The Hungry Dead (9 page)

In their beat-up van, Bones and Drake cruised slowly on the wooded rural highway, hoping to spot the big rig disabled and ripe for a hijacking.

Drake grumped, “Ain't gonna work. I don't see a shittin' thing. That bag of sugar didn't do the trick. Maybe somethin' else woulda worked out for us, some wallpaper paste or somethin'.”

“Who the hell carries around freakin' wallpaper paste?” Bones jeered. “What really pisses me off is I ain't gonna have no sugar for my coffee if this scheme backfires.”

“Or for my Cheerios,” Blake interjected. “I like Cheerios, but they gotta be sweet.”

“Fuck you and your Cheerios,” said Bones, and they both laughed.

Blake kept on driving, only halfheartedly expecting to see a busted-down big rig. But Bones kept peering around intently, staring into clumps of trees and out into fields as far as he could see, and he even tried to see if any grass was mashed down as if a vehicle had careened off the road.

He kept this up for a long while, till finally he let out a whoop. “Ho! What's that over there, Mr. Naysayer?”

“Nothin',” Drake said. “Pure nothin'. Zilch in fact.”

“The hell it is! That's a truck track, stupid! Right there off the berm! The fuel lines musta froze up while they were comin' down this hill, and they went outta control.”

“And disappeared into thin air?”

“How the hell should I know? They musta skidded back onto the road.”

“Then where in the fuck are they, Herr Reich Marshal?”

“Look!” Bones shouted. “Way out in that field! Our fuckin' windshield is so filthy I almost didn't see it.”

“I see it now,” said Drake, braking and stopping. “A fuckin' telephone pole is cut in two, and the wires are down, man! And there's the rig—jackknifed into a cell tower!”

“Pull off! Let's go lend a hand to the poor unfortunate souls,” Bones said with mock sympathy.

Bones took a long-barreled semiautomatic pistol from under the passenger seat, worked the slide to make sure a round was chambered, then screwed on a silencer.

Drake humped the van out into the bumpy field and for part of the distance up a broad swath of power company right-of-way, where he had to circle around the splintered telephone pole and the downed cables, till he finally stopped about about twenty yards from the tractor-trailer rig. He reached under the driver's seat of the van for his pistol, which was the same make and model as the one Bones had, and he screwed on the same kind of silencer.

“Don't show your gun yet,” Bones cautioned. “If they're carryin' weapons of their own, they might just blast away at us without askin' any questions. Let's play it sneaky.”

They got out of the van, didn't shut the doors so they wouldn't make much noise, and crept toward the cab of the truck with their silencer-equipped pistols tucked in their waistbands under their black leather jackets.

When they got closer, they could hear moaning, which pleased them because they wanted their prey at least partially disabled. The big rig had crashed head-on into a large cell tower The cab was smashed in, and the windshield was shattered in two head-sized places as if human heads had smacked into those spots. Both doors of the cab were sprung open, but not all the way. The guy on the passenger side was clearly dead, his skull crushed and caked with blood.

The driver was moaning, and these were the moans that Bones and Drake had first heard. “He ain't breathin' very loud,” Drake said. “He ain't gonna make it I don't think, but let's make sure.” He put his pistol, silencer and all, right up to the driver's temple, and squeezed off a round that made only a little pop.

Bones did the same thing to the other trucker.

“Haw!” Drake scoffed. “You call yourself some kinda brain. How's come you just wasted one of our expensive Teflon bullets on a dead man, Bones?”

“To make absolutely sure, Dummkopf. What'd they preach at us when we trained with the Aryan Brotherhood? Thoroughness. See the job through down to every detail. Don't let yourself take for granted your enemy is out cold or dead. Take the time to make sure—that way he ain't gonna spring up big as life all of a sudden and take you by surprise. Let's get humpin'. We gotta load our van with all the electronic stuff we can manage. Then get our sweet asses outta here.”

“Wait a minute. I wanna try somethin',” Drake said, and he yanked out his cell phone and tried to dial a number. “Dead,” he said. “Like I thought. This sucker took out the power lines
and
the cell tower, Bones. Anybody we wanna rob ain't gonna have no contact with the outside, and if they got a security system of any kind, it probably ain't gonna work.”

“That's good to know,” said Bones, “for future reference. But it cuts no ice with what we gotta do right now.”

He reached into the cab and yanked the key out of the ignition, then led the way to the back of the trailer truck. He got the big back door unlocked, and as it started to lift, he and Drake started to hear strange nonhuman-sounding voices. And those voices were making sounds of anger and hunger—weird, slavering noises.

