Epidemic of the Living Dead

by John Russo

  Driving fast and somewhat woozily, she made it into the parking lot of the institute, pulled crookedly into a slot but did not back up and straighten the car out, then hurried onto an elevator that took her to the wing on the third floor where Kelly Ann was kept. She used her key to the steel cabinet where the drugs were kept and filled a syringe with succinylcholine. Then she went down the hall to Kelly Ann’s room. She took a deep breath and eased the door open, hoping she’d find her asleep so the task at hand would go easier.

  She entered and did not see Kelly Ann on the bed. Maybe in the bathroom, she thought—then she got pounced on from behind the open door. Taken by surprise, she couldn’t fight back, and she was knocked to the floor with Kelly Ann on top of her. They wrestled for the syringe, and Kelly Ann got it and plunged it into her shoulder. She rolled over, feeling herself quickly going groggy.

  “I never trusted you,” Kelly Ann said as she stood up. “You and your scientific gobbledygook!”

  Dr. Traeger’s vision was going blurry. She was already losing consciousness as Kelly Ann hurried out of the room and down the hall, where there was a keypad with a combination of numbers that allowed the doors to the lockdown facility to come open. Dr. Traeger imagined, somewhere in the dimming recesses of her drugged mind, that Kelly Ann was going to run away, out into the plague-ridden world.

  Dr. Traeger roused herself from near-unconsciousness, realizing she must not have gotten a full injection, the needle wasn’t plunged all the way in. Half-delirious from the anesthetic, she staggered to the elevator, took it down to the lobby, then made it to her car. She started the engine, flicked the headlights on, then jammed the Camry into gear and headed toward town.

  Her vision was still blurry, and she blinked repeatedly, trying to maneuver the car successfully around the curves.

  Suddenly she saw Kathy standing in the middle of the road. She blinked again, and the image wavered, then became insubstantial, ghostlike. But around a sharp bend the ghostly presence became stronger, almost real. She angrily hit the gas, figuring she’d prove that Kathy wasn’t actually there by running her down. But now she found herself heading for a collision with a huge truck. She swerved and skidded—her tires screamed—and she narrowly avoided the truck as it roared by with its horn blaring.

  Just as she breathed a sigh of relief, she started to go into convulsions, and she knew it was from the hypodermic that Kelly Ann had plunged into her. Her body jerked with painful spasms and her hands flew off the wheel and went to her aching head. She let loose a long, agonizing scream as her car burst through a guardrail and crashed into a utility pole.

  CHAPTER 51

  Dr. Traeger’s corpse was lying on a steel table where it would be embalmed and then worked on by Steve Kallen and his daughter, Brenda, who was learning how to reconstruct and “pretty up” parts of dead, mutilated bodies—a task that she very much liked. Staring at the corpse after they had given it a good washing and cleaning, Brenda said, “As long as she’s going to have a closed-casket funeral, why will we have to embalm her, Dad?”

  “Because when people come to the service, and they kneel to pray over her coffin, they don’t want to have to picture her rapidly decomposing, honey. It’s just how people are, even if they’re not particularly religious. They hate to think they’re going to decay someday. Besides, it’s a state law—all bodies not cremated must be embalmed, for sanitary purposes. And you’d be surprised—if we didn’t do it this way, the odor of a body only a couple days old would soon get our attention, even with the lid closed.”

  He glanced at his watch, then put his arm around his daughter.

  She said, “You’re tired, Dad.”

  “Trying to get rid of me?”

  “I think I can handle the embalming on my own this time. Why don’t you let me?”

  “Okay. I think I’ll take your advice and turn in.”

  He kissed her on her cheek, then went upstairs. He wasn’t really all that tired. It was only ten o’clock, and he figured he could watch something on TV. He wanted his daughter to feel that he trusted her to work on her own, without her dad needing to always be looking over her shoulder.

  Brenda was glad he went upstairs without much prodding, because a few minutes later, as she had expected, the night bell rang. She opened up for Darius, Kathy, and Tricia and saw that Darius’s van was parked in the near side of the lot a few feet from the door. She let them in, and they bemusedly eyed the corpse.

  “Poor Dr. Traeger,” Darius said, shaking his head exaggeratedly. “Now we get to examine her.”

  “Well, not exactly examine her,” Kathy said, grinning slyly. “I told you we fought and I bit her throat. I thought she’d already become one of our undead pets.”

  “It doesn’t always happen so quickly,” said Darius. “We all know that. It depends on their immune systems.”

  “Well, she loves the undead,” said Tricia. “So now she gets to find out what it’s like to be one.”

  They laughed.

  “Not so loud,” Brenda said. “My dad is upstairs.”

  Just then Steve Kallen called out, “Brenda? Are you still up, honey?”

  He crept quietly halfway down the stairs. He was in his pajamas, and he had a gun.

  Before he got to the landing he called out again. “Who’s there? Brenda? Do you have company?”

  For an instant he was relieved when he saw that it was only Brenda and her friends. But, strangely, they were formed into a little group around Dr. Traeger’s body, with their backs toward him.

  Darius said, “Why, hello, Mr. Kallen.”

