The Hungry Dead (5 page)

Dr. Melrose tapped on Victoria's bedroom door. She said, “Go away,” and he heard her sobbing even though her sobs were muffled by the closed door.

“May I come in?” he persisted.

“I don't want to see anyone.”

“Not even your father?”

“Go away, Daddy, please! I'm too ugly to look at.”

But he opened the door, peered into the semidarkness, and flipped on the light.

Instantly Victoria screamed and covered her eyes—but in the sudden bathing of light he had already seen her hideous face, all broken out in big, oozing purple blisters. And her legs and arms were horribly blistered too. It was hard for him to remind himself that without the disfiguration she was as beautiful as her sister Tiffany. He believed and hoped that the disfiguration would soon go away, and he had come to reassure her and comfort her with his scientific wisdom.

“Turn out the freaking light!”
she yelled at him.

Shakily doing her bidding, he hit the switch and the room was in semidarkness again. Softly he said, “Sorry, sweetheart, I didn't mean to—”

But Victoria snapped at him bitterly, “It's your fault I'm like this!
Your fault!
”

He actually did feel guilty about it, but he said, “The blisters will go away soon. Then you'll be like your sister. She had those kinds of blisters too. But she loves the way she is now. She wouldn't trade it for the world.”

“That's easy for
her
to say! She's so beautiful!”

“So are you, sweetheart,” the doctor said, leaning over her. “You have porphyria, and it makes your skin very sensitive to the light. It came on when you hit puberty, just like it did with Tiffany, but she got over it quickly, and so will you.”

“It's because you got
bitten!
”

“Yes, that's so, but it wasn't my fault. It happened because I was doing the kind of work no one else would do. Other scientists were so scared that they abdicated their sacred duty. I paid the price. I thought I cured myself, but a special gene was passed on to you and your sister. It made both of
you
special. That's the way you must think of it, Vicky. You're very special and very beautiful, and I love you both very much.”

When he hadn't had any sort of communication from Jeff Sanders for almost a week, Sheriff Paul Harkness decided he had to make some kind of move. Jeff was supposed to keep in touch by means of a cell phone that he kept hidden in the lining of his backpack. He had actually made several furtive calls, and the sheriff took heart that things seemed to be going as well as could be expected.

On his first surreptitious call, Jeff informed Harkness that he had indeed gotten hired at the Melrose Medical Research Center, but was not yet in a position to learn anything much. Whatever was actually going on was hush-hush, and he wasn't even allowed into certain buildings to clean up. He was employed at minimum wage as a janitor and handyman, but his work was confined to certain areas and everyplace else was off-limits to him. It was made excruciatingly clear to him that if he got caught where he didn't belong, he'd be fired, or maybe worse.

Then, in a second call, Jeff told the sheriff that he suspected Spaz Bentley and Blake Parsons were somehow involved in Janice Fazio's disappearance because of snatches of conversation he had overheard between them when they thought no one was close by. But he had no concrete evidence so far, and he was going to try to break into one of the off-limits buildings on the chance that he might uncover something. Harkness sternly advised Sanders not to do anything foolish and to abandon his undercover role if he sensed it was getting too dangerous. In his third risky phone call, Jeff sounded half spooked. He said he had failed to get into the off-limits building, and somebody might easily notice that the lock had been tampered with, and he might be toast if he was the only employee out there who might fall under the suspicion of the security guys, Bentley and Parsons. That was the last phone call from Jeff. After that, all communication from him ceased.

Then a burned-out vehicle was found within a couple miles of the Melrose Medical Research Center, a late-model Buick registered to a Mr. Albert Mathews, a college professor from New Jersey. His parents were contacted and said Albert had taken his wife and son on a vacation to Pennsylvania and had not stayed in touch with them, which was highly unusual. It was his habit to phone them every night from wherever they happened to be staying because otherwise he knew they would worry too much. But as of late, they hadn't heard from him.

For the time being, Harkness didn't tell Albert Mathews's parents that his Buick was so totally destroyed by an arson fire that it had had to be identified by the VIN number on a flame-tarnished plate welded onto the burned and twisted frame.

