“He speaks of despair, that no one would listen to him. He had been something of an alchemist, it appears,” said Leonard.
“What about the monster itself?” asked Wiz impatiently.
“A dreadful thing to behold, it says. Esruad calls it the Ubbrroxx; describes it as life-eating, life-draining, diabolical … unleashed … uninhibited … disease-carrying.”
“Sounds like our creature,” said Wisnewski.
“Remarkably so,” agreed Stroud.
“And this fellow Esruad … He sounds familiar to me, too,” began Leonard. “I must go over some old notes of my own. If memory serves, he was a kind of prophet, soothsayer. Very little is known about him, but recent archeological breakthroughs in Tuscany have provided a few rays of light.”
Wiz added, “No Etruscan literature other than funeral inscriptions survives, which makes this little piece of paper priceless.”
Pulling at his tie Leonard continued, “Until recently it was near impossible to understand all but a few words, but the alphabet is a mix of Roman, Phoenician and an unknown tongue—very likely the Etruscans’ ancestors. They traded with the Greeks and the Phoenicians, and most of what we know about them is told us by these other peoples.”
“Right at the moment, I think it more prudent to understand the creature,” said Wiz. “We can play history games later. What does it say about destroying the thing?”
“Esruad was unsuccessful.”
“Obviously.”
“It took 500,000 lives in the year 793 b.c. There was no stopping it.”
“Just as I said, 500,000 lives,” replied Wiz.
“But not the lives of the zombies. They lived on after with the guilt of thousands of others on their hands. They—the diseased ones—herded the healthy ones into the pit. When the creature was sated Esruad convinced his people that it must be removed. Using mostly slave labor, this was accomplished. It had gone into a dormant phase, during which time Esruad removed it and placed it on a ship. It was buried in the ship, packed in its own earth ball, and literally sent off into what was then space. It was buried months later, far beyond the seas, still inside the belly of the ship, along with the bones of those sacrificed to it.”
“The land beyond the sea … here and now.” Stroud began to pace the room wondering if this was some kind of eschatological rite of passage for the creature, the “last thing” to come. Every religion had a last coming, a last end to history, a final conclusion to the grand pageant of mankind on earth. He began to wonder if the lives of 500,000 were not a small price to pay. Wisnewski and Leonard were quiet, perhaps with the same thoughts, Stroud guessed.
“I wonder if 500,000 lives will be enough for it this time,” Wisnewski said, as if reading Stroud’s mind.
The three archeologists looked again at the strange Etruscan lettering as if an answer lay somewhere in the writings of an ancient. “We sure as hell can’t do what Esruad did,” said Leonard. “What? Give up hundreds of thousands of lives to it, pray it goes dormant again? Attempt a removal? Send it off into … into outer space or to the bottommost realms of the deep?”
“No, it must be housed in earth,” said Stroud.
“What?”
“We don’t know what kind of evil would be unleashed on the planet if it were to come into contact with salt water or even the vacuum of space. If Dr. Cline’s experiments told me anything, it is that we must keep it away from water. Water only makes it airborne.”
“What do you suggest, then?” pleaded Leonard.
“Esruad constructed a stone enclosure around the ship,” said Stroud, “in what was an uninhabited land.”
“Environmentally sound thinking,” said Wiz.
“The best he could do in his day,” continued Stroud. “We’ve got an obligation to do better, we with all our modern technology.”
“Meanwhile,” Wiz said acidly, “it’s back and it’s waited a long time for a meal.”
Stroud nodded. “And it looks like we’re it, unless we can find a way to beat it.”
“Esruad couldn’t find a way.”
“I still have some yet to decipher,” said Leonard. “Just thought you two ought to know what I’ve learned.”
“Good work, Samuel,” said Wiz.
Stroud agreed. “Yes, very good work.”
Leonard went back to work. A worried Wisnewski took Stroud aside and asked, “How much of this do you think men like Nathan and Perkins and our Bill Leamy are going to buy? Before it is too late, I mean.”
“Wiz, my friend, it may already be too late. If what Sam says is true, this army of comatose people will soon awaken to rise up against the rest of us, and we’ll be forced to either destroy them or be destroyed.”
“Imagine a sentient, diabolical being with the power to exact such tribute from the human race.”
“Sentient, yes.Diabolical, yes, to every degree. And the worst of it is that it will turn us against one another, Wiz. That it will feed on humans is only the tip of the iceberg; that it will set in motion evil working through mankind for eons to come, this makes this thing from below satanic.”
