Ghost Virus

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Oh, I think he does,’ said Jerry. ‘He just doesn’t want to face up to it, any more than we do. That raincoat didn’t really run down the road on its own, did it? A gust of wind blew it, that’s all.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Jamila, and started to climb up the stairs. Jerry followed her.

  Jamila was only halfway up when they heard DI Saunders shout out, ‘Holy Christ! Get off me!’ He sounded hysterical.

  They hurried up the rest of the stairs, along the corridor, and into the parents’ bedroom.

  Jerry said, ‘Jesus.’

  DI Saunders was sprawled on his back on the bloodstained bed. Mindy’s father was kneeling on the bed next to him, gripping his wrists and holding him down, while her mother was leaning over him, wrenching at the front of his uniform jacket and trying to bite his face.

  Jerry was so stunned that he simply stood in the doorway for a second, not knowing what he could do. These two people had been murdered, he had seen them both lying dead, and yet they were attacking DI Saunders with such ferocity that he couldn’t fight himself free.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Jerry, get them off me!’ DI Saunders screamed at him.

  Jamila turned around and shouted, ‘Sergeant Bristow! Sergeant Bristow! We need back-up here, urgently!’

  Jerry crossed the bedroom to the dressing-table and picked up the heavy padded stool that was tucked underneath it. He lifted it up and hit Mindy’s mother on the back of the head with it, hard. She dropped sideways, and rolled off the bed onto the floor, but she was clenching DI Saunders’ left earlobe between her teeth, and as she fell she tore part of it away. Blood squirted down the side of his neck and he screamed out, ‘Fuck!’

  Jerry lifted the stool again and hit Mindy’s father on the shoulder. Mindy’s father lurched to the left, but he kept his hold on DI Saunders’ wrists. A thin yellow string of mucus was swinging from his lips.

  Jerry hit him again, much harder, on the side of his head, which was already dented from the hammer-blows that Mindy had given him. This time he toppled onto the floor, his arms and his legs lifted like a dog that has fallen onto its back.

  DI Saunders heaved himself up off the bed, one hand clamped against his ear. Three of the buttons had been torn from his uniform jacket and it was spattered with blood. Jerry gave him a hand to get up onto his feet, and he stood there dazed, clearly unable to grasp what had just happened to him.

  Mindy’s father was beginning to pick himself up from the floor, and Mindy’s mother was already kneeling up on the opposite side of the bed, almost as if she were praying. Their faces were both bloated and bruised, and her father’s forehead and nose were so badly smashed in that he looked as if he were wearing a Halloween mask. Their eyes were open, although they had turned that dark grey oxidised colour that pathologists call tache noire, so it was difficult to tell what they were looking at, or even if they could see at all.

  Mindy’s father was still wearing his pyjama jacket, although his trousers had now fallen down round his ankles, but Jerry could see that the sleeves of a dark brown sweater were now wrapped at least twice around his neck, with the rest of the sweater covering his shoulders.

  He looked across at Mindy’s mother, whose bloodstained nightgown had dropped down to cover her. Twisted around her neck were the sleeves of a long black evening-dress – knotted so tightly that they had disappeared between the gaping lips of the wound where Mindy had first slashed her. If she had been alive, she would have been strangled.

  Jerry backed away, ushering DI Saunders out of the door. He didn’t know if he ought to order Mindy’s father and mother to stay where they were, or lie back down on the bed. What do you say to two corpses who have come to life? ‘Go back to being dead or you’re under arrest?’ And in any case, would they be able to hear him?

  Mindy’s father shuffled closer, half-shackled by his pyjama trousers, and reached out towards Jerry with both hands, like a parody of a zombie. That made Jerry’s mind up for him. He slammed the bedroom door shut, keeping a firm grip on the handle, and turned to DI Saunders.

  ‘What the hell do we do now?’ he asked. As he did so, two burly officers reached the top of the stairs and came jostling along the corridor in body armour. One of them had a Taser pistol attached to his belt and the other was carrying a Heckler & Koch submachine gun.

  DI Saunders had taken out his folded handkerchief and was holding it against his ear. ‘I have no idea. They’re dead already, although they bloody well didn’t feel like it. Any suggestions?’

