The Hungry Dead (7 page)

Two uniformed sheriff's deputies, Henry Burns and Jesse Halcomb, were on the road in their police cruiser. Henry drove while Jesse smoked a cigarette, which Jesse didn't like because the smoke made him light-headed, sometimes nauseous. But he knew his partner was a nicotine addict, so he tolerated it.

Jesse said, “We make the turn up ahead a piece.”

They were looking for the hard to spot weed-grown entrance to a narrow dirt road that would lead them through the woods to the Melrose Medical Research Center, a place that apparently liked to keep itself discreet and well hidden. Sheriff Harkness had sent them out here in advance of the raid he was implementing, in case Jeff Sanders was in trouble and they might be able to do something about it to keep him safe. But the sheriff didn't know what. He just had a premonition that he had to do something that might prevent disaster from happening before the logistics of the raid were properly organized so it could take place.

“What if Jeff
is
still doing okay here, and we blow his cover?” Henry asked. “What'd the sheriff say about that, Jesse?”

“We're just supposed to show up acting like normal nosy lawmen and try to make sure Jeff's okay. If we do stumble into him, he'll be cool enough not to let on he's ever seen us before.”

But Henry was skeptical. “That's the way the sheriff's got it doped out, huh?”

“Well, he says if we show up asking questions it ought to even help throw suspicion off Jeff. They won't figure we'd put somebody undercover and still come around ourselves.”

“I sure hope he's right,” Henry said. “Here's the turnoff.”

He humped the cruiser off the main road and onto a narrow stretch of rutted mud and gravel that gave them a bumpy, twisty ride. And in about three hundred yards of this, they came to a cyclone fence, which was topped with barbed wire.

“It's electrified,” Jesse said.

“Yeah, I can see that,” said his partner.

They both stared at the carcass of a dead, badly charred deer that was sagging against the steel links of the fence as if plastered to it by a jolt of electricity. The two cops weren't about to get out and touch that fence, so Henry laid on the horn in order to hopefully flush somebody out to greet them.

Other than the presence of the dead deer, nothing seemed too spooky. It all seemed very quiet and peaceful in spite of what was rumored to be going on.

When nobody came out to greet them, Henry laid on the horn again. Then he and Jesse got out of the car, and Jesse dropped his cigarette butt and stepped on it. They both looked around, trying to case the place, but there wasn't much to see, just a big house farther back and several outbuildings made of cinder block.

Henry said, “Why did Sheriff Harkness send us out here on a Saturday? Maybe they all take the day off.”

“He said a Saturday might be exactly the right time to catch them with their pants down.”

Just then, a lovely young woman came walking across the gravel, got up to the fence as the two cops gawked at her admiringly, and said, “I'm Tiffany Melrose. What can I do for you?” She was wearing tight shorts and a T-shirt that showed off her body, and she had an aura of haughtiness about her that did not disguise her disdain for the two lawmen.

“I'm Deputy Burns,” Henry said, “and my partner here is Jesse Halcomb. We need to talk with Dr. Melrose. Is he in?”

“Yes,” said Tiffany. “He's back in the lab. I was helping him. He's my father. We were in the midst of some critical experiments when we heard your horn blasting away at us. Very disturbing. We must get back to our work, so I hope you won't detain us long. As you can see, this is an electrified fence, but I'll cut off the current.”

In her hand she held a remote-control device, and she hit some buttons and then opened the gate, saying, “Follow me, if you will, gentlemen.”

She led them through a solid steel side door of one of the cinder-block buildings and into a large, thoroughly equipped chemistry laboratory complete with beakers, flasks, Bunsen burners, microscopes, and other more esoteric and complicated apparatuses that the lawmen were baffled by. Then she disappeared down a long corridor, and they watched her go, wondering what her game was.

Dr. Melrose, a slim and bald little man wearing a neat white lab coat and wire-rimmed eyeglasses, came toward them after putting down a clipboard, and they had no trouble recognizing him from the photos shown to them by Sheriff Harkness. They took note of the scar on his throat, which they knew had been put there sixteen years ago, and it was so faint by now that ordinarily they might not have noticed it.

“What can I do for you, officers?” the doctor inquired in his prissy little voice. “Let's please be expedient. My daughter and I must get back to our important work. We don't get any government grants, you see. We must flounder on our own. And time is money.”

“We'll try not to take up too much of your
money
then,” Henry said with heavy sarcasm.

