Epidemic of the Living Dead

by John Russo

  “You knew what I meant, so don’t pretend to be obtuse. If you are that obtuse, maybe I should demote you.”

  Bill gritted his teeth to rein in his temper.

  Pete glowered at him, then finally snapped, “Dismissed!”

  His face red, Bill went to the gym as planned, and worked hard on the machines to exorcise his worries and his anger. Nobody else was there, something that used to be an unusual occurrence. Some of his fellow policemen had given up their regular exercising, which seemed to be a further sign of the general despair. As if there was little use, even for them, of staying fit and prepared for a better tomorrow.

  Bill didn’t think he was actually going to get demoted, but he wasn’t ready to take that chance. Not with a baby on the way and his wife already traumatized by the ghoul attack at the Quik-Mart and the mass funerals that followed, including the ones for her father and for Pete and Wanda’s son.

  Lauren was worried more than ever about having another miscarriage. Bill had tried to talk her into getting grief counseling, a service that was provided pro bono for family members of policemen, but she refused. She suffered extreme mood swings that seemed to come without the typical manic highs but with only the bottom end of the bipolar spectrum. Still, Bill hoped for positive changes after their daughter was born and at the same time was scared that she might succumb to postpartum depression. Or worse.

  CHAPTER 11

  As it turned out, Lauren managed to carry the baby to full term, in spite of the fact that in the aftermath of the plague she was more emotionally damaged than ever before. She and Bill were at Applebee’s enjoying seafood dinners and a rare get-together with Pete and Wanda Danko—and two hours later, after they had gone to bed, Lauren was awakened with labor pangs. They both got dressed in a hurry and he drove her to the hospital. She was in labor for eighteen hours. Bill resolutely stayed by her side the whole time, partly because she would have been frightened if he left her, but mostly because he didn’t want to take a chance on anything going wrong. A nurse told him that he should watch the gauges that Lauren’s uterus was hooked up to, and that if the needles took a plunge, it would signal an emergency and he should immediately call for assistance.

  After ten or twelve hours, the head nurse said it would be safe for Bill to take a break now, but he still didn’t dare; he wanted to stay till the finish and not be sorry he didn’t.

  All of a sudden one of the gauges took a plunge, his heart leapt into his throat, and he pressed the emergency button and two nurses came running, along with a doctor who said that the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck, and they had to break Lauren’s water. They did so, and Bill and Lauren hoped they’d saved the fetus, but the couple remained in suspense till the baby was delivered, and it had to be done by C-section because, according to the doctor, if her brain had been deprived of oxygen during the time that the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck, she would have been born brain-damaged.

  Thankfully, the delivery was successful, and Bill experienced the greatest relief and the greatest happiness of his life, even more euphoric than making it through combat situations alive and in one piece. He and Lauren named the baby Jodie. She was born healthy, six pounds two ounces. In Bill’s eyes, she was one of the prettiest babies ever, but he was aware that most other parents felt that way too. He had been awake for thirty-six hours, but he didn’t want to stop looking at his child. Neither did Lauren. She was weak, but beaming. It was the most loving moment they had ever experienced in the entire history of their marriage, hugging each other and looking down at their little newborn. Bill drove home only to hastily shave and shower, then drive right back to the hospital to look at the infant again. He remained sleep-deprived, visiting his wife and baby bright and early before he had to report to police headquarters, every single day that they were in the hospital.

  Sadly but unavoidably, the joy of becoming parents was muted by the cloud hanging over them and their beleaguered small town. Their aspiration toward becoming a happy little family was dimmed by the horrible memories of what they had been through. Of course they were not alone in this. It was seldom talked about, as if it might go away by avoiding it, but many of the survivors were still scarred psychologically by the horror and the losses.

