The Hungry Dead (8 page)

On the morning of the raid against the Melrose Medical Research Center, a young divorcee, Sally Brinkman, and her mother, Marsha, led their horses out of the big barn on their family farm thirty miles south of Willard. The calm, dewy beauty of the sunrise was conducive to relaxing and forgetting their troubles. The morning was a mite chilly, but they both had on warm riding britches and tan leather jackets.

Little did they know it, but this was the calm before the storm. They had no idea of the death and destruction that was about to be visited upon them. Sally smiled as she patted and stroked her horse, Sparky, a three-year-old palomino, and Marsha behaved similarly toward her own mount, Perky, a dark brown mare with a white star-shape on her forehead.

Both women loved their horses and delighted in riding out together to roam and casually inspect the eighty acres that they owned. They mostly grew corn there on part of the acreage with the aid of a tenant on a farm nearby, who was paid for the use of his time and tractor.

Sally was in her late twenties, but she retained the spunky personality that had made her so rebellious and hard for her mother to handle during her teenage years. Marsha understood well these qualities in her daughter because when she was growing up she was the same way. They both had mischievous grins and a perky way of tossing their blond ponytails with a quick jerk of their heads, and sometimes they looked so much alike they almost could be mistaken for sisters. They were sometimes amusingly called “my beautiful hellcats” by Henry Brinkman, husband to Marsha and father of Sally, who came from the house carrying a lunch bucket and heading for a pickup truck parked by the barn. At fifty-seven, he was still lean and physically fit, and Sally thought it was nice to have such a good-looking father. He was handsome in her eyes, even though others might not have thought of him that way because of his craggy, darkly tanned face, thinning gray hair, and deep-set brown eyes that often scrutinized people with a probing no-nonsense stare.

Settling herself into her saddle and stirrups, Sally called out, “Where're you going, Dad?”

“Down to the saloon.”

Marsha wasn't saddled up yet, and she half turned with one foot in a stirrup and said, “So early, Henry? You don't have to open till noon.”

“I want to finish taking my booze inventory, Marsha, so I can maybe figure out how much was stolen by the bartender I had to fire last week. The damned thief! Such a baby face, you'd almost think he's not even old enough to tend bar, but he was sly enough to be stealing us blind!”

“Don't let it aggravate you so much,” Marsha said. “He's not the first bartender you had to can.”

She swung herself up into her saddle and got comfortable in her stirrups.

“Too many folks with sticky fingers,” Henry groused. “I oughta sell the damn place! But nobody'll buy it 'cause it barely ekes out a profit—thanks to all the chiseling bartenders. That's why I'm so glad you're back helping me out, Sally.”

“You know I'll be there right at six, Dad.”

“Want me to drive back and pick you up?”

“No need,” said Sally. “I can walk over there on a nice day like this. It's not even a mile.”

“I know,” Henry said. “I still jog to the saloon and back three days a week to try to keep my stomach flat. But right now I'm gonna ride. See you later, honey.”

He climbed into his truck, started it up, and pulled out.

Sally and Marsha watched him go, then trotted their horses out of the long driveway and across a field.

Sally said, “Dad keeps finding ways to say how much he needs me. I think he's trying to make me feel better about my divorce.”

“Well,” said Marsha, “he wants to make sure you know you're welcome to stay here as long as you need to, till you get yourself back on your feet. You do realize that, don't you? Your father and I are both with you all the way. To tell the truth, we never liked the way Michael treated you, but we kept our mouths shut. I have to say we were glad for your sake when you decided to leave him.”

“He didn't treat me all that badly, Mom. We just grew apart. He didn't abuse me physically or anything. I wouldn't have let him get away with that. I would've punched him out!” The way she was talking amused both her and her mother, and they both chuckled over it.

“Well, he wouldn't have dared hit you!” Marsha jibed good-naturedly. “After all, he knew you took judo classes!”

“Jujitsu.”

“Okay, jujitsu.”

“There's a difference, Mom.”

“I'm sure there is, honey.”

They continued their ride a while longer and got deeper into the field, which was rife with clover, and Sally finally said, “You know . . . my marriage died such a long, slow death. It was really over long before the divorce. When the final papers came last month, I felt relief more than anything else. I'm looking forward to just getting on with my life. I just haven't made up my mind yet which direction to go.”

