Walkers

by Gary Brandner

  The big man came through the door and bore down on her. As he loomed over her Joana could see the gleam of his upper teeth where the lip was split. The outstretched hands reached for her.

  Joana scrambled away crabwise across the grass and managed to regain her feet. The intruder came

  on. He had her cut off now from the front of the house and the relative safety of the street. She ran in the only direction left open to her—back behind the house.

  The grass back there had been allowed to grow longer than that in front of the house. Clumps of weeds and untrimmed shrubbery clutched at Joana, held her back. Her pursuer, moving swiftly, heedless of the bushes, gained steadily.

  Trying to watch back over her shoulder as she ran, Joana hit something that yielded, but would not be pushed out of the way. With a cold dutch of terror she realized she had run into the ivy-grown chain-link fence that separated the little house from the new apartment building behind it. The fence was seven feet tall and had spiky wire ends on the top. Under normal conditions it would have been a difficult climb for Joana. With a maniac charging at her it was unthinkable.

  She ran along the fence, stumbling every few steps. She screamed now for help, help from anywhere. The darkness was all she had on her side. The pursuer had to stop repeatedly and look around for her. Apparently he could not see any better in the night than she could.

  Lights began to blink on in the windows of the apartment building. Heads appeared in the bright rectangles. Voices called out.

  "What's the matter down there?"

  "Who is it?"

  "Do you need help?"

  "What's going on?"

  Joana clutched the fence with her fingers hooked through the diamond openings. She stared through the ivy leaves at the apartment building, just a few yards away, but it might as well have been miles.

  "Help me!" she cried. "Oh, please help me!"

  Hearing her own voice, Joana knew the people from the apartment could never reach her in time. The fence would delay them until it was too late.

  Behind her the brush crashed and the man came through, lunging for her.

  Again Joana dodged out of his grasp. Her lungs ached, her throat was raw from screaming. Sharp branches tore at her clothing as she flailed through the bushes. A sense of hopelessness welled up in her chest.

  As she clawed her way along the fence an exposed root caught her foot like a snare. Her momentum carried her forward, and she fell hard on her stomach. The breath was slammed from her lungs. She writhed on the ground, fighting to draw in air. The brush parted and the big man stepped through. For a moment he stood looking down at her with his empty eyes. The torn lip gave him a hideous sardonic smile. Joana lay before him helpless, shaking. She was unable to draw a breath. The man's hands came toward her throat.

  "Eeeeyah!" The piercing shout came from somewhere behind Joana's attacker. He hesitated, his head cocked, listening. There was a great crashing in the shrubbery. The man turned.

  From where she lay Joana saw Glen charge into view and head for the big man. One of his hands was upraised, the fist clenched. He was holding something. As he came closer Joana saw it was a poker from the fireplace. The intruder turned away from her to face Glen.

  "Get away from her," Glen ordered. He came to a stop six feet away from the man. He brandished the poker. "Get away. Get back!"

  The big man uttered the low animal growl again and lunged for Glen. His move was sudden and decisive, but Glen was ready. He swung the poker down in a hammer blow. The man made no attempt to fend it off, and the heavy iron shaft cracked into his head. It did not even slow him down.

  The sound of the blow made Joana retch. Slowly, painfully, she started to breathe again. She pulled herself over against the fence and crouched there watching the battle. Light from the windows of the apartment building now cast an eerie illumination over the scene.

  The big man seemed not to have felt the heavy blow from the poker. He lashed out with a backhand swipe. Glen partially blocked it, but the blow still had enough force to send him sprawling to the ground. He scrambled to his feet as the man turned his attention again toward Joana.

  As the intruder came at her once more, Joana pulled herself up painfully with handholds on the fence. She heard Glen shout again, then saw him come up behind the man and swing the poker. It came down in a glancing blow on the man's head, and a flap of scalp tore away. Glen hit him two more times, solid, chopping blows. The man's skull cracked like a melon, and a yellowish jellied substance oozed out and ran down the side of his face. And still he advanced on Joana.

