Epidemic of the Living Dead

by John Russo

Genres: General Fiction; Science Fiction; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

From the screenwriter of the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead comes a shocking new wave of zombie mayhem to devour your dreams—and feed your nightmares . . .

THEY ARE WHAT THEY EAT

It starts with infected needles. It spreads like a plague. Soon the town of Chapel Grove, Pennsylvania, is overrun with cannibalistic corpses. Some are taken down with a bullet to the brain. Others, torched like kindling. But a few have survived—inside a maternity ward . . .

THEY'RE EATING FOR TWO NOW

Detective Bill Curtis manages to rescue his pregnant wife Lauren from the ward in the nick of time. But the other pregnant women are not so lucky. Some of them have been bitten—and infected. Now it's anyone's guess what's growing inside them . . .

THEY'RE THE NEXT GENERATION

But the nightmare isn't over yet. The infected mothers' newborns appear to be normal. But as the years go by, Bill and Lauren Curtis begin to worry about their beautiful, healthy daughter Jodie. Jodie is drawn to the town's "special" children, the ones whose mothers were bitten. They're reaching adolescence now. Their hormones are raging. And they're starting to possess strange appetites . . .

Contains mature themes.

Release date: August 28, 2018

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 272

Sample

Eighteen Years Earlier

For Bill and Lauren Curtis, as for many others in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the joy of budding parenthood was tempered by their dread of the plague. Again and again, it had struck in dozens of communities all across the United States, turning decent people into mindless cravers of live human flesh. There were no vaccines, no cures. No one knew where it would strike next. It would flare up and be put down with guns, bombs and torches, then lie dormant till it struck somewhere else, with random, maddening frequency. Bill was a dedicated police officer, sworn to protect his friends and neighbors. But he knew that they might suddenly turn on him. Or he on them.

Lauren had tried to talk him into moving to Pittsburgh, forty miles away. But they both knew that the big cities were no safer than the small towns. So they stayed in Chapel Grove, Pennsylvania, where they had both grown up. The birth rate had shot up in recent years, as will happen when people are so scared that they will grasp at any affirmation of life.

Bill glanced lovingly at Lauren. She was washing breakfast dishes, and her swollen womb made her stand a foot back from the sink. She was into her seventh month now, and wanted badly to have a baby, even though she was scared to bring it into a plague-ridden world. Her first two pregnancies had ended in miscarriages. This time, she almost didn’t dare to be hopeful. Her ultrasound test had revealed that she was going to have a baby girl. She wanted desperately to make it through a full nine months. She was afraid to jinx herself by decorating the spare room before the infant was born healthy and coming home.

Bill was proud of her for sticking to a healthful diet throughout her pregnancy. A petite ash blonde, she not only ate the right foods but also performed daily exercises recommended by her obstetrician. A passion for fitness was one of the things she and Bill had in common. She did her routine in the spare room, which, if all went well, would soon be transformed into a nursery, and he did his at the police gym where he could use state-of-the-art machines. At six-one and one-eighty, he was lanky but athletic looking, with light brown hair, a craggy face, alert brown eyes, and a dimpled chin. When he and Lauren were dressed for a night out, people often beamed at them and said they were a handsome couple.

Bill knew life hadn’t been easy on his wife while he was in the army. He had survived two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and she had lived in fear of getting a dreaded MIA or KIA letter from the Defense Department. He still carried a small piece of shrapnel in his right thigh from an IED explosion, too close to the femoral artery to be removed by a scalpel. After he was wounded, he was offered an opportunity to become a training officer, but instead he came back home and enrolled in the police academy. In five years on the job, he had done well to rise from patrolman to lieutenant, yet Lauren kept wishing he’d quit and do something else.

As he was wolfing down his eggs and toast, in a hurry to get to the police station in time, his cell phone rang and it was his boss, Captain Pete Danko. “Don’t sign in. Meet me at the Chapel Grove Medical Research Institute.”

