by Ivan Turner
"I don't know," Heron said. "Maybe Karl had a strong immune system. Maybe the doctor's was weak. Maybe it's just quicker from a bite. Anyway, Dr. Luco's going to test all of you so you'll know one way or the other pretty soon."
"It's not me I'm worried about," Abby confessed. "It's my son."
***
"HEY! Are you Martin Benjamin?"
Martin, getting impatient, was just answering a call from Abby, who he hadn't been able to reach previously. The cop approaching him seemed determined.
"Yeah," Benjamin said. "In a minute." He answered the phone. "Abby?"
"Martin, it's me. They've got everything under control now."
The cop got to him and stood impatiently in front of him.
"That's a relief. What exactly happened?"
"There's not a lot of time. There's a disease and it's affected two people from the gym. We're all going to be tested in here and you should be tested, too."
"Jesus, Abby."
"Martin, when was the last time you spoke with my parents?"
He thought for a moment. "Not too long ago," he said. "Fifteen minutes."
"How's Sammy? Is he all right?"
In addition to his large frame, Martin was quick witted. It didn't take him a second to make the connection Abby had made. His voice dropped in tenor and his face went pale. It was so abrupt a change that the impatient police officer suddenly became patient.
"His fever's back," Martin said. "Your parents have given him ibuprofen."
"Okay," Abby answered. "Okay."
"What's going to happen to him, Abby?"
"It's… Maybe nothing. You need to bring him here. My parents, too. They all need to be tested."
"I won't let it happen. I've seen the films. I'll…"
"Martin," Abby said gently. "Is there a policeman with you, waiting for you?"
For the first time since the call began, Martin looked up at the cop. He was a bland kind of guy, mid thirties, decent experience.
"Yeah," Martin said. "He's here."
"He's going to take you to get them. Go with him."
Martin felt his eyes glaze over. "I love you, Abby."
"I know that, stupid. I love you, too. Now, hurry."
And then they were off.
***
HERON sat in the waiting area just watching as Todd declined. With the arrival of Naughton, he'd taken it upon himself to go off duty. He was tired and anxious. Zombies were bad enough but he still had surgery to look forward to. Dr. Luco had managed to transform the entire waiting area into a laboratory. She'd recruited nurses and techs from the hospital, warning them all about the dangers of getting involved with the infection. She had personally taken blood samples from each of the day's survivors as well as Abby's family and the police officers involved. She sent them with techs to be analyzed and would have to view the results herself but for now she wanted to be with Todd. She spoke to him and soothed him, hanging bag after bag of some IV solution that Heron could only assume was the same antibiotics that had been no help to Stemmy a week before. Or maybe they were different. He observed the puzzlement on the faces of the techs and nurses every time she gave an order.
Naughton approached him. "Did you call Alicia?"
Heron nodded.
"Are you still having the surgery tomorrow?"
Heron shook his head. "Day after. My doctor's got privileges at another hospital."
Naughton made a sound of approval as if the situation was his to approve. "I've got to make a statement to the press in ten minutes."
"Better you than me."
The captain grinned. "The chief wants me to assemble a special squad to deal with any further outbreaks."
"A zombie task force," Heron laughed.
"Pretty much." Naughton paused for a full minute, allowing Heron to know what was on his mind and to sweat it out. "I'd like you to lead the task force."
Heron nodded. "I figured as much. You know I can't do it."
"Anthony, there's no one else. I'll be the first to tell you that there are better detectives. Forgive my insensitivity but you're half a cop without Stemmy." That hurt a bit and it was meant to. Naughton was trying to bait him. "But I've got to tell you, Anthony, you took charge of this situation as well as anyone's ever taken charge of anything. And it seems you're now the official department expert on zombies."
Heron laughed. "Go to hell, Lance."
"I'm serious. I've got about six minutes left and I need to tell the media something."
"I'm scheduled for surgery day after tomorrow and it'll be a week after before I can even start to think about doing work at home."
Naughton nodded. "I know all that, Anthony. But you've got tomorrow. Come down and assemble who and what you need. Pick a second in command to get things off the ground and then take your week. You'll get hazard pay."
Heron went thin lipped as he considered the proposal. He pushed aside all thoughts of money and inconvenience and, most especially, prestige. Too keenly aware of what had occurred today and that it would happen again and again without someone or something to stand in its way, he couldn't see any way to refuse. Even though he desperately wanted to. So he nodded.
