Epidemic of the Living Dead

by John Russo

  Just when she had almost lost hope and was considering moving to a foreign country, the Homeland Security Department enlisted her to help set up and take part in a clandestine program that would rely on the fact that the Great State of Texas was executing more convicted murderers than any other state in the union. It was a daring strategy that involved a degree of pragmatism that bureaucrats didn’t usually harbor, so Dr. Traeger was immediately heartened by it. With her advice and support, HSD secretly began colluding with the Texas prison system to provide condemned persons to the Chapel Grove Medical Research Institute for experimental purposes.

  She would have thought such a setup to be immoral under normal circumstances, but since the death row inmates were already doomed, how could it be wrong to use them for the benefit of all mankind? Thus she was able to stifle her pangs of conscience when she must cause them either to become undead or be fed to the undead. After all, she did not personally select these specimens, they were selected by the criminal justice system. They were like organ donors but in a more generous way. But the bleeding hearts, of which there were many in this country, would be horrified if they found out. It was the great secret that she was feverishly trying to hide. If possible, she never wanted to admit to her superiors that any needles had gone missing, or at least not until the lid was on tight. The calamity was not her fault, and maybe they would eventually see it that way.

  She would make excellent use of Mr. Landry. She would take blood samples, do CAT scans and EKGs, and make microscope slides from slivers of his organs. Then she would make him undead by injecting him with the blood of those who had “matriculated” before him. And after all experiments of any value were completed on him, she would reward him with the lethal injection that was denied him at the prison. Wryly, she thought of herself as a facilitator of the Texas justice system, just like the right-wing lawmakers, the redneck juries, the vindictive judges, and the sanctimonious two-term governor of that “Great State.”

  CHAPTER 7

  A Hateful Dead roadie they called Road Kill was cooking heroin in a spoon over a lit candle while his babe, Charlene, looked on with a greedy gleam in her eyes. Three other band members showed up: drummer Hal Rotini and guitarists Clay Smith and Banger Bidwell, plus their luscious bombshells, Becky and Rhoda. The women were still in the skimpy bikinis that they wore onstage, and the guys were still in their zombie makeup. They pulled rubber tubing from pockets and purses and started tying the tubing around their arms.

  Hal Rotini, a dark, swarthy, greasy-haired guy with a hook nose and a lecherous grin, said, “Back off, babes. I go first this time.”

  Rhoda said, “What about us girls? Ladies before gentlemen.”

  Rotini said, “Fuck you. Fuck both of you, in fact.”

  “You already did that,” Becky said with a snort and a giggle.

  Road Kill sucked dark brown syrupy heroin into a hypodermic he picked up from the workbench next to the candle and the pile of stash. “We’re runnin’ low,” he said. “Why ain’t Nerdy Ferdy and Sissy Space-Out back from their run?”

  “They better get here soon or I’ll kick their asses,” Rotini said.

  Clay said, “I need a fix real bad, man. I’m startin’ to spaz. I almost didn’t make it through the sound check.”

  Hal said, “Me too. My monkey is starvin’. And I ain’t talkin’ bananas.”

  They all burst into dope giggles as Hal took the syringe from Road Kill and punched the needle into a vein in his right arm.

  Road Kill sucked more of the heroin syrup into a couple more syringes and passed them around till everybody had a chance to dose up, except Rhoda, who was going to be last and could hardly wait. She was licking her lips in anticipation.

  Ferdy was sneaking down the basement stairs with Fishhead’s gun in his hand. And Sissy was close behind him, scared and trembling. They crept softly toward the light from the naked light bulb above the workbench.

  Just as Rhoda was shooting up, Ferdy and Sissy burst in on them.

  “What the fuck!” Rotini cried out.

  Seeing the gun, Banger Bidwell came up with a wisecrack. “Don’t squirt me, Ferdy!”

  And Road Kill said, “That damn well better be a water pistol or I’m takin’ it offa you and shovin’ it up your ass!”

  “You’re bringin’ me down, man,” Clay Smith griped.

  “You’re such a nerd!” Betty jeered.

  “Nerd, nerd, nerd, Nerdy Ferdy,” Rhoda sang in a twangy, squeaky voice.

  Ferdy pointed his gun at Hal Rotini and said, “You won’t be makin’ fun of me much longer, dude.”

