War of the Undead (Day One): The Apocalypse Crusade (A Zombie Tale)

by Meredith, Peter

  Forgetting her training, she touched her gloved hand to the bare skin of her cheek. "Why? Why would you do that?"

  "To make you be like me," he told her. Now it was his turn to blink slowly. The Diazepam was really kicking in, making the dim world seem nightmare black. Only the nurse's pale face was clear to him. "You will change and they will kill you and burn your body....Just like what they’re going to do to me."

  She shook her head. "No. They're working on a cure. I'll be fine."

  "Then go tell them what happened and if you aren't sick now, you soon will...be. I have a...a plan." His lips were fat and heavy and his brain like mush. "Wake me when...you...you...you're...like me..." Von Braun's eyes closed, the demons in him finally caged by the drugs.

  Lacy Freeman realized he had been right about one thing: if she told the others what had happened, they would stick her in the last bed available, the one next to Dr. Lorry who, only a few minutes before had to be restrained because his paranoia had made him dangerous. He was now on his own Diazepam drip and it wouldn't be long before she was hooked up to one of her own.

  Every room came with its own bathroom. Lacy ran in and turned the hot water all the way over. She scrubbed her skin viciously as though she wanted to peel off the first three layers. As she washed herself, she began praying for a miracle.

  5

  The closest CDC office was located in New York City an hour's drive south of the hospital. A three-person team, headed by senior agent, Vince Oldham "sprang" into action. He made sure they checked their gear properly, he readied their paperwork to ensure they would be able to draw a per diem allowance, and he gassed up the van.

  By quarter to three they were out the door so to speak. The crew didn't get very far. The first stop on their trip was to Ray's Original Pizza where they took a half hour for a late lunch. After they paid with an agency credit card, they crawled through city traffic, heading north at an average rate of nine miles an hour.

  Vince did not stress over their pace because he understood that the concept of emergency was relative. A single case of possible respiratory transmission of the Fusarium mycotoxin, though previously unheard of, wasn't likely to constitute much of an emergency.

  He saw perfectly how the case would go down: his team would take some sample blood work, swab the place from floor to ceiling, levy some fines for code violations, make some recommendations that would carry the force of law, monitor a hysterical patient or two and then finish up by checking out what was playing on HBO at whatever motel was closest.

  In the meantime he did his best to enjoy the ride and that meant he ended a squabble over the radio by the other two members of the team: Peggy O'Brian and Damon Green. Vince pulled rank: "We're listening to country;" he declared and then did what any good CDC leader would do, he leaned his chair all the way back and took a nap as Garth twanged in his ears.

  The nap was briefly interrupted once.

  Dr. Lee, the lead investigator at the Walton facility called reporting the breaking of the quarantine by a missing patient. Vince thanked her for the update and hung up. What he didn't do was turn on the siren and the lights, nor did he have Peggy hit the gas and start weaving through traffic. They were three people in one van, not a search team. He followed protocol and called the New York State Trooper station north of Poughkeepsie and alerted them to a possible infectious outbreak and a snafu in the quarantine.

  He then went back to sleep. It was going to be a long ride after all.

  Only three police cruisers were dispatched to find John Burke--the troopers were, as usual, undermanned and stretched thin. Besides, this was just one man who was too sick to get very far and it wasn't as if he was a murderer.

  6

  There was no denying the headache, now. It had started as nothing but an occasional stab of pain, an annoyance that on any other day Lacy Freeman would've ignored. Now it was at another level altogether. It pounded in her temples, keeping perfect time with the thump of her heart. The pain made her grouchy...no, it made her angry. Lacy Freeman was pissed off, but, strangely, she wasn't angry at Von Braun. He was just one man chained to a bed.

  No, she was mad as hell at R&K Pharmaceuticals and she was mad at the doctors and she was absolutely furious with the scientists on the fourth floor.

  They had messed around with nature, they had tried to change the way things were supposed to be, and she had a dark suspicion they had done it all on purpose in order to trip her up, in order to infect her.

  I'm part of the experiment, she thought to herself, not realizing that she was feeling the same paranoia all the other patients had experienced. They're testing me...they're probably watching me.