  Jerry said, ‘Well – the man has a sweater wrapped around his neck, and the woman has a dress wrapped around hers. Neither the sweater nor the dress were present when we first came up and took a look at their bodies. I reckon that’s what brought them back to life.’

  He paused, and repeated, ‘The sweater, and the dress,’ just in case DI Saunders hadn’t understood what he meant.

  He might as well have been talking gibberish, because DI Saunders could only stare back at him, and the two armed officers turned to each other and both of them looked totally baffled.

  ‘I agree with DC Pardoe, sir,’ said Jamila. ‘It seems like all of the clothing in this house could have been infected with something similar to Samira Wazir’s coat and David Nelson’s sweater and Sophie Marshall’s jacket. We’ve already seen how it can take over living people. Perhaps it can take over dead people, too. Sophie Marshall bit my hand and this woman has just bitten your ear. You can’t say that there isn’t a parallel.’

  Jerry said, ‘What I’m suggesting is, we Taser them, and take that sweater and that dress off of them while they’re still stunned.’

  ‘They’re dead,’ said DI Saunders.

  ‘I know, guv. But if we take the sweater and the dress off of them, maybe they’ll go back to being dead.’

  ‘Well, that would suit me,’ said DI Saunders. ‘I’ll have to go for a tetanus jab after this. Not to mention a bloody HIV test. I might even get sepsis, and lose my whole bloody ear.’

  At that moment, there was a loud hammering on the other side of the bedroom door.

  ‘I think they want out,’ said Jerry.

  ‘All right,’ said DI Saunders. ‘Open up and shock them.’

  The officer with the Taser stepped forward and stood next to Jerry, while the officer with the submachine gun stayed close behind him. DI Saunders and Jamila retreated a little way back down the corridor.

  ‘OK – ready?’ asked Jerry. ‘Three – two – one – and go!’

  He pushed open the bedroom door. It collided with Mindy’s father, who must have been standing right behind it, and so he took a step back and then slammed his whole weight against it. Mindy’s father was sent tottering backwards so that he sat down promptly on the end of the bed, but almost at once he stood up again. Mindy’s mother had been staring at her reflection in the mirrored door of the wardrobe, but now she turned around.

  ‘God almighty – what the hell’s happened to them?’ said the officer with the Taser. ‘They look like they need a bus, not a Taser.’

  ‘Just shock them, all right?’ called out DI Saunders. ‘Take the man out first.’

  ‘What, no warning?’

  ‘Do it, for Christ’s sake!’

  The officer pointed his Taser at Mindy’s father, and fired. With a sharp snap, the two barbed electrodes flew out and hit him in the cross-hatched scabs on his chest, trailing their conductive wires behind them. He was shocked by fifty thousand volts, more than enough to give him unbearable pain and violent muscular contractions, and knock him to the floor.

  Instead, he gave nothing more than a complicated shudder, his arms flapping up and down dismissively, like a chicken’s wings. Then he continued walking forward, with the wires still dangling from his chest.

  ‘What the hell’s wrong?’ demanded DI Saunders. ‘Isn’t that bloody thing charged up enough?’

  ‘I gave him maximum voltage, sir!’ said the Taser officer.

  ‘It must be because he’s dead,’ s
aid Jerry. ‘The both of them are. You can’t shock them because there’s nothing to shock. No nervous system. No heartbeat. Nothing.’

  ‘You mean they’re really dead?’ the Taser officer asked him. ‘I thought you meant that they’d been playing dead. How can they be dead?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, but look at the state of them. The woman’s had her throat cut so deep her head’s just about to fall off. And all that blobby grey stuff behind the bloke’s right ear, that’s his brains.’

  ‘Tell the both of them to lie on the floor,’ said DI Saunders. He sounded angry now. ‘Tell them if they don’t, we’ll have to shoot them.’

  Mindy’s father had nearly reached the doorway now, with her mother close behind him. If Jerry had taken two steps forward he could have laid his hand on his shoulder and told him that he was arresting him. Mindy’s father was chattering his shattered teeth together as if he couldn’t wait to take a bite out of Jerry’s face, and then he belched. He wasn’t trying to speak. He couldn’t, because his lungs had no air in them. It was only foul-smelling gas.

