Epidemic of the Living Dead

by John Russo

  She further reassured herself by reflecting upon the unfortunate little boy, Tommy Stratton, who had drowned at age two. None of his autopsy findings had been unusual or alarming. And so, relying on that precedent, Dr. Traeger had every reason to believe that even though Darius Hornsby had bitten the Curtis child, it probably did not carry with it any disturbing ramifications beyond the act itself.

  Three weeks later, during the boy’s regularly scheduled evaluation, tests for pathogens and abnormalities proved negative, and she was greatly relieved. It seemed to be holding true that the children were perfectly normal in spite of the unique circumstances of their births.

  CHAPTER 16

  As the Foster Project passed its seventh anniversary, Dr. Traeger got approval for eight more years of funding so it could continue till the remaining three adoptees could matriculate through puberty. She felt this was necessary and pragmatic because so many changes would take place in developing human beings during the preteen and teen years, so many complicated hormonal transformations and wild mood swings, that if anything were to go wrong in the adoptees’ maturation, this would be the time of most danger.

  She had already made a troubling observation. The special children were developing a strange, almost eerie affinity for one another, even though such cliquish behavior doesn’t usually manifest strongly prior to the onset of adolescence. Even as early as first and second grade, they did not integrate well with their other classmates.

  But they continued to have very strong immune systems, highly resistant to all types of illness. One of Dr. Traeger’s goals in continuing to study them was that she hoped to discover how that same kind of disease resistance could be conveyed to all children, perhaps even while they were still in the womb.

  She had plenty of highly important, intellectually stimulating things to do at the institute and was as deeply motivated as ever, but unfortunately, in her personal life she was not happy. She and her husband were having constant behavioral problems with their adopted daughter, Kathy. Dr. Traeger felt thwarted in her hope of having a warm, comforting family, the kind she had always yearned for, that would help her put the nightmare of her mother’s savage death behind her. She was always dispassionately objective even when analyzing herself, and so she readily understood that what she had experienced as a child had adversely colored her disposition and her path through life.

  She always was inhibited about love and romance. She did not marry until late in life, age forty-three, and Daniel was the pursuer, not she, even though he was twenty years older. She was not highly sexed, absorbed as she was in her calling, and so a much older man suited her. She had grown attached to him during psychotherapy appointments with him while she was still in her twenties, and she could admit to herself that, having grown up as an orphan, perhaps she had a father complex. When they started dating, he stopped being her therapist, which was of course the ethical thing to do. Even after their wedding, she remained immersed in the science of pathogens and the search for cures. They were a compatible if not passionate couple, both working professionals, until his age and his infirmities forced him to give up his practice.

  He became a stay-at-home father after they adopted Kathy, who at first seemed like a bright and bubbly child. But gradually, being with her all day every day, Daniel began to suspect that something was not right with her. Dr. Traeger hated to entertain that thought, for she had come to love Kathy as deeply as she would have loved a child who was biologically hers. She suspected in the beginning that Daniel wasn’t warming to their adoptee as readily as she herself was. She overcompensated by lavishing affection upon Kathy, and Daniel criticized her for it. “You realize,” he said, “that one can smother a child with a blanket of love as easily as one can smother it with a blanket of wool. And any kind of smothering will only make her pull away from you all the more.”

  As time went by, Dr. Traeger had to struggle more and more for her daughter’s respect and obedience. And the more she fought, the more she lost. The distance between the two of them was palpable. She did not feel that she and Kathy had ever fully bonded. She lay awake night after night, hoping that an explanation would come to her. The child did not know that she was adopted, and therefore the distance that she kept could not be due to animosity felt because she was not being raised by her birth parents. Dr. Traeger had to come to grips with the realization that Kathy seemed to treat her and her husband as mere providers of food, shelter, and spending money, instead of as the willing couple who loved her and took loving care of her.

  They had a live-in British nanny, only nineteen years old, and Kathy and the nanny got along fine, better than Kathy got along with her parents. Perhaps it was because the girl was so much closer to Kathy’s age, Dr. Traeger thought, and told herself that she shouldn’t be jealous. At the same time, she tried to fight off the nagging sense of alarm that haunted her when she reflected upon the fact that emotional coldness toward one’s parents was the classic trait of a sociopath. But she didn’t want to believe that about her own daughter. Even if it were somehow to prove true, she felt that it was not necessarily a product of Kathy’s unusual biological parentage. Many, many children went bad who were not born of a plague-diseased mother. So what was going on with Kathy? To search out the answer to that heart-wrenching question was just one of many reasons that the Foster Project must continue. Dr. Traeger needed to find out all those things that she currently did not know, not only about the other adoptees but about her own daughter.

  She longed for a healthy family relationship, which had been denied her after she was orphaned and placed in foster care. The pressures put on her by her crucial work at the institute, coupled with pressures in her own home, were sometimes almost too much for her. It seemed grossly unfair to her that she was such an intelligent, dedicated, and accomplished woman, and yet true happiness eluded her.