  After the baby came home, Bill hoped his little family might achieve a semblance of normality. Lauren immersed herself in the duties of a young mom, cooking and cleaning and breastfeeding and diapering and sandwiching her exercises in between. Meanwhile she took to worrying over every detail of little Jodie’s well-being—her eating, her napping, her sleeping, her clothing, her bouts of fussing and crying. She couldn’t be away from the baby for five minutes without heading back into the nursery to check on her. Bill tried to ease her mind by putting a monitor in the crib to guard against sudden infant death syndrome, but she kept on checking and hovering.

  By the time Jodie was a toddler, Lauren was uptight that Jodie wasn’t safe in her crib anymore but was now crawling or walking all over the house where she could get herself into more danger. Even though Bill had inserted plastic plugs into all the wall outlets and had done all the other recommended “baby proofing” that Lauren insisted upon, she still hovered over Jodie like a watchdog.

  Bill said, “You’re going to have to back off and let her grow up, you know.”

  But Lauren said, “You don’t get it, do you? I worry about her because I’m her mother!”

  But he knew that at all times her concern verged on panic. Many times in the middle of the night he would be jolted awake by Lauren’s feverish outcries and pitiful sobs and he had to stroke and soothe her because of her recurrent nightmares about her father’s death in the Quik-Mart, her own brush with doom at the hands of the undead, and the horror of seeing Wanda Danko bitten by her own son and that son, Jerry, being shot by Pete.

  The little things about Lauren that had made him fall in love with her ten years ago were still locked in his heart. Her sense of humor and sarcasm, her quirky laugh, her way of telling jokes lamely because she forgot or screwed up the punch lines, the look in her eyes when she wanted him to make love to her, and the unabashed pleasure she used to take from it. Even though those parts of her were submerged now, he still could relive them with wistfulness and compassion. And he still entertained hope that those endearing qualities in her would return.

  He went along with Lauren when she wanted to sell their split-entry on the outskirts of Chapel Grove and move into town. She said that she and Jodie shouldn’t be left alone while he was away all day, on the job. She was afraid of who might turn on them both if there should be another outbreak. So they sold their old house at a slight loss, which they could absorb because of a modest inheritance from her father, and moved into a two-story brick on a residential avenue, not far from the police station.

  After that, for a time, Lauren’s spirits picked up. She and Bill started paying a babysitter so they could go out together at least once a week. There were more smiles and touches between them when they were able to enjoy themselves now and then. It gave him hope that they could slowly begin to rediscover each other, in spite of the horrors they had endured and feared might hit them again.

  CHAPTER 12

  For the first year of the Foster Project, everything went along as smoothly as Dr. Traeger could have hoped for. The necessary personnel were hired, adoption agreements were signed, and the adoptees were put under rigid observation and frequent medical and physical exams and evaluations. She generally had complete control over all logistics involving not only the adoptees but relationships between them, their parents, and the community. But of course Captain Peter Danko was her on-site control officer, with oversight by high-ranking officials of the Homeland Security Department who were beholden only to Congress and the president. But the majority of senators and representatives were not given an all-encompassing “need to know,” not even those on select congressional committees. Thus leaks were relentlessly controlled.

  Dr
. Traeger had the foresight and fortitude, not to mention the absolute dedication to her mission, to take one of the special children into her own home and adopt her. She and her frail older husband, Daniel, who suffered from asthma and degenerative arthritis, named the child Kathy. She was the “control” subject needed for valid and proper experimentation. Three of the four Foster Project adoptees were placed with ordinary Chapel Grove families who did not know the children’s true origin. The fourth one, Kathy, was the adoptee who would be more closely and intimately observed each and every day of her life by Dr. Traeger and her husband, a retired psychiatrist, who knew exactly where she had come from. Thus their evaluations of their adopted daughter would have extraordinary value.

  She could detect nothing wrong with the child over her first two years. The others born of infected mothers seemed to be getting along well also.

  But two years and three months into the Foster Project, one of them drowned, a toddler named Tommy Stratton. He had slipped into the family swimming pool unnoticed by his adoptive parents while they did backyard chores, thinking he was safely in his playpen. It was ruled an accident, but it was really an abdication of the obligations they had assumed when they signed the Foster Project adoption agreement.

