Teabiscuit crashed down hard on her right side, a thousand pounds of horseflesh losing against gravity, hurling John Junior two rows over, clean. He knew how to land. He came up flash-fire pissed, and tackled the interloper.
Horses can scream. Pretty soon John Junior was screaming, too.
* * *
“Sheriff, I’m telling you, this isn’t a disease!” Dr. Steckler was practically shouting into the phone and did not care who overheard. “Or contagious psychosis or a virus or space madness or anything like that. It’s not the capsule. Hell, for all I know it’s cosmic rays or God’s will or some hippie shit I don’t understand. The capsule is just a jumped-up radio! No germs, no ooze, no nothing!”
“We’ve got a situation down here,” Sheriff Delaney growled back. The incipient alarm in his voice hurt to hear. Both men were snapping at each other because they lived in denial of the void in which no explanation was credible, or even available. Rarely if ever had Delaney actually heard Steckler resort to what both their moms would have called that kind of language. “A situation where people are dying. A medical situation. Doc, I know you’re doing everything you can. I know this is big and frightening. But we can’t lose our heads. We—”
“I hear you, Sheriff,” Steckler overrode. “Fear gets us nowhere. Fear gets us gut reactions and panic and worse. You’re not going to want to hear this, but all the dead people in the morgue just got up and attacked my staff. Even Hattie Brainard. We both heard Emmalene Strats say the military was edging up on the town—”
It was Delaney’s turn to interpose: “There is no way in Hell or on God’s green earth that Ricky Coverdale was dead when he attacked Tyler and Ace. He was fucked up, true, probably out of his mind on LSD or something, but he wasn’t dead already!” So much for not cussing.
“He’s dead now, right?”
“Doc, he doesn’t have a head.”
“What shape are Tyler and Ace in?”
“Tyler lost some fingers. Chet and Cab bandaged them up. They seem woozy but okay. They really need you to look at them, Doc…”
“Watch them,” said Steckler. “If they lapse or stop breathing or anything, lock them up until I can get there. Avoid contact with them however you can and above all, don’t let them bite or draw blood.”
“That is not rational.”
“Look, Joe—even though it’s not a disease, it helps to think of this as rabies, but from what I’ve seen, incredibly fast-moving. That’s another reason the satellite isn’t to blame. This is all happening too soon, and if what we’re up against was from space, how come we aren’t all affected? We can figure this out later, but we’ve got to deal with it now.”
“Something like, kill the symptoms now, fix the disease later?”
“Exactly.”
“So I guess we need another dead person to start moving around?”
“That would help convince us both. I haven’t witnessed this actually happening yet. If this is systemic, it’ll have a pattern, and what we’d call an incubation period. We’ve got to know what that is.”
Steckler paused to release an explosive sigh. No doubt Delaney could hear the background chatter at the clinic, the voices now surrounding him, demanding he make a decision or take action. Likewise, he could hear nondescript people yelling beyond Delaney’s side of the call. The only sideshow this circus was missing so far was a goddamned priest, hollering holies and freaking out his flock.
“Jesus,” said Steckler. “I can’t believe we’re actually talking about this as though we were in our right mind…”
“Punch a wall if you have to, but don’t vaporlock on me,” said Delaney. “The whole town’s gonna need us. You go ahead on, just keep doing what you’re doing, because you’re about to get a bunch of new patients, maybe alive, maybe dead, I don’t know and don’t want to speculate anymore. But you call through on the radio if you get any flashes of brilliance.”
“Yeah—in twelve hours we’ll probably be laughing about this.”
“In twelve hours I hope to be dead drunk or fast asleep,” said Delaney. “Meanwhile, I’m gonna go ask the army what the hell they think they’re doing, loitering outside my town.”
While they were talking, Ty Strong died from shock and blood loss.
* * *
There was one more dead person in Williamson yet unaccounted for.
Hollis Grenier (sixty-seven, grocery store manager, kidney disease) was boxed up and lay in state inside the Chapman & Browning Funeral Home, preparatory to a traditional burial service scheduled for the next day at 11:00 a.m. He began to stir about sundown on the Day of the Satellite.
