The Hungry Dead (6 page)

Spaz pulled up just outside the cinder-block building in Hawk's van, and Blake parked behind it in the Jeep in which he and Spaz had ridden four miles to where they had picked up Hawk's van. Now Spaz jumped down from the van, and Blake jumped down from the Jeep. Blake said, “Let's not fool around. Let's get him out and haul him in. There's a kickboxing match on TV tonight.”

“Well, we're gonna need help,” Spaz griped. “Damned if I wanna rupture myself lifting that sucker.”

“Here they come now. They musta heard us pull up.”

Two small, wiry men in white lab coats, Morgan Holt and Luke Gentry, two of the same fellows who were on the scene when Dr. Melrose got bitten sixteen years ago, came out through a side door of the cinder-block building and started wheeling a gurney toward the rear of the van. Spaz and Blake came around and opened the cargo door so the two attendants could have a look at the task at hand. Staring bleakly at what was in there and shaking his head in distaste, Morgan said, “No wonder you need us to help you. Sucker looks like three hundred pounds or more!”

Spaz said, “He was close to four hundred when he was alive. Right now there's not as much of him as there used to be.”

“How come?” asked Luke.

“No internal organs left,” Spaz explained, grinning. “I hit him with two shotgun blasts dead-center, almost cut him in two, and blew away his insides. The middle of him is almost totally gone. We wrapped the sleeping bag around him so he wouldn't come apart. That would've been a helluva mess.”

“He's good for nothing but zombie feed now,” said Blake. “We'll feed him to the ones that didn't eat yet.”

They hoisted what was left of Nutso's dead body out of the van and onto the gurney. As Luke and Morgan wheeled the gurney toward the building, Blake and Spaz went to their quarters to toss their clothes into a hamper. Then they showered away the blood and gore and kicked back with a couple of stiff drinks while they watched kickboxing.

 

“Let's take him in through the side door. He's too big, and now his arm's hanging down,” said Morgan, and they wheeled the gurney, with some difficulty because of the rough gravel, around the right side of the building where there was a big garage-type door. Luke pressed a button, and with a rasping metallic sound, the door lifted, revealing steel cages of various sizes.

All told there were six cages in this building, which was an adjunct to the main laboratory where most of the experiments were carried out. There was a ramp that led directly from the cage room and into the laboratory so the zombies could be readily transported from one place to another as required.

One of the cages, with a sign on it that said
CAGE ONE,
was simply a large pen where newly created zombies could be kept en masse till they were categorized. This cage measured fifteen by twenty feet. Right now it contained nineteen inhabitants. DNA samples had been taken from each one, but the results weren't yet analyzed because Dr. Melrose had such a huge workload. DNA analysis was of utmost importance to him due to the fact that obviously there was a genetic factor to the zombie disease, and so there must be some highly unique gene that had aborted the process by which he would have turned into one of the undead, and he desperately wanted to isolate it.

He had plenty of money in US banks and in Swiss bank accounts from selling black market organs of the people he had captured to use as zombie feed or to turn into zombies for his experiments. He could afford to move his facilities to any other part of the country, but he maintained them right here near Willard, close to where the epidemic had started, because he and his parents, grandparents, and many of his ancestors had lived here. The most important DNA he could find in living people or in any of the undead was DNA with components that were a close match to his own. He was searching for a precise match to an anomalous gene that he had found in his own DNA, which he strongly suspected was the anomaly that had given him immunity from the zombie disease and had conferred special powers upon his two daughters.

Cage two was for zombies that Dr. Melrose wanted to separate from the rest because they were set to undergo some special procedure. It measured ten feet by ten feet, and at the moment it was occupied by four zombies on an experimental diet that consisted of corpse meat blended with artificial sweetener, vitamins, and minerals. The doctor was looking to discover a formula that could reduce the need in these ghouls for live human flesh, but so far nothing had worked.