"On two conditions, Lance."
"Name them."
"I won't speak to the press. Not now."
"Okay. No problem. Tomorrow though? We need to put a face on this thing before you go under the knife."
"Okay. Tomorrow morning. Late."
"Perfect. I'll have it arranged. What's the other condition?"
Heron grinned.
***
THEY'D set up a makeshift podium. There were people gathered around it but all Lance Naughton saw were the microphones and the cameras. They didn't frighten him the way they did so many other high profile officers. He'd gotten used to them, learned how to satisfy them without divulging anything he didn't want them to know. This, however, was a different situation. It called for a different tactic.
Naughton made his statement, telling the press just about everything there was to tell. He didn't lie and he didn't twist the truth. He used the word zombie. He urged people to be cautious about physical contact with other people. He urged people who were feeling ill to seek help immediately. He urged people who might encounter a zombie to call the police immediately. Most of all, though, he brought home the point that this was not the end of the world. People had been afraid of SARS. They'd been afraid of the H1N1 virus. Hell, they'd been afraid of West Nile. But none of it spelled the apocalypse and neither would this. The best way for people to help the police and the health department get a handle on the infection was to continue about their everyday business. Shops and schools had to open. Buses and trains had to run. People needed to buy groceries and fix leaky faucets. None of that was going to change and Naughton expressed the hope that this new news would become old news very quickly.
Before leaving the podium, he informed the press that, at the mayor's insistence, he had assigned Detective Anthony Heron the duty of leading the zombie task force. He sang Heron's praises, citing numerous occasions on which his work had been vital to the success of an operation. He mentioned that Heron had been present for both zombie encounters and taken charge of the one at the hospital. Lives had been saved because of his involvement. He did not mention Heron's cancer nor did he mention the surgery and the week he wouldn't even be involved in the operation. He promised them statements from both Heron and Luco the following day.
And, true to his reputation, Naughton left the press satisfied and with plenty of material for the evening's and morning's stories.
***
OFFICER Francis Culph was chosen as second in command of the zombie task force. The decision was made on the spot and held up in the face of Naughton's objections. Heron had chosen Culph for the same reasons that Naughton had chosen Heron. The other policemen, those who had secured the ER with Culph, had each been offered positions on the task force. Four accepted and three declined.
Culph went h
ome excited. Unlike Heron, he was very enthralled with both the money and the prestige this opportunity granted him. He was as impetuous as he seemed, though he would learn to keep it in check for the sake of his job and his life.
When he arrived at his one bedroom Brooklyn apartment late that night his girlfriend was waiting for him in a pink teddy. She'd been there for three hours and was past the point of seduction and just glad to see him. When he told her what had happened she expressed first disbelief, then fear, and then contempt. She did not approve of his new assignment. Still wired from the day's events and its culmination, Culph reacted the only way someone of his nature could. He hit her.
***
WHEN the all clear came back on Peter Ventura's blood test, he grabbed his things and stalked out. He felt frustrated at having been unable save anyone. Marie, Jane, Sven, and worst of all Dr. Leke, had become victims of this horrible thing that would now become a part of their society as had the black plague, pneumonia, influenza, small pox, and every other great scourge that had cut a biological swathe through mankind. In a month or a year, Dr. Luco or someone like her would come up with a cure or at least a viable treatment and life would go on as it had before, those very first victims just ghostly memories.
There was a train delay and it took him almost ninety minutes to get home to his studio apartment on Staten Island. When he walked in, it was dark. There was no girlfriend to meet him. The emptiness of the small space swallowed him up whole and the crushing weight of reality burst through the trauma of the day, infecting his soul as surely as a bite would have infected his blood. He just barely managed to make it to the toilet before throwing up his guts. He spent most of the rest of the night huddled next to the tub weeping.
***
IN his final moments, Todd Mayfield could only think of Sven. They hadn't been particularly close but they had been peers, colleagues. And Todd had run out on him, left him to be chewed up by those things. Ironically, his guilt was his strength. The more he suffered with the illness, the more he believed that he deserved every shred of pain that came to him.
I'm sorry, Sven, he thought over and over until delirium claimed his mind leaving him with just the echoing …sorry…sorry…sorry…. When the infection finally took his body as well, he didn't have even that.