Fleet Jones, an apprentice in mortuary science who had moved down from the university in Omaha, heard a commotion in the prep room just as he was locking up for the boss. He found Hollis weaving like a willow in a high wind, barefoot, his Velcroed funeral suit hanging in bum tatters. This was unusual. Fleet knew Hollis was full of embalming fluid, pumped via cannula into his (very uncooperative) carotid artery.
Fleet, his hands trembling, inadvertently addressed the risen cadaver as if it were still a human being. “Mister Grenier…?” It lifted its head to look at him. In life, Hollis had suffered from cervical myelopathy due to “dropped head syndrome.”
Then Fleet made his second mistake. He moved to steady Hollis, to perhaps reassure this apparition with a human touch. This was some kind of horrific misunderstanding; things needed to be put to rights.
Hollis’s joints made a crackling sound akin to rupturing ice as his dead fingers clawed at his own mouth, splitting the gum-stitches and wire that held it shut. He spat out the cotton batting and gnawed a gob of tissue from Fleet’s biceps, right through his shirt.
Fleet committed no further errors. His last received sensation was the stench of formaldehyde.
* * *
Dr. Manny Steckler watched the dead baby crawl toward him blindly, mewling, trailing a purple umbilical cord, its toothless mouth champing. Somehow it had gotten out of its jar in Pathology; it had not yet been transferred to the morgue, which was now barricaded with utility furniture, quickly scavenged and repurposed.
Steckler’s stomach seemed to drop straight down to Hell and bounce back. A sight such as this could force you to seriously recontemplate your place in the universe, or reconsider the advantages of a quick suicide.
Unavoidably he thought of the Kendrick slaughterhouse. Normally the calmest level of the clinic, the morgue had become a hiding bath, bleeding pit, and mulching chamber all in one as grotesque, mindlessly hungry things dismembered and cannibalized at least three of the clinic’s staff, identifiable now only by a head count of who was still standing, outside. Was it technically cannibalization when a clinically dead corpse resurrected and chewed pieces out of you?
He had seen just enough to drive him to the edge of the crazy pit before he ordered the morgue buttoned up. It was carnage in there, a bloodbath of sundered limbs and exposed organs, tendons snapping like rubber bands, human fat greasing the floor. The dead revived, to chow down on the living, who in turn became dead, who in turn …
Here, now, crept the embodiment of every revulsion he had felt as a med student, the potential healer repelled by the raw pink animalism of infants, the gut reactions and instinctive hatreds he had tamped back with notions of human compassion and species unity. Doctors were not supposed to dislike children, especially in a place like America, where motherhood was unjustly elevated to godhood. He was relieved to leave the clandestine D&Cs to a younger and more idealistic doctor, Felicia Raine, who was willing to take the heat if anybody ever found out that some of the females of Williamson were not falling gently into their presupposed role as brood mares. Discreet and careful even as the militant feminist in her stirred to wakefulness, Felicia had calibrated her own conscience so as not to make a political issue out of a moral one.
Steckler was more or less alone in the corridor; everyone else was hanging back, because he was in charge, and nobody could venture a usef
ul theory about what was actually transpiring here.
Having dealt with his phobia—risen above it, in fact—did not mean that a fear so elemental, bullied into dormancy, could not erupt fresh, given the correct stimulae, the old prompts. The thing lolling in the corridor was a pallid, leaking grub and though it was clearly not breathing, it made a wheezing, clotted sound as it dragged itself along the floor. Steckler instantly hated it; wanted to kill it with fire—and that was also an instinct, vomited up from a much deeper, more primal level than the usual bilge about how adorable babies were, the easy lies by which the subject is swiftly changed.
That thing was not Dolores Whitaker’s technically stillborn daughter. Was not.
Steckler picked it up by the throat. It thrashed in his grasp like a rattlesnake. Since he had the correct keys, he threw it down the elevator shaft before his staff could bear witness. He heard it hit bottom with a snap, like a ripe maggot bursting open.
