Epidemic of the Living Dead

by John Russo

  “Bullshit!” said Tricia. “Carnes the Bible thumper had nothing to do with it! You were going to get better anyway. Aren’t you glad? Now you’re like us.”

  Brenda came to Jodie’s side in time to hear Tricia’s last statement, and she partially disagreed with it, saying, “Well . . . almost.”

  Her feelings hurt, Jodie said, “What do you mean, Brenda? I’ve always been a lot like both of you. Kathy, too. We like the same kind of music and stuff, and we can tell each other just about anything—heck!—that’s why we’re best friends.”

  Kathy looked up from a counter where she was busy spraying different kinds of perfume on her wrist and then sniffing it. With a rather sly look on her face, she said, “Well, now we’re going to be even better friends, Jodie. You’re not a kid anymore, you’re a young woman. Now you’re ready to have a boyfriend.”

  This was something Jodie had dreamed of, but didn’t dare think it could really happen to her. When she was going through her bouts of PTSD and life-threatening allergies, and then breakouts of pus-filled purple blisters on top of everything else, she didn’t think that any boy would ever want her. But now maybe there was a glimmer of hope. Still, aspects of it were frightening, and she said, “I don’t want to have sex till I’m older.”

  Kathy, came up to them with a pile of jeans over her arm and said, “Jodie, you don’t have to have sex till you’re good and ready. But you will be ready for it sooner rather than later, believe me.”

  Flashing a mischievous wink, Brenda said, “As good as sex is for ordinary people, like our mothers and fathers, or even other kids our age, it’s a lot better for us, honey. So don’t be scared of it, just let it happen.”

  “You act like you do it all the time!” Jodie blurted.

  Almost in perfect unison, Brenda and Tricia said, “Well, we do!”

  They burst out laughing, and Jodie half-heartedly laughed with them, thinking they were just kidding. But were they? It didn’t seem like they were, and she was stunned. But also a bit jealous. Her BFFs were so far ahead of her in life experience that she despaired of ever catching up. And she wasn’t totally certain that she wanted to.

  Still standing there with a pile of jeans over her arm, Kathy said, “I’m taking these and trying them on one after another while we’re here. I don’t want to take them home and then have to bring back the ones that don’t fit. Sometimes none of them end up looking good on me, and it really pisses me off.”

  She disappeared into a changing room.

  Tricia watched her go, then in a hushed but singsong voice, she said, “Somebody likes you, Jodie.”

  “Yeah,” said Brenda, “you have a secret admirer.”

  “Get out! Who?” Jodie said disbelievingly.

  Coyly, Benda said, “If we tell you, do you promise to come and meet him?”

  “I don’t believe you! It’s nobody! You’re making it up!”

  But she secretly wished it were true.

  “Then take us up on it,” Brenda challenged.

  Jodie thought it over, and her desire to be liked by a boy got the best of her. “I still think you’re bullshitting me, but for now I’ll play along. So come on and tell me—who?”

  Slyly, Tricia said, “Well, if we’re bullshitting, I guess I’ll let the cat out of the bag. You really want to know who? It’s Darius, that’s who.”

  “Nuh-uh!” Jodie gasped.

  “Yeah, Darius. We’re not shitting you,” Brenda said.

  “Ugh!” Jodie blurted. “He’s the one who bit me! I can’t stand to look at him! The creep! Why would he want me when he can have any majorette or cheerleader he wants?”

  Brenda said, “But he happens to want you, Jodie. He’s sorry for what he did and he knows how you must feel. He outgrew that sort of thing. He’s older now, more mature, and he doesn’t bite anybody anymore.”

  “Listen to us! Of course he doesn’t!” Tricia said.

  “We’re being just too damned silly!” Brenda agreed.

  They laughed at the absurdity of it, and Jodie laughed along with them.

  “Darius wants us to come to his band rehearsal today,” Tricia said. “And he wants you to be there, Jodie.”