  Hal said, “What the hell you talkin’ about, shit-for-brains?”

  “The shit is in your brain, Hal! You’re gonna turn into a zombie.”

  Sissy said, “He’s right! It happened to Fishhead! I was there—Ferdy had to shoot him. It was awful!”

  “Fishhead bit me on the arm,” Ferdy said. “I’m done for. I’m not gonna live long. And soon as I croak, I’m comin’ back—if I don’t stop myself.”

  Road Kill scoffed, “You’re on some kinda fucked-up acid, man! You better go somewhere and chill out.”

  Ferdy said, “I’m tellin’ you, the needles Fishhead gave us are bad news. They musta had zombie blood in them! It killed Fishhead, then it brought him back!”

  “You’re sayin’ he bit you?” Clay murmured quizzically.

  “Right here on my arm.” Ferdy held the arm out so they all could see the wound with its missing chunk of raw, bloody flesh.

  “Eeeeuw!” Rhoda gasped.

  “Holy shit!” said Road Kill.

  Ferdy said, “You know how we used to crack up watchin’ that stupid old movie Reefer Madness? Well, this is for real. It’s zombie madness—and we’re in the starring role.”

  Road Kill said, “You are really stoned, man! Shut the fuck up and leave us alone. You’re bringin’ us down hard.”

  Ferdy said, “I don’t wanna become one of those things, man! Maybe you do but I don’t.”

  “I was scared he was gonna turn while we were drivin’ over here!” Sissy cried.

  “I’m turnin’ now!” Ferdy said. “I can feel it!”

  He put the gun to his own head.

  The druggies just stared at him.

  He pulled the trigger. BLAM! Blood gushed from his head front and back, and he fell to the concrete with a little whimper as he took his last breath.

  Sissy cried, “No!” She knelt, picked up the gun, and put the muzzle against her temple.

  “You ain’t got the nerve,” Hal Rotini said, sneering at her.

  “Marry me,” she said, “or I’ll kill myself. Even if we don’t turn into zombies.”

  “You can’t prove I’m the daddy,” he said, “long as I don’t give no saliva swab.”

  “You’re the father!” Sissy screamed at him.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Banger Bidwell said. “You and Ferdy are gonna bring the band a lotta negative publicity.”

  Rhoda said, “There’s no such thing. We need all we can get.”

  Nervous and shaky, Road Kill said, “You think we really did shoot up with zombie blood?”

  Clay said, “There ain’t never been no zombies in Chapel Grove. Except us. And we’re fake.”

  Banger Bidwell said, “Let’s just enjoy this good shit. There ain’t nothin’ wrong with it. I’m feelin’ purty good right now.”

  Suddenly Hal screamed, clutched his chest, fell down to the floor, and went into convulsions. A spiderweb pattern erupted on his arm. Rhoda ran to him, knelt, and tried to touch him, but in a violent spasm he raked his nails across her cheek, clawing a bloody path. She jumped up and her hand went to her face and came away dripping blood.

  The others just stood there watching Hal writhe and scream. He clawed at his fake zombie makeup, peeling it away in shreds, revealing the real dead skin underneath.

  Then Clay clutched his heart and fell down, writhing and twitching just like Hal. He clawed at his latex scars and artifici
al blood.

  Becky bent over Clay, crying, “Help me! We gotta give him mouth-to-mouth!”

  But then she was hit with convulsions too, knocking her to her knees.

  One by one, the rest of them fell—the whole bunch of them—all screaming and writhing in awful pain. Spiderweb patterns erupted on their arms, at the injection sites. The ones with fake zombie makeup clawed it off. Their convulsions subsided, and then stopped. They were all dead.

  Road Kill was the first to revive. His eyes twitched, and he sat up, now zombified. He had been an ugly oaf while he was still alive, but he became even worse looking as one of the living dead.

  The other band members and their groupies started to come back to life too.

  In utter panic, Sissy Space-Out backed away from them and ran up the basement stairs.

  Salivating and hissing hungrily, her undead friends came after her.