Then all of a sudden he made up a story off the top of his head that he hoped might enable him to more directly and cleverly find out whether or not Jeff was still on the premises. Lying through his teeth, he said, “A snitch told us he met a guy named Jeff Sanders who was hitchhiking out on the highway near here, and this guy Jeff is somebody we've been on the lookout for. He's wanted for breaking and entering back in Willard. He tried to burglarize a jewelry store, and the alarm went off and he ran—but we got a good description. Our snitch said he talked about trying to get hired out here. He said it'd be a good place to stay out of sight for a while.”

Henry hoped this made-up story would be a good excuse to get to talk with Jeff, under the pretense of grilling him about the phony jewelry store robbery, but Dr. Melrose didn't fall for it. “We don't have anybody new on our payroll,” the doctor lied. “And nobody has applied recently. In fact, we haven't seen any strangers in a long time.”

Jesse had readily tuned into his partner's line of deception concerning the nonexistent snitch, so he continued ad-libbing the phony story. “You sure about that?” he shot back at Doc Melrose. “Our witness swears your daughter was seen with this Sanders hoodlum. Where'd she disappear to? We want to talk to her, and if we don't like what she has to say, you can bet we'll haul her in for some sharp questioning.”

“You can take that to the bank,” Henry added meanly.

Rattled, Dr. Melrose fell into the trap and blurted out some things that were partially truthful. “Tiffany went for a ride with some young fellows. We don't know who they were, but I guess one of them could've been this Sanders fellow. They dropped her off here and went on their way. We don't know any more than that.”

Both of the cops now knew that Doc Melrose was lying about not knowing Jeff Sanders.. So they were more determined than ever to find out all that they could before they would let the sheriff and his raiding party risk their lives.

“We're gonna have to talk to Tiffany, no way around that,” said Jesse. “She might know a whole lot more'n you do, doc. Teenagers often do. So take us to her. Pronto. We're not foolin' around here. We're after a dangerous felon.”

“I suppose I'll have to let you speak to her,” Dr. Melrose said, his thin mouth twitching. “But she won't be helpful, not because she doesn't want to be, but because she can't be. She doesn't really know anything. But come with me, gentlemen. We have absolutely nothing to hide.”

The doctor escorted the two deputies down the long institutional corridor where Tiffany had disappeared, and at the end of it, there was a heavily bolted steel door. The door was bolted from the outside, not the inside, so the bolt wasn't intended to keep people out. It was intended to keep somebody or something
in.
The deputies got immediately more nervous, but they didn't say anything. Dr. Melrose undid the bolt and swung the door open on nothing, it seemed, except murky darkness. Then the lawmen gasped and reeled backward, covering their nostrils.

“Ugh!” Henry blurted. “What's that smell?”

“Something rotten!” Jesse echoed.

“You'll see better when I flip the lights on,” Dr. Melrose informed them prissily.

Suddenly the area beyond the steel door was bathed in stark fluorescence, revealing the cage that held Barney and the other long-term zombies.

The two deputies were so taken aback that Blake and Spaz, who had sneaked up behind them, had little trouble plowing into them, ripping their guns out of their holsters, opening the cage door, and shoving them in there. A savage battle ensued as the slavering zombies closed in, Barney taking the lead and shoving some of the others out of his way.

For a time, Jesse and Henry held out and got in some blows, refusing to succumb easily to their fate. For fun, Blake and Spaz had teased them with faint hope of escape by leaving the cell door open, and they punched and clawed at the attacking zombies, trying to reach the opening, even though they were both being bitten in various places on their bodies.

Dr. Melrose watched all this, fascinated, his thin mouth twitching, which seemed to be his way of showing delight in an impending triumph. He knew it was a foregone conclusion that the two deputies would not be able to hold out for long, and with bites all over them and chunks of their flesh torn out, they would be swarmed under. The hungry flesh eaters would crush them to the floor of the cage and continue tearing at them and devouring them till they were satiated.

Spaz and Blake would watch till the bitter end. They enjoyed this sort of thing more than Dr. Melrose did.

And besides, the doc had important work to do, and he didn't want to neglect it.

He had to finish up some important experiments. Then he had to put himself and his entire enterprise into survival mode. Because there was little doubt that the police would soon be here in full force.

Tiffany came back down the corridor and said, “We've got to get rid of the patrol car they came in, Daddy.”

He said, “I know. The keys must be in one of their pockets, but Blake and Spaz can hot-wire it instead of bothering to look for the keys.”

Blake heard this and turned around, holding up the cops' guns and asking, “What about these?”

“Hang on to them. I think they will come in handy,” said Dr. Melrose. “As a matter of fact, let's hold back on sinking their car into the pond. It might come in handy for a tactical getaway.”

