Dead Stop (27 page)

“Yeah, I
noticed.”

“Just remember,”
Rachel held her gaze, “we can be as tough as the guys…or at least some of us
can…but we have to be smarter about it.”

“I know.”

I bet you do,
Rachel surveyed her patient.
You’ve been through hell tonight, in more ways
than one, but you’re still ticking. And if you’re willing to do what it takes
to get us out of this alive, I guess I shouldn’t complain and get on with doing
my part.

“Then you’re
‘good to go.’” She patted the girl on the leg and turned towards the back
hallway. “I guess I better go look at what Harley wants to show me.”

“But you don’t
want to see it, do you.”

Rachel stopped
and looked back to see Marisa favoring her with an evaluating look of her own.

“No,” she
admitted. “I’m a veterinarian, not a human doctor. I’m used to the sight of
dead animals. But I’m no different about dead human bodies than anybody else. I
don’t want to see this. Actually, I’m a little scared.”

“But what about
you at the fire door with your little light?” Marisa cocked her head in
curiosity. “You didn’t seem bothered at all then.”

“Because I
stopped viewing those things out there as bodies,” Rachel pursed her lips and
thought aloud. “Whatever they were…and no matter what they look like…they
aren’t really corpses anymore. They’re…something else.”

“Something
else?”

“I don’t know!”
Rachel looked at the ceiling in despair. “It’s like they’re organisms of some
kind now. But they don’t make any sense! Gerald said it might be something
contagious, but I mocked him for it and treated him like an ass. Now it turns
out he was right! And he got killed by something I promised him couldn’t
happen.”

Marisa pulled
herself to her feet and gripped Rachel’s shoulder.

“Gerald
was
an ass,” her voice was low and fierce. “He wasn’t right about anything, Doc. He
just shot off his mouth without knowing what he was talking about, and things
happened to turn out that way. You may know science, but I know people. Gerald
was an idiot who got
himself
killed, and even worse he killed the only
person who stuck up for him at the same time. On the other hand, you’re
actually trying to understand this thing. And when you told him that, it was
because you believed it. That’s
different
.”

“I know,” she
conceded. “It just doesn’t make it feel much better.”

“That’s because
you’re not Gerald. Hey, look…believe me, I know what it’s like to be scared. Do
you want me to come with you?”

Yeah, and
even scared you followed Harley into store with a killer corpse and did what
needed doing. This is starting to get embarrassing.

“No, it’s okay,”
Rachel assured her. “I’ll be fine. Besides, I won’t be alone.”

“You sure?”
Marisa queried, “I don’t mind. After all, I already cried all over
your
shoulder tonight. And since I’m sure I look like a drowned raccoon now, it’s
not like you’re going to be doing me any damage.”

“Thanks,
Marisa,” Rachel laughed. “I won’t forget it. But I’ll be fine. Besides, now
that the bathrooms are open, I think Stacey wants a little company so she can
go before she pops.”

“Seriously!” the
little waitress chimed in while carefully pulling herself up from her place
beside Deke, “And while we’re there, we’ll see if we can de-raccoonify you.”

“That bad, huh?”
Marisa groaned and fell in step beside her fellow waitress as they headed down
the back hallway towards the door to the store.

“Actually, it
sort of gives you that wild and tousled look so many guys seem to find sexy.”

“Really?”

“Nope, not
really. Sorry, but you pretty much look like a rabid raccoon.”

Marisa gave a
long suffering sigh as she pulled the door open, and rolled her eyes at Rachel
who had been following behind. She gave Stacey a friendly shove through the
door before making a mock throttling motion behind her back, then followed the
smaller girl into the darkened store beyond. The pair of them laughed about
something before pushing their way into the girl’s bathroom.

This left Rachel
standing at the hallway door, trying to see into the gloom of the unlighted
store.

All alone.

 She knew
it was supposedly empty and safe now, yet couldn’t help but feel vulnerable
while standing at the edge of the darkened area. Tonight just wasn’t the night
for dark rooms. Harley had come back in here earlier to make sure everything
was still dead, but the gloomy store still filled her with unease.

