Epidemic of the Living Dead

by John Russo

  He had never been a religious man, even when his life was on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had scoffed at the oft-repeated platitude that “there are no atheists in foxholes.” Though he was sarcastic about Reverend Carnes, he couldn’t help pitying him for allowing himself to be so tortured by his beliefs. Bill had noticed that there was a segment of the clergy who almost gloated over the plague itself as a true sign of the vengeance of Almighty God, and Carnes seemed to be one of them. Because the dead had been coming back to “life,” they thought it was an affirmation of satanic possession. It made them all the more certain that their calling was valid and that their faith rested on solid spiritual ground. They built sermons around the story of Jesus casting out demons. According to the Bible, He had banished them into the bodies of pigs, then drove the pigs into the ocean to drown. Sincerely religious people, as well as the ones that Bill called religionists, prayed that Jesus would come back down to earth and perform a similar miracle to wipe out the plague.

  CHAPTER 22

  Pete Danko came into Bill Curtis’s office, shaking his head in consternation. He said, “Bill, you’re not going to believe this. Three bodies have been stolen from Kallen’s Funeral Home—the Haley family, Ron, Daisy and Amy. Their autopsies were supposed to take place this morning, but now they’re gone.”

  Bill didn’t say anything, just stared at Pete, knowing he wasn’t kidding, wasn’t making a macabre joke. He wasn’t the type.

  “I want you to get on this right away,” Pete said. “Go over there and push Steve Kallen for any leads he can give you. His daughter Brenda, too. He’s been teaching her the business.”

  “Do you think she could be behind some kind of teenage prank? Her or her friends?”

  “At this point, anything’s possible. I wouldn’t rule out Reverend Carnes or members of his flock. They all think that Jesus wants them to burn the dead, shoot them in the head, or drive spikes into them.”

  Bill thought it was bad enough being a lawman when the worst you had to deal with were ordinary crimes like robberies, rapes, home invasions, and homicides. Not that they had much high crime in Chapel Grove, which was why he had been able to convince Lauren that if they stayed there his becoming a cop wouldn’t be such a dangerous choice. But the plague had changed everything, creating more danger for policemen everywhere, even in the small towns. And the theft of three corpses seemed to fit right into the new reality.

  Luckily, he recalled grimly, when the outbreak happened at the Rock ’n’ Shock they were able to control it before it went much further. In other localities, when an epidemic had spread rapidly and had run rampant, people had often been in danger not just from the undead but from looters and marauders taking advantage of the breakdown of law and order.

  He checked a black-and-white out of the motor pool. It was a sunny morning in mid-July, and as he drove to the funeral home, on the main drag, seven blocks from the police station, he once again marveled at how pleasant and peaceful the town looked, on its surface. Not much had changed since his childhood, except a dollar store had replaced the five-and-ten, and some of the saloons got facelifts. Chelsey’s Diner was still flourishing, and Chelsey Turner was much older now, but still working the tables and the counter with the same brisk bustle Bill had known as a youngster on a lunch break from school. As he drove past, it was nine a.m., the early rush was over, and Chelsey was probably distributing place mats, napkins, and silverware, getting ready for the lunch crowd. He had had bacon and eggs there at around seven, and had immersed himself in the good smells of the coffee and the grill and the muted banter of the customers, which would probably never regain its former level of cheerfulness till the threat of the plague was somehow over and done with.

  He couldn’t look at the streets of the town anymore without remembering friends and acquaintances he would never see again. Mr. Barone, who had owned the hardware store, had sold it to a newcomer and moved to Pittsburgh after his teenage daughter was killed at the Rock ’n’ Shock. Bert Swantner, who tended bar at the American Legion, had a son who had worked as an ER nurse and was bitten at the hospital, then had to be dispatched by a member of the SWAT team. He could go on; the list of personal tragedies was a long one, and the town was permeated by muted despair. People didn’t go out much anymore, so there weren’t as many pedestrians as there used to be in the nine blocks of business section. A shoe store, a clothing store, and a mom-and-pop grocery store were still in business, but several of the folks that he saw going in and out of the post office or the other businesses had either lost a loved one or had come very close to it during the Chapel Grove outbreak.

