by John Russo
“Yes, that’s so, but it wasn’t my fault. It happened because I was doing the kind of work no one else would do. Other scientists were so scared that they abdicated their sacred duty. I paid the price. I thought I cured myself, but a special gene was passed on to you and your sister. It made both of you special. That’s the way you must think of it, Vicky. You’re very special and very beautiful, and I love you both very much.”
CHAPTER 11
When he hadn’t had any sort of communication from Jeff Sanders for almost a week, Sheriff Paul Harkness decided he had to make some kind of move. Jeff was supposed to keep in touch by means of a cell phone that he kept hidden in the lining of his backpack. He had actually made several furtive calls, and the sheriff took heart that things seemed to be going as well as could be expected.
On his first surreptitious call, Jeff informed Harkness that he had indeed gotten hired at the Melrose Medical Research Center, but was not yet in a position to learn anything much. Whatever was actually going on was hush-hush, and he wasn’t even allowed into certain buildings to clean up. He was employed at minimum wage as a janitor and handyman, but his work was confined to certain areas and everyplace else was off-limits to him. It was made excruciatingly clear to him that if he got caught where he didn’t belong, he’d be fired, or maybe worse.
Then, in a second call, Jeff told the sheriff that he suspected Spaz Bentley and Blake Parsons were somehow involved in Janice Fazio’s disappearance because of snatches of conversation he had overheard between them when they thought no one was close by. But he had no concrete evidence so far, and he was going to try to break into one of the off-limits buildings on the chance that he might uncover something. Harkness sternly advised Sanders not to do anything foolish and to abandon his undercover role if he sensed it was getting too dangerous. In his third risky phone call, Jeff sounded half spooked. He said he had failed to get into the off-limits building, and somebody might easily notice that the lock had been tampered with, and he might be toast if he was the only employee out there who might fall under the suspicion of the security guys, Bentley and Parsons. That was the last phone call from Jeff. After that, all communication from him ceased.
Then a burned-out vehicle was found within a couple miles of the Melrose Medical Research Center, a late-model Buick registered to a Mr. Albert Mathews, a college professor from New Jersey. His parents were contacted and said Albert had taken his wife and son on a vacation to Pennsylvania and had not stayed in touch with them, which was highly unusual. It was his habit to phone them every night from wherever they happened to be staying because otherwise he knew they would worry too much. But as of late, they hadn’t heard from him.
For the time being, Harkness didn’t tell Albert Mathews’s parents that his Buick was so totally destroyed by an arson fire that it had had to be identified by the VIN number on a flame-tarnished plate welded onto the burned and twisted frame.
Deeply worried about all these developments, some of which Deputy Jeff Sanders, so deep undercover, couldn’t possibly know about, Sheriff Harkness decided to try for a warrant that would enable him to swarm all over the Melrose Medical Research Center with a slew of heavily armed officers, round up everybody in there, and thoroughly search the place before anything incriminating could be gotten rid of. The sheriff was sure that rapid deployment and a fast, hard-hitting raid was exactly what this situation called for. He wanted to use the element of surprise to full advantage. There could be a lot of crazies out there, and maybe some of them would have no hesitation about shooting down lawmen if they were given half a chance.
Sheriff Harkness went before a judge, made the sketchy reports from Jeff sound more weighty than they actually were, and leaned his argument heavily on the only hard evidence at hand—the burned-out Buick and its missing occupants. To his great relief, the judge finally agreed with him that there was good reason to believe that Janice Fazio and some other innocent folks were being held at the Melrose place against their will, and therefore there was sufficient justification to issue a warrant that would enable law enforcement to act promptly and forcefully in order to potentially save lives.
CHAPTER 12
Tiffany entered a small workroom adjacent to her father’s laboratory, where Jeff Sanders lay unconscious on a stainless steel gurney. He was stripped nude, and his body was covered with bruises and burns.
Blake Parsons and Spaz Bentley had gotten the truth out of him, so far as he was capable of telling it, by beating him with a rubber hose and burning his flesh with lit cigarettes. Thankfully, he didn’t really know much. But that wasn’t for lack of trying.
