“Just like commandoes, huh?” Dale said, still huffing from his run.
Donna frowned, but it was lost in the darkness. All she wanted about now was a big cup of cocoa and a cigarette. “It’s not exactly my idea of fun.”
“Let’s see if we can see anything in any of these windows,” Dale said. “Then we’ll split.” He started edging his way along the side of the house, careful not to trip on anything and alert whoever was in the house to their presence.
At the first illuminated window, Dale peeked his face slowly around the frame to spy inside. But if Dale had been expecting a view into a mad scientist’s secret lab, he was sorely disappointed. All he saw was a brightly lit waiting room, with overstuffed chairs, coffee tables spread with magazines and religious material, and a coat rack in the corner by the entrance. At the far end of the room was another open door, and from what little Dale could see, he thought it might be a showroom for coffins. He stiffened when he remembered sitting in the private waiting room in another funeral home, just prior to picking out a casket for Natalie.
Donna was still waiting at the corner of the house, thinking “this is his gig… let him do the snooping.” She was content to tag along. Hopefully they wouldn’t be arrested for whatever the hell they could charge you with for sneaking around someone’s house at night.
Dale left the first window and approached the embankment that dropped off into the sub-level doorway. He was just about to look over the edge when headlights swept around the driveway. A car pulled into the back parking lot from the street.
With a panicked glance back to where Donna was, he saw with relief that she had already ducked out of sight. Dale fell flat on the ground, praying that the embankment would shield him from the sight of whoever was arriving. He lay flat on his face, inhaling deeply of the fresh earth smell as the hiss of car tires did a long, slow turn in the driveway. Then, like a search light in a prisoner-of-war escape movie, the back of the house lit up brilliantly as the car came forward toward the doublewide doorway. Any second, now, Dale expected to hear the warbling wail of sirens. The car’s engine rumbled with a deep, throaty power, and Dale was burning to take one quick peek to see if it was a long, black limo.
As the car moved slowly down the ramp to the doorway, there was no sound of a door being opened, so Dale at least had one question answered: the door had been open, as if Rodgers had been expecting someone!
The car braked to a stop, its red brake lights lighting up the inside of the embankment like fire. The engine revved up once, then stopped. This was followed by the sound of a car door opening and slamming shut. Footsteps echoed hollowly up from the basement as the unknown person walked deeper into Rodgers’ basement.
“Good evening, Sam,” said a voice, unmistakably Rodgers’.
So far, so good, Dale thought, we haven’t gotten caught yet.
“Is he ready?” the man called Sam said gruffly. “I want to see him before you get your money this time.”
Rodgers made some reply, but it was lost as their footsteps retreated deeper into the basement. Again, there was no sound of the heavy door being run back down, so Dale figured Sam wasn’t planning on staying long.
Dale craned his neck around and looked back to where Donna had last been. For all he knew, she had panicked and run all the way back to the car as soon as she had seen the headlights. But no, he saw a dark blur of motion, and then she peeked out around the corner. She was hissing softly and waving at him. It was obvious to Dale that she did want to bug out, but he slowly raised himself and then, in a crouch, signaled for her to join him. It was a duel of wills for a moment, but Dale won. Crouching low, Donna tiptoed across the lawn and knelt down beside him.
“Let’s get the Christ out of here,” she said, her voice trembling. Her eyes were twin, pale saucers in the darkness, and Dale could feel her whole body shaking.
“There’s something really strange going on here,” Dale hissed in her ear. “Who around town here’s named Sam?”
Donna scrunched up her face for a moment and shook her head. “I don’t know! Christ! There are plenty of Sams. There’s Sam Talbot, Sam Hardy, he runs the little barbershop on Main Street. ’Course, there’s Sam Higgins.”
“Who’s he?”
“He and his family have lived here I think since the area was first settled. Sam’s one of the biggest land owners; makes most of his money farming.”
“Potatoes?”
Donna snickered. “What the hell else do you think?”