  ‘OK – stop!’ Jerry told him, although he felt absurd saying it. ‘Stop right where you are and lie face-down on the floor, otherwise we may have to shoot you.’

  ‘That’ll do,’ said DI Saunders. ‘I didn’t want to open fire without a formal caution.’

  He stepped back and said to the officer with the submachine gun, ‘Take them down. Go for the legs. That should do it.’

  ‘They’re not armed, sir,’ the officer protested. ‘They’re not actually presenting any kind of imminent threat. If I shoot them, that’ll be murder.’

  ‘You can’t murder them, son, because they’re already dead. Haven’t you been listening? Can’t you see that for yourself?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘They’re dead,’ DI Saunders repeated. ‘They may be walking and I have no idea how or why but let’s just put them out of their misery, shall we? And that’s an order.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the firearms officer. ‘You’d best get back a bit, in case of ricochets.’

  Jerry and Jamila and DI Saunders retreated along the landing while the firearms officer cocked his submachine gun. As they reached the top of the staircase, the crime scene manager was coming up, in his white Tyvek suit, carrying a camera.

  ‘OK to process the crime scene now, sir?’ he asked.

  DI Saunders didn’t even look at him. ‘Not yet. And if you could clear your people out of the house for a while, I’d appreciate it. We’ll call you back in when we’re ready.’

  ‘Oh, really? All right, sir – but I have to say that we’re a little pushed for time. Three of my team are pretty close to the end of their shift.’

  ‘I said – we’ll call you back in when we’re ready.’

  The CSE started to go back downstairs. As he did so, the firearms officer came backing out of the bedroom doorway, followed by Mindy’s father and mother.

  Jamila leaned close to Jerry and said, ‘This is so wrong. This is going to give me sleepless nights for the rest of my life.’

  The firearms officer slowly retreated down the corridor, which allowed Mindy’s father and mother to come out of the bedroom and stand facing him, side by side. He was obviously reluctant to open fire. The two of them may have looked bloodied and grotesque, sticking out their blackened tongues and snapping their teeth, but they looked pathetic, too, like two circus clowns who had wandered into the lion’s cage by mistake, and been savagely mauled.

  ‘Do we have to do this, sir?’ Jamila asked DI Saunders.

  ‘What? Have you got any other suggestions?’ said DI Saunders. ‘They can’t be Tasered, so what else are we going to do with them? Lock them up? They haven’t committed any serious crime – not yet, anyway, apart from biting half my bloody ear off. Send them to hospital? They’re dead, so what would be the point of that? Besides, they attacked me like a couple of mad dogs, and what do you do with mad dogs?’

  Mindy’s father suddenly let out a cackling sound, like somebody being violently sick, and stalked towards the firearms officer, flailing his arms. With a deafening bang, the officer opened fire, hitting him in the chest.

  Mindy’s father was thrown backwards against the wall, but after only a moment’s hesitation he launched himself at the firearms officer a second time. The officer shot him again, twice in the chest and once in the stomach, and again he staggered backwards, but yet again he came teetering forward, his fists windmilling like a boxer.

  ‘The legs!’ shouted DI Saunders. ‘I told you to go for the legs!’

  The firearms officer took another step back and then shot Mindy’s father in both kneecaps. Mindy’s father lurched forward, still trying to walk, but then his splintered shinbones pierced through the skin and he collapsed. He lay on the floor twitching and beating his fist against the skirting-board in frustration.

  Now Mindy’s mother rushed at the firearms officer, silently, but with a grim expression on her face. The officer shot her in the right thigh, and then the left, and then he pointed his submachine gun downwards and shot her in the right ankle, which almost blasted her foot off. She limped towards him, with her foot bent to one side, but then she too tumbled to the floor and lay beside her husband, face-down, slapping the carpet in the same futile way that he was beating his fist.

  The corridor was filled with acrid smoke, and Jerry had to wiggle his fingertips in his ears to clear his hearing. The firearms officer was reloading with another clip.