  It was an amazing turn of events. Almost like a date. And she had to admit she was now intrigued. She craved romance, but had to stifle the craving when she suffered from life-threatening allergies. She used to wonder, in utter despair, how she could ever let any boy kiss her, because she’d have to ask him to wash his mouth out first, if he had been eating nuts. She had read about a man who killed his fiancée by French kissing her and spitting a lump of peanut butter down her throat. This was an extreme case, for sure, but there were plenty of more “ordinary” cases, like quite recently when a fifteen-year-old boy died after eating a pancake with milk in it. He had forgotten his EpiPen and had been told by the restaurant staff that there was no milk in their pancakes.

  But now Jodie’s allergies seemed to be magically gone, and perhaps a longed-for world of romantic love was opening up to her at last.

  She knew that Darius was what parents called a bad boy, almost a modern-day equivalent of an aspiring outlaw, a gunslinger. But maybe she should give him a chance. Maybe he wasn’t all bad. Maybe he kept his finer qualities hidden from everyone, and she would be the one to draw him out. If he truly liked her. But if he didn’t and her BFFs were just running a game on her, she’d be mortified and would never live it down. Her classmates would pillory her on Facebook and everywhere else.

  CHAPTER 47

  Darius Hornsby’s band, Darius & the Demons, was rehearsing in a garage at his parents’ ranch-style home on a pleasant treelined avenue in one of the best parts of Chapel Grove. The big double doors of the garage were wide open. Jodie could hear the blaring of drums and guitars even before she and her BFFs got out of the Mustang. The top was still down and there were no wound-up windows to mute the music. They had to park in the street because the driveway was blocked by Darius’s van, plus two SUVs and two motorcycles.

  Jodie tentatively entered the front of the garage, following behind Kathy, Brenda, and Tricia. She had never been to a band rehearsal before, and the brand-new experience awed her and made her feel sort of special, even though they weren’t in a huge auditorium but were spread out and hanging back in the murky semidarkness of a garage.

  Darius was the lead singer and lead guitarist—and he was so amazingly, undeniably good! Jodie was enthralled, in spite of all the negative feelings she had nurtured about him throughout her young life. His tenor voice was clear as a bell, and yet he was belting out his lyrics in an angry, sinister way that was simultaneously soft and sexy, a combination of qualities that didn’t fit but somehow magically did. Lost in his passion for his music, he was extremely alluring, a rock star in the making perhaps, and much more than that in Jodie’s eyes—to her it seemed as though he had already arrived! He had a wild, energetic charisma that cast a spell over her that was palpable and real. She glanced at Brenda, Kathy, and Tricia and saw that they were as blown away as she was.

  The song ended in a thunderous climax, and all the girls yelled, whistled, and applauded. Darius was flushed with excitement and bathed in sweat, his long blond hair lank and wet, hanging down over his forehead. The other band members were breathing hard but beamingly elated. Drummer Ben Kerr whipped his dreadlocks like a cat-o’-nine-tails as he flailed his sticks, while Hank Lawson wiped sweat from his brow and ran his hand through the tight curls of his huge Afro. The third guitarist, a lank and bony white boy, wielded his guitar like a weapon, and the veins on his arms stood out between the tattoos of skulls, dragons, and bloody knives inked into his pale, pasty skin. None of the boys were in any of Jodie’s classes, so she thought maybe they were dropouts. They ended their song with a cacophony of loud, vicious drum and cymbal crashes and guitar riffs, and Darius wiped perspiration from his shiny face and said, “Now we’re gonna do an original, written by me, of course, and it’s called, ‘The Devil Made Me.’” He focused on J
odie, and his violet eyes bored into her as he sang.

  I wrapped my arms tight around you

  Kissed you deep while I killed you

  My demon looked down from my shelf

  No way could I control myself

  ’Cause the devil made me

  The devil made me

  The devil made me do it to ya!

  We went to the graveyard at midnight

  Held our Black Mass in the moonlight

  We sucked each other’s blood

  You dropped dead with a thud

  ’Cause the devil made me

  The devil made me

  The devil made me do it to ya!

  The song got louder, wilder, and crazier, and Darius kept on staring straight at Jodie while he was singing and playing. During the instrumental bridge, Hank handed Darius a canteen and he took a sip of whatever was in it. Then he passed it back, and the other boys took turns sipping. That’s when Jodie noticed that the boys, other than Darius, all had numerous scars on their arms, as if they had been sliced a number of times with knives or razors and then the wounds had healed.

