Dead Things (14 page)

But the locusts didn’t crawl back into their holes. Even Creedy and Chili One Nut, generally smart jailbirds who kept to themselves, raised a ruckus, screaming wide-eyed about the devil and demanding release.

Events went from bad to worse. The guards got jittery. Some of them stopped showing for their shifts. The county couldn’t lend him staff. Neither could the National Guard. They were faced with shortages of their own. Everyone was calling in sick.

Shepherd was forced to operate with a skeleton crew. Short-staffed, he ended visiting hours and began sleeping nights in his office. Frustrated friends and family members congregated outside the prison walls.

The prison break came at dawn just three days before. The guards, waiting to be spelled by a morning shift that was long overdue, were exhausted. They were easily overrun. The lucky ones had their throats cut straightaway. Some weren’t so lucky. They were carried off into the bowels of the beast, turned into human pin cushions. The prisoners took their keys and the guns and used them to get more keys and guns. They passed through the checkpoints unabated. Not a single alarm sounded.

When Shepherd woke that morning, he immediately knew something was wrong. He checked the video monitors and stared in disbelief. The prisoners were running rampant. They were destroying the facility, fighting each other, beating the guards.

Monitor one: Cell Block A was on fire.

Monitor two: Snow instead of a pan on Cell Block B.

Then Shepherd looked at monitor three. What he saw shocked him to his core: the visitors outside the gates had grown from fifteen to fifty. What’s more, they looked like they were...eating each other.

He called for help on the intercom. There was no response. He tried again.

With no food, no water, little sleep, and just a revolver for defense, it’s amazing that Shepherd was able to fend off the rioters. Day in and day out, they beat on his metal office door. Finally, though, it came off its hinges, and the prisoners swarmed in.

They seized Shepherd and pulled him screaming down the passage. He clamored weakly for a hold at the passing doorframes. No use. They carried him through the labyrinth to Cell Block B, murderers’ row.

They kept him bound and gagged for the better part of a day. That night they delivered Shepherd to Ira Ridge.

Ira Ridge smiled wide. Shepherd despaired. He knew something of Ridge’s story. Diminutive, but as dangerous as a scorpion sting, Ridge had killed his wife and her lover. But Ridge’s wasn’t a crime of passion. It was ruthless, premeditated evil.

Ridge had kept his wife and her lover, a local salesman, gagged and bound in an empty cistern behind an abandoned farmhouse. He had prepared the kill zone with plastic tarps and duct tape, the floors and walls lined.

Ridge then gave his wife’s Toyota and her credit cards to his nephew Kenny. The kid had outstanding warrants, and Ridge told him that the police had stopped by, looking for him. “Hightail it to Mexico,” Ridge said. And Kenny had.

Ridge had gone to the police 24 hours later, a forged Dear John letter in hand. She was leaving him, it said, going to Acapulco to be with the love of her life. The police assumed the lovers had run off, and they verified their steady progress to Mexico using his wife’s credit card trail. While the cops hunted in vain for the couple, Ridge began the ugly business of punishing them, as the court records later indicated, “for violating an oath to God.”

Ira Ridge had butchered them, filleting them piece-by-piece. A pile of flesh—fingers, toes, and ears—had grown in the corner. Ridge took his pound, then another, then more. All the while he was sure to leave their eyes intact so that they could watch each other slowly disappear.

Eventually, though, the mound of decay had drawn a pack a feral dogs. Officials from Animal Control discovered the grizzly remains of Ms. Ridge and her unfortunate lover a full three months after they went missing.

Shepherd may have mumbled something to Ridge, cried for his life in vain, as the inmates held him down. He can’t remember. Bits of his memory fragmented and melted away like shards of a broken ice.

Ridge sauntered forward, reptilian, beaming. He said nothing as he straddled Shepherd’s chest, the warden’s arms still held taut. Ridge took the warden’s skull in his hands, almost gingerly, at first. “Praise be to God. Hallelujah.” With that, he slammed Shepherd’s head against the concrete. Hallelujah. Bang. Hallelujah. Bang. Hallelujah! Bang! HALLELUJAH! BANG!