  Lacy cast semi-secret glances up at the ceiling, trying to locate the cameras she was certain had been installed to spy on her. No one noticed. There were twenty people trapped with the infected patients on the second floor, eight nurses, the two oncologists: Dr. Wilson and Dr. Sinha, four cafeteria workers who had just brought up lunches when the quarantine trapped them, five construction workers, and the security guard, Rory Vickers. They sat around in various stages of exhaustion. Dealing with so many patients was draining but it was nothing compared to the stress of being quarantined with a virulent disease possibly floating in the air.

  They had turned the nurse's station into a clean area by hanging plastic sheeting from the ceiling and then taping the bottom edges to the floor. It wasn't perfect, especially since they had to come in and out every thirty minutes or so to check on the patients, but it was working. No one had shown any symptoms...except for Lacy.

  She was definitely sick, just like they had planned. Well, she decided she wasn't going to play by their rules. Von Braun had a plan. They didn't know about that plan she was sure. Oh, but she knew. She would just have to play it cool until she could find out what it was and escape.

  A sudden spike of pain in her head caused her to grimace and that damned Linda Sheffield caught the look. "You ok?" she asked, leaning back and eyeing Lacy closely.

  "I'm fine," Lacy said. It wasn't easy keeping the snarl out of her voice. "I'm just...anxious. Why haven't we heard anything? Shouldn't they have a cure by now? Or any clue what this is?"

  "It's only been a few hours, Lacy," Dr. Wilson said. "We can't expect miracles."

  "Why not?" Dr. Sinha asked in her lilting Indian accent. "Why must we expect only calamities?"

  Lacy forgot herself. "Yes! She's right. There could be a cure. They probably have one already." She went to the phone and punched in the number to the fourth floor lab. It seemed to ring a long time before someone picked up.

  "What's wrong now?"

  It was a voice she recognized. "Dr. Lee? This is Lacy from the second floor. Is the cure ready yet?"

  "Cure? There's no cure. We still don't know what we're supposed to be curing yet."

  "How come?" Lacy demanded as if talking to a flunky as opposed to a doctor. "We've given you everything you've asked for: practically a gallon of blood, arterial gasses, fecal smears, urine, and now EKGs? What else do you want? What else could you possibly need to save us?" No one seemed to notice that she was practically hysterical.

  "I know you're all scared, but we need time," Thuy said, wearily. "We're overloaded with samples and as of yet, the only thing that we've been able to figure out is that the Com-cells are collecting and reproducing in the ménages. It shouldn't be happening, but it is."

  "So you don't know anything helpful?" Lacy asked, sounding like an imperious teenager. "You've been working on this project for like two years and you're pretending you don't know anything?"

  Dr. Lee went suddenly cold. "I know enough to cease this conversation. Lacy, you need to get yourself checked out. You may have contracted the...the sickness or whatever it is. You don’t sound like yourself."

  "Of course," Lacy replied, now warmly. "I'll do that right away." She hung up to find everyone staring at her. It was as if they were trying to hurt her with their eyes.

  "What did she sa
y?" Wilson asked.

  "Nothing really...except she wants me to check on the patients...to see if there's any changes in their, uh, level of consciousness."

  "Sounds like busy-work," Wilson said.

  "Yeah, but they’re doctor's orders." Lacy went into the supply closet where they were keeping the gowns and hoods. Before she pulled them on she dug out a handful of Relpax from her pocket. It was about eight times the recommended dose for migraines; she swallowed them dry. They kept her migraine to a low frequency horror and relaxed the rage building up and up inside her.

  Ten minutes later she was next to Von Braun's bed as he came awake. He smiled at her. "They’re trying to kill us," she told him.

  "We should kill them first,” Von Braun said. “We should kill them and make us clean. Do you feel it? The dirt in you?”

  “Yes.” Lacy could feel the dirt crawling inside her, especially her mouth and in her ears and under her fingernails and beneath her breasts. It was driving her crazy. “I want to get clean, but there are too many of them and they’re all in on it. They’re all part of the experiment.”