“What’s up?”

“Some hypodermic needles have been stolen.”

“Is that a big deal?” Bill asked.

“Don’t ask questions, just get there.”

Annoyed at not being filled in more, Bill grimaced as he plunked his cell phone on the kitchen table, and Lauren shot him a worried look. “Not a murder or a bad accident,” he told her consolingly. “Only a petty theft. I’ve got to meet up with Pete.”

“That man pushes you around too much,” she said. “I wish you could find another job.”

“Well, I don’t like working with him, but if something bad happens, I want to be where I’m needed.”

“That’s what scares me, Bill. You’d risk your life for other people, and I don’t want to be a widow or a single mother.”

“This town is safer than most towns,” he said, and swallowed the dregs of his coffee, which had gone cold.

She sighed and said, “Text me later so I’ll know you’re okay.”

“Sure,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

He kissed her good-bye, then headed for the institute on a two-lane blacktop shimmering in the morning sun. The woods and green fields all around looked so peaceful and pleasant in the orange light of dawn, it was hard to believe that the plague was a constant threat. In the face of it, people still had to go on with their daily lives. In about an hour, Lauren would head for the Quik-Mart on the other side of town, where she worked for her father, along with Pete Danko’s wife, Wanda. The extra money helped Bill and Lauren pay bills and set aside money for a bigger and nicer house for the baby to grow up in, and Wanda’s extra money helped the Dankos pay for their son’s college tuition. It was a terrible thing in Bill’s eyes that the normal goals and aspirations of ordinary families were now tinged with dread.

He arrived at the Medical Research Institute just as Pete did, and they slid into side-by-side parking slots. He got out of his three-year-old Malibu and Pete got out of his shiny new Mercedes. Pete was fifteen years Bill’s senior, and in the army had been a major while Bill had been a sergeant; now he was the police captain, and Bill was his lieutenant. Pete had never shed his military bearing. His buzz cut was shaved to the bone around his ears, and his black suit, black shoes, and solid black tie might as well have been a uniform. He shot Bill a disparaging look for coming here in denim jeans, tan blazer, and open-necked yellow shirt, none of it against regulations, but not the way Pete thought his “inferior officer” should dress. As they walked toward the glass double doors of the gray concrete institutional building, he said sternly, “I’ll do the talking. I know the director.”

They signed in and were directed to Dr. Marissa Traeger’s office by an armed security guard. She sat behind a gray steel desk, and they took seats on steel folding chairs facing her. She had a rectangular face, a prominent nose, and brownish-gray shoulder-length hair. When she laid her wire-rimmed eyeglasses on her desk blotter, Bill saw that her brow was furrowed and there were dark, puffy bags under her eyes. She said, “Gentlemen, I’ll come straight to the point. We’re facing a bad situation. A dozen hypodermic needles were stolen from us, and I have good reason to believe they’re contaminated with the pathogen that causes the plague.”

“How sure are you of that?” Bill asked.

“Let me do the talking,” Pete said.

Dr. Traeger blinked at the severity of Pete’s demeanor, but went on to answer Bill’s question. “The needles were sent to us by a rural police department in West Virginia, after they were discovered on a dusty evidence shelf. They were collected during an outbreak ten years ago, so we knew they couldn’t teach us anything we didn’t already know. I consigned them to a hazmat disposal facility, but this morning I was told they never arrived. I confronted the orderly who made the run and made him think he wouldn’t be prosecuted if he told me the truth. He broke down and admitted that he had dashed into a convenience store for cigarettes and left the Jeep unlocked for five minutes, and when he came back out the hazmat container was gone. If the needles are shared by drug addicts, we could be facing an epidemic.”

“Why would you have thought this orderly was trustworthy?” Pete asked accusingly.

“He qualified for a secret clearance. And he’s been here three years and never failed any of his urine tests.”