Deeply worried about all these developments, some of which Deputy Jeff Sanders, so deep undercover, couldn't possibly know about, Sheriff Harkness decided to try for a warrant that would enable him to swarm all over the Melrose Medical Research Center with a slew of heavily armed officers, round up everybody in there, and thoroughly search the place before anything incriminating could be gotten rid of. The sheriff was sure that rapid deployment and a fast, hard-hitting raid was exactly what this situation called for. He wanted to use the element of surprise to full advantage. There could be a lot of crazies out there, and maybe some of them would have no hesitation about shooting down lawmen if they were given half a chance.

Sheriff Harkness went before a judge, made the sketchy reports from Jeff sound more weighty than they actually were, and leaned his argument heavily on the only hard evidence at hand—the burned-out Buick and its missing occupants. To his great relief, the judge finally agreed with him that there was good reason to believe that Janice Fazio and some other innocent folks were being held at the Melrose place against their will, and therefore there was sufficient justification to issue a warrant that would enable law enforcement to act promptly and forcefully in order to potentially save lives.

Tiffany entered a small workroom adjacent to her father's laboratory, where Jeff Sanders lay unconscious on a stainless steel gurney. He was stripped nude, and his body was covered with bruises and burns.

Blake Parsons and Spaz Bentley had gotten the truth out of him, so far as he was capable of telling it, by beating him with a rubber hose and burning his flesh with lit cigarettes. Thankfully, he didn't really know much. But that wasn't for lack of trying.

Tiffany was the one who had caught him at his sneaky, traitorous game.

She had a sixth sense about such things.

She had never really believed much of anything he said about himself when he was riding in Hawk's van with her and Hawk and Nutso. The only true and honest thing he had done was to freak out and start seeing zombies where there weren't any. They were in his mind, and he couldn't help it. He must have had a really bad experience with them back when he was younger. Maybe he was somehow a victim of the same outbreak in which her father had gotten bitten.

Suspicious of Jeff at all times, Tiffany had started to keep an eye on him whenever she could. And luckily she had followed him one dark night when he creeped out of his room and worked his way behind the building where the zombie cages were. He had his backpack with him, and he furtively unzipped it and groped around till he pulled out a cell phone. At that very moment, Tiffany got her little .25 automatic out of her purse and aimed it at him. “Drop the phone, Jeff!” she told him sternly. “Drop it or I'll shoot you.”

He stared at her, his face taut, then he did as he was told. He dropped the phone in the dirt.

Tiffany said, “You were planning to rat on us, then cut out of here, right, Jeff?”

He stammered, “No. Why should I? I just got hired here.”

“And that happened because of me,” she confessed. “You didn't know that, did you? I never trusted you, so I wanted you on a short leash. I wanted to give you enough rope to hang yourself, and now you've done so.”

“I was only going to call my wife, Amy. I never told you about her. I wanted to find some kind of work here so maybe I'd start making some money and she wouldn't want to end our marriage.”

“Liar! I can smell cop all over you! I'll bet some of the numbers you've called plug directly into the sheriff's office.”

“No way!”

“It's no use lying to me. I know you're a traitor. Traitors used to be hanged in the old days during wartime, but out here we have our own version of the death penalty. It's called the
living death,
Jeff.”

“Well put!” Blake said with a barking laugh. He had just arrived on the scene, and he had his gun drawn. So did his buddy, Spaz. Dr. Melrose was accompanying them, but unarmed, because he didn't need to be. Tiffany turned toward him and said, “Jeffy here remembers the outbreak sixteen years ago all too well, Daddy. He suffers from flashbacks. Funny you two don't remember each other from back then.”

“I think I do sort of remember him,” said Dr. Melrose. “In fact, I believe he
was
a cop. I never paid much attention to those dolts. They never made any great impression on me.”

“I've never laid eyes on you, but I've heard about you,” Jeff said. “You're the wacky guy who got himself bitten. I wasn't there, but I was close by, in another part of the cemetery, and we all heard about what happened. We all thought you should've been shot.”

“Of course you would think that way. You're the type of person who would have joined the slavering mob who wanted to burn Galileo at the stake. You fear what you don't understand. But I face ignorance bravely and use my intelligence and my scientific curiosity to unlock the secrets that benefit mankind.”

“Sure!” Jeff jeered. “Just like Dr. Mengele and all the rest of Hitler's deranged Nazi scientists! They
called
themselves scientists, but they were really a bunch of racist quacks!”