  Glen moved quickly around to put himself between her and the attacker. The poker rose and fell, rose and fell. With each blow the sound of impact became mushier.

  Joana had a hand pressed against her mouth. She tasted blood and realized she had bitten through the skin on her knuckle. A few feet away, the big man still tried to get at her as Glen hit him over and over again with the poker. The man's head was a shapeless mass with yellow shards of skull bone sticking out and the ooze of brains splattering everything. Joana wondered at the fact that there was so little blood.

  The sound of running feet.

  Voices shouting.

  People from the apartment were climbing over the fence and running around from the street side toward the grisly tableau. When he heard them coming, Glen stood back. His breath came in labored gasps. His face was a mask of revulsion. The thing that stood swaying before him now wore a shapeless blob for a head. It stood there, turning from side to side, as though it could still see with the ruined eyes.

  The first of the arriving people reached the scene and pulled up abruptly at the sight of the man. Others ran up and stopped just as suddenly. The mutilated creature stood turning, turning, surrounded. For eerie seconds no one spoke, no one moved. Then without warning the intruder collapsed on the ground and was still.

  Glen stood for a moment looking at the fallen man. Then he dropped the poker into the grass and rushed to the fence, where Joana still crouched, her fingers laced through the wire. He gently freed her hands and pulled them away from the fence. He knelt beside her and held her close against his chest.

  "Are you hurt?" he asked in a whisper.

  "No, he didn't get to me. You, darling?"

  "A bump on the head. I'm all right."

  And then the tears came.

  The people who had run onto the scene moved in and edged cautiously closer to the man lying in the weeds. Others came over to join Glen and Joana. "What happened?" somebody said.

  "I saw it all from my bedroom window," somebody else answered. "That big guy there was like a maniac. He kept going after the girl. The other guy tried to stop him, but he just kept coming. He kept taking those shots to the head like they were nothing."

  "Jesus, look at his head."

  "There's nothing left on top."

  "How did he stand up as long as he did?"

  "He was a maniac. Really freaked out."

  A man knelt on the grass where Glen was holding Joana. "Are you two all right?"

  "Yeah," Glen managed. "We're okay." He nodded his head toward the crumpled body of the big man. "What about that one?"

  "He's finished."

  Glen groaned softly.

  "Hey, don't worry, you couldn't help it. Enough of us saw what happened. There was nothing else you could have done."

  A police siren wailed in the distance and grew steadily louder.

  Chapter 15

  Dr. Hovde sat on a metal stool in his examination room facing his patient, Mrs. Helen Ingalls. She perched on the edge of the table, holding her right arm gingerly out in front of her.

  "It hurts from about here," she pointed to a spot on her lower triceps, "all the way through the elbow and down to my forearm."

  The doctor passed his fingers lightly along the woman's arm. There was no swelling, no discoloration. He applied a little pressure.

  "Ouch," she said.

  Dr. Hovde nodded, satisfied.

/>   "It hurts especially when I serve," she said, "and when I have to reach for a backhand."

  "It looks like you have a classic case of tennis elbow," Hovde said. "How long have you been playing the game?"

  "Twenty years, for Christ's sake."

  "Have you made any changes in your game lately?"

  Mrs. Ingalls gave an embarassed shrug. "Well, I have been trying to improve my serve. I mean, with the little pitty-pat delivery I've been using, I'm a sitting duck for a winner off the return. Don has been making excuses to get out of being my partner in doubles."

  Dr. Hovde shook his head at the folly of a man and wife teaming up to play tennis. He said, "What kind of a change did you make in your serve?"

  "The thing is, I've been watching Martina Navratilova, and she really powders the ball. I'm trying to serve more the way she does it, and I've only just started getting results."

  "I'll bet," Hovde said. "And one of the results you're getting is the tennis elbow. Remember, Helen, Martina Navratilova is a professional. She is also six inches taller than you, at least forty pounds heavier, and she's left-handed. I suggest you pick somebody else to model your new serve after. In the meantime, go back to pitty-pat."