“Remember what Larry said on the tape?” Dale asked. He kept his eyes riveted to the doorway, expecting at any second to hear Sam’s car start up and back on out of there. “Larry said Rodgers was selling these zombies he was making to use during the potato harvest.”
“Do you realize how crazy you sound?” Donna asked. All she wanted to do was get the hell out of there. Never in her life, even more than after graduation, had she wanted to leave town and never come back.
“I know something’s up,” Dale said. “And I aim to find out what.” With that he swung his leg up over the embankment, positioned his hands, and silently vaulted to the sloped driveway below. He landed and caught his balance, then quickly signaled for Donna to follow. Clinging to the shadows, he edged his way down to the doorway. A wave of disappointment hit him when he saw Sam’s car and immediately realized that it probably hadn’t been the car that had tried to force them off the road. A few more steps inside, though, and he saw something that made his breath catch in his throat: it was obviously Rodgers’ car parked further inside. It was a long, sleek—and black—limousine.
Donna crept up silently behind him, and almost bumped into him in the dark when he stopped to run his hand along the side of the car.
“Does this car strike you as familiar?” he whispered.
Donna sniffed, afraid that if she opened her mouth, nothing would come out except a lung-ripping scream. She sure as shit did recognize this car!
Dale quickly went to the front of the car. Feeling around blindly, his fingers traced the smooth, polished chrome, but then something snagged his fingers. He couldn’t be sure without seeing it in the light, but it felt like a deep dent in the front fender. From ramming a car? he wondered as a chill spread through his veins.
“I think they went down there,” Dale whispered, pointing along a corridor that ran the length of the house. “Let’s go into this room over here. Maybe we can hear what’s going on through the wails and not get caught.”
Donna was shaking her head. The thought that filled her mind was that she and Dale were both going to end up on marble slabs down in this basement if Rodgers caught them. The door to the waiting room was unlocked. After a quick peek to make sure the room was empty, they tiptoed inside, pulling the door shut behind them. Dale wiggled the doorknob, making sure they weren’t just locking themselves in as they went.
“Do you think this could be a setup?” Donna whispered as they crossed the room and headed toward the casket display room.
Dale turned and looked at her, his mouth a firm, harsh line. “What do you mean?”
“I mean the door’s wide open to this place at night. Does that make sense to you? I would think an undertaker, even if he wasn’t doing something strange, would have some kind of security system. Wouldn’t it be, like, a state law or something? So people wouldn’t be breaking in and… I don’t know, stealing bodies and stuff?”
Dale shrugged as he leaned on the doorjamb and looked in on the long lines of caskets. There were at least thirty different varieties in this vast room, ranging from little more than an unpolished box with cheap satin liner and pillow to what had to be the Rolls Royce of caskets, heavy, ornate, and expensive. The only thing missing was a gold-inlay and diamond-studded coffin!
Dale was chilled by his own memories as he looked at row after row of coffins. All but two of them had their half-lids opened to reveal the plush interiors. He tried to keep away the mental image of Natalie, lying there in her soft puff of pink
satin, her fingers laced stiffly across her chest, her face and lips looking so lifelike.
Enough so you almost expected her to get up!
There were two other doors leading into this display room. One, double-wide, like the outside doorway, obviously led directly to the basement and the ramp up. The other door, at the far end of the room, just as obviously led to Rodgers’ laboratory where he eviscerated the deceased, and gave them their jolt of embalming fluid. It was where he applied makeup and other cosmetics, so the living could admire the dead, muttering softly as they proceeded by, “Oh, he looks just like himself!”
In the back of his mind, he again heard Larry Cole’s frantic, nearly insane voice say:
…taking dead people and turning them into… into… zombies!
Dale stepped into the display room with Donna close at his heels. He could faintly hear the buzzing of voices through the wall, and he was thinking he could maybe learn all he needed to know if he could just hear what Rodgers and Sam were saying. They were halfway across the floor, though, when the door from the laboratory started to swing open. With a barely suppressed shout, Dale shoved Donna in between two of the caskets and quickly ducked in behind her. Crouching low, they scurried to the far end of the room as footsteps approached and the voices got louder.