“You
poor
boy!” Dr. Melrose mocked. “You must have had an unfortunate and rather terrifying encounter with some of the undead. I can see that your mind is blown. You're suffering from posttraumatic stress. Maybe you'd like to try to work through your disorder. We can help you reconnect with some of the undead from back then that we still have in our cages.”

“You
kept
some of them?” Jeff blurted. “Some of the ones who were infected?”

“We kept some, and we created others,” Dr. Melrose admitted, and there was a trace of pride in his voice. “We wanted to keep carrying out our experiments. I was bitten, and I had to try to save my own life. I had to learn more about what may have caused the plague. The government disagreed with me and wanted all experimentation to stop.”

Tiffany said, “They wanted to pretend it had never happened, or at least would never happen again.”

“I didn't turn into one of the living dead,” said Dr. Melrose, “so I came to believe I was completely cured. I think now that I must have had a natural immunity, but it was incomplete. The virus must have hibernated inside my body, like the herpes or syphilis viruses will sometimes do. It came out in a mutated form in my two daughters, around the time they reached puberty. They need to drink human blood. They're not flesh eaters. But when they take blood from someone, it transforms the victim into one of the undead, like the ones we keep in our cages.”

“You're mad!” Jeff yelled. “You keep them for experiments! Part of your perversity is that you want to believe these crazy experiments might help you find a cure for your daughters!”

Doc Melrose burst out laughing at this—a maniacal, diabolical laugh to show that Jeff had missed his point.
“Cure them?”
he sneered. “Heh-heh! Oh no, not at all! I want to find a way to make
everybody
like them! Everybody!
Everybody!
”

“It's such a noble goal, Daddy,” Tiffany assured him.

He went on rambling at Jeff because he was so proud of himself and he had a captive audience. “I suspect that Tiffany and Victoria will never die. Yet they have all their faculties—they are both highly intelligent, and they thoroughly enjoy art, music, etcetera. They are not like the ones we keep in the cages who cannot think except for a few basic instincts that animate their dead brains.”

All of this kind of talk brought on another of Jeff's flashbacks and posttraumatic stress attacks. He totally went bananas. If he were an ape, he would have been ramming himself at them or at the bars of his cage and throwing his own feces at them. He was shaking and cursing and rolling on the ground punching zombies that weren't even there, and Spaz and Blake stepped back and enjoyed it for a while, laughing uproariously and kicking Jeff with the toes of their boots. But finally they tired of the display. And they got Jeff into handcuffs and took him away to wait till he came to his senses, so they could interrogate him further. They had administered enough beatings and cigarette burnings to get to the bottom of everything he knew. But in their pent-up anger while they were grilling him, they had unintentionally treated him far too roughly. Tiffany had ordered them to keep him alive for the time being, but he kept on ranting and stupidly fighting back when they tried to handcuff him, and he had another episode of imaginary zombies, and they hit him too hard over the head with a blackjack.

Now he was in a coma.

Tiffany's father was panicked. They all were. They knew now that Jeff Sanders was an undercover cop who had infiltrated his way in here to uncover secrets he wasn't supposed to learn. But luckily Tiffany caught onto him, and she had flushed him out. And the unmasking of him had given her and her father a timely warning that evidence had to be destroyed or cleared out before lawmen arrived in full force.

Tiffany smiled enigmatically now as she looked down at Jeff. His breathing was very raspy and thin. She stroked his damp forehead as if he were someone she cared deeply about. And in a way, she did. She gazed at him almost tenderly. She held his moist hand and stroked his forehead. Then she used her two thumbs to peel back his eyelids so that his two eyeballs seemed to stare straight up at her, unseeingly.

Softly she said, “Can you see me, darling? Can you see me? Because I can see into what's left of your soul.”

At that moment, the fangs that had been folded back against the roof of her mouth sprang forward, and she said, “You're such a lovely man, and I'm going to love you to death.”

She sank her fangs into Jeff's neck. And trickles of blood flowed as she pulled back. But she bent and drank again. Then she reached for a glass beaker that she had placed on a lab table under a glowing lamp. She brought the rim of the beaker up to the trickle of blood, and the beaker started to fill.