Pete said, “Rounding up addicts and quarantining them, or even just rousting them without a warrant, would be against the law and might cause people to panic.”

“I realize that,” Dr. Traeger agreed. “I’m hoping you can recover the needles if you act quickly.”

“Was your man parked in a high-crime area?” Pete asked her.

“He swears he parked on a nice side street downtown,” she said. “But that’s no excuse to leave the vehicle unattended, especially without locking it up.”

“Where is he right now?”

“I made him wait in the basement, figuring you’d want to interrogate him. For God’s sake, track down the missing needles and get them back, and don’t let this incident leak out.”

Bill shuddered inwardly, trying to take in what he had been hit with. He had left home on a bright and peaceful June morning, as near to “normal” as one could get these days. Now it was a day imbued with a weary malignant dread. He had reassured Lauren that he was only going to investigate a petty robbery. But instead it had turned into something that could wreak utter devastation if he and Pete couldn’t stop it in time.

Pete turned to him and gave him orders. “Head for police headquarters, and I’ll meet you there in a while. Sign out a squad car for us to use. If I can get something useful out of the orderly, I’ll fill you in when we meet up.”

Bill thought he should have been allowed to be present while the orderly was being questioned. Maybe Pete didn’t want any witnesses. He had been an interrogation officer in Iraq when harsh, illegal things were done to prisoners, and he sometimes boasted of his successes, with sly hints that he had used his own “unique talents.” Whether or not Pete had actually engaged in any illegal practices, Bill really didn’t know. But he resented being treated more as an underling than a colleague. And he felt that he was capable of handling cases of much greater importance than the petty burglaries, car thefts, and domestic assaults that usually went down in Chapel Grove.

Three months out of his third rehab, Ron Haley was back as lead guitarist for a mediocre heavy metal band called the Hateful Dead. They were onstage doing sound checks for a matinee performance at a defunct Catholic church that had been gutted and turned into a rock palace. Ron remembered when he used to come here as a child, while it was still a church. Now it was one of the “occasions of sin” that the church preached against.

Even as he did his guitar licks, he knew he couldn’t remain drug-free if he didn’t quit the band. He wanted badly to scratch himself because he was wearing itchy, sticky ghoul makeup. Like other costumed bands such as KISS and GWAR, they had their own shtick, which was to impersonate flesh-eating zombies. They sported greenish-gray dead-looking skin and ghastly wounds molded in latex and streaked with gobs of artificial blood, and they screamed obscene lyrics at an ear-splitting volume, while four pierced and tattooed babes in string bikinis cavorted amid fake tombstones, grinning skulls, and severed body parts.

Ron was wearing earplugs because his hearing was two-thirds gone and he didn’t want to lose the rest of it. He darted his eyes left and right, half-expecting Bill Curtis to stomp in with Pete Danko, Curtis’s boss, who always had a stick up his ass. Bill had cut Ron a break because they had been buddies in high school, but if Danko had handled the bust, no question “zero tolerance” would have been Ron’s fate. In the fifteen years since they graduated, Bill had built a straight life for himself while Ron had gone pretty far crooked, and Ron knew that Bill still might send him to the slammer if he didn’t stay clean. “Check into a treatment facility and keep me in the loop,” Bill had warned him. “You do the right thing, I’ll drop the charges against you to possession without intent to sell, and it won’t carry jail time.”

When Ron got out of rehab a week and a half ago, he called Bill at the police station. “I’m finally getting my act together,” he promised. “I’m clean and I’m gonna stay that way.”

“Glad to hear it,” Bill said sternly, “because next time I won’t bail you out.”

Ron said, “I wasn’t always a degenerate musician, remember, Bill? I played in the band and you were on the football team, and I used to be in the Honor Society, same as you.”