“Harley?” she
called in a soft voice. “Hey, Harley? You in here?”

The door to the
men’s bathroom cracked open, spilling light into the short back hallway of the
store.

“I’m in here,
Doc.”

Now it was
Rachel’s turn to roll her eyes.

“You want to
‘show me something’ in the men’s bathroom?”

“Yeah.” The
irony of her remark seemed to be lost on him. “I drug the thing in here so you
would have light to see by.”

Well, that made
sense.

She knew she
might as well get it over with. Steeling her nerve, Rachel took a deep breath
and marched over to the door. She pushed through with firm resolve, then
stopped and sized up the scene in front of her.

Harley knelt on
the tile floor by what must have been the creature in question. It wasn’t
immediately obvious since he had covered it with a vinyl tarp he must have
found somewhere in the store. It appeared she would be spared her encounter
with a corpse for a moment longer. Still, her eyes were drawn to the blue
square of vinyl like reluctant magnets. The tarp was a considerate idea on his
part, but it just meant there was one more grisly “reveal” she had to get
through.

“Let’s just get
this over with.” She nodded at the covered figure.

“You sure?”
Harley asked. “Marisa told you how I killed this thing, right?”

“Yes, she did.
She said you beat its brains out with her bat. I understand this won’t be
pretty, so let’s get on with it.”

“Well, that’s
just it.” He stared down at the covered form and readjusted his hat. “I beat
something
out of it, but a lot of it wasn’t brains.”

“What?” Rachel
frowned at the man, then down at the figure under the tarp, “What do you mean?”

“Okay, I’ll show
you. Maybe you can tell me what this stuff is. By the way, there’s a trash can
under the sink there if you get sick.”

Rachel waved the
suggestion off with a grimace and bent to look as he slowly pulled the tarp
back.

It wasn’t
pretty.

The thing lay
there with what was left of its skull turned to the side.  Its head had
been beaten down, almost flat, to a level about even with where its ears used
to be. Shards of stained bone stuck up through shreds of flaking grey scalp,
and a large section of skull had split off from the back and now hung loose by
a flap of leathery skin. If it had been dead before…it was deader than dead
now.

It was at the
hole created by the loose piece of skull that Harley pointed.

“See that?” He
indicated a fibrous white material protruding from the wound. “That’s not
brain. What is it?”

“Well,” she
winced at the intensified smell caused by him lifting the tarp, “it’s an old
corpse, Harley. It could be a lot of things…like a product of plain old
ordinary decay.”

“I don’t think
so,” he muttered. “I finished off the other zombie I had disabled earlier
tonight. Its head is full of the same stuff. Two bodies, that must have come
from different coffins, and yet the same stuff in both of their heads. What are
the odds of that?”

She thought
about it for a second and realized he had a point.

“Hmmm,” Rachel
scowled and bent lower for a better look. “I can’t argue with that. It’s still
probably nothing, but let’s see what we have here. You have a stick, or
screwdriver, or something?”

“I’ve got my
pocket knife.”

“Even better,”
the veterinarian grunted got down on her knees beside the body. She pulled the
tarp from the rest of it while Harley fished in his pocket for the knife. The
sight of the full cadaver didn’t bother her as much as she feared. As a matter
of fact, the doctor started to feel that the filthy clothes hanging off the
thing were the only reminders of its former humanity. She gave it a long slow
look from head to foot and realized she had just started the same type of
cursory examination she would give if about to perform a necropsy.

And why not?
Like you told Marisa, this isn’t a person and it isn’t exactly a corpse anymore
either. It’s like some kind of organism, and here is your chance to figure this
thing out.

“Okay then,” She
took the proffered knife and bent to the task, “I guess I get to be the first
person in history to perform an autopsy to figure out why something
wasn’t
dead.
We might as well start with the area in question.”

“We?”

“Yep, you killed
it, Mister…you get to help me cut it up.” Rachel severed the flap of skin
holding the hanging piece of skull. “You aren’t going to go squeamish on me
now, are you? Oh, and get me a roll of toilet paper, please. My operating
gloves are out in the truck so I’m going to have to improvise.”