“Take your time, honey, and be sure,” Marsha said. “You could always go back to working for those lawyers.”

“But I found out I hated paralegal work. It was so boring! I need to find something more adventurous, or at least more involving. But I don't know what.”

Sally had quit her paralegal job as soon as she got pregnant, and she was looking forward to being a stay at home mom. But the pregnancy ended with a miscarriage, and somehow that put the capper on her disappointing marriage to Michael Stotner. Whereas she had thought he was so debonair and exciting when she first met him, she had come to dislike his smugness and his braggadocio. He was a faithful husband, but not a caring or attentive one. He was too much into his exaggerated image of himself as a hotshot movie producer, even though he only produced TV spots and sales films of an unremarkable variety; nevertheless he thought, or wanted to think, that they were impressive.

“You and Dad have been great,” Sally told her mom. “But don't worry too much about me. One thing I've learned is that
nothing
in life is absolutely sure.”

They rode in silence across the field.

The sheriff ordered his men to make a bonfire out of the zombie corpses, same way it had been done during that other outbreak. They doused the pile with gasoline and touched a torch to it, and instantly it turned into a huge, blazing pyre.

Some distance from the smoke and flames, Sheriff Harkness and Deputy Bruce Barnes stood over Dr. Melrose, who was lying on a gurney near the rear of an ambulance while the two paramedics applied emergency measures, trying to stop the blood flow from the doctor's chest wound and treat him for shock. They knew the irony was that going into shock would slow the blood flow down, but in itself, it would probably kill him. So they had exercised their best judgment, and they felt they were doing the best they could, even though their private opinion was that Melrose deserved to die right here instead of sticking the county for the cost of a long, drawn-out trial.

Melrose went on blathering, even though his voice was getting weaker and weaker. “I'm dying . . . I'm not going to . . . make it . . . to the hospital. It doesn't matter, you see . . . my two daughters . . . will . . . carry on . . . my work. . . .”

Taking in the full meaning of this, the sheriff instantly barked a gruff question.

“What're you driving at, Melrose? Your daughters will carry on what? Where?”

“They're . . . gone . . . you'll never . . . catch them. . . .”

One of the paramedics piped up. “Back off, Sheriff, please! Let us work on him. He's too weak to talk.”

Melrose said, “It . . . doesn't matter . . . anymore.... I'm done for.... I injected myself. When I die . . . shoot me . . . or I'll become . . . one of
them.”

“What the hell're you talkin' about?” the sheriff demanded. “You didn't become one before, why would you become one
now
?”

“What
fuckin' serum?”

“Trying to . . . study them . . . find out why . . . they don't die. The government backed me . . . at first . . . let me capture them . . . and keep them here. But later they wanted . . . to shut me down. But my daughters . . . will carry on . . . in a secret place.... You'll never find it.... It's under . . . the ground . . .”

Enraged, Sheriff Harkness grabbed the dying doctor and shouted into his face.

“
Where?
Damn you! Tell me where! Do some real good for humanity before you die!”

But Dr. Melrose did not respond. He was a lifeless doll now, his eyes glazed over, staring up at the sun.

Bruce pulled the sheriff back, and they both stared down at Doc Melrose's corpse.

The paramedics looked on in silence. One of them gave a futile wave of his blood-smeared, latex-gloved hand. The other paramedic shrugged and backed away.

The sheriff said to them, “You guys better wash up real good and sterilize yourselves. This nutcase said he injected himself with some kind of wacky serum.”

“Shit!” Bruce said. “All we need is for the damn plague to start up all over again!”

The sheriff said, “Somehow we gotta track down Melrose's daughters and put a lid on this thing once and for all.”

“How're we gonna find them?” Bruce lamented. “They could be clear across the county by now. We don't even know how they're traveling—plane, bus, or car. We have to run a check, see if there are any vehicles registered to the Melroses. If we could get a license plate number . . .”

“Yeah,” said the sheriff. “Phone the station and get somebody busy on it. We gotta put out an all-points bulletin and set up road blocks as quick as we can. Don't forget the train and bus stations, for god's sake!”