  DI Saunders said, ‘OK. If you’re right about that sweater and that dress, let’s have them off them, shall we?’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Jerry, taking his clasp knife out of his windcheater pocket and clicking it open. He walked back along the corridor and knelt down beside Mindy’s father. Her mother twisted her head around to stare at him with those eerie dark grey eyes, and she peeled her lips back in a hostile snarl, but she was too damaged to get up and attack him.

  ‘Sorry about this, mate,’ Jerry told Mindy’s father, although he had no idea if he could hear him, or even if it was Mindy’s father that he was talking to.

  He took hold of the sleeves of the dark brown sweater that were wrapped around Mindy’s father’s neck, and quickly cut into them. They felt soft and crunchy, like wool, but at the same time he was sure he detected a muscular reflex, as if he were cutting into somebody’s wrists. Mindy’s father kept jolting his head from side to side, but the only sound that came out of his mouth was the faint whistling of gas from his putrefying stomach.

  Jerry sliced right through the sleeves, but when he tried to pull them away from Mindy’s father’s neck, they clung on tight. He took hold of the back of the sweater and yanked it hard, again and again, but it was like trying to pull an octopus away from the piling of a pier.

  ‘Having trouble there, Jerry?’ called out DI Saunders.

  ‘Just a bit,’ Jerry grunted. He pulled at the sweater again, even harder. There was a tearing sound, and he managed to lift seven or eight centimetres away from Mindy’s father’s right shoulder, but the rest of the sweater still refused to come free. It was stuck to his skin just like Mindy’s jacket and all of the other clothes had been stuck, its dark brown fibres penetrating his pores.

  Jamila came up behind Jerry and laid her hand on his shoulder. ‘Why not cut it up into little bits?’ she suggested.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Perhaps it was only another of her stories, but my grandmother said that when a jinn tried to get into their house one night, my grandfather slammed the door on it, so that it was caught halfway in and halfway out. The half of the jinn that was inside his house, he chopped up with shears and threw them on the fire.’

  ‘Your granny should have been locked up for telling you stuff like that,’ said Jerry. All the same, he grasped the sweater in his left fist and started to rip it apart with his clasp knife.

  Gradually, as he shredded it up into rags, he could feel its grip on Mindy’s father began to weaken. Its sleeves fell away
from his neck, and then the rest of it dropped off his shoulders. His dark grey eyes remained open, but now he lay motionless.

  ‘How about that, it worked,’ said Jerry. Just to make sure, he pushed Mindy’s father with the heel of his hand, so that his body joggled lifelessly against the skirting-board. ‘No, he’s proper dead now. Like, dead dead.’

  Mindy’s mother was still feebly slapping her hand on the carpet, so Jerry turned his attention to her, and the long black dress that looked as if it were choking her. Instead of trying to cut through the sleeves that were wound so tightly around her throat, he started to slash at the bodice and the skirts. He felt the dress ripple, like a wave coming in, but he carried on slashing at it until he had reduced it to ribbons, which he then he tore apart with his hands. For almost half a minute, there was no sound in the corridor but the tearing of cotton, while Jamila and DI Saunders and the two armed officers watched Jerry as if they were mesmerised.

  He could see it on their faces: This can’t be happening. This can’t be real. But I’m here and I’m a witness and it is.

  When the dress was ripped to shreds, the black sleeves slithered away from Mindy’s mother’s neck as if they were two cowardly snakes. Her hand now lay flat against the carpet, and her dark grey eyes stared at nothing but her dead husband’s shoulder.

  Jerry stood up and folded away his clasp knife. He felt numb – not just because the whole scenario had been so surreal, but because he felt as if he had taken two lives.

  DI Saunders came along the corridor now and looked down at the bodies.

  ‘They’re completely dead now?’ he said. ‘One hundred per cent? I don’t want them jumping up and trying to take another bite out of me.’

  ‘Both of them were completely dead before,’ said Jamila. ‘It was their clothes that brought them back to life. What we have to ask ourselves is who were their clothes possessed by? They could have been second-hand, or from charity shops, like the others, or else—’

  ‘Or else what?’

  ‘I don’t know. We have no way of telling for sure, do we, until Dr Fuller has the chance to test them for DNA? But supposing these clothes weren’t second-hand? Supposing this sweater and this dress were possessed by Mindy’s parents themselves? What if they were trying to reanimate their own dead bodies?’