  CHAPTER 8

  As Bill sped onto the two-lane blacktop that led to the Rock ’n’ Shock, Jackie the Junkie started running at the mouth again. He seemed especially hung up about the chick he called Sissy Space-Out, and Bill got the feeling that he might have a crush on her. “Hal Rotini knocked her up and everybody knows it,” he babbled, “but Hal won’t admit it. He says she’s just one more airheaded groupie that was glad to put out for him, and he ain’t about to pay no child support. He’s the band’s drummer, and she’s gonna pop his kid out any day now. You wanna talk to Sissy—she can make a little sense now, ’cause she stopped usin’ when she found out she was gonna have a kid. The other dude who might give ya the straight poop, ’cause he just got rehabbed, is Ron Haley—and his girlfriend, Daisy, who ain’t usin’. She’s one of the band’s dancers, sexy as hell, a real looker. He’s the lead guitarist, but he already told the band he’s gonna quit after this road trip and he and Daisy are sick of the drug scene and they’re gonna get married.”

  Bill Curtis was glad to hear that Ron Haley was still straight. Maybe he’d make something of himself yet. Bill had no quarrel with the type of music Ron played; he could even admit that Ron was a gifted guitarist. But he deplored the band’s heavy use of drugs and the blatantly erotic antics of their scantily clad dancers. He used to just take it in stride when he came here to check on Ron or arrest drunken, doped-up brawlers. But now that he was going to have a daughter of his own, he found himself devoutly wishing that she wouldn’t ever lose her self-respect and nakedly disport herself in front of an unruly, sex-starved crowd.

  When he pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Rock ’n’ Shock, Bill was relieved to see that everything looked as quote-unquote normal as a buildup for a heavy-metal performance could possibly be. The lot was packed with cars, SUVs, vans, pickup trucks, and motorcycles, plus a few outlandishly expensive rides like Hummers, Corvettes, and Mercedes Benzes. Bill remembered when the rock joint used to be a church up until a few years ago when it got sold and the altar and pews were taken out.

  There wasn’t a Rock ’n’ Shock sign on the defunct church, just a big garish neon one on a tall steel pole near the road. Bill couldn’t drive up close to the front entrance because of the psyched-up crowd in front of the double doors, a huge, writhing phalanx of milling people, pushing and prodding, anxious to get in. Most of them had tattoos, body piercings, and dyed and butchered hair, often so many tats on their arms and legs that at a distance it looked like they were wearing long-sleeved sweaters and decorated skin-tight leggings.

  They didn’t make a buzz over the arrival of the squad car. It didn’t cut any ice with anybody and nobody bothered to stare at it. Bill parked it at the far end of the lot, on an apron of weeds and grass that flanked the edges of the gravel. He and Pete got out and he pressed the lock button twice to lock all the doors, leaving the druggie, Jackie Shaheen, handcuffed in the back seat.

  “Don’t worry,” Shaheen blathered. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere, I wanna be hidin’ in here with the windows wound up if the shit hits the fan.”

  “What kind of shit?” Pete demanded.

  “I dunno, just yakkin’,” Shaheen said.

  Pete and Bill slammed the doors on him and took a look around, then started walking. Just then a ripple went through the crowd, and their fussing and shouting reached a new level.

  Bill saw that the front doors had come open. Cheers went up. The crowd pressed forward more than before, getting even tighter against one another, which Bill wouldn’t have thought possible. Some of the people up front were pushing the ones behind, yelling at them to make way for somebody wanting to come out of the Rock ’n’ Shock. The people up front saw who it was ahead of everybody else, and they started a chant:

  “Rotini! Rotini! Rotini! ROTINI!”

  Thinking they were going to get autographs and photo ops, a bunch of Rotini’s fans started waving Hateful Dead hats, T-shirts, and eight-by-tens at him and snapping pictures with their cell phones. No question that they idolized him. An especially lewd and brazen young woman pulled her halter up, baring her huge breasts, and held out a Magic Marker for Rotini to sign his name on them. He folded his arms around her and she started grinding her crotch into him, and people yelled and applauded, urging her on.

  Suddenly Rotini bit into her neck—and pulled away, growling and hissing, with a chunk of her bloody flesh dangling from his lips!

  People clapped, shrieked, and whistled, and some kept using their cell phones to capture the exciting moment on high-def video.

  Bill almost pulled his weapon. But from the way the crowd was whooping it up, he thought it must be yet another Hateful Dead stunt—the kind of thing they did onstage with special-effects makeup and hidden tubes pumping artificial blood.