A battered old van with the image of a Confederate flag on its front bumper plate pulled into a rest area off a two-lane rural road. Its rear bumper bore two hateful slogans:
PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN NAZI
and
DEATH TO JEW LOVERS.
Drake was driving, and Bones was in the front passenger seat. They were both stoned on crack cocaine, and both had crude swastikas tattooed prison-style on their cheeks and foreheads and daggers with roses tattooed on their biceps with their mothers' names on them.

About a half dozen vehicles of various types were parked at the rest stop, which consisted of one building with toilet facilities and another with soft drink, coffee, bottled water, and candy machines.

Bones and Drake sneeringly gave the once-over to a guy walking a dog and a couple of fat, frumpy women who did their business, got into their car, and drove off.

What made them pull over at this particular rest stop was that they had spotted a trailer-truck logo consisting of the letters
M
and
R
inside a painted rose, and underneath the logo, in red letters, it said:
M-R ELECTRONICS.
And they were always looking to boost stuff they could turn to cash, so they didn't even need to discuss this opportunity when it fell into their laps.

As the two skinheads got out of the van, they stared at the trailer truck with greed in their eyes. But Drake shook his head ruefully and said, “Forget about it, Bones, we ain't gonna hijack that rig all by our lonesome.”

Bones said, “Shut up. You got brawn but no brains, Drake. That's why I gotta come up with all the strategy.”

“Strategize all you want if it gets your rocks off, but ain't no way we can pull it off without plenty of help.”

“We got smarts and we got the element of surprise, don't we? And we got somethin' else.”

“All we got is two handguns.”

“And a bag of sugar in our grocery bag,” Bones said with a sly grin.

“Sugar?” Drake said quizzically. “You shittin' me?”

“Ever put sugar in somebody's gas tank, Drake?”

“I never done it, but I know what it's supposed to do—freezes up the engine and makes it grind to a halt.”

“Well, not exactly,” said Bones. “My piece of pussy looked it up for me online. Turns out sugar sludgin' up the engine is a buncha horseshit. But what it can do is gunk up the fuel injectors, which is good enough for us, Drake. This big rig here's gotta be loaded with electronic shit we can fence or put to good use. Get me the bag of sugar and keep a lookout while I do the dirty deed.”

Drake loitered near a tree where he could seem innocent while Bones unscrewed the fuel cap on the big rig and poured in all the white stuff in the bag. By the time he was finished with this, two truckers came out of the toilets and stopped to buy cans of soda, then headed for the rig.

Bones managed to get the fuel tank capped in time not to get caught. Then he and Drake loitered a short distance away, waiting to see which way the trailer truck would head after it pulled out.

Bones said, “Let's hurry up and take a piss. If we're lucky, their engine will go kaput in a lonely enough spot.”

Sally and Marsha rode their horses across a meadow to the edge of a pond where they dismounted and let Sparky and Perky dip their heads and drink.

Sally said, “I should be heading back about now. Dad really wants me to help him today.”

“Oh, he can get along by himself,” Marsha said with a fond smile, thinking about her husband, “even though he makes doing inventory sound like a major military campaign. He just likes to have you at his side, that's all. Even when you were married, he loved when you and your husband would come to visit us. Remember?”

“Yeah, I could tell,” Sally said.

“We both missed you more than we liked to admit,” Marsha told her. “So we're glad to have you back, even though the circumstances were nothing we would've wished for.”

“I understand, Mom. I really do,” said Sally. “Don't worry about me. I'll be okay. I'm determined to get my life back together and move on.”

“Spoken like a truly spunky daughter,” Marsha said, and they both laughed.

“It's nice to know you believe in me,” Sally said. “It helps give me strength.”

“You're the one of the strongest women I know,” her mother said. “Deep inside, I mean. As a child you were willful—and a handful! But the willfulness morphed into strength. I'm the one who should know. I've lived with you since before you were born.”

“Mom, don't pull that one on me,” Sally said. “You didn't psych me out while I was still in the womb!”

“But pretty quickly thereafter,” Marsha maintained. “Don't forget I have a degree in child psychology.”

“Which you never used very much,” Sally squelched.