The Hungry Dead (4 page)

Tiffany perked up when she asked Jeff Sanders where he was hoping to get to, and he said, “The Melrose Medical Research Center. I'm hoping to get hired there.”

“As what?”

“Any kind of work they want to give me. I don't care how menial. I read about Dr. Melrose and the work he does, and I admire him. I'd like to take part any way I can.”

“I know some people who work there,” Tiffany said.

“Can you put in a plug for me?”

“I don't know. Maybe. I'd have to get to know you better.”

She said this slyly, almost like a come-on, and Jeff was taken aback by it. He used to be, if not exactly a womanizer, then something of a flirt. But he certainly didn't want to have to deal with a sexually precocious teenage girl. He wanted to stay focused on his mission and save his relationship with Amy.

However, he wasn't above smoking a joint and guzzling some wine to make these people think he wanted to fit in with them. As the occupants of the van chugged from a half-gallon bottle of cheap red table wine and passed around a joint, the van weaved down the highway through spectacular mountain scenery enhanced by the fall colors. Next to Jeff, Nutso was still playing with the skull, holding it in his lap. He and Hawk and Tiffany were doing a lot of giggling while Jeff often just stared morosely out through the grimy window.

“Those people back at the rest stop were scared of us,” he said. “You could see it in their faces.” He shrugged and took another swig of wine when Tiffany handed him the bottle, then he passed it to Nutso.

Hawk said, “Why would they be scared? We wouldn't hurt a hair on their heads, now
would
we?”

Jeff said, “They saw me thumbing but were afraid to stop. Everybody's scared of me these days, even my own wife.”

Tiffany flashed a sneaky smile and said, “You beat up on her or something?”

“Worse. Worse than that,” Jeff admitted.

Then he sunk back gloomily and clammed up.

Hawk said, “Nutso got hisself a lucky strike today. Gonna make hisself twenty bucks. He'll sell that Injun skull to my little brother so he can put blinking turn signals in the eyes and mount it on the back of his Harley.”

Nutso giggled, holding the skull up and wiggling his fat, dirty fingers through the eye sockets. Hawk and Tiffany laughed hard, then even harder, and Tiffany stared at Jeff for not laughing along with them. Nutso kept on giggling and staring too. Jeff could see Hawk's eyes staring back at him in the rearview mirror as he drove.

Jeff started to sweat and shake. He tried blinking his eyes and covering his face with his hands. But this didn't chase away the images of the skull with the wiggling finger-eyes staring and laughing.

Jeff let out a groan.

Nutso kept on leering and waving the skull idiotically, spittle dripping from his fat lips.

Suddenly the skull had rotting, oozing flesh on it—it had become a zombie head in Jeff's eyes, and he lunged at it and seized it by the throat, which was really Nutso's thick, hairy wrist. Jeff was in another world now, choking the wrist as hard as he could and yelling,
“Die! Die, die, die!”

Nutso used his free hand, made it into a big fist, and punched Jeff hard in the forehead, knocking him back.

Dazed, Jeff groaned and panted, sprawled in the backseat.

Hawk barked at him. “Man, you freakin' out? You freakin' out. You gotta get outta my van!”

Jeff just lay there staring into space.

An hour after they had finished their lunch, the Mathews family was back on the road, headed for Fort Necessity which was still seventy miles away, but Albert couldn't wait to get there. “Just being in this part of the country stirs my imagination,” he enthused. “It's like stepping back in time. General Braddock got himself killed and his men annihilated because he was used to the way troops marched at each other in open fields in Europe, the way Napoleon fought. He didn't expect to go up against Indians firing bullets and arrows from the dense brush, then charging out to scalp and mutilate him and his soldiers.”

Albert shut up suddenly because he saw something curious in the distance. It was Hawk's beat-up white van parked off-kilter, one set of tires down in a ditch.

“My god, they've had an accident!” Meg gasped.

“Cool it, Mom,” Stevie said as if he believed himself to be more adult than his parents.

Albert slowed the car and cruised by very slowly, checking the scene out. The van seemed to be utterly abandoned. Albert started to pull over and park.

“Don't you dare stop!” said Meg. “Let's just keep going.”