  She shuddered because it made her remember her own scar, from the bite Darius had given her in the sandbox, when she was only six years old. There was no sign of that scar now, which had magically disappeared only two days ago.

  Darius motioned for Jodie to come closer, and he handed the canteen to her. Somehow she couldn’t refuse it, even though it scared her. But she didn’t want to displease Darius. So she drank, and to her surprise she liked it very much. Turning toward the other girls, she exclaimed, “This is good!” She licked the red stuff from her lips, whatever it was.

  “We knew you’d love it!” Tricia said.

  As Jodie went to take another sip, Brenda said, “Don’t hog it, now—let us have some.”

  They kept passing the canteen around and taking sips as Darius & the Demons pounded to the conclusion of “The Devil Made Me.”

  Darius laid down his guitar and came toward Jodie. The other three boys joined up with Tricia, Kathy, and Brenda, closing around them tightly as they introduced themselves to Jodie as Ben, Hank, and Doug—first names only. Ben wore dreads with silver death’s heads tied into them and Hank wore his hair in an Afro.

  Darius took Jodie’s face between the palms of his hands and kissed her lips tenderly, as if he had been doing it his whole life and had a perfect right. A thrill coursed through her, and her legs went weak, and the feeling was so intensely pleasurable that she wanted more of it, in spite of herself. He said, “Stick around, huh, babe? I wanna get to know you.”

  She flashed her friends an unsure look and murmured, “Brenda? Tricia?”

  Kathy said, “Oh, don’t worry about us, hon. We’re gonna cruise. If we don’t hook up again, Darius will drive you home.”

  Jodie’s three gal pals departed, and with trepidation she watched them go, feeling almost as if she were being ditched. And scared. Was she really about to be alone with a boy, for the first time?

  As if he had read her thoughts, Darius said, “Don’t worry, babe, it’ll be cool.”

  CHAPTER 48

  Reverend Carnes knocked on the door to Pete Danko’s office and was in a dither from the moment the police chief let him in. “Bennett and Margaret Stein are missing! No one’s heard from them for two days! Neither one of them showed up at his law office this morning.”

  “All right,” Pete said. “Have a seat and try to calm down. They’re both sensible adults, and there might be a good reason for this.”

  Pete sat behind his desk, and the reverend sat opposite him, still fidgety. “I was supposed to meet Bennett at ten a.m. to discuss church business. He’s always there promptly at nine, if not sooner. He and Margaret normally come in together—she’s his head paralegal. But they’re not there, and neither one of them called in. His private secretary is extremely worried. This is so unlike them!”

  “Did you check your phone for messages?”

  “Of course! There are none, except from a couple of my other parishioners. He’s never missed an appointment with me—never! He’s an extremely successful attorney, but the church means even more to him than his law practice.”

  “Well, something must’ve come up that was very important to both of them,” Pete said. “It will probably turn out to be something outside of their normal routine, but nothing to be alarmed about. Have you talked with any of their family members?”

  “I tried unsuccessfully to reach their daughter, Marilyn. She lives here in Chapel Grove with her husband and their son, a three-year-old. They all belong to my congregation.”

  “Did you go to their house?”

  “No, I tried their landline and both of their cell phones, and they all went to message. I left messages, but no one has called back.”

  “This looks like some kind of family emergency might’ve cropped up,” Pete said. “Maybe an illness or an accident.”

  “If so, I should have heard from them,” said Carnes. “I’m their pastor, and I’m the first person they lean on.”

  “Come to think of it, there haven’t been any accident reports,” said Pete. “Not in the past couple of days. We’ll have to check with the hospital to see if Bennett or Margaret Stein might be listed as patients. Maybe one of them fell ill all of a sudden.”

  “Anything that serious, they would’ve called me already,” Reverend Carnes said quite adamantly.

  “Well, try to relax. We’ll get on it,” Pete told him.

  “I never relax. I stay vigilant,” said Carnes. “These are perilous times, and both God and the devil work in strange ways.”

  CHAPTER 49

  Bill and Lauren were watching TV, a true-crime story on ID Discovery, which was one of Bill’s favorite channels, but not Lauren’s, when a horn honked in front of the house. Bill got up, peeled back a curtain, and got upset when he saw Darius Hornsby out there in his van, parked by the curb in front of the house. Jodie, in ass-tight jeans and a stretchy white halter, came running down the stairs trying to run out the door before her father could yell at her and make her put on something he considered more dignified.

