Zombies! (Episode 4): The Sick and the Dead
Page 6
"Busy today," Heron noted.
She nodded.
"Something on your mind?" he asked just as she was wondering the same thing about him. His tone of voice was different from the usual.
She was just about to answer when she caught a glance of Whitaker out of the corner of her eye. He was discussing something with the trainer but spared the time to flash her a disdainful look. A visit from Heron usually meant a break. They couldn't afford to be shorthanded right now.
"I don't really have time to talk," Abby said, motioning toward Whitaker. Heron looked over and saw the expression on the kid's face. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen him looking so intense. Apparently, in recent weeks, Whitaker had developed a taste for hustle and bustle. He was attacking his job with gusto, almost showing ambition.
Heron nodded, a bit disappointed, and turned to leave.
"Just…" Abby called after him, stopping him in his tracks. She came out from around the counter and moved in close to him. "It's going to sound like nothing. It probably is nothing."
"Let's have it."
"One of our customers didn't show up for her regular workout today."
"You're right," he said. "That doesn't sound like much of anything."
She frowned. "You don't know Suzanna. She's a workout nut. I mean obsessive.""
"So? There are any number of reasons why she might not have shown up."
"I know, I know. But she was kind of sniffly on Friday when I saw her and Larry Koplowitz was her workout partner, and I think maybe more."
Heron successfully hid his reaction. Larry Koplowitz had changed his life. He'd been the first zombie, killed on the street by Shawn Rudd. The investigation into Koplowitz's identity had led Heron and Stemmy to his apartment where his zombie daughter had taken a bite out of Stemmy's calf.
"I'll check it out. Do you have an address?"
Rushing back to the computer, Abby punched in the information for Suzanna DeForest and scribbled it onto a sticky note. Tearing it off of the pad, she handed it to Heron. "Will you call me when you know?"
"Sure," he answered. "It'll be later, though."
She smiled, relieved. So relieved, in fact, that she was able to slide easily back into her work when he was gone.
***
LATER that day, Heron and Culph went to the building where Suzanna DeForest kept an apartment. Though Abby's hunch seemed unlikely, Culph had practically begged to come along. Running simulations is fun for a couple of hours, but a man like Culph needs to see some real action. As they marched through the front doors, Heron was vividly reminded of his last call with Stemmy. The attack of poisonous nostalgia was so strong that he needed to look directly at Culph just to soak in the differences between him and his late partner. Their age. Their attitude. Their look.
"What?" Culph asked him.
"Nothing." It didn't help that Eileen had chosen this particular day to shut him out. Even as that thought flitted through his mind, he realized it wasn't fair. She hadn't chosen the day with an ulterior motive. As they rode the elevator up the seven floors Heron realized and maybe even understood just how hard it must have been for Eileen to have that conversation with him. She and her family were suffering in a way he could not even comprehend and it meant nothing to him. He had been selfish. He wondered what would Alicia say when he told her? Would she be relieved that the Stemmys were completely out of their lives? Relieved like she was when she'd learned of Stemmy's death? Wait. That wasn't fair either.
"Get your head in the game," Culph said, tugging him out of the elevator.
Heron looked at him, blankly, and then offended. "I don't need a babysitter," he snapped.
"Look man, you've been off ever since you picked me up. I don't care if you don't want to talk to me, but if you think we're going to meet a zombie, you'd better snap out of it."
It would have been more than difficult for Heron to admit that Culph was right so he didn't bother. Instead, he marched past him with purpose, striding confidently up to Suzanna's apartment door. He knocked.
There was no answer.
He knocked again.
"Ms. DeForest, are you in there?" he called. "My name is Anthony Heron and I'm a policeman."
Culph rolled his eyes.
Heron knocked again.
Still, there was no answer.
Impatient, Culph reached forward and tried the knob. It turned and the door opened a crack. Even through just that crack, they could smell it. They looked at each other as Culph drew his pistol.
Heron put a hand out. "Go gear up."
"What? That'll take twenty minutes. She lives alone. You said so yourself."
"That doesn't mean she is alone. Go get your gear."
"Come on, man. Let me just check…"
"Hey!" Culph fell silent. "This isn't a video game or some exciting adventure. Go get your gear and then you can check it out."
