Epidemic of the Living Dead

by John Russo

  “Can you possibly come here? Please, can you do a house call?”

  “I’m still working late, seeing patients. Don’t panic. I’ve had other cases like this, and they’ve all gotten well. I’m not at liberty to tell you who, but some of her teenage friends have gone through the same symptoms. We don’t know the exact cause, but we’re able to treat them and at least help them manage the pain. It seems to be a temporary anti-immune system response, probably due to the hormonal changes of puberty.”

  “Well, thank you for taking my call,” Lauren said. “I’ll pick up the prescription.”

  She killed her cell phone and stood in one spot, fidgeting, nervously rubbing her hands on her apron. She had been in the kitchen basting a chicken when Jodie had let out a shriek from her bedroom. She had gone up there to see what was the matter, had spoken to Jodie and tried to soothe her, and had taken her temperature. Then she had phoned Dr. Miller.

  She listened again now, and wasn’t hearing any more shrieks or sobs. So she tiptoed up the stairs. She stood for a long moment in the hall outside Jodie’s room. Hearing nothing, she slowly opened the door.

  The room was dark, so much so that she could barely make out Jodie lying on her bed.

  She automatically reached out and flicked on the light switch, and Jodie immediately yelled at her, “Shut that damned light out!”

  But Lauren froze at the sight of what had happened to her fifteen-year-old daughter in just the past fifteen minutes. Jodie’s skin had turned an ugly pasty-white, and there were hideous purple blisters on her scarred arm and around her lips.

  “Shut the fucking thing off, Mom!”

  “Don’t swear at me like that! I’ll tell your father!”

  “Big fucking deal!”

  “Sometimes I could just smack you!” Lauren said. She angrily flipped the switch and the room was plunged into murkiness. Then she hesitated for a minute or so and didn’t get cursed at again. So she crept into the bedroom and hovered at Jodie’s bedside like the caring mother that she was. But Jodie turned her head away.

  Lauren said, “Sweetheart, I can brew some tea with honey and lemon, to help you sweat out your fever.”

  “I don’t want anything,” Jodie said sullenly. “I’m sorry I swore at you, Mom.”

  “Dr. Miller said not to worry, he’s seen cases like yours before. I’ll be able to get a prescription.”

  “I’m so ugly!” Jodie wailed. “That salve didn’t help at all! I look worse than before!”

  Lauren risked getting cursed at again and reached out and held her daughter’s hand. It felt amazingly hot to the touch. She said, “Honey, you’re not ugly. And you’re going to get well. Dr. Miller said the prescription will be sure to help.”

  “In how long?”

  “Maybe no longer than a week.”

  “Great! I won’t be able to go out of the house! I might as well be dead!”

  “Well, I’ll leave you alone for now. Try and get some rest. Are you sure you don’t want to come down and eat? I’m roasting a chicken.”

  Jodie shook her head no, and Lauren bent over her and kissed her feverish forehead, then backed out of the room and softly closed the door.

  As she came down the stairs, Bill came in the front door. Immediately he asked, “How’s Jodie? What’d the doctor say?”

  She gave Bill a hug and a kiss, then said, “She doesn’t appear to be deathly ill, but she looks far worse than when she first came home from school. Her temperature is up pretty high, but not at the emergency level. Dr. Miller says temporary hormonal imbalances during puberty can produce strange symptoms. But nothing like that ever happened to me.”

  She followed her husband into the dining room where he performed the standard ritual of taking off his suit jacket, removing his shoulder holster, and locking his gun in the cabinet.

  Suddenly they heard a loud scream from upstairs.

  Jodie was yelling hysterically.

  But the screaming stopped before Bill and Lauren could get up there.

  The light was on in the bathroom, and they saw Jodie lying on the floor. Her eyes were staring glassily upward.

  Lauren yelled, “Oh my God! Bill! Shut that light off! I don’t know why—”

  Bill didn’t immediately shut the light off. Instead he knelt over his daughter. He saw her blisters. And now they were oozing a purplish pus.

  “She’s still breathing,” he said. “Help me carry her into bed.”