  CHAPTER 17

  On a Saturday morning when Bill Curtis was supposed to have the day off, he was jolted out of a fitful sleep by a phone call from Pete Danko. “Bad news. Dr. Traeger’s husband has fallen down a flight of stairs. She says he has no pulse, and she thinks his neck is broken. I’ll meet you at their place. Coroner is on his way.”

  When Bill got to the Traegers’ home, a large Tudor with a four-car garage, there were two squad cars parked in the wide driveway, along with the coroner’s van. A patrolman guarding the front door admitted him into the living room, where the coroner was at the foot of the stairs examining Daniel’s body. A three-pronged aluminum cane lay next to him, as if it had tumbled down the stairs with him.

  Bill realized that Pete Danko must have arrived not long before he did, because Dr. Traeger, who was wearing a gray skirt, a blue blouse, nylons, and high-heeled shoes, was just now clueing him in. “I was about to leave for work,” she said shakily. “Our daughter witnessed the fall, but I heard the noise. She told me my husband tripped over our pet cat. You can talk with Kathy if you wish, but treat her gently, she’s only seven years old. She’s in her room. We have a nanny, but she’s in Pittsburgh for the weekend, with one of her friends.”

  Pete turned to Bill and said, “We’ll have to question the little girl, much as we might not want to. I’ll talk with Dr. Traeger, Bill, and you talk with Kathy. We’ll compare notes.”

  Bill tapped lightly on the little girl’s door, which was slightly ajar, and she said, “Come in, Mommy.” Her eyes widened when she saw it wasn’t her mommy. She was sitting on her bed. The room was full of stuffed animals and expensive-looking furniture, and also contained a computer and a PlayStation. Bill thought it looked like a bedroom that would belong to one of Hollywood’s child stars, definitely more high-end than Jodie’s room. He hesitantly approached the pretty seven-year-old, reminding himself that he should be as tactful as possible, but before he could ask her anything, she said, “Is my daddy dead?” He didn’t see any tears, and her flat way of asking that question seemed strange. She rattled on, in an emotionless monotone. “Kitty was on the steps, a
nd Daddy didn’t see her at first. He tried not to step on Kitty, and then he fell. His cane missed the step.”

  Dr. Traeger interrupted right then, peeking into the room with Pete at her side. “Please don’t push my daughter too hard,” she pleaded. “At Kathy’s age I witnessed my own mother’s death, and I didn’t get over it for a long, long time. I had nightmares from grade school on, even through medical school.”

  “I’m deeply sorry to learn that,” Bill told her.

  “Likewise,” said Pete. “Step outside, Doctor, and we’ll talk some more. You too, Bill.”

  Bill stepped into the hallway and pushed Kathy’s bedroom door all the way shut.

  Dr. Traeger said, “This happened because my husband is so frail. He has degenerative arthritis, among other things, including osteoporosis. We were scheduled to have a chairlift installed next week. If we could have gotten it earlier, this probably wouldn’t have happened.”

  “The coroner says he’s going to rule it an accidental death,” Pete said, lowering his voice so Dr. Traeger’s daughter wouldn’t overhear. “I don’t see anything that would contradict his assessment. It’s sad that poor Kathy had to be there to see it.”

  Bill thought to himself that if Kathy were an adult witness Pete wouldn’t so readily accept her statement, but would dig deeper. Instead he had interrupted Bill’s chat with her before she could be questioned in depth. All right. She was only a child, in third grade. But Bill had the nagging thought that she might know something more. However, there really didn’t seem to be any strong reason to suspect the child of pushing her elderly parent down the stairs even though it was conceivable that she would have had the strength. But what possible motive?

  Still, Bill didn’t want to let it go. “Pete, why don’t you let me finish talking with Kathy?” he said. “That way I can put everything she says into my report, and inquiring eyes will see that we did everything by the numbers.”

  “No,” Pete said adamantly. “The child has been through enough. We already know what she told her mother, and we don’t need to put her through any more trauma.”

  Bill could concede that maybe that sounded reasonable. But the way Pete was squelching him made him think back to the hunt for the missing needles and the outbreak at the Rock ’n’ Shock. Pete had seemed less than candid back then, too, as if he knew something that he wasn’t telling. When Bill tried to probe more, he felt like he was walking on dangerous ground and might fall into a pit with sharpened stakes.

  After the detectives left and Daniel’s body was taken to Kallen’s Funeral Home for cremation, Dr. Traeger fell to pieces, crying uncontrollably, soaking three hankies and a sheaf of paper towels. Was it possible that the child she and her husband had adopted could be more tainted than she ever wanted to believe?

  Trying to pull herself together, she considered the fact that from Kathy’s earliest childhood she had seemed unnaturally close to the other children of the Foster Project. In reports to Homeland Security, and in her personal journals, Dr. Traeger had gone so far as to use the word “eerie” when puzzling over the unique affinity that the children had for one another. But she had not wanted to use language stronger than that until she was more certain of her findings.

  She had also noted that the close-knit circle of Kathy’s friends was definitely widening. She had to ask herself if her daughter, as well as the others like her, might have a special charismatic power over other children, even those of normal birth, a charisma not unlike that of certain cult leaders or religious zealots like David Koresh, Jim Jones, or even Reverend Carnes, the pastor of his stupidly named Church of Lazarus Risen.