“Oh,” Rodgers said, his voice swelling with pride, “just wait until you see him. This is, without a doubt, my best work. Here, see for yourself.”
Dale and Donna tensed when the footsteps stopped beside one of the caskets. Was that one of the closed ones? Dale wondered frantically. Peering under the tables that supported the caskets, all he could see were two pairs of legs from the knees down.
“You open the lid,” Rodgers’ voice boomed, “and see for yourself.”
Dale cast an anxious glance back at Donna, who was shivering as she crouched beneath the casket display. She had one hand clapped over her mouth, and her eyes were opened so wide Dale could see white all around the pupils. She took her hand away to whisper something to him, but he shushed her with a wave of his hand.
From where Rodgers and Sam were standing, there was a soft click, and then someone, probably Sam, grunted as he raised the casket lid, as Rodgers had directed.
“My goodness,” Sam said, his voice hushed with awe. “That certainly is incredible!”
“Like I said, he’s definitely my best yet,” Rodgers said.
Dale was burning to know what or who they were looking at. They certainly weren’t admiring the wood finish on one of the coffins.
What in the name of Christ is going on? he wondered, as he considered what they should do next. The options were definitely limited: he either had to maneuver so he could see what they were looking at, or he and Donna were going to get the hell out of there and convince Winfield he had to investigate. Playing the tape for him might convince him!
Maybe now, Dale thought, they could or should trust Winfield and if they were going to, now wouldn’t be such a bad time to get him out here. But getting Winfield out here first required that they get out.
Dale’s hands were slick with sweat as he crouched on the carpeted floor, wondering which way to turn. The door back into the waiting room, at least for now, was out of the question; Rodgers would easily see them as soon as they made a break. But if they waited for Rodgers and Sam to leave… hell, they might be here all night. And if either Rodgers or Sam for any reason happened to lean over, they would easily spot them.
“And watch how well he obeys,” Rodgers said. Dale tensed, and the next words her heard rang in his ears like the heavy pounding of a hammer on metal.
“Larry,” Rodgers said, his voice deep and commanding, “I want you to get up now.”
In the tingling silence that followed the command, the only sound in the room was the heavy rustling of something shifting weight on slick satin. Someone groaned deeply, and the sound reminded Dale of a heavy oak door, swinging slowly open.
Donna was cringing back against one of the table legs, shaking her head slowly back and forth, as though what she had heard couldn’t be real! Whatever was happening over there, she wanted absolutely no part of it!
Dale knew he had to see it with his own eyes before he would truly believe what he feared was happening in the casket. He tried unsuccessfully to block out the images that rushed into his mind as he quietly edged his face around the side of one of the caskets. He felt a flicker of relief when he saw that both Rodgers and Sam were standing back to him, but what he saw made the blood stop in his veins.
He was staring straight into the dead eyes of Larry Cole! His face was a tangle of dark, rotten meat, showing strips of sick-looking pink beneath, and he was slowly rising from his coffin. One side of his head was sheared clean of hair, giving him an odd, lopsided look. Either his lips were skinned back in a grimace, or they were gone, possibly burned off in the car crash. His teeth were chattering from the effort of movement, and the hollow clicking sounds they made reminded Dale of Mrs. Appleby’s ever-present knitting needles. Larry’s eyelids were peeled back, exposing sickly, yellow orbs; and the pupils had swollen to the size of twin black marbles that looked blankly ahead, directly at Dale, where he crouched.
Like Rodgers’ left eye! Dale’s mind screamed, his breath catching in his throat like a tangle of briars.
As Larry sat up stiffly in the casket, Rodgers and Sam each took a few involuntary steps backwards. Then they turned, looked at each other, and, nodded.
“You see,” Rodgers said, stroking his chin, “I had to continually modify the ingredients of the compound. The important thing, I’m sure you’ll agree, is control. The drug cannot be effective unless it completely reduces the individual’s will and his sense of purpose.”