  However, the chance for Dr. Traeger to learn as much as she could postmortem could not be passed up. She purposely delayed little Tommy’s autopsy for three days on the chance that the little boy might prove immune to a normal death. After the third day of wary observation, she was pleased that she had learned something invaluable: Though born of a ghoul-bitten mother, the child had died without becoming undead.

  Like his peers, two-year-old Tommy had been subjected to comprehensive mental and physical examinations every three months, and as luck would have it his last regularly scheduled exam had taken place just two weeks prior to his death. Therefore Dr. Traeger would get to compare postmortem results with the results of the very recent tests performed while the boy was still alive. Even though she lamented the death of the little boy, from a scientific standpoint she couldn’t help strongly looking forward to the comparison.

  Kallen’s Funeral Home, on the main street of Chapel Grove, was the facility where the Foster Project children were to be autopsied and where burial services for them were certified to be carried out should any be required. When Dr. Traeger arrived there, she rang a bell in the back and was let in by Pete Danko who said, crudely, “He’s all yours.”

  The little boy was nude and laid out on an embalming table. Danko was there to observe the procedure and note whatever he thought might be of interest to the Department of Homeland Security. The owner of the funeral home, a handsome black man named Steve Kallen, was also present and was one of HSD’s plants in the community. His daughter, Brenda, who lived with him in the apartment above the viewing rooms, was not one of the Foster Project adoptees. Kallen was in his mid-forties, tall and trim with a goatee and mustache, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and gray slacks this evening, instead of the dark suits he habitually wore when greeting mourners.

  Dr. Traeger said, “As you both know, this is the first adoptee who has died. None of them get sick. Not even so much as a common cold. I’m going to examine Tommy’s bodily fluids, organs, and brain. If we’re lucky, I’ll learn something new.”

  “Good luck with that,” Danko said dismissively.

  “I almost can’t believe we actually have one in this condition,” said Kallen. “I’m glad my daughter, Brenda, wasn’t adopted, know what I mean? I’d hate to think she might be one of these.”

  Danko said, “Isn’t your daughter in the same day care center where Tommy’s parents used to drop him off?”

  “Well, yeah,” said Kallen. “There aren’t too many choices of day care places in Chapel Grove. I wanted Brenda in the best one. Since my wife died, I’ve been trying to raise her the best way I know how.”

  Dr. Traeger said, “A lot of the kids play together. That’s the main idea of the Foster Project—to observe and study the adoptees in a natural environment, not someplace rigidly controlled.”

  She put on rubber gloves and took the first step in the autopsy, making the Y-shaped incision from Tommy’s narrow little chest to his soft and vulnerable thorax, so she could extract the internal organs. She had to steel herself to perform such a hideous procedure on a little boy, but it had to be done for the good of humanity. It pained her to have to carry her work forward in ways that circumvented the normal tenets of law and democracy, but there was no other way. Although she believed heartily in government of, by, and for the people, at the same time she wished martial law could be temporarily instituted till she could find a cure for the plague. She knew the precedents for it. Lincoln had done it during the Civil War, and Roosevelt had done it during World War Two. Civilization was direly threatened during those historic times, but the plague was far worse and deserved the harsher measures.

  She meticulously carried on with Tommy’s autopsy, and was disappointed when it did not yield any further discoveries. She found no anomalies, no abnormalities. Though anticlimactic, this was totally in line with what she had expected. She said to Kallen and Danko, “Nothing unusual was going on inside the boy. I think the adoptees are perfectly normal. Maybe even better than normal, in fact.”

  Danko said, “How so?”

  “Well, they’re unusually healthy and affliction-free. I’d like to discover the cause of that. It’s gratifying that poor Tommy didn’t exhibit any signs of becoming undead. Perhaps he lacks the animating force, or else it was weaker in him, but still was strong enough to prevent disease.”

  “Pretty far-fetched,” said Danko, with a scornful snort.