“We’ve got to find a way to fight back.”
“Couldn’t agree with you more.”
“Cline’s antidote, the stuff that helped Leonard … is it the answer?”
“Afraid not. She tells me that it is only working in a small fraction of the cases. Most have succumbed too completely to be reached. It seems to help only in cases not too far advanced.”
“So all these comatose people, all these madmen running about the city like wolves in packs … it’s all a fermentation process, and when the fermenting is done…”
“Then we’ll see the city fall like a house of cards as men are turned agai
nst men, as the sacrifices begin.”
-10-
At St. Stephen’s Hospital in the middle of Manhattan, Dr. Kendra Cline and her assistants continued to work tirelessly on an antidote that wouldn’t throw the victims of this plague into a catastrophic fit that, for some, had ended in death. Leonard had been the rare exception. She theorized that the protective wear and the fact he and Stroud and Wisnewski had been breathing untainted oxygen had gone far to combat the ravishes of the paralyzing disease. To date they had had only a handful of successes. Those who were infected simply were not responding to the treatment, except to die of it, which, as the grim word getting around the hospital had it, wasn’t such a bad cure, given the alternative of a vegetative state.
All the hospital’s equipment was strained beyond the limits.
She heard a noise outside the lab, some disturbance, people cheering. Her intercom buzzed. It was Mark, shouting, “We’re seeing some activity in here, Dr. Cline. You’ll want to come see for yourself.”
“Activity? What kind of—”
“They’re coming around, all of them, on their own.”
“The comatose patients?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“Yes. Come quickly.”
She could hear her staff cheering in the background. So why did she feel a cold wave of eerie fear grip her heart? There was something on the other side of her sane world, scratching with a satanic talon to rip sanity from her. She could feel it close at hand like the rush of the A/C whenever she sat below the vent. Like something trapped in the wall, scratching to get in … or out.
She was suddenly aware of an ominous silence outside. She got up and rushed to the monitoring room, where she stood frozen with the others this side of the glass that separated them from the walking zombies on the other side. What was at first thought a remarkable, unprecedented medical phenomenon was fast becoming a nightmare. The people whose limbs worked, who had snatched out their IVs, dragging them along behind, unfeeling, unthinking and unseeing, stared back at the fully living with green-hued eyes that bored through them. The jubilation of Cline’s staff had ended abruptly with the realization that these zombies had the use of their limbs and muscles but not their minds. It was clear that they were like so many marionettes, their bodies manipulated by unseen hands.
They raised their hands and arms in unison and pounded with all their combined weight against the thick glass partition, which resounded with a barrel noise as it held. They brought their combined force against the glass a second time, a third, a fourth, as the interns, nurses and doctors watched in horror.
The zombies, on the fifth attack against the glass, used their heads along with their forearms, bloodying themselves in their relentless obsession to break through. The glass shattered but held at first, a spider’s web of crackling lines now masking the horror somewhat, snapping Kendra and the others out of their awe-inspired helplessness.
“Call for help! Mark, get on the phone!” she shouted.
“Who do I call? Orderlies won’t touch these guys.”
Tom shouted from his phone, “It’s happening on every floor, every isolation ward!”
“What?”
“Every comatose patient is walking out of the hospital.”
The glass was hit again and again and it began to crumble. Some men and women who tried to subdue the flood of zombies were grabbed and lifted and carried before the army. Mark and Tom uselessly threw hefty notebooks and chairs at the front of the line, trying to slow their progress as they ushered everyone back. Mark grabbed Dr. Cline, pushing her through the door.
Once everyone who was able had gotten beyond the door, it was locked behind them, but suddenly the door was being rammed. The zombies attacked it without letup again and again and again.
“I’ve got to call Stroud,” Kendra called out, racing back into her lab, but there she saw that some of the zombies had opted for a second way out of the isolation ward, having battered through a wall, using the bodies of some of her dead staff as their battering rams. She raced from here, and now the zombies were coming through the locked door of the monitoring room, the bodies of other blood-soaked men and women used as battering rams dropped before them and trampled underfoot.
The zombies made for the corridors, the stairwells, the exits, and before them ran the staff.
Kendra found nurses cringing behind a desk on the floor below who told her they’d telephoned police, but that the same thing was happening all over New York, at every hospital and clinic that had taken in victims of the plague, that they were all moving and killing as they went.
From the windows they saw a flood of zombies amassing in the streets going blindly toward some unknown destination. “Like an army of mindless insects,” said one of the nurses from a window on the twenty-ninth floor.
