The Lazarus Question (Cities of the Dead)
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into the human body in real-time, or our capability to create complex compounds to treat diseases, or the fact we can transplant organs from the recently dead into the living with the assumption that we know everything. We still can’t even cure the common cold.
“And, we have a man in containment in the sub-basement that has been documented to have died, but is now alive. There are only two other people in human history that can make that claim.”
“Two?” Haversill said, scratching his chin. “Jesus, okay, that’s one. Who’s the other?”
“Lazarus.”
Haversill made a “Duh, I shoulda known that” roll of his eyes.
“And I have no doubt that if we spent some time looking into it, we’d find similar stories in other cultures. So, it is entirely credible that there is at least a slim possibility that there is something out there capable of reanimating a dead body, and we need to figure out what that something is.”
Haversill looked at the monitor at the swaying figure of Gruev. His skin was gray. His eyes were blank. He looked almost angry. Haversill started in his chair.
“Shit, Carl, Gruev bit one of our guys that first day we were trying to get him pacified for samples. Do we know what happened to him?”
Bowersox shrugged. “If I recall, he was treated and released. It was a rather minor bite wound.”
“We need to find him. He’s the only guy we know of for sure who’s been potentially exposed to whatever Gruev has. If this is zombie-plague-whatever, then we need to test him. If he’s okay, then we’re on to something else.”
Bowersox sat in his office staring out the window at the Centers for Disease Control campus, pondering the complexity of the modern world. Various forms of plague had spread the globe in the past, and there had never been anything mankind could do about it. Infected fleas traveling on rats in the holds of ships or the backs of beasts of burden moving along the ancient trade routes had spread The Black Death across the planet, killing scores of millions. It was impossible to know, but estimates ranged from thirty to sixty percent of the world’s population had died as a result. In modern times, somewhere close to 100 million people died during the Spanish Flu outbreak in the early 20th Century, almost five percent of the world’s population, and roughly a half-a-billion people had been infected at one point or another – a quarter of the planet’s population.
He and his compatriots in the field of disease control knew more now about pathogens and their spread, but he was nowhere near confident that the knowledge was useful in containing the world’s bugs. Mankind had grown much more mobile since then, and there was still no way to detect or stop the unspeakable horrors gestating the in the gut of a flea, or the nasal mucus of a traveling salesman. Who could know the devastation of a biological agent spread through the malfeasance of even a few determined actors? For all he or anybody knew, Gruev’s trip from Bulgaria to America had been a deliberate way to infect a certain segment of the modern world with whatever it was Gruev had.
And now, Bowersox had a real problem on top of that. Morgan Stanhope had been bitten by Gruev the day they tried to restrain him for medical testing, and Stanhope was now off the grid. An emergency response team had gone to his house just hours ago and discovered blood and bodily fluids on his bed, indications of something traumatic, but it would be a while before the samples yielded anything. The data all pointed one way: pandemic.
The authorities in Los Angeles had been warned to expect an outbreak and prepare for containment once it was identified, but everyone in-the-know was certain that any action would come too late, and that a horde of Patient Ones were likely already out in the world.
The only good thing was that the disease didn’t actually seem to kill the subject, or at least not for long, so there was the possibility that whatever the agent did to a person could be undone. But where to begin to figure that out? It had taken six men in special protective clothing to restrain Gruev long enough to get a bite shield over his mouth. None of the tranquilizing agents they had shot into him through the slot in the door had had any effect, and Tazering him worked only so long as the charge was active. Studying him was going to be difficult, at best, if he were going to be kept alive. Or, rather, undead.
Not that anybody had argued for killing Gruev, since he was clearly a victim of something. They were there to figure out what he had, find a way to keep it from spreading to the general public, and then come up with either a cure or a quarantine plan to deal with the infected. But if they couldn’t do what they needed before then with a living undead version of Gruev, it would only be a matter of time before someone advocated killing him and dissecting him. The ethical implications of this possibility boggled Bowersox’s mind.
Bowersox thought about what they knew so far of the situation. They had a contagion that could kill a person and revive them inside a twenty-four to ninety-six hour window. Gruev had been feeling slightly ill for several days before he got on the plane, but once he had, the symptoms had overcome him, and in the flights from Bulgaria to America he had become delirious an died. About twelve hours after that, he had risen from the dead. Now, he was undead.
Bowersox thought of Lazarus, of what it must have been like to be dead, his body lying still in its tomb, and then to have had life placed back inside of him. What is life if it can be taken from the body and then returned to it? What is ‘life’ as a zombie? Haversill said Gruev seemed angry, and Bowersox had remembered a conversation he’d had with his daughter a decade earlier while they had been watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which Buffy had been resurrected. Maybe the dead didn’t want to come back to life. Buffy hadn’t. Maybe whatever came after this existence was worth the wait of going through it, no matter how long or short the stay on Planet Earth had been.
Maybe coming back from the dead would make you angry; you might just want to eat the living, make them pay. Jesus Christ had called Lazarus back to life from the grave, and Bowersox realized he had no idea what Lazarus had done after his grave clothes had been removed; it was all supposed to be evidence of the promise of life after death. It had never occurred to him that Lazarus would have had to return to all the hardships and drudgeries of life. Bowersox had always assumed it was allegory, not reality. He was going to have to look into his Bible and maybe call Pastor Tom after he got off work: why would Jesus call back to life on Earth a man who had died and was living in Heaven?
He drummed his fingers on his desk and gazed out on the city through his windows, acutely aware of the many errors of the past week-and-a-half. “We’re going to have to figure out what yellow means.”
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About the Author
William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He was a newspaper reporter for more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.
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