  “Look, Bill!” Lauren shrieked.

  She was pointing at the water in the commode bowl. It was as purple as the blisters on Jodie’s arm and lips.

  CHAPTER 38

  Steve Kallen was applying beautifying touches to the corpse of a silver-haired woman already wearing the frilly blue dressing gown she would be wearing in one of the viewing rooms. For now, she was still in the embalming room, and Kallen’s daughter, Brenda, was at his side, observing and listening.

  As he began cleaning the cadaver’s nails with a nail file, he said, “I used a half-and-half mixture of embalming fluid on Mrs. Filbert here. If you get a body that’s already partially decayed, you have to make your mixture much more potent. But bear in mind, honey, that if your mixture is too strong you might get fluid burns—the skin will turn splotchy red and the tissues will get like hard rubber. However, a too weak mixture will cause discoloration and odor. And you don’t want that when the family comes to see their loved one.”

  She said, “I still don’t understand why people want corpses to be prettied up like this. It seems bizarre to me, a weird way for us to make money.”

  “Maybe I agree with you, but I wouldn’t say it out loud,” Kallen admitted.

  He laid the nail file down. Already knowing what he’d be doing next, Brenda showed off her knowledge by handing her father a fine-bristled brush and jar of dusting powder.

  “Now we’ve got to make her look healthy,” he said, “even though her long bout with cancer wasted her away, emaciated her. But her family doesn’t want to see her that way. So we use Sun Tone flesh-dusting powder.”

  “I already know that, Daddy.”

  He began brushing the powder artfully on the cadaver’s face as he instructed, “You’ve got to take your time . . . study her . . . make her look tanned and robust. Then use a touch of ruby lip gloss.”

  “She still looks ghastly to me!” said Brenda.

  “But her loved ones are getting exactly what they’re paying for,” said Kallen. “Believe me, they’re going to be happy campers.”

  As he reached for the lip gloss, the night bell rang. He went to the steel door and looked through the peephole. He was surprised when he saw it was Dr. Miller. He let him in, and the doctor, normally a dapper-looking professional, was sweaty and disheveled. He wasn’t wearing his suit jacket or his necktie, and his shirt was rumpled and had a brownish stain on it. The top two shirt buttons were unfastened, and he had whisky on his breath.

  “Made a house call,” he said, blinking and shaking his head. “Wish I didn’t. No wonder I seldom do it. The Curtis girl . . . I saw her tonight . . . same as the others . . . only worse.”

  When he suddenly focused on Kallen’s daughter, standing by the corpse of Mrs. Filbert, he clammed up and said, “Oh, hi, Brenda,” with an attempt at nonchalance.

  Kallen said, “She’s learning the family business, Doc. I see you remember her.”

  “Sure . . . sure I do. I remember all my patients . . . all the kids I make healthy.” He stared at Brenda for a long moment, then said, “Can we talk alone, Steve? It’s important.”

  Brenda said rather coyly, “Nice to see you again, Doctor.” Then she pivoted and left the basement.

  Steve Kallen returned to the cadaver and started applying lip gloss.

  Following him over there, Dr. Miller blurted, “They all exhibit signs of porphyria! Then they get better, like a miracle!”

  Continuing to paint the cadaver’s lips, Kallen said, “I’m afraid I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re ta
lking about, Doc.”

  “Don’t you, Steve? Are you sure Brenda is everything you think she is?”

  “I’ve never seen you drunk like this, Doc. You should go home and sober up. I don’t know what the heck you’re babbling about.”

  “Was Brenda ever in a fight with the Hornsby boy when they were in kindergarten? Did he ever bite her that you know about?”

  “No, nothing like that ever happened,” Kallen said. “At least not to my knowledge. These days they’re buddies. They pal around together.”

  “Did her skin ever break out in purplish blisters?”

  Kallen stopped the tube of lip gloss in midair. “Not that I ever saw, no. But she’s been going to summer camp. If it happened there, at the church camp—”

  “Whose church camp?” Dr. Miller pounced.

  “Reverend Carnes’s. She joined his youth group.”