  But then other band members and their groupies shambled out, looking hungry and dead, and started attacking their rabid fans. It was clear to Bill now that people were being knocked down and bitten by the Hateful Dead! Their screams were loud and agonizing. What they had thought was going to be an orgy of fun and music had quickly turned to one of dread and terror. Some were already undead. And some were bitten but hadn’t turned yet.

  Bill glanced frantically at Pete. They were both so stunned, they were slow to react. Although they had dreaded the Plague of the Living Dead for so many years while it struck elsewhere, and they had tried to always be alert for any signs of it in their midst, it was still an overwhelming shock for them to realize, by being thrust suddenly into the middle of it, that the plague had finally arrived in Chapel Grove.

  Bill spun and ran for the squad car, and Pete followed hot on his heels. They both knew that their sidearms weren’t going to be of much use in such a horrific melee, so they were going for the riot guns they had in the trunk. Bill dug in his pants pocket for the remote and clicked the trunk open as he ran. Glancing back, he saw that more and more people were being choked, clawed, and bitten. In trying to escape through the panicked crowd, some were being trampled, ripped apart, and devoured. Some of them tried to help the ones being mauled or chomped on, and others simply fled to save their own lives.

  Bill managed to make it back to the squad car and grabbed a riot gun—a pump-action shotgun loaded with fifteen powerful shells. Soaked with sweat and breathing heavily, he covered Pete for a few hasty minutes without moving toward the heavy action, while Pete used his cell phone to call headquarters for backup, knowing he’d have to overcome disbelief and denial on the part of officers who weren’t seeing what he and Pete were seeing. But belief would probably come much more quickly than in the past, because nowadays everybody knew that these kinds of outbreaks were real. They had happened often and in many places by now, but still they were feared much more than they were understood.

  Bill hoped backup would come soon. He didn’t know how many of the undead had to be dealt with, but he knew their numbers were growing, thanks to the bitten ones who were able to die and come back. He felt the same mix of adrenaline and fear that he had felt going into combat in Fallujah, only maybe worse than that now, because he wasn’t facing armed human bei
ngs whom he could sort of understand, but human facsimiles who had turned into something that seemed almost supernatural, and unfathomable in normal human terms. He and Pete were two against many, and with only two weapons apiece. If they chose to wait for the promised backup, many innocent people would die or be torn apart. And the ones who died were likely to come back in a hideously mutated form.

  Luckily, the crowd was coming down from hundreds to a few dozen, thanks to those who had fled. Some had made it to their vehicles and managed to get the hell out of there, and others who got to their vehicles were hemmed in. Cars, pickups, and SUVs rammed one another over and over, going frontward and backward, screeching their tires and banging into one another, unable to make any headway at all. Some folks locked themselves in their cars and didn’t take part in the collision derby, just sat there sobbing and screaming, utterly terrified.

  Newly created zombies were already shambling around, drooling and hissing, trying to grope their way out of the parking lot. Bill Curtis understood, with a shudder, that they must be heading wherever blind instinct was telling them to go, in search of live human flesh. And at that moment he realized that his wife, Lauren, and Pete Danko’s wife, Wanda, might be in real and imminent danger at the Quik-Mart, only about a half mile from the Rock ’n’ Shock. Some of the zombies might already have wandered that far down the road. It made Bill remember, with a rush of guilt, that he had promised to text his wife to let her know he was okay. He hadn’t done that, partly because he didn’t want to hit her with a lie of omission after Pete had told him not to warn her or anybody else of anything before they had a chance to put a stop to the catastrophe. Now it might be too late. Cradling his riot gun, he reached for his cell phone, but two of the undead shambled from between two smashed cars and started toward him. Pete saw them and signaled that he would take the one on the left and Bill should take the one on the right—who happened to be the teenage girl who had bared her breasts so willingly for Hal Rotini, only to be bitten by him. The other one was a scruffy young man, naked except for ragged denim cutoffs and sockless sneakers, his bare torso covered with grotesque Hateful Dead tattoos. Neither Bill nor Pete wanted to waste shotgun shells on the ghouls, so they used their Glocks to blast them in their heads. They reeled backward, staggered a step or two, then fell.