Tiffany was the one who had caught him at his sneaky, traitorous game.
She had a sixth sense about such things.
She had never really believed much of anything he said about himself when he was riding in Hawk’s van with her and Hawk and Nutso. The only true and honest thing he had done was to freak out and start seeing zombies where there weren’t any. They were in his mind, and he couldn’t help it. He must have had a really bad experience with them back when he was younger. Maybe he was somehow a victim of the same outbreak in which her father had gotten bitten.
Suspicious of Jeff at all times, Tiffany had started to keep an eye on him whenever she could. And luckily she had followed him one dark night when he creeped out of his room and worked his way behind the building where the zombie cages were. He had his backpack with him, and he furtively unzipped it and groped around till he pulled out a cell phone. At that very moment, Tiffany got her little .25 automatic out of her purse and aimed it at him. “Drop the phone, Jeff!” she told him sternly. “Drop it or I’ll shoot you.”
He stared at her, his face taut, then he did as he was told. He dropped the phone in the dirt.
Tiffany said, “You were planning to rat on us, then cut out of here, right, Jeff?”
He stammered, “No. Why should I? I just got hired here.”
“And that happened because of me,” she confessed. “You didn’t know that, did you? I never trusted you, so I wanted you on a short leash. I wanted to give you enough rope to hang yourself, and now you’ve done so.”
“I was only going to call my wife, Amy. I never told you about her. I wanted to find some kind of work here so maybe I’d start making some money and she wouldn’t want to end our marriage.”
“Liar! I can smell cop all over you! I’ll bet some of the numbers you’ve called plug directly into the sheriff’s office.”
“No way!”
“It’s no use lying to me. I know you’re a traitor. Traitors used to be hanged in the old days during wartime, but out here we have our own version of the death penalty. It’s called the living death, Jeff.”
“Well put!” Blake said with a barking laugh. He had just arrived on the scene, and he had his gun drawn. So did his buddy, Spaz. Dr. Melrose was accompanying them, but unarmed, because he didn’t need to be. Tiffany turned toward him and said, “Jeffy here remembers the outbreak sixteen years ago all too well, Daddy. He suffers from flashbacks. Funny you two don’t remember each other from back then.”
“I think I do sort of remember him,” said Dr. Melrose. “In fact, I believe he was a cop. I never paid much attention to those dolts. They never made any great impression on me.”
“I’ve never laid eyes on you, but I’ve heard about you,” Jeff said. “You’re the wacky guy who got himself bitten. I wasn’t there, but I was close by, in another part of the cemetery, and we all heard about what happened. We all thought you should’ve been shot.”
“Of course you would think that way. You’re the type of person who would have joined the slavering mob who wanted to burn Galileo at the stake. You fear what you don’t understand. But I face ignorance bravely and use my intelligence and my scientific curiosity to unlock the secrets that benefit mankind.”
“Sure!” Jeff jeered. “Just like Dr. Mengele and all the rest of Hitler’s deranged Nazi scientists! They called themselves scientists, but they
were really a bunch of racist quacks!”
“You poor boy!” Dr. Melrose mocked. “You must have had an unfortunate and rather terrifying encounter with some of the undead. I can see that your mind is blown. You’re suffering from posttraumatic stress. Maybe you’d like to try to work through your disorder. We can help you reconnect with some of the undead from back then that we still have in our cages.”
“You kept some of them?” Jeff blurted. “Some of the ones who were infected?”
“We kept some, and we created others,” Dr. Melrose admitted, and there was a trace of pride in his voice. “We wanted to keep carrying out our experiments. I was bitten, and I had to try to save my own life. I had to learn more about what may have caused the plague. The government disagreed with me and wanted all experimentation to stop.”
Tiffany said, “They wanted to pretend it had never happened, or at least would never happen again.”