Ron ruefully recalled that before he got hooked up with the Hateful Dead, he had a strong social conscience and a belief that life was meaningful. He got a degree in music education and cherished a mild but attainable ambition to become a teacher and band director at Chapel Grove High School. He hoped to revive that dream by quitting the band after tonight’s gig and asking his girlfriend, Daisy, to marry him. She was one of the Hateful Dead dancing girls, and the only one who wasn’t a druggie. Ron hated to see her prancing around damn near naked just because the band and their fans demanded the titillation. He felt bad that he used to take her tip money from her for drugs. He had completed his third rehab, and he was three months clean, and he knew that the numeral “3” was a mystical number in the New Testament. He told himself that maybe hope, like death, came in threes. He wanted to live past thirty-three, his next birthday, the same age Jesus was when he died.

Maybe if he married Daisy he’d go back to church, if he could somehow believe in it again. The Hateful Dead used to be his religion, but now, while he was clean, they seemed like a bunch of sick, toxic jerks. They couldn’t be much more brain-dead if they were embalmed. By acting like zombies, they were aping the plague, shaking their fists at it and pretending that life was meaningless. Death was taking over. The only creatures who would survive, for a while at least, were the undead. Ron wondered who the undead ones would devour when all the disease-free human beings were gone. What would the ghouls do when there was nothing more for them to eat?

In the years prior to the plague outbreaks, Ron had worried much about issues like global warming, a concern that now seemed to take second or third place to the plague, even among environmental activists. This didn’t seem rational, but it showed how people could forsake the things they had formerly believed in once they were wallowing in fear. How would the plague matter so much if the earth were burnt to a crisp? Ron believed the scientists who warned that the temperature of the oceans was rapidly elevating to the point where they could no longer hold enough oxygen for fish to survive, and when oceanic life was eliminated from the food chain, human beings would die off too. But now we didn’t need global warming to destroy us. We were doing it to ourselves. The earth would become a dead planet all right, a planet of the undead. But only for a little while—till even the living dead would die of starvation without any live people to eat.

As Dr. Traeger got on an elevator to descend to the basement of the Chapel Grove Medical Research Institute with Pete Danko, she was sure he would try to keep the lid on the situation, but if he sensed his own career in jeopardy he’d rather see her head roll than his own. He was a misogynist and a bully, in her eyes, but as necessary as a guard dog when it came to keeping the institute and its secrets safe and secure.

Stepping off the elevator, he said, “When all this blows over, I’ll come back for another tour of the top floors. It’s my duty to stay up-to-date on everything that goes on up there.”

He was referring to the laboratories where the undead were caged, treated, and studied. Experiments on them while they were still “living” had been illegal for the past five years, but the institute was still doing them, under the clandestine auspices of the Homeland Security Department.

“Those needles getting loose could be our undoing,” Danko said. “If the shit hits the fan, I won’t be able to protect you from our superiors, much less the public, the right-to-lifers and the Congress. Since the fuck-up happened on your watch, you’ll have to take the fall.”

“I’m well aware of that,” said Dr. Traeger. “That’s why I’m hoping to keep damage control local, at least for now, with your help. But what about Lieutenant Curtis? Can you control him?”

“That’s why I’m keeping him close. If anything blows up in our face I can blame it on him. He knows that you do medical research here and your main mission is finding a cure for the plague, so he’ll be as zealous as I am about finding the missing needles. He has to do whatever I tell him, without question. Or else I can get rid of him—with extreme prejudice, as the old CIA used to say.”

Dr. Traeger hated that she had to rely greatly upon Pete Danko’s ruthlessness. Privately she considered him a misogynist and a secret sociopath. He had been covertly inserted into his job as police chief, but in actuality he was an agent-in-place for HSD and was thus privy to what the Chapel Grove Medical Research Institute was all about. He knew enough to crucify her if push came to shove.

“What’s our young culprit’s name?” he asked as they walked down a long concrete-block wall.

“Jamie Dugan,” Dr. Traeger replied. “I feel sorry for him.”