  “Damn! Maybe he treated her with something, some crazy method of his, without my finding out about it. I wish Brenda had told me. Maybe she had the disease last summer, or the summer before, while she was at that camp. Or maybe she never got it at all. Maybe she’s immune to it.”

  “Immune to what? You’re scaring me, Doc!”

  “Porphyria! It’s what the Curtis girl has. They get it when they reach puberty. A blood disease—a metabolic disturbance. It’s like shingles, it lies dormant, but when it comes out, it makes their skin blister and bleed. Even their urine changes color, it turns purple. They can’t go out in the sun. Back in the Middle Ages they were called vampires, and in a way that’s what they were—the disease caused them to lose so many nutrients that drinking blood seemed to help them, or at least they believed so. When they were caught, stakes were driven into their hearts. Don’t you get it, Steve? It was the origin of the vampire myth! We don’t have any idea what these kids are going to turn into!”

  “Even if my daughter had it and I didn’t know about it,” Kallen said desperately, “she must have gotten over it, and maybe she’ll remain healthy from now on. She never gets sick anymore. That’s a very good sign, isn’t it, Doc?”

  “I’d like to believe that, because it used to be that most porphyria sufferers, once they got the disease, would have it for the rest of their lives. They’d have to stay on tranquilizers and cortisone creams and injections. If they drank any alcohol, used drugs, got pregnant, or even stayed in the sun too long, they’d get those severe blisters and develop all kinds of mental aberrations, including psychosis.”

  “But the Foster Project kids all get completely better. Isn’t that what you’ve been saying? You and Dr. Traeger,” Kallen said. “You’re supposed to be the experts! I totally believed you! I thought that if Brenda ever had any of those kind of symptoms, she surely would’ve told me.”

  “The Foster Project kids don’t exhibit the outward signs of it. It could be because their abnormality was passed on to them while they were bathed in amniotic fluid. It’s the ones who are infected by those children who develop the outwardly manifested symptoms. I think it’s possible that the condition can be transmitted not just by biting but by the transfer of saliva by kissing or even sharing candy or soft drinks. Heaven help us! Some of them could’ve gotten it by licking each other’s ice cream cones!”

  “What does Dr. Traeger say? Does she know all this?”

  “We discussed it in her office earlier today. We compared notes and were able to put two and two together. She intimately knows her research, of course, and I know more about what’s been going on out in the community. When the facts are merged, it leads to the conclusions I revealed to you. Dr. Traeger wants to keep all of it top secret. But I felt like I should warn you about your daughter.”

  “Is there any chance she’s really okay?” Kallen asked desperately.

  “I don’t know,” said Dr. Miller. “She’s first generation, so maybe. The others who are infected by them exhibit these ungodly symptoms, and then they appear to become perfectly normal, as if someone passed a magic wand over them. But beneath the surface they might be anything but normal.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Pete Danko used his secure Skype system to report to Colonel Spence at the Pentagon.

  “We’ve got another loose cannon in our midst, besides Bill Curtis,” he told Spence as soon as the colonel’s image appeared on the computer screen.

  “Who is it?” the colonel asked.

  “Dr. Miller. The pediatrician we put in business here in Chapel Grove. Apparently, he’s had some kind of mental lapse. He showed up at the funeral parlor unannounced late last night, apparently had too much to drink, and babbled about things that Steve Kallen wasn’t authorized to know. Kallen had the good sense to tell me about it right away.”

  “What was the gist of it?”

  Danko related the details of what Steve Kallen had told him, including the speculation about porphyria, which up till now hadn’t even been on anybody’s radar and was a stunning new development.

  “Porphyria,” Colonel Spence mused. “Are we sure that such a thing actually exists?”

  “It does. And it seems that Dr. Traeger was the first one to start thinking in that direction. She ran it by Dr. Miller, then Miller blabbed to Kallen about it, out of a misguided intention to warn him about his own daughter.”

  “Does Dr. Traeger know about the leak?” Colonel Spence asked.

  “Yes, I discussed it with her. She’s quite upset about it, as she would be about anything that threatens to expose her work. But she’s also jumping at the chance to get the Foster Project reinstated and funded again. She said it never should have been discontinued so abruptly.”