  “Then make more of them like us,” Von Braun told her. “Then we’ll be the ones doing the experiments. We’ll be the ones with the knives and the scopes and the needles and the chains.”

  This made perfect sense to Lacy. She pulled off her blue glove and reached out a shaking hand to touch Von Braun’s mottled skin. His flesh was black and wet, alive with something evil and now it was on her hand. She hid it back in her glove.

  “You should sleep until,” she said, turning his Diazepam drip back to where it put him out.

  In the nurse’s station Lacy changed out of her gear and then went to the others holding her right hand out like it was a treasure to behold. Again, no one noticed. They were all listless and bored, except the two oncologists who were preparing yet another sample for the lab.

  More experiments, Lacy thought to herself. The idea was acid in her mind and she went about touching the others with her special hand, leaving only Wilson and Sinha unaffected. Those two were different. They were with the scientists, the ones running everything, the ones who had done this to them

  They would have to suffer.

  Her stomach rumbled hungrily at the thought and she whispered, “Not yet.”

  Chapter 7

  //3:15 PM//

  1

  Two girls, both blonde and stick thin sat in the shade of the big house with their backs up against the brick. They weren’t doing anything in particular because Maddy was concocting a plan.

  Jaimee could only guess at the meaning of the word "concocting", it was one she'd never heard before. Her friends back in Izzard would have said they were "hatching" a plan, like it was something that came fully formed out of a neat little shell, only back home, plans were never so neat as that.

  Like the time Jaimee had decided to become a beekeeper on account of the fact they were out of honey. That had not ended well, not for the bees, not for Jaimee, and certainly not for the postman who opened the mailbox to find thirty-eight very angry insects. He got all stung-up and Jaimee had her bottom reddened by her daddy, and ever since she wasn't keen on plans. And that was especially true of a concocted plan. It sounded like something a witch might do.

  The pair had been there resting against the house for a good long time, long enough for Jaimee to have eaten up the two cookies and slurped down the iced tea that Ms. Robins had given her. Maddy hadn't touched her snack at all--she was too worried about her mother to eat.

  "She's jes sleepin' is all," Jaimee said in an attempt to calm her new friend. "That's what y'all’s nanny-sitter done said." Jaimee was also confused on what a nanny was. Ms. Robins sure looked like a sitter in her eyes.

  "I think she was lying," Maddy replied. "Didn't you see her eyes? She was crying. Ms. Robins never cries and I think that means something's wrong. And besides, it’s been hours and hours. They said the cure wouldn't take nearly this long."

  Jaimee glanced across at the four-story hospital where her daddy was getting rid of his cancer by some sort of magic formala—a potion she reckoned. "Sometimes it takes a long time, don'tcha think? I mean theys take a long time to git sick so maybe theys git better slowly, too."

  "Maybe," Maddy granted. She stood and looked down on Jaimee, who squinted up at her.

  "Whatcha doing? Y'all got a plan all thunked up? Y'all gonna eat them cookies?"

  "You can have them if you wish," Maddy said. "Hey, remember how my Grandfather confused you with me last night?"

  It was something that Jaimee would not easily forget. She'd been on her lonesome trying to find a bathroom when this wrinkly, old man with great tufted ears like a screech owl and a nose bigger than a potato, had come up out of the dark and scared her near into wetting her panties. He had started talking strange, too.

  "Your mother is going to be alright. You'll see."

  "My momma is daid," Jaimee had told him.

  Rothchild bent down to look at her closer and with the big circles of his glasses doing a number on his eyes, his resemblance to an owl grew. "Why, you're not Maddy."

  "No suh. I'm Jaimee Lynn Burke. My Daidy is sick up in y'all's hospital."

  "I remember," Jaimee told Maddy as she pocketed the two cookies. "He was scarier than a striped haint."

  "A what?"

  "Y'all don't know what a haint is?" Jaimee asked, looking at Maddy in wonder. "Well, it's a ghost, don'tcha know. But a bad 'un."

  "I didn't know," Maddy said, smiling as she frequently did at Jaimee's colloquialisms. "A haint does sound scary, but my grandfather isn't one. He's very nice. He just needs new prescriptions for his glasses, which is going to help us with my plan."