Bones and Drake jumped back, startled, and looked at each other momentarily, their eyes widening with sudden terror.

They both knew at once that whatever they tried to do to save themselves would be too late.

Zombies were pouring out of the truck . . . hungry . . . drooling . . .

Perhaps Drake and Bones had heard of Dr. Harold Melrose, or maybe they had read about him when he was in the news so much, sixteen years ago. If so, in their final moments it may have dawned on them that the logo with the rose and the letters
MR
stood for Melrose. And the big rig wasn't really carrying any electronic equipment. Instead it was transporting zombies. Lots of them. Including the huge long-term zombie called Barney, who had always been one of Dr. Melrose's favorites. He wasn't one of the first ones out of the truck though; he was too bulky and slow-moving, and others got out ahead of him, which probably saved his “life.”

Drake and Bones managed to shoot some of the first ones out. But at first they failed to use head shots. So the zombies they shot weren't always seriously hurt. They just kept coming.

Three of the zombies came out together, and they even bore a resemblance to one another: a man, a woman, and a teenage boy in neat and clean clothing, as if they were going on a picnic or a trip to the movies. These were newly created zombies, new recruits to the ranks of the undead—and they each had puncture wounds in their necks—and of course Bones and Drake didn't have time to notice this or to even care about it.

Bones shot the teenage boy, Stevie Mathews, in his head, and that was the end of Stevie. He and his parents had been transformed when Tiffany and Victoria Melrose drank their blood last night.

Albert got hit by a bullet that Drake fired, but it was only a flesh wound that grazed his skull.

Meg wasn't hit at all by any of the gunfire. But a zombie next to her got shot in the head and went down, and in her newly zombified state this did not faze her much.

Utterly panicked by the ferociousness of the attack they were under, Bones and Drake belatedly tried to run. But they were choked, pummeled, tackled, and bitten, their legs pulled out from under them.

Then they were swarmed over by hungry ghouls, including Meg and Albert, who took their first satisfying bites of live human flesh.

Bones and Drake kicked and thrashed and screamed at the tops of their lungs, but not for long.

Their screams were overwhelmed by slavering, chomping sounds and then slowly and with utter finality, the screaming faded away forever.

Sheriff Harkness sat behind his desk puffing on his pipe, and Bruce Barnes was in a chair facing him. They were trying to make sense of what they had been through this morning and figure out what had been accomplished, even though the serving of the search warrant hadn't panned out the way they had thought it would. Now they needed to decide what their next moves ought to be.

Mulling it all over, the sheriff said, “Melrose's claim that the
government
backed him at one time was nothin' but poppycock. Probably had a little grain of truth in it, but basically a lie to cover up a guilty conscience.”

Bruce said, “I don't believe he
had
a conscience.” Seems to me he was a rogue scientist, a loose cannon. It'd be nice to know that the government wasn't involved with a nut like that.”

“Well,” said Harkness, “when the plague broke out sixteen years ago, he was one of the so-called scientific experts wrackin' their brains tryin' to dope it out and find a cure—but they never came up with anything except cockamamie theories. Meantime pea brains like you and me put an end to it the old-fashioned way—gunned 'em down and burned 'em. Everybody hoped that'd be it—it'd go away like the bubonic plague and never come back. The eggheads were told to stop all their experimenting and dispose of any of what they called ‘infectious biological material' that they still had in their labs. I guess the politicians and the big brass were a tad squeamish about using human beings like lab animals, even human beings that weren't quite human anymore. They decided it was best to cremate them and hope the plague never came back, even though nobody knew where it had come from in the first place.”

“But apparently Melrose wanted to go on,” Bruce said. “Why? What do you think he was on to?”

“You got me,” said the sheriff. “Probably nothin'. Or maybe somethin'. There's always been a lot of babble in the tabloids about secret laboratories where the army is studyin' zombies, tryin' to figure out why they can't be killed with just a body shot.” He chuckled at this. “It'd be a helluva advantage for guys goin' into combat, wouldn't it? But I don't know what good it woulda done Dr. Melrose.”

Bruce said, “How did he keep them alive for so long? They would've had to eat, wouldn't they?”

“Well, unfortunately, we know what happened to Jeff Sanders, and he might not have been the only one who was fed to those things. But it's hard for me to picture Dr. Melrose kidnapping and killing people to use them as zombie feed.”

“Why not?” Bruce said, with a raising of his eyebrows. “He was the kind of doctor who likes to play God. I read a case study on a nutcase named Doctor Mudd who was getting away with one murder after another back in Chicago in 1893 when the World's Fair was going on there. He was kidnapping people who came to the fair from other parts of the country, killing them, and selling their bodies to a medical college. He was even putting some of the bodies in vats of acid to take all the flesh off, then selling the skeletons.”