“Meg, be reasonable. If somebody needs help, I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I just drove off without at least having a look around.”

Stevie agreed, saying, “You're right, Dad. Not everybody who looks dangerous
is
dangerous.”

Meg warned, “Be careful, Albert!”

He opened the car door and got out, then reached under the driver's seat and grabbed a tire iron. Clutching it, he cautiously approached the van, his eyes darting all around in case someone was lurking somewhere nearby. But he heard and saw no one.

The doors on the passenger side of the van were hanging wide open. Albert warily came nearer.

Meg and Stevie watched apprehensively from the car.

Tire iron at the ready, Albert checked out the front and rear passenger compartments of the van. Finding them vacant, he then went around to the back door and tried the handle.

When he pulled the door open, he had to jump back. Blood splashed at his feet.

Shuddering all over, he stared as the blood continued to drip, and it dawned on him that he was looking at a lumpy pile of blood-soaked sleeping bags. On top of the bags, all bloodied up, was the Indian skull that had been Nutso's plaything.

Gritting his teeth, Albert forced himself to peel back a corner of a sleeping bag, and he found himself confronting the dead, ripped, or chewed-up face of big, dumb Nutso.

He peeled back another corner and saw Hawk's dead face this time—but it was not chewed up at all. Instead there were two puncture marks in Hawk's neck.

Badly shaken, Albert covered the dead faces up, and then backed away from the van, still clutching his tire iron.

“Drop it, Mister!” someone barked at him, and he wheeled around and froze, then started trembling.

Two big, mean-looking men had pistols trained on him.

And another man, back at the car, had a shotgun trained on Meg and Stevie, who stared helplessly at Albert as a feeling of doom crept over them.

The truth was that Dr. Harold Melrose did not know how or why he had been cured. He had taken painkillers, he had applied ointments, such as aloe and vitamins A and E cream, to his neck wound, and he had overdosed on steroids. He had even anointed the wound over and over again with holy water, desperately giving religion a chance, but this had not worked, and in lieu of resorting to an exorcist, he went back to being a full-fledged atheist.

In any event, as luck would have it, he got better. So, in his time of desperation, maybe something he tried had worked. But he didn't know what. Or maybe he had a natural resistance to the ghoul disease. A resistance that other people did not have.

However, in the past sixteen years he had not had any success with experimental “cures” that he kept on trying on his subjects.

He knew, to paraphrase
Hamlet
, that there were more things in heaven and earth than the human mind could thus far comprehend. But that didn't mean that
somebody
wouldn't be able to understand them
someday
. And he wanted to be that somebody. He had utmost faith in his own intelligence, cleverness, and scientific genius, in spite of his many frustrating setbacks.

To date, all of his efforts directed toward rehabilitating the undead had failed. He himself was the only ghoul-bitten person that he knew of who had not turned into one of them. Yet, he was not fully cured. He was carrying a genetic defect that he had unwittingly passed on to his daughters. He had little doubt that a crucial gene of his must have been altered by the ghoul bite sixteen years ago. And he was dedicated to solving the mystery.

His girls, Tiffany and Victoria, both born in years that postdated the year that he was bitten, were now strangely afflicted. Tiffany, the eldest, had been normal in every way until she reached puberty. Then she came down with a rare, almost unheard of disease called porphyria. Dubbed “the vampire disease” back in the Middle Ages, it had lapsed into obscurity over the next few centuries. However, it was responsible for many aspects of the vampire mythology. Sufferers became extremely sensitive to sunlight; they couldn't go out in the daytime without seeing their skin erupt in ugly blisters. Their gums receded from their teeth, making the canines look like fangs. And they actually craved blood, possibly due to the vitamin deficiencies and poor food absorption caused by the disease.

Tiffany was struck with this unfortunate ailment after she reached the usual age of puberty but was late in beginning menstruation. She acquired porphyria when she was fifteen, and it was only after she fought her way through it that she began to menstruate for the first time. In most ways she seemed perfectly normal thereafter. She never got sick anymore, not even a common cold, which in itself was abnormal. To all appearances, she had become splendidly, magnificently healthy.