  “Maybe she’s right. In the meantime, what do you suggest?”

  “Dr. Miller should be replaced.”

  “Of course. I’ll summon him to Washington. But I think something should happen to him at the airport.”

  “The departure airport or the arrival airport?” Danko asked.

  “Departure.”

  “Good,” said Danko, “because then I can handle the matter myself. No one else needs to be involved.”

  “You have my authorization,” said Colonel Spence.

  After terminating the Skype meeting, Pete Danko began thinking of how he would ensure a clean departure for Dr. Miller, not just from Chapel Grove but from his loose-lipped life.

  CHAPTER 40

  Thinking back to his courtship of Lauren, Bill Curtis recalled how, quite a while after they began dating, he took a chance and revealed to her that he was an agnostic. She was so appalled that she almost broke up with him right then and there. She was raised so strictly in her religion and within her family that she harbored the two usual complexes: guilt and inferiority. But in the process of falling in love and getting to know each other intimately, Bill felt that he was opening up her mind by communicating some of the history of religion and its origins that he had gotten to know through his reading and his conversations with other doubters. By the time of their wedding, neither he nor Lauren was any longer willing to accept religious doctrine on faith alone, but not wanting to break it to her parents and shatter Howard and Mildred’s doctrinaire, nailed-down little world, they faked their way through mandatory marriage instructions from a priest and got married in church.

  But Lauren was becoming religious again, of late. And worse, she was consulting with Reverend James Carnes. This was a regression, in Bill’s opinion, a backslide brought on by fear over their daughter’s enigmatic illness. Lauren was running scared and giving up too much of the intellectual maturity that he had helped awaken in her, and which he thought had germinated and blossomed.

  It was his hope that no matter what kind of severe pressure he might be under, he would not give in and start praying to a god who probably wasn’t there. But regrettably, Lauren wasn’t strong enough. She was caving, out of desperation, and Reverend Carnes was aiding and abetting her motherly fears, filling her head with what Bill considered nonsense. Carnes had come to the house when Bill wasn’t there and told her, �
��I treated Brenda Kallen when she got sick at my church camp. Prayer saved her body and her soul.”

  Lauren had told Bill about the reverend’s visit when he got home from work yesterday.

  “Please, why don’t we at least try it?” she pleaded.

  “Carnes is pushing nothing but Iron Age superstitions,” Bill said. “I’m sure he believes in what he’s saying, but you and I should be above all that. If Brenda Kallen got well, she was going to, anyway, in spite of Carnes and his mumbo-jumbo. It’s like the savages who stick pins in voodoo dolls, then if the person happens to die, they think they caused it.”

  “Maybe there really are miracles sometimes,” Lauren persisted.

  “Ignorant, vulnerable people want to believe that,” Bill told her. “But I can’t afford to lose my objectivity. If I did that, I’d be no good as a detective, right?”

  It saddened him to think that he and Lauren weren’t on the same page anymore. But she surely knew that he would do almost anything to heal his daughter or preserve her from harm. If it came down to it, he would give his own life. But he wasn’t cowardly enough to cling to the false hope offered by charms and potions, and he thought that in essence it was all that Reverend Carnes was offering.

  He also still believed that somehow Carnes and some of his followers were behind the theft of the three bodies of the Ron Haley family from Kallen’s Funeral Home. Totally frustrated, he had even asked Pete Danko for advice on how to move forward on the case, much as he hated to come to his autocratic boss with an admission of failure. But Pete wasn’t at all helpful; in fact he seemed to like hearing that Bill was stymied because to him it was further proof that he was superior to his underling.

  “What if we could get hold of Carnes’s cell phone and see where it was pinging that night?” Bill pressed.

  “We don’t have enough probable cause,” Pete said. “You should know that without even asking.”

  “I do know it,” Bill defended. “I was hoping you could pull some strings.”

  “I’m not God,” said Pete. “There’s a good chance the Haleys’ remains have been burned or buried in some remote place where we’ll never find them.”