“Don’t tell me about control,” Sam said sharply. “Considering the problems we had with those last two you sold me.”
“It was a mistake, I’ll admit. But all the ones before those two are still fine, correct?”
Sam nodded.
“And I assure you it won’t happen again with this one or any others. The drug is perfectly balanced now, and, although I’m quite sure the individual is still dimly aware that he is or was living, there’s no motivation to do anything except what he’s told to do.”
“And what about the other problems?” Sam said. He turned sideways to face Rodgers, and when he did, Dale got a good look at his face. Quickly signaling Donna, he slid back behind the casket so she could sneak a look.
“Is that Higgins?” Dale whispered at her ear.
After only a split-second look, Donna ducked back down. Her mouth was set in a grim line as she nodded her head yes.
“The deterioration rate, yes,” Rodgers said. “Well, when you consider all the factors, we’re lucky they last as long as they do. Repeated doses of the drug in liquid form will maintain this state for… well, what’s the longest time you’ve had one last?”
Higgins scratched behind his ear. “I think I had a couple that lasted nearly two years before they… well, you know what happens.”
Rodgers cleared his throat and cast a glance at Larry, who was now sitting bolt-upright in the casket, his eyes vacantly focused straight ahead. “I’ve told you, I’m sure,” he said, “what my studies in Haiti indicated.”
Higgins nodded.
“Unless you can think of some way to provide a steady diet of human brains, your workers will inevitably deteriorate with time. There’s really no way I know of yet, to stop the body’s decomposition. I’m working on it.”
Higgins shook his head vigorously from side to side. “No I don’t want to get into that,” he said, his voice taking on a trembling edge. “I mean, what we’re doing with these is bad enough. I’m not going to start murdering people just to feed these things.”
Rodgers tossed his hands up into the air and then clapped them to his side. “Well, you certainly can’t have it both ways. Besides, it’s not as though we haven’t on occasion arranged, shall we say, a bit of an accident for someone who’s per
haps a little too close to our project.”
“Look!” Higgins said, suddenly turning on Rodgers and jabbing a forefinger at him. “I pay you to do what you do, and for now it works out just fine for both of us. I get cheap labor, and you get to ‘experiment’ with your drugs and potions. At least so far, by moving them around frequently, and not being too obvious, we’ve been able to keep the police and people around town here from getting suspicious. Let’s just leave it at that, all right?”
“I mean nothing by it,” Rodgers said placidly. He took Higgins by the arm and turned him toward the door. Dale just had time to snap down behind the casket, and as the footsteps approached, he and Donna wriggled under the table to the other side.
“Do you want to take this one with you tonight?” Rodgers asked.
Higgins huffed. “You said you had another one that will be ready by tomorrow night?”
“Yes,” Rodgers said. Dale could see their legs as they stopped by the waiting room door. “That poor chap, Mr. Perry, who died this afternoon in the hospital. He’s in the lab now, but after the fuss that friend of this one made about the closed casket, I’m going to have to wait until after the ceremony to get him out of the coffin and give him the final dose.”
“I suppose, then, that I could wait until tomorrow night to pick them up,” Higgins said as he walked out into the waiting room.
Dale saw this as his chance to escape, and pointing toward the door that led to the laboratory, told Donna to get going. Higgins and Rodgers were through the doorway when Dale and Donna stood up and made a dash for the door. If there was an exit from the lab they would be safe; if not…
Donna was at the door, fumbling to turn the knob, and Dale was just a few paces behind her when from behind them, they heard a loud, gurgling moan that froze them both. Glancing over his shoulder, Dale saw Larry’s wide, black, empty eyes fixed unblinkingly on him. His arms were raised, reaching out toward him as though in greeting. Does he recognize me? Dale thought, his heart all but bursting from his chest.
Again, the moan issued, this time louder, from Larry’s dead throat. Satin hissed and dry ligaments crackled like ice underfoot as Larry struggled to kick his legs free of the confining coffin.
The Siege Page 27