“Where are they going?” asked another.
Then it dawned on Kendra exactly where the zombies were going. Their goal had to be the pit at the Gordon Construction site. Gordon meant to bulldoze over the pit, having changed the design of his massive tower, but something in the pit had other plans.
She raced for the phone and dialed Stroud at the Museum of Antiquities. It seemed to ring forever before Wisnewski answered it, and when she pleaded for Stroud, he told her that Abe was just getting some much-needed sleep.
“Wake him, dammit! This is important, Doctor.”
“What’s happened?”
“Please, I must speak to Stroud.”
It seemed another eternity before Stroud got on the phone. She almost screamed. “There’s something terribly wrong going on out here, Stroud!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Our comatose patients … all got up—” Her voice was out of control.
“Then your antidote is working!”
“No! No, it isn’t! They’re—they’ve attacked us.”
“Attacked?”
“En masse! They’ve become like—like zombies, Stroud, and it’s happening all over the city, and—”
“Easy, easy—”
“—and they’re all heading for the pit, toward Gordon’s damned hole!”
“Christ, it’s happening.”
“What?” She was suddenly confused. “You expected this?”
“No, not so soon, anyway. This thing must be incredibly powerful.”
“Gordon’s people must be warned, and Nathan’s—”
“Gordon’s people?”
“Don’t you see, it’s got to do with Gordon’s people back at the construction site.”
“But we had an agreement with the mayor that—”
“All bets are off. You’ve been so secluded at the museum that you don’t know what’s going on. Gordon’s calling the shots now.”
“Dammit! The fool has precipitated this. Damn him!”
“Gordon’s planning to bulldoze the site and—”
“Seal it off? Dammit, don’t those fools know that this thing is not in the pit any longer, that it’s among us! In us! If we seal the site off, we seal our own fates. Where is Nathan in all this?”
“I don’t know … Gordon’s overseeing the work.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the hospital! I was on my way to see you when—”
“Are you all right?”
“—all right? My patients are walking out on me like so many zombies, Abe!”
“But you’re physically all right?”
“Yes, yes, but—”
“Good, then do what I ask.”
“Whatever you say.”
“That concoction you put together for Leonard. It may be our only hope at this point. Is there any way to transport as much of it as possible to the construction site?”
“Yes, but … but why?”
“We may have to use it, Kendra.”
“Use it? On the zombies?”
“It may be our only hope. Those zombies as you call them are bent on destroying us, Kendra. Don’t ask me how I
know this, there isn’t time. Just trust me.”
“You’ll need some way to inject the antidote—or should we now call it poison?”
“For any of those who come to the pit, consider it poison, I’m afraid. And yes, anything you can do about injecting literally hundreds … please bring your tools and your ideas. I’ll meet you at the site.”
Kendra got on the P.A. system and gathered what remained of her staff and debriefed them as quickly as possible. She asked for volunteers to go with her to the Gordon Construction site carrying the necessary materials Stroud had requested. Only Mark and Tom volunteered.
“All right,” she said, “we’ll need all the protective gear we can gather up. We’ll need all the syringes and dart guns we can find, and we’ll need every ounce of the … the so-called antidote. Everyone else remaining behind, I want you to go into producing more of this poison. It may be the only weapon we have against those zombies. And don’t roll your eyes at me. I know these zombies were people once, but at the moment, they will kill you in order to see their ends met. Now, do as I say.”
Very soon after this Tom Logan and Mark Williams had loaded a medical van in the parking lot with all the materials at their disposal, and they were now racing for the Gordon site and the fearful pit where they would link up with Abraham Stroud.
Abraham Stroud tried desperately to stop the mammoth machines at Gordon Construction from moving in to seal off the mysterious Etruscan ship. But police, ordered to control the strange, growing crowd of zombies and madmen that had encircled the construction site, dragged Stroud away from the dozers and to James Nathan. Not even the C.P. was listening to any more rhetoric. He shouted at Stroud, “It’s time we took action!”
“Blindly?Stupidly?”
“Any damned way we can get it!” His anger and his words were a mirroring of the feelings of almost all of the citizens of New York City. Thus far, the evil was dividing them, one against the other, as sharply as a meat cleaver. Stroud continued to argue. “But we’re going to need access to the damned pit, to the ship! Nathan! We’re close!”
“Not close enough,” came a sharp-edged voice beyond Nathan. It was one of the construction guys, the boss from the look of the man. He pointed skyward. “Here comes Sir Arthur now.”