“Well, there's all kinds of nuts in the world,” said the sheriff. “But it's a good thing that not all of them are homicidal 'cause we've got more than enough on our hands as it is.” He took another thoughtful puff on his pipe, then said, “I had to break it to Amy that Jeff is no longer with us, and she went to pieces so bad. I don't think she was ever intending to divorce him even though he was so worried about it.”

“That's a shame,” said Bruce. “Everything about it is a shame. They should've been able to have a good life together.”

The sheriff shook his head sadly and said, “I hated to tell Amy how he died, but I couldn't think of a way around it. I asked her to keep the details to herself for now, just say he got killed in the line of duty. I think she'll cooperate. She understands that we have to downplay everything so we don't start a mass panic—at least for the time being. I'm thinking that the zombies we killed at the Melrose place must've been all that he had out there. But we don't really know for sure right now.”

Bruce said, “We ought to get in touch with the medical colleges, not just around here, but across the country. Maybe we'll find out Doc Melrose was buying cadavers from them. Maybe that's how he was feeding his so-called
lab specimens
.”

“I wouldn't put it past him,” said the sheriff. “I wouldn't put
anything
past him.”

Bruce said, “It could be that Melrose didn't intentionally kill Jeff. Maybe Jeff stepped into something he didn't understand. He told you he was gonna try to break into one of the buildings out there. If he didn't know what was in there, and one of those zombies jumped him . . .”

“It could've been that way,” the sheriff said before Bruce had to finish his grisly thought. “But no matter how it went down, Melrose is responsible. If he was alive, we'd be prosecuting him for Jeff's murder and probably a whole host of other crimes we don't know about right now. Same with his daughters. According to him, they're on the loose somewhere, and we've got to find them.”

“It's disappointing that our road block didn't turn up anything,” Bruce said. “But all we really had to go on was the possibility of coming across that van we were told about, the one with the sign that said Olsen's Grocery Mart.”

Returning from their morning ride, Sally and her mom halted their horses near the open door to the barn. Marsha said, “You can go in and take your bath. I'll unsaddle the horses.”

“You sure, Mom? I've got time to help.”

“I don't mind a bit. I want to stay out here in the fresh air for a while before I get started with the laundry.”

“All right then. Thanks, Mom.”

They both dismounted, and Sally headed for the house, approaching it by means of the long, winding brick walkway. It was the home she had grown up in, and she still felt more comfortable in it than in any other place. For her, it exuded a warmth that was full of childhood memories. It was over a hundred years old, and her mother and father had bought it before she was born, a large, stately, two-story frame house with a railed and pillared front porch that went the entire width of it, and brick chimneys on both ends of the slate-shingled roof. The house was painted white with red trim for the porch banisters and window frames, and it reminded Sally very much of some of the homes she had visited at historical sites going back to colonial or Civil War times. But it was very modern inside as far as the furniture and fixtures were concerned, although the huge stone fireplaces were treasured by her and her family and would never be gotten rid of in spite of the fact that they were seldom used. Gas heating and air-conditioning were just too convenient, and the Brinkman family, like many people, were addicted to it.

As she pulled open the seldom-locked front door and went into the living room, Sally tugged off her riding jacket and dropped it on a leather armchair so she could pick it up on her way out later, after she had had her bath. Then she skipped upstairs to start filling the tub.

Marsha led her horse Perky into a stall, then got her uncinched, unsaddled, and unbridled. She was about to do the same for Sparky when she heard the palomino whinnying and snorting as if something had made him scared. So she hurried out of the barn and was pounced on by a huge beast of a man—or at least she thought it was a man. And it sort of was one! It was the undead behemoth named Barney who had escaped from the big rig that had wrecked into a cell phone tower, thanks to the attempted hijacking by Bones and Drake.

Marsha screamed as Barney seized her roughly and tried to sink his teeth into her neck.

Sparky, tethered to a steel ring in the barn door, whinnied in fear and yanked hard against his reins.

Marsha kicked Barney in his groin and managed to wrench herself out from under his big arms, which of course were exceptionally powerful when he was alive but were not as strong now that he had been undead for a long time. Like all of the undead, his movements were single-minded, but slow and stiff as if still under a semiadvanced stage of rigor mortis.

Marsha whirled and glanced toward the house, thinking to run in that direction, but Barney was coming at her again, blocking her way, so she ran back into the barn.