Sheriff Harkness had to carry out his raid on the Melrose complex ahead of schedule on an emergency basis because two men he had sent out there as a surveillance team reported that what appeared to be a preparation for an all-out evacuation, or something close to it, was underway under cover of darkness. And the other two men he sent out never came back.

Luckily, the sheriff had insisted on an around the clock surveillance, instructing the two men to spell each other in four-hour shifts and had issued them infrared spy gear including goggles and telescopes. Two nights in a row they had observed trucks and vans being loaded from midnight till dawn with labeled crates of office and laboratory equipment, and also dozens of multisized cardboard boxes that were not labeled but were numbered, probably so their contents could be checked off on a manifest.

The raiding party consisted of a six-man SWAT team and a dozen deputies under the command of Sheriff Harkness. Bruce Barnes was one of the deputies, and he, like everyone else, was worried about the possible fate of Jeff Sanders.

None of these men had any idea what they were going to encounter. But whatever it was, they wanted to get to the bottom of it if it turned out to be something illegal. The sheriff knew that if Doc Melrose really was orchestrating a pull-out, he might already be one jump ahead of the law. This might turn into a pursuit and BOLO—be on the lookout—instead of a detain and search mission.

This was a chilly October morning, and when the lawmen first arrived just after dawn, the sun had not finished burning off the fog. The grass was dewy, and the dark limbs and wet multicolored leaves of the trees glistened in the first weak rays of sunlight as the mist slowly began to lift.

To the sheriff and his men, it looked like the Melrose compound was deserted. If this was the situation, there would be no shooting. On the other hand, empty labs and offices would probably yield little evidence of any suspicious activity that may have occurred there over the months and years previous.

Sheriff Harkness was armed with a shotgun and a holstered sidearm, and he was also carrying a battery-powered megaphone. His plan was to get on the megaphone and call out to whomever was the honcho in there to shut the current off and immediately open the electrified gate, so he could go in to serve his warrant and hopefully carry out his search without any bothersome interference or, god forbid, foolish gunplay.

But the gate was already wide open.

By means of hand signals and whispers, the sheriff passed along deployment orders and, in a military-style maneuver, the men broke their ranks down into four-man squads that took turns covering each other, while one squad at a time crouched and ran through the open gate and through holes they had made with shears through other parts of the chain-link fence. In a matter of minutes, all the SWAT men and the deputies were deployed inside the compound, their guns trained on the various buildings and doorways, ready to open fire as soon as they were provoked or ordered to do so.

The sheriff pressed a button and spoke into the handheld megaphone, and his gruff voice boomed out all over the compound. “We are the police! We have you surrounded! Come out with your hands up!”

There was no response whatsoever. So the sheriff tried it again. “We are the police! We have you surrounded! Come out with your hands up!”

The sheriff was flanked by Deputy Bruce Barnes, who had performed so well in the outbreak sixteen years ago, and by two other deputies, Jerry Flanagan and Carl Ortiz, officers with just over ten years' service, who were not on the job when the sheriff's first run-in with Dr. Melrose had taken place. But they had no doubt that the stories they had heard about the incident were real. After all, they both had friends and family members who had suffered and died back then.

Wisps of fog still crept among the cinder-block buildings. And here and there the fog was heavier, as if purposely hiding something—at least it seemed that way to some of the lawmen who were creeped out by the place in spite of their need to be brave and alert.

Sheriff Harkness was making up his mind whether to let his voice blare out over the megaphone one more time or whether he should just move forward with a handpicked squad while the rest furnished cover.

But before he made his mind up, three shambling figures emerged from a thick pocket of fog between two of the cinder-block buildings and started shuffling toward the sheriff and the deputies who were flanking Harkness protectively.

“Holy
shit
!” Carl Ortiz cried out.

And Jerry Flanagan took a faltering step backward, as if he had been hit with something.
“Christ! What are they?”
he blurted.

“Zombies!” Bruce Barnes said as calmly as he could. But he was rattled. It seemed like a déjà vu moment to him, and a very scary one at that. “Fucking zombies,” he repeated, muttering it to himself.

The three undead beings shuffled toward the sheriff and his flanking deputies, and there was no doubt that they were quite decayed and dead-looking but somehow still “living.” One was a red-haired woman in a flower-print housedress, and the two others were middle-aged men wearing olive-green jumpsuits of the type usually worn by workmen, such as carpenters or plumbers.

“Fuck! It's happening all over again!” Bruce cursed.