Ten minutes of praise later, Shepherd’s brain is soup. Images and sounds are a blur. He thinks he sees another prisoner, a farmer named Connor, tackling a grimacing Ridge just as everything eternally and mercifully goes dark.

Chapter Thirteen: Footprints and the Prince of Darkness

Morning comes. Burt is sullen. He shambles about, eyes downcast. He knows he’s never going to find Spiderman 129. He’s never going to trade it for the Superman 10. He wonders how he would have fared if he had stayed back at the plane.

Ian feels like young adults his age do: somewhat remorseful, but mostly absolute in his position that they really did nothing wrong the night before. Ian has yet to learn to value of diplomacy, and his nonchalance is the result of a still-developing ego more likely to burn bridges than to build them. Saving face is a kid’s game, but it is one he will continue to play until he learns better.

Besides, Ian has other concerns. He’s taking lead again.

He’s a bit surprised. He thinks Wright overheard him complaining to Van, “It’s an exercise in futility.” Hour upon hour of staring at trees, brush, and other flora. Hour upon hour trying to perceive something beyond the foliage, trying to penetrate their veil, to no avail.

But Wright wants to talk to Dr. Heston. She’ll work on breaking down his defenses just a little more today.

**

The revenants can be found anywhere. They can be found at anytime. But they generally stay hidden in the shadows or under the cloak of night. This has been Wright’s experience and that of others as well. Perhaps they are nocturnal. Has Heston ever heard of anything like that?

He has. Parasites not only influence the “how” of transmission, but the “when.”

There’s a fluke that is not satisfied with leaving reproduction to chance, so it makes its own luck. It lays eggs in the intestine of a cow, and the eggs are expelled in the manure. Snails eat the fluke eggs in manure, and the fluke hatches in the snail’s gut. It escapes, covered in snail slime, a delicacy to ants. Once inside an ant, the fluke works its mojo by attacking the nervous system near the mandibles. It takes control of the brain, driving the ant to leave its colony as night falls. The ant climbs a single blade of grass, securing itself to the tip with its jaws. There it waits for a cow to eat the grass. Once devoured the fluke explodes forth. The circle of life begins again.

Night offers the lancet fluke the best chance for survival. If it remains in the midday heat, it will burn.

Another example: spores from a certain fungus infect a fly, sending tendrils deep into the insect’s body. The fungus ravages the fly for several days, reproducing in the fly’s stomach. It, too, takes over the brain, forcing the fly to attach itself to a high place at sunset. There it will die. At dusk when other flies are resting, the fungus erupts from the dead fly. Tendrils spout spores and shower the sleeping flies below. Sunset is the perfect time, the only time, for the fungus to infect other flies. The air is cool and moist just before nightfall, maximizing the likelihood of infecting other insects.

Wright scratches her head. The answer to “how?” begs the question “why?” Why create monsters that are largely nocturnal?

If forced to speculate, Heston would argue that nighttime conveys advantages to the parasite: under the cloak of night, victims are much more likely to be taken by surprise, thereby allowing further proliferation; also, the decay of the human body may be somewhat stayed by avoiding direct sunlight, humidity, and intense heat.

Fascinating
, Wright thinks.

But for Heston, it is “quid pro quo” time, time to settle up accounts. Heston has a question in kind: just why is Wright so curious about all this?

The answer’s not that simple, largely because Wright hasn’t given it much thought. The answer might lie in her interests. She’s always been inquisitive, she’s always wanted to know just how things work. Her favorite class was high school biology. She excelled at it, as well as chemistry and physics. She planned on a science-based major in college—that is, until the curriculum was deemed sacrilegious and eviscerated by the church.

But a truer answer is this: there is a problem needing a solution. Something that needs to be worked out. Another mission she can perform. Another distraction.

If personal satisfaction could be measured metaphorically, if love, family, friends, and happiness could be represented by cathedrals, homes, parks, and monuments, Wright’s heart would be a vacant lot. Worse, construction is all but prohibited there because of a giant sinkhole that she is incapable of filling.