  Helen Ingalls frowned. She was an attractive fortyish woman with tied-back blonde hair and crinkly blue eyes. "Don isn't going to like it."

  "Let him play with Martina. If you take a couple of aspirins before you play and wear an elastic brace, it will cut down on the pain, but that's all I can do for you except to tell you to forget the cannonball serve."

  Mrs. Ingalls sighed and pulled on her jacket. "I'll think it over."

  Dr. Hovde left the examination room and walked back to his office in the renovated old house. He went into the washroom and scrubbed his hands at the sink. Out on his desk the telephone buzzed. He dried

  his hands and walked back to pick it up."Yes, Carol?"

  "There's a Dr. Breedlove calling."

  Dr. Hovde was instantly alert when he heard the pathologist's name. "I'll talk to him."

  The line clicked and Hovde said, "Hello, Kermit?"

  "Hi, Warren. You busy?"

  "No more so than usual. What's up?"

  "A customer came in downstairs last night that you might be interested in."

  A knot clenched in Hovde's stomach. "Who is it?"

  "Name's Edward Frankovich."

  Hovde ran the name through his mental file. Nothing clicked. "I don't know the name," he said.

  "It's not him, it's the place where he died. A house up on Beachwood Drive. The girl who lives there is Joana Raitt."

  "Joana? Is she all right?"

  "As far as I know. Just the same, there are some peculiar things about Frankovich's death that I

  thought you'd be interested in."

  "For instance?"

  "For instance, the guy seems to have died twice." There was a moment of silence on the wire before Hovde replied. "Are you going to be around there for a while?"

  "Where else would I be?"

  "I'll be down as soon as I can. I want to talk to you about this."

  Dr. Hovde hung up the phone and sat for a moment pulling on his lower lip. He badly wanted a cigarette. He picked up the receiver again and buzzed the receptionist. "What do we have going for the rest of the afternoon, Carol?" he asked.

  The receptionist ran down the list of patients scheduled for afternoon appointments, and their respective complaints. The more urgent cases Hovde arranged to send to a colleague who had a clinic just a block away. The others he told Carol to reschedule wherever possible for later dates.

  Dr. Hovde changed from the white jacket into his old tweed and slipped out the back door, leaving Carol to deal with the patients in the waiting room.

  It was most unprofessional behavior, he told himself sternly, but the circumstances were extraordinary. The message from Dr. Breedlove had triggered all sorts of unpleasant thoughts, but Hovde forced himself to draw no conclusions until he had all the facts.

  It was two o'clock when he pulled into the doctors' parking lot at the West Los Angeles Receiving Hospital. He jogged to the Emergency entrance, nodded to the doctors he knew on the ward there, and rode the elevator down to the sub-basement.

  The chill of the air crawled in through his clothes as it always did down here. It was an unnatural cold, the cold of a place that has never been warm. The cold of death. Dr. Horde hurried past the row of refrigerated drawers to the pathology lab.

  Kermit Breedlove sat at a battered old desk in one corner of the room. His chair was tilted back, his long legs stretched out with the feet propped on a pulled-out lower drawer. He was reading a paperback Western. The ever-present toothpick jiggled in a corner of his mouth.

  On one of the autopsy tables lay a human form covered with a sheet. Dr. Hovde judged it to be a man, six feet five or six feet six, and about 240 pounds.

  "Hello, Kermit," Hovde said. He gestured at the sheeted body. "This the one you told me about?"

  Dr. Breedlove turned down a page corner and laid the paperback aside. "That's him." He got up and ambled over to the table where he stood beside Hovde. "I opened him up this morning and found some mighty interesting things inside."

  "Can we have a look at him?"

  "Sure." The pathologist grasped the sheet at the top of the table. Then he hesitated and said in a tone that was more serious than his usual offhand banter. "This is a bad one, Warren."

  Hovde nodded his understanding and stood back to watch while Breedlove peeled away the sheet.