Then he heard it moving around again.
* * *
On the far side of the morgue barricade, Casey Fields resurrected. Her paramour, Kyle Fredericks, reanimated. And attendant Lenny Rana revived. Half of him, anyway. Casey still felt “restless” inside, but was incapable of codifying the modified vector of this new hunger that was so much more primal than sex. In combination with the ambulatory remains of Jason Lowwens, Hattie Brainard, Chuck Greene, Sonny Brickland, and Dolores Whitaker, their group now massed to sufficient heft to breach the doors, which—despite the fact they had been dammed outside all the way to the far wall with office furniture—came free at their weakest point, the inside hinges.
Awaiting them in various corners of the clinic were at least fifteen other patients lacking the simple strength to move from their beds with any speed.
Most of the clinic staff had vacated in naked, directionless dread, once their boss, their Number One, their leader, had proven incapable of further leadership.
Something vital and irredeemable had snapped inside of Dr. Manny Steckler when he encountered the baby in the corridor. Once that snowball begins to roll, best to take cover until the avalanche is spent. He was already in his car, headed out of town at top speed, legal limits be damned.
He was T-boned by a pickup truck being driven recklessly by Bernardo Rawls and his girlfriend, Tammy. Per Buddy’s pronouncement, people over-sped the legal limit all the time and usually, nothing happened. Nada.
There were no survivors.
* * *
Not regular army, thought Sheriff Delaney. Nope. The soldiers he could see were all in murky-dark fatigues devoid of company or mission patches, and toting the newer M16s. Just as Indochina had become Vietnam, the coveted “black rifles” had evolved to this A1 variant, which would not become the standard service long gun for another nine months. Delaney had never actually seen one before but knew the mags were supposed to be ten rounds bigger.
He got a closer clue when the chrome-plated bore teased the nape of his neck, about a quarter-mile past the boundary to Lester Collins’s soybean field, where Sonny Brickland had drunk himself to death. He heard the crackle of a radio-comm behind him: “Trespasser in the loop, Captain.”
Delaney was divested of his sidearm and escorted by a pair of sentries toward a cluster of three-quarter Jeep trucks and larger, “five-quarter” carriers. A low-light field HQ had been set up in one of these latter. The authority of his badge and his standing as sheriff did not seem to impress his captors overmuch. They herded him with monosyllables and prods, almost like an animal, but more like an enemy, which set off the danger alarms in his flesh like firecrackers.
A flap was lifted and Delaney was presented. “Here’s our stray,” said the soldier who had proven to be quieter than Delaney, out there in the field. Stealthy sonofabitch. The kid looked about nineteen, eager to be a war dog.
“This fella pokes me one more time, I’m gonna lay him out,” said Delaney directly to his chaperone … who backed up a step without meaning to.
“Come in, Sheriff Delaney,” said a man with captain’s bars on a brigade sweater, probably the oldest man here except for Delaney, who mentally chalked the soldier as somewhere in his mid-forties. The man had a pretty dynamic mustache for military issue. One of those guys with perfect gray temples but black hair above, resulting in salt-and-pepper eyebrows. He dismissed the guards and waved Delaney toward the nearest bench in the cramped truck bed. “Sit down.” He looked up and made direct eye contact. “Please.”
“Please,” Delaney repeated. “That courtesy shit only works in an equal environment. You just had me brought here at gunpoint, so don’t butter my ass, Captain—?”
“Fletcher.” The captain removed his steel-rimmed glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose, exuding a precise balance between harried bureaucrat and hardball centurion—a performance that seemed too calculated for Delaney, as though strictly for his benefit. Whatever decisions were to be enacted here had been made already.
Now the guy would try to “confide” in Delaney. He’d act off-the-record and crack a serpent’s smile.
“Sorry,” said Fletcher. He cracked the smile. “Long day.”
“Don’t,” said Delaney. “Don’t offer me bad coffee or pretend you’re my pal. If this was legitimate, I would have been notified. This is my town. People are dying and nobody can explain it. So spare me the spreadable cheese and tell me what the fuck is going on here. Do me that kindness, because that’s all I want to know.”
