The Lazarus Question (Cities of the Dead)

by William Young

The Lazarus Question

  By William Young

  Copyright 2011 William Young

  Atlanta, Georgia – Day 11

  Geoffrey Haversill stared at the monitors showing Hristo Gruev and wondered what the hell was keeping the man alive. He had had nothing to eat or drink since being brought to the Centers for Disease Control’s headquarters a week ago, and the man had not died. Hristo Gruev wasn’t alive, either, not in any sense of the word that Haversill was familiar. But there Gruev was, on camera, swaying from side to side as if he were a blind man passing time listening to the rhythm of the world. Haversill paused as he thought that line, wondering what the musician’s name was … Steve? Stephen? Stevie? Not Stevie Ray Vaughan, though, that was the dude from Springsteen’s band.

  Or was that Van Zandt?

  Haversill drummed his fingers and stared at the man on the monitor, the dead man walking. There was no way for him to be alive. But, still, there he was, alive and kicking.

  Haversill riffled through the paperwork on the desk, hoping something unusual or obvious would suddenly jump off a page, signaling to him what it was he was looking for. They had tried to subdue Gruev and get samples from him, but Gruev had fought them the entire time, injuring one of the medical technicians: Gruev was significantly stronger than a normal man given his build and had nearly overwhelmed the team. The few samples they had managed to obtain had so far had yielded nothing.

  Haversill had been watching Gruev now for six days, and nothing about Gruev indicated the man was alive other than the fact he was alive. Confined in the small containment cell on the other end of the CCTV deep in the bowels of the building, Gruev never complained. Never asked for anything. Made only the most superficial efforts to try to get out. Gruev only reacted to stimuli when one of the technician’s would change his meal tray, but Gruev didn’t eat. He didn’t drink. He didn’t sleep. He just was.

  “Got anything?” Sarah Purcell said as she entered the room.

  “Nope.”

  “The guy’s wife has gone to the Bulgarian embassy for help,” Purcell said, sitting down and tapping through menus on a laptop computer. “It’s only a matter of time until we have to release him.”

  Haversill frowned at that. “I don’t know about that. He killed that morgue technician so he’ll go to jail in California before he goes back to Bulgaria.”

  That jarred a memory awake. “The other tech and the coroner from the LA incident have both disappeared.”

  “They disappeared?” Sarah asked.

  “Yeah, it’s in today’s morning update,” Haversill said, motioning to a tablet computer on the desk. “The tech and coroner were both discharged later the day of the incident and the dead tech’s body had already been transferred to a funeral home. None of them have been seen since that day. They just vanished. And the dead morgue tech’s body was lost at the funeral home somehow. The LA people aren’t telling anyone this, yet, because they also can’t find any of the people Mr. Gruev here barfed on while he was on the airplane.”

  Purcell had an astonished look on her face. “So, everyone this guy’s come in contact with in the last, what, eleven days has disappeared?”

  Haversill smiled. “Well, you and I are still here.”

  A dull moan came over the speakers attached to the laptop, a plaintive, primitive call that caused Haversill and Purcell to look at each other.

  “I swear it sounds like he’s saying ‘brains,’” Purcell said.

  Haversill rolled his eyes. The entire facility was abuzz with the notion they had a zombie in custody. “Bowersox says that, too.”

  The door behind them opened and in walked Carl Bowersox, the team leader for the group studying Hristo Gruev. He was holding a clipboard and flipping through a series of papers and photographs on it. He paused and let the door shut behind him, waiting for the sound of the latch to click before he looked up from the paperwork.

  “Well, we still don’t know what he has, if he has anything,” Bowersox made a head move to indicate to the others that they all knew Gruev had something, it was just nobody knew what, “but one of the nuclear med guys ran a skin sample through a spectral analysis and found that the mitochondria in them all glow yellow.”

  Haversill let out the smallest laugh while Purcell just furrowed her brows.

  “Glow?” Haversill asked. “I don’t remember anything about them glowing, unless you put a laser on one.”