  Steve said, “Why won’t you look at me? What’s going on here?”

  Now each kid turned slowly, in unison. And at the same time Dr. Traeger’s naked corpse sat up from the table.

  The kids sprouted glistening fangs, their countenances markedly demonic, their eyes staring, their expressions fiendish.

  Scared out of his wits, Kallen fired his pistol at them, but the shot went wild, thudding into Dr. Traeger’s left breast.

  The corpse fell back onto the table, groaning and hissing.

  Kallen fired again, and his second bullet hit Tricia Lopez. She sagged and fell dead—and now he knew they could be killed, which gave him a modicum of hope. But by then his own daughter was clawing at him, seizing his gun hand and pushing him down. As he fell to the floor, he squeezed off another round that went wild.

  Dr. Traeger’s corpse sat up again, even with the gaping hole in her chest. Kallen tried to aim his gun at the corpse’s head, but dropped the weapon when Darius kicked him in the groin and Kathy kicked him in the side of his head. Then the revived corpse of Dr. Traeger came at him, rasping and drooling. Kallen tried to crawl away, but he was too weak by now and in too much pain. Kathy and Darius rolled him onto his back and his eyes were wide with horror as his own daughter sank her fangs into his neck.

  * * *

  Minutes later, a 9-1-1 operator took a frantic call from a clerk in a dollar store across the street from Kallen’s Funeral Home. She reported hearing gunshots, and the report was relayed to the desk sergeant at the Chapel Grove police station. Most of the cops on the small force were out on patrol, so Pete Danko took Bill Curtis with him to respond to the incident. While Pete drove the short distance down Main Street to the funeral home, Bill radioed for backup. As they swung over to the curb, they spotted Darius Hornsby’s satanically decorated silver van peeling out of the back lot.

  “Get a BOLO out on that van!” Pete told Bill. “All our guys know it, they should be able to chase it down. But make sure at least a couple of squad cars don’t split off. We need them to get here.”

  “The van came from in back,” Bill said. “Maybe that’s the way we’ll need to get in.”

  They ran back there and found the steel door half ajar. Drawing their weapons, they went in cautiously, covering each other. The first thing they saw was Steve Kallen’s mutilated body, his brown skin turned a shade of ghastly whitish tan, drained of blood. Fa
ng marks were all over his limbs and face. There was also a bullet hole in his head. And his torso was eviscerated, as if the abdomen was clawed open to grant access to the soft internal organs.

  The fang marks were something new to Bill, but his past experiences told him that the ripping open of the abdomen had to be the work of the undead. “Oh, shit!” he said to Pete. “It’s happening all over again!”

  A short distance away from Kallen’s body, Tricia Lopez was lying dead from a gunshot to her head, and a .38 revolver was lying near her.

  Pete said, “Dr. Traeger’s body is missing. She was badly torn up in that head-on collision, and Steve told me he would need to do a lot of cosmetic reconstruction on her.”

  “Maybe she’s already upstairs in a coffin,” Bill suggested. “Does her daughter know that she was killed?”

  “I don’t think so. The medical examiner tried to reach her, but couldn’t. I tried too. No one seems to know where Kathy is.”

  “I could make a pretty good guess,” Bill said. “She’s probably in that van. Brenda Kallen, too, Pete.”

  “You think those three kids did all this?”

  “Doesn’t it look that way to you?”

  “Yeah, it does,” Pete said. “I’ll wait down here for backup. Go upstairs and see if you find a closed casket in one of the viewing rooms. Dr. Traeger might be in it.”

  “I doubt it,” Bill said. “This is right in line with the disappearance of Ron Haley and his wife and daughter.”

  Pete wondered just how bad things were going to get. He hoped that no matter what happened, he’d be able to do damage control. He vowed to do his best, no matter whom he might have to kill.

  CHAPTER 52

  As he always did each night before he went to bed, Reverend James Carnes was kneeling in the church cemetery, at the foot of a large, ornate, poured-concrete cross, reciting his Prayer for the Dead, hoping to keep them from arising again before Judgment Day.

  May these souls rest in peace

  May their bodies return to dust

  May they never rise again

  May they remain in Purgatory

  Or with the Lord till Judgment Day

  May they enjoy Perpetual Light

  Amen.

  About to get up and dust off the dirt from his knees, the reverend thought he heard a noise from behind him. He stood and looked all around, trying to peer between the moonlit gravestones and monuments. Was someone sneaking up on him? He was well aware that he had enemies in Chapel Grove, people who thought he was fixated or half-deranged, even some who wanted to stop him before he got a chance to spike their loved ones. When he was all alone like this in the church cemetery, he was vulnerable and he knew it, though he tried to believe that the Lord would protect him. He could be mugged or bludgeoned to death by anyone who coveted the little bit of money he carried, or who wanted to vandalize the church or steal its few valuable artifacts.

  He was relieved when his close friend and attorney, Bennett Stein, appeared from behind a maple tree at the far edge of the burial ground. He hadn’t seen or heard from Bennett for several days and had been worried about him. Darius and some of the other kids had said that the youth group leader had left the campfire meeting early because of an emergency. But that explanation never sat well with Carnes.