“Nah, it ain’t
squeamishness.” Harley stood and went into the nearest of the toilet stalls. “I
just don’t like staying where I can’t see what’s going on outside.”

He returned with
the requested roll, which she took and set beside her. Tearing off a piece,
Rachel used it to move the piece of cranium aside. She considered the ruined
skull before her then used another piece of tissue to hold a bone fragment as
she began to cut that free as well.

The pieces came
off easier than she expected.

“Well,” she
continued talking while she worked; the monster’s head was a wreck and pieces
came off easily, “I don’t think this thing is going to get back up, but I’m not
confident enough in that to sit here in a bathroom all alone with it. So I’d
appreciate it if you hung around till I’m done. You can stand over there and
look out the door if you want but…well, well, well, check this out.”

“What is it?”
Harley leaned over to look at her handiwork.

Rachel had now
removed the side of the cadaver’s skull facing upwards, revealing a side view
of the brainpan’s contents.

“This,” she
indicated a squashed, grayish area in the rear half of the head, “is brain.” It
filled about half to two thirds of the skull. “This…” she now indicated the
white fibers filling the rest of the cranium, “isn’t brain. But you knew that.
Have you had medical training, Harley?”

“Nah, not
exactly,” he followed her demonstration with intent interest, “just some fairly
basic field first aid. Stuff like that. So show me what I didn’t know.”

“Uh huh.” She
eyed him doubtfully then continued. “Well, notice how these threads seem to
flow towards the back of the skull and then downwards. I’m betting…” She used
the knife to cut out a piece of the brain and then set it aside. “Yep…looky
here.”

“What am I
looking at, Doc?”

“It’s not just
on the outside of the brain, it’s penetrating into it. And mainly into the
hindbrain areas, which are the most intact.” she tilted her head,
concentrating, then cut deeper and lifted another piece out of the way.
“Interesting.”

“What do you
mean?”

“Well, it seems
to continue on down the brain stem to the
foramen magnum
.”

“The whozit?”

“The hole at the
bottom of the skull,” She frowned at the indicated area. “It’s especially thick
here, and now it’s back on the outside again too. Hmmm…I wonder…” She inserted
the knife into the mass.

The corpse
thrashed, causing Rachel to scream and both of them to dive away from it.

Suddenly, the
bathroom seemed a very small place. The veterinarian scrambled backwards in a
blind panic, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and the
flailing body. That resulted in her smacking into the wall and clanging the
back of her head against the bottom of a urinal hard enough to see stars. The
pain blinded her, filling her vision with exploding fireworks…but it didn’t
slow her down from scrabbling under the nearby divider into a toilet stall.

Any shelter in a
storm.

Rachel struggled
to her feet, and immediately clambered up onto the john. She put her hands
against each side of the stall for balance and froze in place. Her heart
hammered in her ears. She took a few seconds to get her breath back under
control, and for her vision to clear, then tried listening…

Nothing.

No sounds of
fighting, screaming, or even feet shuffling to indicate what could be happening
on the other side of that divider. Just the soft sound of the fan. Rachel
strained her hearing for any clue of what might be going on.

Still nothing.

After a couple
more seconds of silence she decided to risk making noise of her own.

“Harley?” she
called softly.

“Yeah, Doc?”

He couldn’t have
sounded more nonchalant if he tried. She already had a pretty good idea what had
happened…as impossible as it seemed…but the idea of him just waiting out there
grinning about the event really ticked her off.

“I’m guessing
you’re okay?” she asked sweetly through clenched teeth.

“Other than a
mild heart attack, yeah.” At least it didn’t sound like he was laughing. “It
looks like you hit a nerve on that thing. It ain’t doing nothing now. I think
it’s safe.”

“No,” she
retorted. “Actually, it may not be safe. Here, take this.”

Rachel climbed
down and slid the pocket knife under the divider and back into the room. She
heard the sound of his boots approach, and then stop.

“Okay,” he
answered. “But it ain’t doing nothing. Besides, I’ve still got the bat.”