  In her grief, Dr. Traeger decided that, now that her husband was gone, she needed to redouble her efforts to form a deeper bond with Kathy. She needed to be warm and welcoming, not judgmental or accusatory in any way. She had to try to nurture the human empathy that usually comes naturally to humans.

  She understood well the workings of the human brain, for it had been the major focus of her studies and experiments. Most laymen think of the brain as just one organ. But scientists had learned that down through the millennia, the most primitive part did not evolve further; instead, as evolution created mammals and then man, more advanced parts were added onto the basic reptile brain that humans still retain. The reptile complex is the seat of aggression. The limbic system, which began to show up in early mammals, is the seat of nurturing and caring about others. And the neocortex, the last part of our brains to evolve, gives us our power to discriminate and reason.

  When the neocortex loses its control over the reptile complex, we become creatures devoid of ethics and morality. Who was the tempter in the Garden of Eden? The serpent. The reptile. In other words, the reptilian side of man—that’s who the devil is. That is what Dr. Traeger firmly believed. She had long looked at the plague as an enigmatic disease of the neocortex, the seat of reason, coupled with an impairment of the limbic system. The people afflicted with it were not much different from reptiles, driven by the urge to kill and eat. Therefore, she had reasoned, the cure for the plague, if she could someday find it, would most likely involve discovering some way to revitalize and rebuild the neocortex and the limbic system, thereby reviving the power to think as well as to empathize.

  Over the past several years, several outbreaks in various parts of the country had provided her with specimens to continue her studies. They were immobilized with paralyzing darts, like zoo animals, and brought to her for her purposes. A crude way of doing it, but a necessary procedure, of course. Desperate times require desperate measures.

  It had occurred to her, with a flash of insight, that the unfortunate disease Alzheimer’s might be related to the disease of the undead. The most horrible thing about Alzheimer’s was that one could feel one’s brain being stolen away. Were not the undead similarly afflicted? Their brains were partly alive, but only to animate them and imbue them with an implacable craving for human flesh.

  Therefore, for some time now, Dr. Traeger had been studying sufferers of Alzheimer’s as well as captured specimens of the undead. She became excited when she thought of how wonderful it would be if she could find the cure to both diseases! She believed that the solution, when it came to her, would likely be elegantly simple. But arriving at it was not simple at all. It was frustratingly elusive, as were her attempts to break through to her own daughter.

  She left her study, gently knocked on Kathy’s door, and asked if she might come in. When she got no answer, she entered anyway, and sat on the edge of the bed. “Tell me once more how Daddy’s accident happened,” she began. She hoped that they would be able to cling to each other through this time of grief, so that healing could begin to happen for them both.

  But Kathy turned her head away and said, “Please, Mommy, leave me alone.”

  She decided that she just needed to give her little girl more time. So she backed away and softly closed the bedroom door. She wished Kathy would display more emotion about her father’s death. She didn’t want her to start blaming herself, she only wanted her to at least shed some tears or give some sort of sign that she could behave in a normal way. In spite of the fact that she was an adopted child, and one with strange origins, Dr. Traeger had come to love her as she had wished she would, and she longed for her love to be returned. She knew from the tests she had performed on Kathy that the child’s neocortex was healthy and uncompromised. She was highly intelligent and creative, so perhaps her superior intelligence was what made her standoffish to children outside of her own close-knit group.

  Still, Dr. Traeger wondered if Kathy’s limbic system, the seat of caring and empathy in all mammals, was damaged in some scientifically undetectable way, leaving an unfathomable emotional void. And if this should be true of Kathy, was it also true of all the special children?

  CHAPTER 18

  Jodie was nine years old when, on a Friday in May, Lauren texted Bill that she had gotten great news and was coming to the police station to tell him about it. He
was immediately excited because she almost never came to his workplace because she hated to be around Pete, and now she had texted that she and Jodie both would be there in fifteen minutes. They arrived in even less time, and barged right in with big smiles on their faces.

  “We just came from the allergist!” Lauren blurted happily. “Jodie’s allergies have cleared up! She may not even need to carry her EpiPen anymore!”

  “How could that be?” Bill asked, maintaining skepticism at first, not daring to be too quick to get his hopes up. After five years of wondering when or where Jodie might inadvertently eat something that would send her into anaphylactic shock, it was hard to believe that the ordeal might end. From everything he had been told or had read online, the defect was genetic and had no known cure.

  “The allergist can’t figure it out,” Lauren told him. “He says her body chemistry must’ve changed, but he hasn’t a clue why. He’s going to consult with some of his colleagues, but he’s sure they’ve never seen a case like it. He said if they did come up with an answer, they’d patent it and get very, very rich.”

  Jodie was beaming, and Bill got up from behind his desk, hugged her tightly, and said, “I’m glad, honey. You’ve been through a lot, we all have, and now everything will start to get better.”

  “I’m already better, Daddy,” she said, smiling the sweet unblemished smile he remembered from her earliest childhood but hadn’t seen for several years. It made his heart ache.