Sparky whinnied again and reared up violently, tearing loose from his reins. And when the big stallion's hooves came down, they landed partially against Barney's legs, knocking him down. Then Sparky reared up again and trampled on Barney—so hard that maybe Barney would have been killed, especially if the horse had landed his steel-shod hooves on the big zombie's head—but instead of doing that, Sparky ran in panic out into the field.

Barney groaned and slowly pulled himself to his feet. Then he headed into the barn after Marsha. Limping and breathing hoarsly, he passed by the swung-open barn door into a dimly lit, cavernous place of hay bales and animal stalls.

Marsha cowered behind a hay bale.

Barney stopped and looked around, moving his big head slowly and stiffly.

Then three more zombies came into the barn, as if they were a pack of animals who knew the smell of human flesh. One of them was the serial killer named Chub, now zombified, who was so used to hunting humans when he was alive. And perhaps he retained some of his guile and cunning now that he was undead.

The other two zombies were a man and a woman, both dressed in plain clothing, the woman in a blouse and shorts, the man in a T-shirt and faded jeans, and both of them wearing snaeakers. If they were alive they would probably have been wearing warmer clothes because of the October chill. But now they were undead and didn't, or couldn't, care less. Both of them had the greenish flesh often exhibited by corpses, and they were not so much vicious-looking but mute and dumb. And that was somehow scarier than diabolical slyness or fiendish intelligence because they exuded the single-minded intention of not being stopped by anyone or anything until they could tear apart and feast upon a victim. Any victim would do, so long as he or she was still alive.

Marsha risked peeping out from her hiding place, and when she saw around the side of the bale, she gave an involuntary gasp, recognizing that she was now facing not just one zombie, but four! And they were closing in on her, drooling and moaning hungrily.

She darted her eyes around frantically, looking for an avenue of escape. But she was hemmed in by the windowless plank wall of a section of stalls. She grabbed the only thing in sight that she thought might help her defend herself—a two-by-four leaning against a corner.

Perky was whinnying fearfully now—whinnying and whinnying in desperate terror.

The zombies came closer to Marsha. They were slow-moving dead things, but relentless in pursuit, except for Chub, who hung back a little, perhaps instinctively retaining the self-protective, cowardly impulse not to risk himself so readily if he could let others put themselves in danger, then reap the benefits.

Marsha bravely stepped out from behind the bale to give herself room to swing the two-by-four. And when the female zombie got close enough, she swung the lengthy piece of lumber hard against the zombie's kneecaps, knocking her legs out from under her. She went down with a hiss that sounded almost painful, and the male that was right behind her stumbled over her thrashing body.

With another hard swing, Marsha clobbered the stumbling male over his head, cracking his skull, and he grunted and went down like a sack of potatoes.

Marsha swung at Barney, clubbing him in his barrellike chest and knocking him back a step or two, but the impact jarred the two-by-four out of her hands, and when she scrambled for it, the female zombie still thrashing on the ground got hold of the other end of it. They both yanked on it in a tug-of-war. Then Barney pushed Marsha as hard as he could, and she stumbled backward, hitting her head against the side of something hard—she didn't know what.

Then, groggily, she saw that it was the ladder leading up to the loft, and there were streaks of sunlight up there, filled with dancing dust-motes that almost seemed to whisper “salvation.” Marsha scrambled up the ladder, hoping desperately that those dead things could not climb.

Anxiously she knelt in shreds of old hay up there in the loft and peered down, then shuddered—because one of the zombies
was
starting to climb! It wasn't Chub, and it wasn't Barney. It was the female.

Marsha tried shaking the ladder to make the female zombie fall, but it wouldn't budge. It was anchored up there by a pair of metal cleats.

Marsha scrambled deeper into the loft, not knowing what she was going to do next to try to save herself.

The female zombie climbed stiffly and laboriously till she reached the point where she could crawl into the loft. Then she raised herself up, turning her head this way and that—and with a victorious scream Marsha plunged a pitchfork into the zombie's chest.

The zombie fell fifteen feet backward and down, pitchfork and all. She lay flat on her back, hissing and writhing, trying to pull the tines of the pitchfork out of her wretched body. The other two zombies stood around staring at this spectacle, awed and backing away from it.

In what seemed to be a state of confusion among the dead beings, Marsha scrambled out of the loft, jumping the final four feet off the ladder, plowing into Chub and knocking him down, then darting for the wide-open sunlit doorway of the barn.

Barney turned, dumbly peering after her.

And just as she got almost to freedom, three more zombies appeared, blocking her way.