“I didn’t turn into one of the living dead,” said Dr. Melrose, “so I came to believe I was completely cured. I think now that I must have had a natural immunity, but it was incomplete. The virus must have hibernated inside my body, like the herpes or syphilis viruses will sometimes do. It came out in a mutated form in my two daughters, around the time they reached puberty. They need to drink human blood. They’re not flesh eaters. But when they take blood from someone, it transforms the victim into one of the undead, like the ones we keep in our cages.”
“You’re mad!” Jeff yelled. “You keep them for experiments! Part of your perversity is that you want to believe these crazy experiments might help you find a cure for your daughters!”
Doc Melrose burst out laughing at this—a maniacal, diabolical laugh to show that Jeff had missed his point. “Cure them?” he sneered. “Heh-heh! Oh no, not at all! I want to find a way to make everybody like them! Everybody! Everybody!”
“It’s such a noble goal, Daddy,” Tiffany assured him.
He went on rambling at Jeff because he was so proud of himself and he had a captive audience. “I suspect that Tiffany and Victoria will never die. Yet they have all their faculties—they are both highly intelligent, and they thoroughly enjoy art, music, etcetera. They are not like the ones we keep in the cages who cannot think except for a few basic instincts that animate their dead brains.”
All of this kind of talk brought on another of Jeff’s flashbacks and posttraumatic stress attacks. He totally went bananas. If he were an ape, he would have been ramming himself at them or at the bars of his cage and throwing his own feces at them. He was shaking and cursing and rolling on the ground punching zombies that weren’t even there, and Spaz and Blake stepped back and enjoyed it for a while, laughing uproariously and kicking Jeff with the toes of their boots. But finally they tired of the display. And they got Jeff into handcuffs and took him away to wait till he came to his senses, so they could interrogate him further. They had administered enough beatings and cigarette burnings to get to the bottom of everything he knew. But in their pent-up anger while they were grilling him, they had unintentionally treated him far too roughly. Tiffany had ordered them to keep him alive for the time being, but he kept on ranting and stupidly fighting back when they tried to handcuff him, and he had another episode of imaginary zombies, and they hit him too hard over the head with a blackjack.
Now he was in a coma.
Tiffany’s father was panicked. They all were. They knew now that Jeff Sanders was an undercover cop who had infiltrated his way in here to uncover secrets he wasn’t supposed to learn. But luckily Tiffany caught onto him, and she had flushed him out. And the unmasking of him had given her and her father a timely warning that evidence had to be destroyed or cleared out before lawmen arrived in full force.
Tiffany smiled enigmatically now as she looked down at Jeff. His breathing was very raspy and thin. She stroked his damp forehead as if he were someone she cared deeply about. And in a way, she did. She gazed at him almost tenderly. She held his moist hand and stroked his forehead. Then she used her two thumbs to peel back his eyelids so that his two eyeballs seemed to stare straight up at her, unseeingly.
Softly she said, “Can you see me, darling? Can you see me? Because I can see into what’s left of your soul.”
At that moment, the fangs that had been folded back against the roof of her mouth sprang forward, and she said, “You’re such a lovely man, and I’m going to love you to death.”
She sank her fangs into Jeff’s neck. And trickles of blood flowed as she pulled back. But she bent and drank again. Then she reached for a glass beaker that she had placed on a lab table under a glowing lamp. She brought the rim of the beaker up to the trickle of blood, and the beaker started to fill.
CHAPTER 13
Spaz pulled up just outside the cinder-block building in Hawk’s van, and Blake parked behind it in the Jeep in which he and Spaz had ridden four miles to where they had picked up Hawk’s van. Now Spaz jumped down from the van, and Blake jumped down from the Jeep. Blake said, “Let’s not fool around. Let’s get him out and haul him in. There’s a kickboxing match on TV tonight.”
“Well, we’re gonna need help,” Spaz griped. “Damned if I wanna rupture myself lifting that sucker.”
“Here they come now. They musta heard us pull up.”
Two small, wiry men in white lab coats, Morgan Holt and Luke Gentry, two of the same fellows who were on the scene when Dr. Melrose got bitten sixteen years ago, came out through a side door of the cinder-block building and started wheeling a gurney toward the rear of the van. Spaz and Blake came around and opened the cargo door so the two attendants could have a look at the task at hand. Staring bleakly at what was in there and shaking his head in distaste, Morgan said, “No wonder you need us to help you. Sucker looks like three hundred pounds or more!”