  Bill spun from the window and said, “Whoa, young lady! Where are you going?”

  “To a movie. With my date.”

  “What date?” Lauren said, startled.

  “Darius Hornsby. Bye, Mom. Bye, Dad!”

  Totally surprised by this new information, which went against every opinion his daughter had previously uttered against Darius, Bill said, “Not so fast, Jodie! You’re not going anywhere till he knocks on the door and shakes hands with me so we can have a man-to-man talk. And while we’re doing that, you’re going to go up to your room and change into something decent. Those jeans you’re wearing would’ve fit you when you were thirteen, but now they look like you were poured into them.”

  “Awww, Dad . . .”

  “Go out there and tell him what I said. Or else you’re grounded.”

  “Why do you always have to act like a policeman?”

  “I’m acting like a father. If he really cares about you, he’ll treat you like a lady, especially if you dress like one. And he’ll pay proper respect to me and your mom.”

  Shrugging, sighing, and shaking her head, Jodie stomped out the door. When she returned, she led her “date” into the living room and said, as if the words hurt her tongue, “Dad, this is Darius. Darius, this is my mom and dad.” She bit her lip, looking embarrassed, and hastily added, “It’s a little cooler outside than I thought, Darius. I’m going to take a minute to put on something warmer.”

  As Jodie scampered back upstairs, Bill reached out to shake Darius’s hand, but Darius turned it into a fist-bump, and Bill gave in to it, awkwardly, then said, “Nice to meet you.”

  Darius said, “How ya shakin’, dude.”

  Bill immediately took the heat. “Listen to me, young man. I’m Mr. Curtis to you, and you better keep it that way if you expect to date my daughter. And you will address my wife as ‘M
rs. Curtis’ at all times. Is that fine with you, or not.”

  “A-okay . . . er . . . sir.”

  There was no mistaking the taint of sarcasm on the word “sir”—but Bill decided, rightly or wrongly, to let it slide for now and come down harder on the boy in the near future. He said, “It’s no secret, Darius, that you have a bad reputation, not just in the community but with the police force. I hope your bad behavior is behind you. But if I find out, or even suspect, that it isn’t, then you won’t be taking my daughter anywhere. Understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Darius slurred, and punctuated it with a thumbs-up. And Bill didn’t like it one bit.

  “I’ll have Jodie home by twelve,” Darius said, which at least was some acknowledgment of parental authority.

  “That’s what I like to hear,” said Bill.

  Jodie came back from upstairs, dressed more suitably in a not-too-tight skirt, and shrugged at Darius as if to say, I can’t help it, my dad made me change clothes.

  Lauren, who had remained silent till now, said, “Have a good time, dear.” And after the young couple went out the door, she turned toward Bill and said, “You were too hard on them.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. Jodie doesn’t have many close friends, let alone a boyfriend, and if this one dumped her she’d be utterly devastated. Nothing hurts worse when a girl is at her age. They’re so vulnerable. Some of them even commit suicide when puppy love doesn’t survive.”

  “Who’s being overly dramatic?” Bill said.

  “I’m just glad our daughter is finally doing some things that all normal teenagers do,” said Lauren.

  Bill flipped the porch light on for his daughter for when she came home, then reclined in his La-Z-Boy while Lauren plumped up a pillow and stretched out on the sofa. They resumed watching the ID channel, a rerun of a program called Homicide Hunter about brutal murders in the career of a detective named Joe Kenda, who had retired from the Colorado Springs Police Force after solving nearly four hundred cases. Lauren wasn’t keen on this kind of stuff, far from it, but Bill was addicted to it, partly because he sometimes picked up professional tips, but mostly because he derived satisfaction out of seeing the guilty bastards get caught and punished. Right now, he wasn’t working in a place that had one-hundredth the murder rate of Colorado Springs, at least not murders of the ordinary kind. But like every town in America, Chapel Grove was under the constant dark shadow of the plague. One outbreak had already occurred, sixteen years ago, and another one could be lurking, for all anybody knew. So Bill felt he was as battle-hardened as any cop in America, when it came right down to it.