**

It is a chilly and dark during the early hours of morning. Professor Tiehl walks the quad. He walks it every day on his way to Gregory Hall, to his class, Political Science 215: Arms Control and Security. But he has no real recollection of this course, his syllabus addressing nuclear non-proliferation and terrorism, or his role in academia. He doesn’t even remember his students’ names. He’s just cognizant of their faces. He thinks about them…and he feels a voracious hunger swelling inside him. He hurries towards his classroom where he hopes they wait.

It’s like that every day for Tiehl. He rambles to class before the sun rises and returns home after dusk. The sun is missing in his life. Gone, too, is the sing-song of the birds and the chirping of the quad squirrels. Those that survived left long ago.

Tiehl is virtually animatronic, his day pre-programmed like a pirate on the Caribbean Disney ride. His reality mimics the motions of a pendulum, swinging from work to home, always scanning for an elusive meal.

In life, Professor Tiehl was a creature of habit. Now he is more or less just a creature. One of the thousands that wander about oblivious to the campus crumbling around them and their own slow disintegration.

Gerome watches Professor Tiehl. He hides amid the rows of corn of the U of I’s Morrow Plots, the oldest experimental agricultural field in the United States. Gerome doesn’t wonder much about Tiehl, who lurches like a drunk past Foellinger Hall. He doesn’t question who this man was. All he needs to know is what he
is
.

The telltale signs are all there. The shambling gate. The broken and sharp teeth. The dried and sunken skin. The shriveled ears, left pointed and bat-like as the cartilage gave way to time.

Gerome will return to his team’s position in the Arboretum. They will come back when the sun is at its highest. First they will hit the Medical Center. There they will collect drugs of all types. After, they’ll turn south to the Round Barns in hopes of finding animal steroids and medication.

Then, if time permits, they will visit Noyes Lab and the Chem Annex, the chemistry labs, to collect equipment, illegal tools like electron microscopes, journals, and Bunsen burners, to their secret home.

When Gerome arrives at the Arboretum, he is greeted by his first in command. He has news. Maybe good news. One of the men has spotted smoke, plumes billowing from somewhere north, perhaps twenty or thirty miles from their position.

Gerome’s heart leaps.

It always does when he finds survivors.

**

Ian walks the dry creek bed, squinting against a low sun. It is an overripe orange, pulled low on the branch by frost, signaling the coming winter.

The foliage is turning. It becomes more and more perceptible as they move north. Ian gawks at what can only be called majesty: a cluster of dogwoods, leaves afire, fooled by unseasonably cool weather. But the fall colors, as beautiful as they are, herald loss. Ian is troubled by a suspicion. He is as entranced by the coming death as by the natural beauty laid bare before him.

Before him…a footprint.

Long, thin, and frozen in time by the baked sediment, at least until the next rain fills the stream, which will erase it like a natural Etch-n-Sketch.

Ian halts. He raises an arm, signaling those behind him. As trained, the trekkers drop to the ground scattering like a nest of bunnies into the wild. There they will stay until beckoned from their hiding places by Wright’s all clear sign, the approximation of a sparrow call.

All of them, that is, except Van. Van is already jogging to Ian’s position. He wants to know what the fuss is about.

His partner, Anne, stands her ground twenty yards back caught in a state of indecision. She watches Van abandon her. Her head and torso point toward him, but her lower body turns as if to flee into a neighboring bush. She bites her lip anxiously, her eyes ping-ponging from Van to the safety of the leaves. Van. Bush. Van. Bush.

Ian’s perturbed. He wonders aloud what Van is doing, why he hasn’t taken cover. Ian’s on point after all.

Van chuckles. Ian has got to be kidding. This is their first bit of action in days. Van cannot be dissuaded, despite Ian’s pleas. “Come on, what did you see?” he asks.

Ian hushes him, angles his head from side to side. No monsters, but he does see Anne anchored in plain sight. “Van, you left that poor girl by herself?”