  He parked in front of Kallen’s Funeral Home, which was once lived in by a large Italian-American family, the Corrados. There were five brothers and four sisters. He had graduated from Chapel Grove High with Esther Corrado, but all the boys were a couple years older than he, and the sisters, other than Esther, were several grades behind him, so he hadn’t hung out with them. When Steve Kallen bought the large brick home with plans of turning it into a mortuary with viewing rooms on the ground floor and an apartment for him and his family on the second floor, all of the Corrados left town.

  He got out of the squad car, locked it, then opened the trunk and took out his fingerprint kit so he wouldn’t have to come back for it. The funeral home had a large front porch with white banisters and white columns and a beautiful green lawn totally free of dandelions and weeds. Visitation hours for the Haleys, scheduled for tomorrow morning, were posted in a glass frame to the left of the porch. Except now they wouldn’t have any visitation hours unless he could somehow recover their bodies. He had the strange, rather unnerving thought that if Carnes and his flock had taken the corpses and spiked them, Steve Kallen would be obliged to use his facial reconstruction skills, employing derma wax and cadaver cosmetics, to make them presentable for a rescheduled viewing.

  He didn’t know whether he should ring the doorbell or go around to the asphalt driveway in back, where the dead were delivered for autopsies, embalming and cremation. He opted for going up onto the porch and ringing the bell. Steve Kallen opened the door, wearing a dark suit, black tie, and crisp white shirt, his habitual uniform for greeting mourners, but in the face of the bizarre theft this morning, his lugubrious composure had deserted him. “Come in, come in, Bill,” he said, “this is terrible.” Like most people in town, Bill had shaken hands with Kallen at many, many funerals, but they weren’t drinking buddies. “Where can we talk?” he asked, getting right down to business. He took out his ballpoint pen and spiral-ringed notepad and the funeral director said, in his usual hushed voice, “Let’s go into my office.”

  The office was nicely appointed. The oils on three of the walls were scenic pastorals in large gilt frames. Two leather-upholstered armchairs faced the ornately carved oaken desk. The desk blotter was green, and so was the carpet, which looked freshly vacuumed. There was a framed photo of Kallen’s daughter on the desk, which showed her to be light-complexioned whereas he was very dark. So maybe she took after her mother, Bill thought, but he had never met her because she passed away before Steve and Brenda had moved here. Sitting in front of the solemn-looking funeral director, he said, “Tell me how you discovered the bodies were missing.”

  “They were going to be autopsied, and they were still in their body bags last I saw them. I figured that by later today I’d be done working on them, and my handyman, Sam Kent, would help me get the coffins up here and into the viewing room. He’s here now. But there’s nothing for him to do, unless we quickly recover the bodies. I already phoned Ron Haley’s mother and let her know what happened. Naturally, she’s horribly upset. She’s up in years, and it’s another very hard blow for her to take.”

  “When you got to the basement, what exactly did you see?”

  “My heart jumped into my throat. All three body bags were gone. And all the doors were locked. No signs of breaking and entering.”

  “Well, I’ll have to take a close look,” Bill
told him. “Although, if a lockpick was used, I may not be able to spot any evidence of it. Who has keys, besides you?”

  “Sam does. And my daughter, Brenda. That’s all.”

  “By any chance, does Sam Kent belong to Reverend Carnes’s church?”

  “I don’t know what church he belongs to or what religion he practices. In any case, why wouldn’t they simply spike the bodies right here in my basement, if that’s what you’re driving at, instead of carrying them off?”

  “What about your daughter?”

  “Brenda? We’re both Presbyterians, but not sticklers about it. In our business, it helps to be ecumenical. She did join Carnes’s youth group, but only because her friends belong to it.”

  “Do her friends believe all the things that the reverend preaches?” Bill inquired, trying not to sound sarcastic about it. “Spiking the dead, for instance,” he added more pointedly.

  “I suppose that some of them do, but my daughter definitely isn’t a true believer. Like I said, she joined the youth group just for the social aspect.”