  “Everything that we don’t understand seems far-fetched to us, until we unlock the scientific reasons,” said Dr. Traeger. “Isaac Asimov famously remarked that the technology of any sufficiently advanced society will inevitably seem like magic to the less advanced.”

  “Eggheaded drivel,” said Danko.

  “The secret of the plague is how it somehow reanimates corpses,” Dr. Traeger said. “So, what if the cause of it could be deciphered and controlled? Maybe then it could be regulated so that human beings reap immunities from it but also don’t become mindless creatures out to devour all of humanity.”

  “A stupid pipe dream,” Danko said. “We’re better off blasting them down.”

  “We need to move beyond that,” said Dr. Traeger. “Maybe the secret of the plague is also the secret to a longer life.”

  “Dream on, Doctor,” Danko said.

  CHAPTER 13

  On the third anniversary of the first outbreak of the plague in Chapel Grove, Bill Curtis’s American Legion chapter held another memorial service that was attended by many of the survivors, including Ron and Daisy Haley, who had married soon after the outbreak and now had a cute little girl, Amy, about the same age as Jodie. Lauren and Daisy showed each other wallet photos as they mingled over coffee and cookies, Ron and Bill in suits and ties, their wives in their best dresses. The Haleys seemed happy together, and Bill had a fondness for them because of how well they appeared to be doing since their harrowing ordeal at the Rock ’n’ Shock and how hard Ron had fought to escape from addiction.

  As speeches got underway, Bill and Lauren sat at a large round table with Steve Kallen and his daughter, Brenda, Pete and Wanda Danko, and Ron and Daisy Haley. Pete was the Legion Commander. He stood behind the podium, welcomed everyone, and spoke briefly about the somberness and appropriateness of the occasion. Then he turned it over to Reverend James Carnes, the clergyman who went around preaching that the dead needed to be spiked. Bill was annoyed that Carnes had gotten himself elected to chaplain of his American Legion post. He considered Carnes to be an anachronistic fear-mongering fool. But it wasn’t hard to get elected to a Legion office; all you had to do was ingratiate yourself with enough voting members by always showing up at meetings, helping to put flags on veterans’ graves for Memorial Day, and volunteering to do such things as roastin
g corn or grilling burgers and dogs at the annual picnic. Bill wasn’t intolerant of all religious people, just the ones he called religionists—those who pretended to have a direct pipeline to God. To his relief, Carnes didn’t let loose with his usual blather. Instead he read the same prayer that was read each Memorial Day for soldiers who had given their lives in America’s wars.

  Bill held Lauren’s hand and glanced at her warmly. He reminded himself that she had good reason to be traumatized, in light of all she had been through, and maybe someday, hopefully, she’d be able to put it behind her. She had lost her father that day, but Wanda Danko had lost her son, yet seemed to be recovering in a faltering way. As for Pete, he never let on that he was suffering. Maybe he wasn’t. He had the coldest thousand-yard stare Bill had ever seen, colder and deader than the eyes of badly wounded soldiers. Was he battle hardened? Or was he immune to his own suffering as much as he was to the suffering of others?

  Bill suddenly noticed that Dr. Marissa Traeger was sitting with a rather frail elderly man in the back of the room, at a table for eight that held only those two. He wondered why they hadn’t mingled with anyone, not even Pete and Wanda Danko. Still, he thought, it was nice that they had come here to show support for the community, and he said to Pete, “Should we go over and say hello to Dr. Traeger and her guest?”

  “Stay away from them,” Pete said. “They’re very private people.”

  “Then why are they here?” Bill said.

  But Pete shrugged and walked away, which contributed to the strangeness of this already bizarre occasion.

  In many ways, Bill found the loss of life from the plague harder to deal with than the deaths of his fellow soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. He realized that some of people in the community, who had never gone into combat in an “ordinary” war, were scarred just as terribly, or even worse, by the losses they had suffered during the battle with the undead. Some of these folks, not just Wanda Danko, had been attacked by their own sons or daughters who had secretly been into drugs and had fallen prey to the infected needles.