Sheriff Harkness held back on giving an order to fire. He wanted the undead creatures to get closer first. But suddenly shots rang out anyway, and two of the zombies went down, hit in the head by bullets—the woman and one of the “carpenters.” The one still on his feet had been shot in his chest—a big gaping hole appeared there—and he reeled backward and almost fell, but somehow he did not go down. He just kept on coming.

And behind him a half-dozen more zombies appeared, venturing out from behind the buildings.

“Fire at will, men!” the sheriff barked over the megaphone.

A volley of shots rang out immediately, and the “carpenter” zombie who had been shot in his chest took a high-powered shot to his head that splintered his skull and splattered his brain, and what was left of him fell down hard onto the gravel.

Loud gunfire echoed throughout the compound, and several more zombies bit the dust. “There are some over there tryin' to crawl through the hole you guys cut in the fence!” the sheriff shouted to a squad of SWAT men. “Go after 'em! Don't let 'em get away! If they make it into the woods, we might never catch up with 'em!”

The squad moved off, efficiently aiming and firing, and the sheriff watched them kill three more zombies, and he nodded his approval. It seemed to him that the situation was close to being under control—unless there were more zombies inside the buildings.

But things weren't quite over yet, and a female zombie was coming at the sheriff behind his back, and he almost didn't hear her because of the spates of gunfire. At the last second, he wheeled and swung his shotgun into action just in time to shoot the sneaky zombie in the face. She dazedly covered her face with her hands as she sank slowly to her knees, then she toppled sideways.

The sheriff stood over her and saw the damage made by the shotgun pellets—holes like little BB marks in her partially decayed facial skin, but not a direct hit. She was still breathing, emitting an eerie rasping sound. He drew his .44 Magnum, aimed between her eyes, and dispassionately squeezed off a round. This time she was blown away for good, ghoul brains and gore soaking into the earth.

Breathing hard, Deputy Bruce Barnes came up to the sheriff while he was taking time to reload his Winchester, the same one he was using sixteen years ago. “I think I spotted more of them ducking behind those two tar paper sheds over there,” he said. “We better check it out.”

“You, Jerry, and Carl come with me,” the sheriff responded.

Weapons at the ready, they proceeded around the side of the main cinder-block building and toward the two sheds Bruce had mentioned. Even though they expected to encounter
something,
they were still startled to find three zombies crouched over someone's half-devoured remains. The zombies looked up like pack animals ready to protect a kill. They were chewing and drooling, their faces streaked with blood. They were too satiated and too lethargic to even make much of an attempt to get away.

Without a word, the sheriff and his deputies blasted them down.

Then the lawmen approached closer to the erstwhile feast.

And even though the face was chewed up, they still recognized the dead man.

“Oh god,” Jerry said, “that looks like—”

Carl said, “Jeff Sanders.”

“It is him,” Bruce said, sadly shaking his head. “He must've got himself caught spying, and they
fed him
to these things.”

“Then they cleared out,” said Sheriff Harkness. “They knew we were coming. That's why none of their vehicles are around. Dollars to doughnuts all the buildings are gonna be empty. Dr. Melrose and his crazy crew are long gone.”

Just then a shot rang out, and Carl Ortiz was shot in the chest. He screamed and fell dead as the sheriff and his two remaining deputies took cover behind the tar paper sheds, looking to return fire.

Another shot rang out, and this time the muzzle flash called attention to a sniper on the roof of one of the buildings. He peeped from behind a chimney, and the lawmen cut loose with a heavy volley.

The sniper ducked out of sight. But not without getting spotted long enough to make out that he had a rifle and was wearing a white lab coat.

The sheriff and his two surviving deputies waited tensely with fixed gazes, ready to fire if the sniper peeped up again.

They heard some of the other deputies and SWAT men coming toward them in the distance, drawn to the situation because of the the gunfire now that other areas of the compound were mostly silent.

All of a sudden the sniper peeked around the side of the chimney and squeezed off three rapid rifle rounds.

This drew heavy return fire from the three lawmen.

The sniper screamed and fell behind the chimney, and his rifle dropped and clattered down below him on a brick walkway.

For a long moment, all was still except for the cautious footsteps of the approaching SWAT team and the other deputies.

Then a weak and whimpering voice came from the sniper up on the roof. “I'm hurt bad . . . I'm bleeding . . . I surrender . . . come and get me . . .”

“Damn it. Who the hell
are
you?” Sheriff Harkness shouted.

“Who . . . do you . . . think? I'm . . . Dr. Melrose.”