Except now she craved blood.

Dr. Melrose had little doubt that his youngest daughter, Victoria, who had recently turned fifteen, was going through exactly what her older sister had gone through. And it drove him to despair.

His wife had died of cancer three years ago, and he missed her terribly. He saw her beauty and her personality reflected in his daughters. He wanted to rescue them from the blood-craving aftermath of their strange and frightening disease. But so far he hadn't learned how. And that was one of the major reasons his experiments must continue. He had not given up on his obsession with finding out why the undead could not die. But now he had the additional motive of doing the very best that he could for his beloved daughters, Tiffany and Victoria.

Spaz Bentley pushed a remote-control button disabling the electrical current surging through the chain-link fence and swung the gate open, allowing Blake Parsons to drive through the entrance in the blue van with the fake grocery mart sign. Then Spaz climbed back into the front passenger seat for the short ride to the compound. They pulled up and braked, killed the engine, then hustled around to the back of the vehicle and opened the cargo door. Albert, Meg, and Stevie Mathews were lying on the floor of the van, their hands handcuffed. The dead-faced guy, Hawk, was handcuffed too, but he was also muzzled like a big dangerous dog; otherwise he might have chomped into one or more of the Mathews family. And the doc had said that he wasn't to be fed until he was examined.

Tiffany pushed the rear passenger door open and jumped down onto the gravel.

Spaz and Blake prodded the Mathews folks with their rifle barrels and ordered them to get out pronto.

“Go ahead,” Tiffany said. “Take them in and cage them.”

The two hired thugs herded Albert, Meg, and Stevie into a barnlike building.

Then Tiffany cooed to Hawk, coaxing him seductively. “Come on, don't be afraid. You can follow me. I won't hurt you.”

After a little more coaxing, Hawk stepped down from the van and let Tiffany lead him by his hand. The fang marks on his neck still glistened, oozing a bit of blood.

“That's it, Hawk,” Tiffany coaxed softly. “Come on, now . . . come to Tiffany. You're
such
a good boy, Hawk. You'd follow me anywhere, wouldn't you? You know that I gave you your life back. Now come with me. If you behave, we're going to feed you.”

Tiffany was used to her strange powers now, and she actually relished them. At first she had hated finding out that, after she had recovered from porphyria, she had developed a blood craving. But she enjoyed it now, not just the taste of human blood, but the fact that along with the craving came a special power. If she bit someone and drank enough of his or her blood to cause death, the victim would arise again as a zombie and would be under her complete control. This made her feel invincible, all-powerful. Hawk was a big man, stupid but strong, and an ordinary woman would be no match for him if he turned brutal. But this cut no ice with Tiffany. She enjoyed dominating big, blustery men like him. And she could do it any time she wanted to.

She hated the underlying stench of the cages in the barnlike building that adjoined her father's laboratory. It was masked by an exorbitant use of bleach and disinfectants, but Tiffany's sense of smell was as strong as a bloodhound's, and the odor of old or dead things came through to her in spite of extraordinary attempts to mask it.

However, she wanted to visit the new captives that Spaz and Blake had brought in two days ago, for she was always curious about people who seemed to lead the ordinary sort of lives that she felt had to be quite boring and useless; in fact, it gratified her to think that because it made her more satisfied with her own circumstances. That's why she had decided to lead Hawk into his cage while they took care of the Mathews family and got them into their new accommodations.

After Hawk was prodded into a cage by himself, still muzzled so he wouldn't, in his hunger, start gnawing into his own arm, Tiffany went over to the cage that imprisoned the known serial killer Chub Harris. He didn't know it yet, but he was going to become zombie feed. Or maybe he did actually know it by now. Maybe he had figured it out.

“How many women have you raped and killed?” Tiffany asked him.

“What's it to
you
?”

“I like murderers,” she said. “They turn me on. If what you have to say pleases me, I could set you free, get you out of here.”

“Ha! Why should I believe you?”

“Because my father owns this laboratory.”

“Then he's not going to risk letting me go. I might tell on him.”

“Tell on him for what?”

“Kidnapping. Holding me against my will.”

“Haven't you done that to quite a few women?”