Cage three measured only six feet by six feet, and it was for those unlucky folks who were doomed to become zombie feed, but not right away. Blake and Spaz called it “the pantry,” but they were careful not to let Dr. Melrose hear them say that because he had no sense of humor where his work was concerned. He was “deadly serious” about it, but that expression could not have been used to his face either, because he would have deplored it.

Today the occupants of Cage Three were the three members of the Mathews family, Albert, Meg, and Stevie. The parents were all right, but the son, like many teenagers, was a smart mouth, and Dr. Melrose had him gagged after he got tired of being cursed at. He wasn't really sure what to do with the three of them. One choice was to have Tiffany take their blood and turn them into zombies for experimentation. The other choice was to use them for zombie feed, which the doctor had some qualms about, but they were from New Jersey, and to his knowledge he had no relatives from there, and so a link to his own DNA was unlikely. He had to concentrate his investigations on people living or undead who might share some of his own genes, and not waste valuable time on others when the results might be rather fruitless.

Cage four and cage five were isolation cages; in other words, a kind of solitary confinement. Number four held the serial killer, Chub Harris, and number five held the big oaf who called himself Hawk, who was turned into a zombie by Tiffany when she took his blood. Well, she had to have her nourishment, and she shouldn't be looked down upon for this, any more than a tiger should be disparaged for having to kill and eat an impala, a buffalo, or even a human being. The earth's creatures with their built-in inherited qualities could not in any way be blamed for living up to their true nature, which they did not choose and certainly could not control except by denying their instincts in a most painful and debilitating way.

Even the serial killer and rapist, Chub Harris, could not be expected to overcome the festering predilections that had made him that way. He either had a brain defect or a defect in his upbringing that had warped him. He was a freak of nature or nurture and was thus incorrigible; he could not be rehabilitated so as to conform with society's usual standards of behavior. Before assigning Blake Parsons and Spaz Bentley the task of ferreting him out and hunting him down, Dr. Melrose had thoroughly investigated his background in case there might be some redeeming or mitigating factors. But there were none that mattered. He was doomed to go on killing and raping until he was stopped. His birth name was Peter Harris, and he grew up right in Willard, and that was his constant prowling ground. He had a high IQ, but no trace of what is commonly referred to as a “conscience”—a respect for good deeds, a need to give and receive love, and an aversion toward evil.

Pondering how he should make best use of the serial killer in captivity, Dr. Melrose considered the fact that men of Chub's ilk had a single-minded urge toward the violent destruction of others that was not unlike the irrepressible inclinations of the undead. Did that mean that Chub Harris should be kept alive and studied in depth? Or did it mean that he should be immediately used as zombie feed because he was no good for anything else of any intrinsic value? Or, taking yet another tack, did it mean that the serial killer's impressive ability to hunt, track, and capture his victims should be harnessed and turned to good use—in other words, providing he was kept under the watchful eyes of Blake and Spaz, could Chub be trusted to help gather the types of subjects that were constantly needed for the experiments being carried out here in the laboratory?

Dr. Melrose decided that he would discuss this serious matter with Tiffany. She was wise beyond her years, thanks to the aberrant gene she had inherited from him. And Victoria was developing nicely in the same direction. Both his daughters were a wonder to behold, and Dr. Melrose had no doubt that as time went by they would both learn to be even more helpful than they already were. At present, he relied on them for carrying out a great deal of painstaking research, but they needed more math and chemistry to take on the most demanding duties of scientific inquiry. This process would be set in motion as soon as Tiffany began to earn her medical degree, and Victoria was destined to follow in her footsteps. They were both brilliant, as was to be expected in Dr. Melrose's estimation since they had inherited such exceptional qualities from him.

He watched Luke and Morgan wheel in the gurney containing the mortal remains of somebody Tiffany called Nutso, a person he didn't think he needed to know anything much about, because Nutso would soon be zombie feed. Tiffany had already filled Doc Melrose in on this dimwit, who happened to be a cousin to the one called Hawk. This oaf had already been turned into a zombie, thanks to Tiffany. So his past, his family, and his genetics would have to be totally investigated and analyzed, for he would be an experimental subject. Perhaps he would even reveal DNA with markers similar to those of Dr. Melrose, although he very much doubted it at this juncture due to the fact that the oaf
was
an oaf, and the doctor could not imagine that anyone so oaflike would turn out to be a leaf on his own family tree. But one never knew, one never knew. Even the most brilliant of people could give birth to defective children.