  Bowersox pulled the pages from his clipboard and set them down on the table. He fanned the pictures out for the other two to see.

  “Well, they don’t glow, Geoff, which is the strange thing about it,” Bowersox said. “Or should I say, the most recent strange thing about Gruev. But I’m willing to bet that whatever’s causing the glow is what’s causing our problems here with Gruev.”

  Bowersox looked up at the two as Haversill and Purcell quickly exchanged a WTF? glance between them. Bowersox smiled.

  “I’ve been here eleven years, Carl, and never once have I had to figure out why something was glowing,” Purcell said, tucking her hair behind her ears. “Not only that, nobody has ever had to figure out why something was glowing, and I’m pretty sure we have nothing – no equipment, no tests, no procedures, nada – that could be used to even start figuring out why Gruev’s mitochondria are glowing, much less come up with a reason for why they’re glowing yellow.”

  Carl shrugged. “Yeah, I know, but I’m going to ask you to find a way to figure it out anyway. And we need to work fast. Everyone who’s come in contact with this guy in California has gone missing, and the locals are starting to panic big time. We should have something on this by now, but we’ve got nothing.”

  Haversill tabbed through a series of folders on the laptop, scanned them, and looked up at Bowersox.

  “He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep. And he’s unresponsive to most stimuli. He tests positive for nothing, and now you’re telling us his mitochondria glow yellow,” Haversill said, running the back of his right hand across his brow. “But the big problem is going to be actually running tests on him. We barely got anything the last time we tried, and nobody wants to go in and try again. Have you seen the guy’s teeth?”

  Bowersox nodded and shrugged. “Well, then we need to think outside the box and maybe venture into the realm of science fiction.”

  Haversill shook his head. “Horror, you mean.”

  “No, Geoff, I mean science fiction. Hristo Gruev is a real person suffering from something real that science can figure out. It might seem like horror, and let’s hope it doesn’t get to that, but right now we have science. And in this building we have some of the best scientists the U.S. government has. We need to figure this out.”

  “So, we’re going to actually go down this road and figure out if he’s a zombie?” Haversill asked. “I mean, okay, so we put out that joke position paper on the Internet letting everyone know we’d know what we were doing in the event of a zombie outbreak, but I thought that was just because we wanted the CDC to seem hip and cool while telling the public to have emergency kits in their houses and plans to deal with real-life possibilities. But zombies?”

  Purcell tented her fingers. “Well, there’s no shortage of historical similarities to what Gruev is suffering from. It’s in just about every cultural history there is. In Europe they had what they called revenants, which were undead that walked and attacked the living. The Arabs had ghouls, often appearing as women who lived in the desert and seduced men into the dunes with their siren-like calls, and when the man would show up, they’d change form and devour them. Even the Chinese had a version of this, which established the death rite culture of binding the dead with ropes be
fore burying them. It’s why we have locks on caskets.

  “Pretty much almost any culture with a written history has a version of an undead person in it. A lot of it is just rooted in burial practices and a fear of the supernatural, that a dead person might come back to life for some reason if not interred properly, but there might be something more to it. It might make sense that there’s a contagion of some sort we aren't familiar with that mimics death but which we haven’t seen in a long time because of,” Purcell said and paused, her eyes flitted through the corners of the room as she thought, “... I don’t know, better diets or hygiene or who-knows-what. But there is a historical record to it.”

  Haversill looked at her and tilted his head. “Really? And there’s a historical record of Minotaurs and Bigfoot and dragons - hell, every culture, especially the Chinese, have stories about dragons - and yet, no Minotaurs, no Bigfoot and no dragons. This is nonsense. If there were any real agent that both killed and reanimated a human body, we’d know about it.”

  Bowersox chuckled. “Geoff, we’ve only had ‘modern medicine’ for about half-a-century, and the more we learn about it, the more we realize there is to learn. Don’t confuse the fact we have computers and diagnostic equipment that can peer