Chub's dry, chapped lips formed a sly, gloating smile, and the lip-stretching smile made one of the chapped places crack open and bleed.

Tiffany looked at the trickle of blood on Chub's lips, but she had absolutely no urge to lick it. Everything about this creep turned her off. She felt that his blood would poison her. Just looking at it made her want to puke.

“I fuck the women's brains out,” Chub boasted. “Then I make sure they can't give their filthy pussies to anyone else but me.”

“Is that what you did to Janice Fazio?” Tiffany probed, even though she already knew full well what had happened to Janice. Blake and Spaz had let Chub have his fun torturing and raping her, then playing his repetitive strangling game before finally finishing her off. They had watched furtively from a hiding place while Chub dug a shallow grave in the woods. They knew it would be a shallow one because the earth was hard and Chub was so lazy, so they didn't have to wait long before the grisly task was completed. After Janice was dumped in the hole and dirt was shoveled over her, Blake and Spaz had taken Chub down.

“None of your fucking business what I did to Janice,” Chub sneered at Tiffany.

“I know what you did. She's buried in the woods behind Willard High School.”

“How do
you
know about that?”

“I know everything that goes on around here and everyplace else. I learned a lot from my father. I'm not just some dumb blond bimbo. I'm starting premed school next year. I've been working with my father since I was nine years old. He trusts me more than anyone else.”

“Is he screwing you?”

“None of your business.”

“You're totally beautiful, blondie. I bet he can't keep his hands off you. But I bet your pussy stinks.”

“You're the one who's going to stink real bad when we turn you into zombie feed,” Tiffany jeered, then pivoted sharply away from him before he could respond and walked over to the cage that held the sad, terrified Mathews family.

Albert tried to be brave, even though he and his wife and son were helplessly caged. It was almost laughable to Tiffany. “Get away from us!” he blathered at her. “You look sweet and innocent, but you're a murderous bitch! You and that other guy!”

“What other guy, dear?” Tiffany said sweetly.

“The other man who was in that van, in the backseat,” said Albert. “His body wasn't one of the ones I saw—neither his nor yours. One of you must've killed those other two, or both of you did.”

“What if Jeff did it and ran away? Or what if he's dead? What if I killed him
and
the other two but didn't leave his body in the back of the van? You're not covering all of the possibilities, Mr. Mathews. Your brain is too addled. You're too stressed out.”

“If you're so innocent,” Meg interjected, “then why are we caged up here? We're not guilty of anything, and you must know it. So why don't you speak up for us? Why don't you set us free?”

“First of all, nobody in this whole world is totally innocent. We all have secrets. We all have done things we'd be embarrassed about if they were found out. Second of all, I think one of
you
killed Nutso and tried to kill Hawk. They were my friends, but you're trying to pin their murders on me. We're not going to set you free so you can run and tell your lies to the police.”

At this, Stevie jumped up and came hurtling at Tiffany, but he was stopped by the bars of the cage. He stood there frustrated, screaming at her, “
Liar! Filthy goddamn liar!
Let me out of here and I'll rip your ugly blond hair out by the roots!”

Tiffany merely smiled at him, gloating in the fact that he was under her power, which was the power of life and death. “Rip my hair out, would you? Wouldn't you rather
fuck
me, Stevie? I'll bet you would. I'll bet your father would too. Are you a
virgin,
Stevie? Do you want to die or stay in a cage here for years and years without ever knowing what it's like to
get laid
? Especially by someone as beautiful and sexy as I am? I could fuck your brains out, Stevie. Yours too, Albert. And I can pleasure a woman just as well,
Meggie
. Wouldn't you like to go to bed with me?
Any
of you . . . or all three of you . . . the excitement might be more than you could take. But you'll never know, will you?”

“Get out of here, you bitch!” Meg screamed at her.

“I was leaving now anyway,” Tiffany said haughtily. “Later tonight, after dinner, I'll help my father determine your fate. You should have been nicer to me, but you weren't. But when push comes to shove, I'm a fair and objective person, the way my father taught me to be all my life. So I'll try not to let your poor manners influence my opinion about what should happen to you. Now good evening, you all.”