  “Well, I’m going to have to question Sam Kent. And Brenda, too. Not that I suspect them of anything. But it’s my job to cover all the bases.”

  “I’ll make them both available,” Kallen said.

  “First, let’s you and I have a look at the crime scene.”

  They didn’t use the elevator, but instead took the stairs down to the basement. Bill pulled latex gloves out of his pocket and put them on before scrutinizing the doors and the locks. There were two windowless garage doors, large enough to accommodate ambulances or hearses, and a side door made of steel, with a deadbolt. He didn’t see any scrapes or nicks, so he dusted the doors, the jambs, and the locks for fingerprints, but got only smudges, too blurry for identification purposes. He then dusted all three of the gurneys that had supported the Haleys’ body bags, got several legible prints, and used his phone to photograph them. He knew he would have to fingerprint Steve Kallen, Brenda Kallen, and Sam Kent for comparison with the prints he had gotten. He found nothing else of evidentiary value in the basement.

  “Where’s Sam?” he asked Kallen.

  “Still sitting in one of the viewing rooms, unless he went outside for a cigarette.”

  “I’ll find him,” Bill said. “I’ll talk with him first, then your daughter. She’s here, isn’t she?”

  “In her room. I’ll be in my office while you’re with Sam. Let me know when to get her down here, and I can buzz her on the intercom. There’s a meeting of Carnes’s youth group at the church today, but I made Brenda stay home. I knew you’d want to talk to her.”

  “I want to question Brenda and Sam separately, and in private,” Bill said.

  Kallen went back into his office and closed the door, and Bill found Sam Kent sitting in the viewing room that had been meant for the Haleys. A lanky, rawboned white man who looked to be in his sixties, Sam had long gray hair pulled back into a ponytail and held together with a rubber band. He was wearing bibbed coveralls and yellow clodhoppers. He smelled like cigarette smoke, and his fingers were brown from nicotine. He looked up when Bill entered, but remained seated on one of the chairs lined against a wall, waiting for the mourners who weren’t coming. Three satin-draped pedestals stood at the front of the room, devoid of coffins. Floral arrangements, with sympathy cards attached, surrounded the empty pedestals, emphasizing the creepy feeling Bill got over the fact that the three guests of honor were absent.

  Sam Kent said, “I know who you are. You’re the Curtis boy. Your parents were Bill and Mary. Do I recollect rightly?”

  “Yes. How did you know them?”

  “Painted their house for ’em, when you were little. Too little to remember, I guess. You married the Stanski girl, didn’t you?”

  “Lauren Stanski.”

  “Uh-huh. I thought so.”

  This sort of banter was obligatory in Chapel Grove, a kind of ritualized tail-wagging before people would warm up and get down to the business at hand. After Bill figured he must have schmoozed Sam long enough, he asked him if he had any gut feelings about the missing bodies.

  “I ain’t got no idea who took ’em. If’n I did, I’d tell ya.”

  “What do you think of Reverend James Carnes?”

  “He’s a Bible-thumping fool! He drives spikes in people’s heads after they’re dead. A stupid waste of time! If he did that to my old lady or my daughter, I’d knock all his teeth out, or I’d spike him! There’s nothin’ magical about the plague—it’s just a disease that we ain’t figgered out yet—like AIDS or cancer. By ’n’ by, the scientists’ll come up with somethin’. But meanwhile spikin’ or burnin’ the corpses ain’t gonna help. It’s only the ones that we know are carryin’ the germ that need to be put down. If they’re just ordinary dead folks that ain’t gonna jump back up and bite us, we should bury ’em and leave ’em alone. Leave ’em rot in their graves.”

  Sam had made some good points, Bill thought. In his rude but pragmatic style, he had cut right to the heart of the matter. He obviously didn’t have much formal education, but there was nothing wrong with his intellect. Bill couldn’t picture him teaming up with the kind of people who wanted to steal dead bodies.