  He started to call out a cheerful greeting to Bennett, just as Margaret Stein also stepped out from behind the maple tree. They both came forward, seeming to move awkwardly, perhaps even painfully, as if they both had been hurt in an accident or something.

  But then they got close enough for a better look at them, in the moonlight—and a shock of sudden fear rippled through the reverend. He could now see that their clothing was ripped and blood-spattered, and there were puncture marks all over them.

  He grabbed a gold cross from around his neck and thrust it toward them, saying, “By the power of the Holy Spirit, I condemn you to eternal death and damnation! Be gone from me, unclean beings!”

  But the two undead creatures kept on coming.

  Carnes stood his ground. He lowered his little gold cross and let it dangle on its chain.

  The zombies got closer, and Margaret was in the lead.

  Carnes pulled out an old long-barreled revolver that he always tucked under his belt when he went out to pray in the cemetery at night. “May she rest in peace,” he said. Then he shot Margaret in the head. She let out a tiny hiss of breath as she staggered and fell.

  The reverend’s hand shook with the emotion of vanquishing someone whose friendship he had known and treasured, but now the other undead being was almost upon him and he had to steady his aim.

  BLAM! The Bennett Stein effigy reeled backward and fell heavily to the ground.

  Carnes stared at it, his hand shaking worse.

  “May your soul rest in peace,” he murmured.

  Then he looked skyward and begged the Lord to forgive him for what he had done.

  CHAPTER 53

  Ben, Doug, and Hank, the three sidemen of Darius & the Demons, were in a rented U-Haul, driving the streets and neighborhoods of Chapel Grove, dropping off what Darius had referred to as “special gifts for the community.”

  The special gifts were the zombies they had created.

  Some of them had already been “planted” around the stores, bars, and restaurants on Main Street. Darius’s intention was that they would start attacking the citizens of the town, creating havoc. He and his blood-seeking companions were endowed with an impish sense of humor as point-counterpoint to their more bizarre qualities. They loved playing macabre and often deadly pranks on the adults of the town, especially the authorities and even more especially their own parents. Hopped-up Bob Dylan lyrics that Darius’s biological father, Hal Rotini, used to sing in a blaring heavy-metal rendition on an old Hateful Dead CD often came into his mind.

  Darius knew that he and his kind would soon be taking over the world. The seeds of destruction were planted here in Chapel Grove, an innocent little town that became the womb of the New Order. It might take a decade or more, but archaic humanity was finished, they just didn’t know it yet. A stronger, more ruthless breed was taking over. And Darius was one of its leaders. Sometimes he allowed himself to believe that he would even be the Grand Leader someday. And Jodie, his beloved, would be his consort, basking in power and always by his side.

  When they fed on the blood of primitive humans, those victims became archaic husks of humanity, like the dry husks of dead insects in a spider’s web. They were dumb, flesh-hungry slaves, useful for creating havoc, spreading terror, and paving the way for Darius and his cohorts to rise to power. He knew that in the future, when the bulk of humanity would be kept in pens as a source of blood, like farm animals were now kept as a source of meat, the poor dumb zombies would no longer be needed, and would be put to death, like the prisoners in concentration camps who were too sick to work anymore.

  Jodie didn’t know all this quite yet. He was slowly indoctrinating her, teaching her to accept her new, superior persona and to relish her destiny, which was to rule alongside him.

  CHAPTER 54

  At Kallen’s Funeral Home, Bill Curtis and Pete Danko were waiting for the CSI team to get there. Pete was sitting on a gray steel folding chair, and Bill couldn’t stop pacing, hoping they’d soon get a call from a patrol car saying that Darius’s van had been pulled over and the occupants were in custody.

  Pete said, “Let’s step outside for some air, till they get here.”

  “Neither one of us still smoke or that’s what we’d probably do,” Bill said.

  They went out through the steel door—and Pete pulled out his Glock and aimed it at Bill’s back just as Bill turned around and saw him do it.

  “What the hell!” Bill blurted.

  “Sorry, partner,” Pete said with a sly chuckle. “You’ve been a pain in the ass long enough. The shit is going to hit the fan, and I can’t have you around for the party. You know too much already, and you won’t stop pushing.”

>   “You sonofabitch!” Bill shouted. “You kept me from doing my job! I knew there was some ulterior motive going on!”

  “Well, you’re going to die not knowing any more than that,” Pete said. “This ain’t the part where I get stalled blabbing everything, while somebody comes and rescues you in the nick of time. So don’t get your hopes up.”

  “Ballistics will trace the bullet to your gun. Where’s your drop weapon?”

  “Fuck you, I don’t need one. I’ll say you were a fuckin’ hero, shot in the line of duty by persons unknown.”

  But just as Pete was going to pull the trigger, he was pounced on by undead Hilda Lopez!

  She had crept around the side of the building to leap on him from behind.

  She sunk her teeth into Pete’s soft throat, severing the jugular, making blood spurt like a fountain, before Bill could draw his Glock. Yanking it from its holster, he stepped close enough to give Hilda a head shot. BLAM! She sagged to the asphalt as Pete bled and died, emitting a final trickle of blood.