  The body was a big man, thick through the waist and powerfully muscled at the chest and shoulders. The Y-shaped autopsy incision across the chest and abdomen had been closed and stitched together. All these details Hovde took in on his second and third impressions. All he could look at when the sheet was stripped away was the man's head. It was battered and crushed like a rotten melon. The face was all askew. All traces of blood had been washed away, and the splintered skull was clearly visible through the lacerated scalp. The brain, Hovde could see, must have bulged through half a dozen fissures before it was removed for the autopsy.

  "No need to ask the cause of death on this one," he said.

  Breedlove eyed him cagily. "You think not? Would you like to make a little bet?"

  Hovde recalled the pathologist's words over the phone: "The guy seems to have died twice." He said, "Tell me about it."

  "They brought him in about midnight last night. Apparent homicide. When I came in this morning I didn't like the looks of the body at all. And I don't mean the head."

  "What do you mean?" Hovde prompted.

  "The condition of the corpse didn't jibe with the time of death on the report. I don't know why nobody else picked up on it. They probably never looked past the busted-open skull."

  "I can understand that," Hovde put in.

  "Right away I saw there were signs of postmortem decomposition that wouldn't have been evident until a body was dead at least twenty-four hours. Want me to run over them for you?"

  "I know the signs of putrefaction on a dead body." Hovde said.

  "Okay. His identity was established through papers he was carrying—driver's license, credit cards, and that stuff. We verified it by checking his fingerprints with the DMV. When we knew there were no close relatives, I cut into him."

  Breedlove paused to probe at a molar with the toothpick.

  "Kermit, will you get on with it?"

  "Sure, sure. When I got inside I found the gastrointestinal evidence and the degree of blood-cell breakdown confirmed what I thought when i first saw him. The guy died some time Friday, and not Sunday night. I don't care how many witnesses there were. Then I remembered the similar case of the crazy woman driver in Westwood, and it occurred to me that the name of the girl in the house was the same as the one the woman almost ran over. Your patient. So I gave you a call."

  "I'm glad you did," Hovde said. He gazed down at the dead man with the long, roughly sewn scar running down the middle of hi
s trunk. "If the blows to the head didn't kill this man, what did?"

  "Suffocation."

  "You're serious?"

  "Serious as the Pope. You can see that the face, what's left of it, still has the dusky plum celor associated with asphyxiation. The organs I took out were cyanotic and congested. There were small hemorrhages in the thymus, lungs, pericardium, and pleura. Internal bruising of the larynx suggests to me that he choked on something he swallowed."

  "No foreign material in the laryngeal aperture?"

  "Not when I opened him, but I'll guarantee something was in there and cut off his air long enough to kill him."

  "On Friday."

  "No later."

  "Do you have the police report handy?"

  Dr. Breedlove strolled back to the desk and shuffled through the papers scattered haphazardly across the top. He came up with a carbon copy of the typed police report and handed it to Hovde.

  Slipping on his reading glasses, Hovde skimmed through the information in the blocks at the top of the sheet. He confirmed that the apparent homicide did indeed occur at an address on Beachwood Drive occupied by Joana Raitt. He read quickly through the narrative description, then stopped suddenly.

  "Glen Early," he said aloud.

  "What's that?" said Breedlove.

  "The 'assailant' here, the one who delivered the blows to the head, I know him. He lives in the same

  apartment complex that I do."

  "Some coincidence."

  "Not really," said Hovde, more to himself than to the pathologist. "No coincidence at all."

  He quickly finished reading the report, then went back and read it again more thoroughly.

  When he had finished, Hovde laid the report flat on one of the unoccupied autopsy tables and thought about it. This new attack on Joana, following the woman in the car last Thursday, plus the accident in the swimming pool and Joana's weird story, added up to a conclusion he did not like, but one he could no longer deny. Whatever was going on here was beyond the scope of medicine, or any other of the natural sciences. There was only one possible conclusion. Walking dead people were trying to kill Joana Raitt.