***
ABBY Benjamin and her husband and son and her parents huddled together in an exam room for two hours waiting for someone to come and give them the results of their tests. Sammy was somewhat feverish, though the ibuprofen kept it in a safe range. He drank a little but ate nothing, which had been his behavior throughout the course of the day. They tried to talk, the four adults, tried to lift Sammy's spirits as well as their own. But there was this oppressive pall over the environment and they could not escape its influence. It was better to face the terrible possibilities head on.
It wasn't Dr. Luco who brought them their results. It was a haggard technician. Luco had checked them, though, checked them twice. The technician carried with her a small bottle filled with a pinkish liquid in it. It was an antibiotic for Sammy's strep throat.
They were all clean.
Collapsing in tears, the lot of them, they remained for several minutes. The tech left them to themselves. She had a lot more work to do.
As they finally collected themselves, Abby grabbed up Sammy in a great big hug. Thank God. Strep throat, thank God. But as grateful as she was, she understood what that diagnosis had meant before the discovery of antibiotics. There had been a time when a person's own body's ability to fight off an infection unaided determined the outcome. There was a time when a mother cried over her son's strep throat the way Abby would have cried if the diagnosis there had been different.
***
DENISE Luco watched Todd Mayfield suffer. And suffer he did. Every interminable moment of his illness caused him more and more distress and even though Luco hung bag after bag of IV solution, she did nothing.
Really.
Nothing.
The bags were filled with saline, just something to keep him hydrated and to keep everyone else thinking that she was trying to help him. She wasn't. And she wasn't sure she would ever be able to look at herself in the mirror again.
Throughout her ten year career, Luco has seen few patients. As a fourth year med student doing her rotations in a hospital, she'd learned very quickly that dealing with patients was not in her future. She'd turned to research then, enjoying the slides of bacteria, and the interaction of numbers on a data sheet. Whenever she had seen a patient, it was under the careful observation of a superior or at least a peer. Someone else was the attending physician and she was just observing symptoms. Here, though, she was the attending physician. The zombie bacterium was her baby. She'd blundered into its path and adopted it.
When Detective Stemmy had come in a week before, bitten and teeming with bacteria, she'd immediately classified it and prescribed a heavy dosage of what she deemed would be the best antibiotic. The bacteria had turned to fight the medicine and eventually won. Then it had fought Stemmy. It won that battle, too, but had little defense against the bullet Detective Heron had put into his partner's brain. With Todd, though, she needed to see more than she had with Stemmy. She needed to see how a defenseless body fought against the infection. She needed to see what it did to his blood and his organs in stages. She needed to see what happened when he died…and when he turned. She took vial after vial of blood and ran test after test. She gave him nothing but saline, not even morphine. Not even a Tylenol.
It devastated him. And it did so in about a third of the time it had with Stemmy. It turned Todd's immune system against him. What's considered normal, healthy bacteria was wiped from his system at record speed. When all of that was gone, it attacked the vital organs. Todd went into kidney and lung failure, followed by heart failure.
As he breathed his last breaths, Luco fastened restraints around his ams and his legs and his waist. She tied a makeshift one around his head, running it through his mouth. She took a saliva sample. She would take another when he died. If he noticed her torturous probing, he gave no indication. There wasn't much left of Todd Mayfield.
A nurse came over to check the alarms, saw the restraints and got a stricken look on her face. Luco stared daggers at her. They both knew what happened next. As the nurse scurried away, Luco pulled out her phone and made a call. It was late but time was no longer an issue anymore. Transport was on its way.
Slowly, in the wee hours of the morning, Todd Mayfield slipped away and a thing took his place. Denise Luco, the ever present angel of death, dug her hands deep into rubber gloves, and began her work.
***
I hope you've enjoyed this, the second installment of Zombies! Abby's bad day gave you a close look at Abby Benjamin, whose very normal life seems destined to be intertwined with the ridiculously abnormal appearance of zombies. There'll be plenty more of Abby to come in the future episodes but next month you'll get reacquainted with Shawn Rudd and meet his love interest. In addition, you'll finally get an in-depth look into John Arrick, who's popped in and out of the first two episodes. It's all about romancing the dead in one month when Zombies! Episode 3: Love Bites hits the smashwords pages.
***
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