“Fair enough.” Fletcher stacked some paper, uselessly truing the edges—another corporate cue that it was time for plain talk. “We have experienced a terra incognita event. The entire country, so far as we can tell; possibly the whole world. Not just your town, ah—” (he had to check) “—Williamston.”
“Nearest ‘Williamston’ is in Michigan state,” said Delaney dryly.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. Talk plain or shut up.”
“All right. A terra incognita event is something we’ve never seen or experienced before.”
“Yeah—‘unknown land.’”
“We had a suborbital snooper drop unexpectedly. A satellite.”
“Yeah, I know that, too. I’ve also got a doctor who says the satellite has nothing to do with what’s going on with dead people. Or people who are wounded and die. They get back up and attack.”
“Yes, we had reports from California, Boston, New York City, all over. But the satellite crashed in Williamson, Sheriff. Your own newspaper has already posted stories to the wire services. It was exactly the kind of story we needed to explain what was happening, in order to stave off major panic for as long as possible.”
A beauty of a headache—the kind caused only by the truth—was settling into the space between Delaney’s eyes with the sizzle of a hot bullet casing. “You need a cover story. Deniability for some larger screwup.”
Fletcher brought his steepled hands down on his meager desk with a thump—the first honest reaction Delaney had seen. “That’s just it, Sheriff. There was no screwup. Our first guess was that it was a biowar spill, an accident from … somewhere. Nope—nothing reported yet. No ground zero. It’s not from space unless it’s a cosmic ray belt that saturated the entire planet at the same time…”
Delaney’s vision lost focus. “There’s no time to investigate and split hairs about what it is or isn’t. You’ve got a bigger and more immediate problem … and so do I. Whatever happens, people are going to say it was because a space thing crashed in Williamson and it isn’t true, and that makes you all happy because now you’ve got something to blame. Terrific. What else are you planning to do for me?”
“We need your cooperation. We’ve cordoned off the town. Nobody in or out.”
“Your men are toting hot weapons,” said Delaney, meeting Fletcher’s gaze directly.
“We need you to tell the people in Williamson to cope as best they can while we get a determination from the president.” It was a near-classic tied-hands ploy. I have to wait
for orders from my superiors; that’s all I can do.
“Cope,” said Delaney, now doubting the meaning of the simplest words. “Cope with their friends and neighbors trying to eat them. And they try to leave, you’ll shoot them, plain enough? This is a scared shitless scenario, Captain. I’m scared. You’d be scared, too, if you saw what I’ve seen so far today.”
“But containable,” said Fletcher.
“Oh, yeah, no big deal at all.” Delaney stood up in the narrow space. “I think you and I are done.”
The guard just beyond the tailgate brandished his weapon. Fletcher waved off the conflict.
“Sheriff Delaney, my orders are to maintain a sterile cordon.”
And that brought the face Delaney had wanted to see all along: the humorless mouth, the metallic eyes, all cards on the table, whose dick was biggest.
“Tell your people we’re doing the best we can.”
Delaney turned back. “Against what? You don’t even know. This is all to support a goddamned story you just made up.”
“Corporal, let the sheriff go back into town, and make sure he’s headed in the right direction.”
“That’s it, huh?” Delaney shot back.
“You said it, not me. We’re done.” Fletcher nodded, his lips white. He whispered sorry one more time, but Delaney could not hear. Then he unracked the receiver for his hot line.
“This is Captain Fletcher.” He recited a confirmation code and a few other special numbers. “We are pulling back to the outer marker. We are green, I repeat, green-for-go, for Anubis.”
* * *
Sheriff Delaney plodded grimly across the soybean field, looking for his Jeep in the dark. If all else failed, he could tack toward the back-field pole lamps illuminating the grounds around Lester Collins’s farmhouse.
The soldiers had returned his pistol but taken all his ammo, and wasn’t that a rancid cherry on top of the whole psychotic day?
Nights of the Living Dead Page 22