Culph glowered at him for a moment, then turned and left. Instead of waiting for the elevator, he plowed into the stairwell, the door banging against the wall. Heron reached out to close the door and hesitated. They'd just spent ten seconds shouting at each other and there was no sign of any trouble. To the best of his knowledge, any indication of a living meal should have called the undead from anywhere in the apartment to the door that they had stupidly left open. It was possible, just possible, that there was nothing more than a dead body inside and this was something he'd be able to turn over to the homicide team.
Not likely.
Pulling his gun, Heron pushed the door open. The odor was stronger now but the apartment was empty. The shades were drawn so it was dark. He reached around the side of the door frame and found a switch. It lit up a sixty watt entryway bulb. It was more than enough light to show him that the small space was clear. Checking first behind the door, he moved inside.
Culph was going to be pissed.
Inside, he discovered a small apartment, perfect for a single woman. There was a certain amount of taste to the décor but it bespoke of a person whose interests lay elsewhere. Much of what he saw was either minimalist or practical or both.
The entryway led into a short corridor. On the left was an opening that showed a sizeable kitchen. On the right was a small square room that clearly served as the living room. Further back, Heron could see an open door with light coming from it. From his less than ideal perspective, he guessed it was a bathroom. Opposite the bathroom was a closed door that had the look of a closet. At the end of the corridor was a darkened bedroom.
Heart beating in his chest, cancerous lungs trying to keep up with his heavy breathing, Heron moved inside, flipping on lights as he went. He took a glance in the kitchen and a glance in the living room. Both empty upon observation. There weren't many places to hide in the kitchen. There was a small table with 2 chairs and a tablecloth. Though he didn't see any shadows under the covering, he checked it just to be sure.
The kitchen was clear.
Next he checked the living room. To say that there were plenty of places to hide in that room was best classified as an accurate overstatement. Compared to the kitchen, this room was a maze of furniture and draperies. Compared to other places, it was practically bare. Heron cleared the room in less than a minute, satisfied that there was nowhere a human, even a child, could hide.
As he moved down the corridor toward the bathroom, the odor grew stronger. It didn't escape him that the fact that the bathroom light was on was a good indication that he would find something in there. And so he did. Splattered across the floor was a Jackson Pollack pattern of dark spots and thin lines. Though the hue of the spots was different in different places, it was definitely blood. The greatest concentration of the blood was on the side of the bathtub itself. It looked as if a great big balloon full of blood had been broken against the it. There was also blood on the toilet and blood in the sink. The color of the blood in the sink was lighter, washed out. Someone had tried to clean his hands but not bothered to rinse out the sink.
There was no body.
He tensed, ready to rush the open door when he heard something from the bedroom. He froze, his body going numb. Heron had not dealt directly with the undead since his chance encounter at Sisters of Charity. His surgery had kept him chained to his house and then to a desk for a long time. Though he'd been on the go for a week, he still hadn't taken any calls. That he was there in that apartment was just the result of the favor he was doing for Abby.
He knew he shouldn't enter the bedroom. Every sense he had was telling him to wait for Culph. Those senses told him how vulnerable he was, how traumatized he was, how sick he was. They reminded him about his wife and his little girl and what Stemmy's death had done to his family. And yet those senses weren't nearly as strong as the senselessness. Mechanically, he walked the three paces to the bedroom and stood in the doorway. Light spilled inside from behind him. He cast a long shadow. There was no light switch near the door and the lamp was on the bedside table.
Rooted to his spot, Heron took a quick evaluation of the room. There was a bed, bedside table, and chair, situated next to the bed as if someone had been comforting Suzanna in her final hours. There was a dresser. The bed sheets were rumpled and bunched up. There could be someone in the bed but it was too hard to tell.
"Where are you," he whispered into the dark.
It answered him with a low moan. It was almost but not quite the same as the moans he had heard previously. This one had less of a voice to it. The same mocking rush of air through the dead pipes was recognizable, but it was a mere whisper compared to the others. It came from behind the bed.