Dr. Melrose moved over to cage six and said, “Good day, Barney, how are you?” to one of the cage's long-time occupants. This fellow was the very zombie who had bitten Dr. Melrose sixteen years ago. He had been so long in residence here that he was almost like an old friend, and the lab assistants, Luke and Morgan, had given him the nickname “Barney.” Dr. Melrose rather liked that little touch and eventually found himself using it with easy familiarity.

Not long after Barney was captured, his background had been investigated. The initial leverage for the inquiry was furnished by his driver's license, which happened to be in one of the front pockets of his bibbed coveralls. His real name was Horace Dalrymple, and he wasn't an indigent barroom brawler, as one would think upon first impressions, but had been a hard-working dirt-poor farmer. He had been pulled off his tractor while he was working in his alfalfa field and had fought off an unknown number of zombies, but one of them had succeeded in biting him, and thus his fate was sealed. Though bitten, he tried to protect his wife and his twelve-year-old son, but seeing that he was bitten, they ran away from him, jumped into an old, battered pickup, and escaped into Willard. It was a miracle that the same zombies who attacked Barney did not overwhelm his wife and son, but then, the undead were slow-moving, and there weren't too many of them in that locale during the beginning stages of the outbreak.

Dr. Melrose had learned many of these details about Barney and his erstwhile family from newspaper and television interviews with the surviving wife and son after the outbreak was quelled, and had gleaned even more details by assigning Luke and Morgan the task of furtively prying into the Dalrymples' past. He had considered uniting the family here in the lab, but he had decided to let Barney's wife and son live out the rest of their lives normally, after reluctantly deciding that they had suffered enough.

Barney showed few signs of age because zombies did not deteriorate much with age as long as they were properly fed. He was as huge and imposing as ever, his diet scrupulously maintained by the attendants and his weight preserved at a pretty steady three hundred and fifty pounds. He was still wearing the flannel shirt, bibbed coveralls, and clodhoppers of sixteen years ago, and every once in a while he was injected with powerful drugs to knock him out so his personal clothing could be disinfected and washed. There was a constant, creeping, underlying stench in the cage room, and the living people could only tolerate so much of it, and so now and then the long-term zombies had to be hosed down and their clothes had to be laundered.

Dr. Melrose firmly believed in treating his zombies humanely. He respected the need to keep them as clean and healthy as possible in order to maintain, not just his experimental integrity, but also his own self-respect.

He wasn't a cruel man, just one who was exceptionally pragmatic and unflinching when it came to the needs of science.

Tiffany entered her sister's bedroom carrying the beaker of blood that she had taken from Jeff Sanders. She felt sad when she saw that Victoria was crying, looking at her hideously blistered face in a handheld mirror.

“Don't worry, Vicky,” Tiffany said consolingly. “You're going to be beautiful again. I brought you a nice sweet drink to help clear up those blisters.”

Victoria turned to face her older and presently lovelier sister. Her eyes fastened upon the beaker and its contents . . . and she licked her lips, already craving it.

“Yes, sweetheart,” said Tiffany. “You instinctively want to drink it, don't you? You understand that it will be good for you.”

Victoria reached out quickly and took the beaker in her two hands. She stared at it hungrily, and her tear-filled eyes seemed to brighten a bit.

“Don't be so depressed,” Tiffany cajoled. “You'll be better in a few days. When so-called normal people get porphyria they have it all their lives and must never go out in the sunlight. But you and I are different, thanks to the gene we got from Father. For us, the ugly symptoms eventually go away, and we become far superior to ordinary people.”

Heartened by her sister's words, with a faint smile Victoria brought the beaker of Jeff's blood to her lips and drank. And Tiffany cooed to her and stroked her hair as she did so.