She stopped in her tracks, backing up and whimpering, “No . . . no . . .”

Now all the remaining zombies closed in on her from all sides. They clawed at her and pulled her down onto the patch of ground in front of the barn, right where she almost made it to freedom. Their yellowish drooling teeth glimmered in the sunlight.

She struggled for a while, her screams muffled because Barney and Chub pressed their forearms into her throat while the others pinned down her arms and legs.

Six more zombies arrived on the scene, with rasping breath and shuffling footsteps. Two of them started toward the “meal in progress,” but the ones who got there first gave them fierce looks, glowering and growling like lions guarding their kill.

The two backed off, then moved with the rest of the newly arrived pack toward the house.

 

Sally had not heard the sounds of her mother's fight with the marauding ghouls, partly because the barn was a good distance from the house and partly because she was filling the bathtub with loudly gushing water for her bath.

She tested the warmth of the water with her fingertips, sprinkled in some pink, nice-smelling bubble-bath crystals, then she went to her bedroom to get her robe and slippers.

Meanwhile, zombies were starting to surround the house.

Three of them, a male and two females, were standing in the front yard, gazing at the front porch as if contemplating an approach, but for some reason they were hanging back for now.

Two others circled around back, both males. One of them was about twenty-five years old and probably used to look pretty dapper in his blue blazer and tan slacks, which were now wrinkled and torn and smeared with muddy grass stains. The other one was about in his twenties also, but wore a wifebeater undershirt and ragged denim cutoffs, with tattoos all over his legs and arms and rings in his lips and nostrils. In ordinary life they likely would not have hung out together, but they were united in a common goal now that they were undead.

In the upstairs of the house, Sally came down the hall carrying her robe, slippers, and a hair dryer, and went into the bathroom, where the water was still gushing. She set down her slippers, hung her robe on a hook behind the door, laid the hair dryer on the sink counter, and plugged it in. Then she shut the bathroom door and tested the water in the tub again, swirling it around with her hand, maximizing the bubbles, and letting the tub completely fill up before turning off the spigot.

She dried her hands on a little towel on the sink rack, then started to unbutton her blouse, but stopped when she heard footsteps, followed by a bump on the door.

She listened.

More footsteps.

Then
bump
. . .
bump-bump
.

“Mom?” Sally called out.

She listened at the door.

Then she opened it.

She peeked right and left and saw no one in the hall. But she was startled by some rasping and shuffling noises coming from her bedroom.

“Mom?” she called out once again. Then, “Dad?”

She slowly crossed the hall and went a couple steps into her room—and what she saw caused her to gasp and freeze in her tracks. She caught a horrifying glimpse of an image reflected in her dresser mirror, and her mind was partially paralyzed by what she could not comprehend—a depraved-looking
thing
with the flesh ripped out of his face and maggots crawling in his hair!

She tried to back up and run—but too late—the zombie was already lunging at her. He grabbed her by the throat from behind and pulled her to the floor, almost making her pass out from sheer fright and the rancid odor that instantly overwhelmed her. She landed with a bone-wrenching thud, her body twisted and her legs half under the bed. The putrid zombie was kneeling over her head, trying to choke her and get close enough to take a bite out of her face.

When he was almost biting into her cheek, she grabbed his long, greasy, maggot-ridden hair—her fingers slippery with crushed maggots—and pulled hard, slamming his forehead against the steel bed frame . . . once . . . twice . . . three times. It made him loosen his grip on her throat, and she managed to slide her feet out from under the bed, kicking hard at the zombie's body and punching her fist into his Adam's apple. He reeled and spluttered, emitting a rasping, choking sound, and Sally scrambled to her feet.

But the zombie came after her, growling and drooling.

She ran into the bathroom, then tried to slam the door shut and lock it, but the zombie barged in on her before she could slam the bolt home. He clawed at her, and she backed herself into a corner.

She groped frantically, trying to grab on to something she could use to defend herself. Soap, a soap dish, and bottles of shampoo and conditioner clattered to the floor. Still groping, Sally latched onto the hair dryer, but in his wild, mindless thrashing the zombie knocked it out of her hand, and it landed in the sink. She had the crazy thought that she could've held on to it if her hands weren't still slippery from those filthy maggots.

The zombie was on her once again, seizing her by her shoulders in a life and death wrestling match, a grapple in which Sally's goal was not only to get away but to somehow avoid being bitten. Like everyone else, she had heard plenty of stories of what had gone on around here sixteen years ago, and it was clear in her mind now exactly what she was facing. She and the flesh-hungry zombie had hold of each other's clothing and were pulling and twisting.