Spaz said, “He was close to four hundred when he was alive. Right now there’s not as much of him as there used to be.”
“How come?” asked Luke.
“No internal organs left,” Spaz explained, grinning. “I hit him with two shotgun blasts dead-center, almost cut him in two, and blew away his insides. The middle of him is almost totally gone. We wrapped the sleeping bag around him so he wouldn’t come apart. That would’ve been a helluva mess.”
“He’s good for nothing but zombie feed now,” said Blake. “We’ll feed him to the ones that didn’t eat yet.”
They hoisted what was left of Nutso’s dead body out of the van and onto the gurney. As Luke and Morgan wheeled the gurney toward the building, Blake and Spaz went to their quarters to toss their clothes into a hamper. Then they showered away the blood and gore and kicked back with a couple of stiff drinks while they watched kickboxing.
“Let’s take him in through the side door. He’s too big, and now his arm’s hanging down,” said Morgan, and they wheeled the gurney, with some difficulty because of the rough gravel, around the right side of the building where there was a big garage-type door. Luke pressed a button, and with a rasping metallic sound, the door lifted, revealing steel cages of various sizes.
All told there were six cages in this building, which was an adjunct to the main laboratory where most of the experiments were carried out. There was a ramp that led directly from the cage room and into the laboratory so the zombies could be readily transported from one place to another as required.
One of the cages, with a sign on it that said CAGE ONE, was simply a large pen where newly created zombies could be kept en masse till they were categorized. This cage measured fifteen by twenty feet. Right now it contained nineteen inhabitants. DNA samples had been taken from each one, but the results weren’t yet analyzed because Dr. Melrose had such a huge workload. DNA analysis was of utmost importance to him due to the fact that obviously there was a genetic factor to the zombie disease, and so there must be some highly unique gene that had aborted the process by which he would have turned into one of the undead, and he desperately wanted to isolate it.
He had plenty of money in US banks and in Swiss
bank accounts from selling black market organs of the people he had captured to use as zombie feed or to turn into zombies for his experiments. He could afford to move his facilities to any other part of the country, but he maintained them right here near Willard, close to where the epidemic had started, because he and his parents, grandparents, and many of his ancestors had lived here. The most important DNA he could find in living people or in any of the undead was DNA with components that were a close match to his own. He was searching for a precise match to an anomalous gene that he had found in his own DNA, which he strongly suspected was the anomaly that had given him immunity from the zombie disease and had conferred special powers upon his two daughters.
Cage two was for zombies that Dr. Melrose wanted to separate from the rest because they were set to undergo some special procedure. It measured ten feet by ten feet, and at the moment it was occupied by four zombies on an experimental diet that consisted of corpse meat blended with artificial sweetener, vitamins, and minerals. The doctor was looking to discover a formula that could reduce the need in these ghouls for live human flesh, but so far nothing had worked.
Cage three measured only six feet by six feet, and it was for those unlucky folks who were doomed to become zombie feed, but not right away. Blake and Spaz called it “the pantry,” but they were careful not to let Dr. Melrose hear them say that because he had no sense of humor where his work was concerned. He was “deadly serious” about it, but that expression could not have been used to his face either, because he would have deplored it.
Today the occupants of Cage Three were the three members of the Mathews family, Albert, Meg, and Stevie. The parents were all right, but the son, like many teenagers, was a smart mouth, and Dr. Melrose had him gagged after he got tired of being cursed at. He wasn’t really sure what to do with the three of them. One choice was to have Tiffany take their blood and turn them into zombies for experimentation. The other choice was to use them for zombie feed, which the doctor had some qualms about, but they were from New Jersey, and to his knowledge he had no relatives from there, and so a link to his own DNA was unlikely. He had to concentrate his investigations on people living or undead who might share some of his own genes, and not waste valuable time on others when the results might be rather fruitless.