  He went back upstairs to ask Steve Kallen to let him talk to Brenda. Kallen turned his desk over to Bill after buzzing Brenda on the intercom, then left the office after she came in. Bill eyed her for a few minutes in silence, just to put her on edge in case she had anything to hide. In person, her skin was a shade darker than how it appeared in the photograph. Her oval face was framed by shiny black hair down to her shoulders. She had a gleam of insolence in her black eyes and a hint of scorn in her tightly pursed smile.

  She sat in front of Bill and he said, “Thanks for talking with me, Brenda. Do you have any idea who could have broken in here?”

  “If I did, I’d tell you,” she said huffily. “I know the bodies were stolen, but I don’t have a clue who did it.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “My father told me. Stealing dead bodies? Why would anyone do that?”

  “Some people believe in spiking or burning them,” Bill said.

  “Well, yeah,” Brenda said. “But why wouldn’t they just spike them right where they found them?”

  “Good question,” said Bill, “but I don’t have the answer yet. I didn’t find any indication that the doors or the locks were tampered with. Your father says that, besides him, only you and Sam Kent have keys.”

  “I never loaned my key to anyone. I can’t speak for Sam or my father.”

  “Is there any chance one of you could have failed to make sure the doors were locked and dead-bolted? Including the doors up here?”

  “I wasn’t down here last night. I was in my room studying and listening to music. Then I took a shower and went to bed.”

  “Are you sure? You didn’t come back downstairs for any reason?”

  “Not that I recall, no.”

  “I understand you joined Reverend Carnes’s youth group. What’s that all about, Brenda?”

  “Carnes is a cartoon. I only joined his little club so I can hang out with my friends. We smirk and laugh behind his back. But he buys ten pizzas and a bunch of cases of pop for us when we go to his Bible meetings and pretend we’re listening to him.”

  Bill said. “Is there any chance you could have set your purse down at Carnes’s church, and somebody could have taken your keys and made copies of them?”

  “I suppose anything’s possible. I wouldn’t put anything past some of the true believers who want to drive spikes in people’s heads. That’s why I never leave my purse unattended.”

  Bill decided he’d have to get a list of the members of the Church of Lazarus Risen so he could do background checks. It was conceivable that some of them might have prison records, might even have been sent up for burglaries that involved skillful lock picking—the kind that left no scratch marks. To Bill, the theft of dead bodies seemed less likely to be a teenage prank tha
n the work of religiously deluded adults. Unless the good Reverend Carnes wasn’t above using brainwashed kids to help him in his misguided mission.

  After fingerprinting Brenda and Steve Kallen in the funeral director’s office, Bill got back into the squad car and drove to Carnes’s church, which was on a hilly side street, three blocks from the business section. Its gravel parking lot was filled with vehicles, and Bill noticed that Darius Hornsby’s garishly decorated silver van was among them. The church proper was over a hundred years old, and he had always admired its beautiful stonework, done by Italian artisans in the early 1900s. He headed for the front doors, but changed direction when he heard voices coming from the cemetery on the far side of the church, opposite the parking lot.

  Making his way among the gravestones, he saw that a prayer was being chanted by a group of thirty-odd young people led by Reverend Carnes himself and by his attorney, Bennett Stein, who must be a deacon or something of that sort. Stein’s wife, Margaret, was standing next to him. Bill knew her from seeing her with Stein at quite a few fund-raisers and social functions, including the Memorial Day services and picnics held by the American Legion.

  Other than the three adults, the prayer group was comprised of teenagers ranging in age from about thirteen to eighteen. Their chant seemed to have been lifted from the King James version of the Old Testament, then modified into an incantation against the Plague of the Living Dead. The final stanza was a direct plea to Saint Lazarus:

  We beg thee, our dearly beloved patron saint,

  To let all these souls rest in peace.

  May their bodies turn to dust.

  May their bodies never rise again.

  May their souls enjoy the bliss of heaven.

  May they be bathed in perpetual light.

  Forever and ever. Amen.

  Bill wondered why they were reciting a prayer designed to keep their dead and buried parishioners from coming up out of their graves. No such thing had ever happened during any of the plague outbreaks. Only walking, talking people aboveground had been dying, then coming back to life to attack the living.