Finding his strength, Heron moved into the room. He held his gun close to his body, aware that there could be more than one zombie. Clearly there had been a struggle in the bathroom. But there was no blood anywhere else. There wasn't even a trail from the bathroom to the bedroom. He'd have noticed that right away. As he came around the side of the bed he noticed its feet. They were just shadows in the dim room. Bare, they protruded out as if the zombie itself were propped up against something. Giving the feet a wide berth, he swung around the side of the bed and took it in fully. Even in the dim light, he could tell that its head was badly ruined. The hair looked almost glued into a crazy pattern on the side of its head. Someone had bashed that head repeatedly against the side of the bathtub. Someone had left this zombie for dead. But it wasn't dead. It had dragged itself from the bathroom to the bedroom, the blood from its wounds so dried that it didn't even dirty the floor.
What was left of Suzanna DeForest tilted its head up toward Heron. He could tell that it wanted to move, wanted to attack him. But its wounds were severe. He wondered about the effect of the blows to the head. He wondered if it had actually healed.
He took aim and fired. The single bullet punched into its brain. It spasmed once and then lay still. Heron just stood there in the dark, staring at it until Culph came rushing in, rifle in hand. He was half done with his gear, no helmet, no pads. He wasn't wearing the belt. He looked once at the corpse on the ground and then looked up at Heron. There was a lot of anger in that look.
A lot of anger.
***
ABBY was just about out the door when Whitaker called her back. He had the phone in his hand and told her with no attempt to disguise his contempt that it was her boyfriend. With a sour look, she came back into the gym and took the cordless phone from him over the counter. It was Heron.
"I have bad news," he said after they'd gotten over the pleasantries.
She went cold. "Is it Suzanna?"
"Yes," he said. "I'm sorry."
"Jesus," she whispered. "It…she was one of them?"
"Yes."
"It's not right," Abby moaned. "It's just not right?"
"There's more," Heron said. "There are signs that someone was here with her, but there's no one here now. They must have fought because Ms. DeForest was badly wounded. Does she have any other friends at the gym that we can question? We need to know who was here with her."
"Can't, I don't know, forensics tell you that?"
"Yes, of course," he told her. "We have a forensics team here now and there's plenty of evidence but it may not lead us to an identity. Is there anyone you can think of?"
"Sure," Abby said, moving behind the counter. "Sure, there's John. They've been dating."
"A boyfriend? I thought you said that she was carrying on with Larry Koplowitz?"
"And I thought you told me Larry Koplowitz had a wife and family."
"Right," he admitted. "Sorry."
Abby punched up the information on John Arrick and passed it to Heron. That made three addresses she had given out to the policeman. Somehow she had to believe that she was violating the privacy of her customers for doing that and opening up the gym to all sorts of litigation. Of course, the first two people were dead. And John. John didn't deserve this. Not John.
"I'm going to check it out as soon as we're done here."
***
WITH twenty minutes to go until the announcement of the new public health alert, Lance Naughton arrived at Arthur Conroy Memorial Hospital. Denise was in her office working but with a very different perspective. The fact that her morning had gone well, coupled with her excitement over her new relationship had her running on high. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for Naughton. She could tell that something had gone wrong even without looking up from her microscope.
"What happened?"
There was none of the normal humor in Naughton's eyes when she finally looked at him. "The situation has escalated," he said. "I've spent all day on the phone and the computer fielding reports coming in from as far west as Iowa."
"We knew it was going to happen, Lance," she said, realizing that it was no comfort. She was bad at comfort. "After half of the city took off a few weeks ago, the disease was bound to spread all over the states. I'm surprised it took so long for the reports to come in."
Naughton shook his head. "You don't get it, Denise. I spoke with the president today. There's a small town in West Virginia called Bucksburg. Ever hear of it?"
She shook her head. "Should I have?"
"After today it will be a household name. The Bucksburg police kept an outbreak of the plague secret; no one knows why. Only when the state police didn't get a weekly report from their sheriff's office did they go and investigate. I read the reports and I saw the pictures. There's some audio from the state troopers who went to investigate."
"How many died?" she whispered.
Naughton looked directly at her. His eyes were sunken and his cheeks were pale. He was a shadow of himself. In the few weeks she had known him, she had never seen him so rattled. He handled just about every situation with this sort of casual nonchalance. In fact, it was one of the things she both envied and loved about him. Naughton was the kind of guy that, no matter how bad things got, he just knew that it was going to turn out all right. Not now, though. Not this. The fear that radiated from Naughton was almost tangible. And it was definitely infectious.