  "Is that so?" Jaimee replied, wearing a false smile. She didn't want to go anywhere near the old man. Old people scared her, even nice ones. They was chugged full of awful smells and they were easily riled like a chained up yard-dog on a July afternoon.

  "That is so. Hopefully he won’t be able to tell us apart. The first thing we need to do is change clothes. I'll wear yours, you wear mine."

  "Y'all want me to change out here where God and ever-one cun see?" Self-consciously, Jaimee pulled the hem of her shirt lower.

  "Exactly," Maddy said, slipping off her shirt. "Except there's no one around. Come on, hurry."

  Maddy was down to her panties and shoes in seconds. Reluctantly at first, but with growing enthusiasm, Jaimee switched out her Walmart sale duds for Maddy's Rodeo Drive name brands. Jaimee's clothes smelled of earth and little girl sweat. Maddy Rothchild's smelled of perfume and they were soft, and what’s more Jaimee felt pretty for the first time since her mother died.

  "Now we'll both pin our hair back," Maddy said.

  Jaimee, who only knew the basics of ponytails, looked on nervously as Maddy's little hands pinned up her own hair. "That's kinda fancy. I don't reckon I could do that at all."

  "It's easy." Maddy took charge and within two shakes had Jaimee’s hair pulled into place in no time. "There we go. We're not quite twins, but we're close enough to fool my grandfather. Just as long as you don't talk, that is."

  "I can talk like a Yankee iffin I wanna," Jaimee declared. She cleared her throat, stuck a pinky in the air and said as distinctly as possible: "How do you do? I am Madison Rothchild. I reckon I'm happy to be your acquaintance."

  The two girls broke down in giggles. When Maddy recovered she said, "Other than saying 'reckon' that was pretty good. Can you say Grandfather, just like that?"

  Jaimee repeated the word, Yankee style, and Maddy shrugged. "I think that's good enough. Now follow me and stay quiet."

  Maddy led the way. They entered around back where the finished walkout basement opened onto a patio. It was dark and quiet, much like the rest of the house was when Maddy and Jaimee weren't tearing around it at full speed like they had been the night before.

  The house was spacious, sporting seven bedrooms, eight bathrooms, two kitchens, a billiards room and a spa. The Rothchild
's family physician, Dr. McGrady was staying for the week of the trials, he was billeted in one of the three top floor bedrooms with the other two belonging to Maddy and Ms. Robins. The master suite on the main floor had been converted into a hospital room for Maddy’s mom, Gabriele. Edmund Rothchild stayed across the hall from her so he could always be near.

  The two basement rooms were being used by the housekeeper and Edmund's secretary, Mrs. Unger, who was very stern and frightened Jaimee as much as the old man did.

  "Go up to my room and make sure that you're seen by all the adults," Maddy whispered, explaining her plan. "When you get to the main floor, wave to them and then run upstairs. At the top, call my Grandfather, just like you practiced. He's always watching my mom's room like a hawk. Once he goes up to see you, I'll zip in, check on my mom, and then when I'm done I'll meet you in my room."

  “What will I say to your grandpa?”

  “Uh…tell him I’m playing hide and seek, and that I want him to find me. That’ll keep him busy.”

  It was a sound enough plan and Jaimee was really and truly all for it--more than anyone, she knew what it was like knowing that your momma was dying and not being allowed in to see her. It was just about the most miserable, helpless feeling imaginable.

  Jaimee went up the stairs from the lower floor, paused with her chin slightly turned away from the adults who were sitting around the island in the kitchen, talking solemnly. She gave a wave in their general direction and then started up to the top floor where she ran into Dr. McGrady.

  "Hello Maddy,” he said. “Wait, sorry. It's Jaimee, right? I thought you were Maddy. You both look very much alike."

  "Yes," was all she could think to say. He stood there, smiling pleasantly until Jaimee was forced to walk away. She went to Maddy's room, hoping that the doctor would either go back in his room or head downstairs to be with the others. He did neither. He pulled out a cell phone and stood in the doorway to his room, talking about white blood counts which didn’t make no sense to Jaimee. Everyone knew blood was red.