“Don’t,” Danko said. “He fucked up and now he’s going to pay for it.”

“It’s still a pity,” said Dr. Traeger.

“Don’t waste your pity on him,” said Danko. “We’re in a war against the plague, and if we weaken we’re doomed. So don’t go all weepy on me just because you’re a woman.”

Dr. Traeger snapped, “Don’t give me your sexist crap. How many men could do the kinds of things I do here?”

He didn’t answer her. Instead, he confronted a uniformed guard stationed by a steel door and gruffly asked, “Is our prisoner restrained?”

“Not yet, sir,” the guard said as he unlocked the steel door and led them into a windowless, heavily padded, soundproofed room. “Hands behind your back,” he barked, and put handcuffs on young, bland-looking Jamie Dugan, who began shaking and perspiring even before the cuffs were clamped on his wrists. The guard pushed him down onto a steel chair that was bolted to the floor, then wrapped and locked a chain around his chest and shackled his ankles to two steel rings at the base of the chair.

Dr. Traeger blanched and looked away as Jamie’s eyes darted nervously from Danko to her, silently pleading, making her feel deeply sad and guilty. He had worked at the institute for several years and she had always been cordial toward him, and now she wished she could show him mercy. But she knew she couldn’t show weakness in front of Danko.

Danko turned to the guard and asked, “Do you smoke?”

“Not in here,” the guard said. “Not allowed.”

“Well, it’s allowed now because I said so. Light one up.”

The guard pulled a filter tip from a half-flattened pack that was in his pants pocket, and lit it with a BIC plastic lighter.

“Burn his left forearm,” Danko ordered.

The guard did it, and Jamie sucked in his breath with a soft whimper that doubtless would have been a scream if he had not controlled himself. Dr. Traeger tried not to be squeamish, but she flinched when she smelled hair and flesh burning. She told herself that, as distasteful as this extreme measure was, it nevertheless had to be implemented because Pete Danko needed to find out if Jamie was hiding any additional information that might lead to the retrieval of the missing needles.

“I already told you the truth!” Jamie yelled, tears flowing down his cheeks.

Danko said, “Keep going with the cigarette burns.”

Jamie’s screams got louder and more pitiful while multiple burns were administered one right after another on various parts of his body. Meanwhile Danko just stood there, looking on expectantly, as if his victim might blurt out something valuable due to the continuing torture, without even being asked any follow-up questions.

It was a long and agonizing process for Dr. Traeger as well as for the prisoner. She had to watch blisters being raised all over Jamie’s arms, legs, and face, making him cry and scream worse than ever. Still, he didn’t give in, and she wished he would so the torture would end. She became convinced that Danko would learn nothing more of any value. She felt sorry for Jamie. She had always thought of him as a polite and pleasant young fellow. She was stunned when he finally started whining through his tears, confessing to much more than he had told before.

“My wife was gonna divorce me because of my gambling. We were gonna have to file bankruptcy. I sold the needles and some of her jewelry to a street dealer they call Fishhead.”

“Fishhead?” Danko scoffed. “Surely you can make up a better name than that, Jamie!”

“It’s the God’s truth! Please let me go,” Jamie pleaded.

“Burn his left nipple,” Danko told the guard.

The blistering, burning flesh brought forth the loudest screams that Dr. Traeger had ever heard. She wanted to put her hands over her ears but she didn’t want to earn Danko’s scorn.

“Do the right nipple,” he told the guard.

“No . . . please!” Jamie cried out. “Logan Cronan! That’s his real name! I swear!”

“Anything else you want to tell us?” Danko asked.

“That’s all I know,” Jamie whimpered.

“Burn the right one,” Danko said once again.

The guard did it, and Dr. Traeger thought she would faint from the agony and sound of Jamie’s screams. But no further disclosures came out of the young man’s mouth.

Danko drew his pistol and said, “Stand back.”

Dr. Traeger was already backed against one of the padded walls, wishing she could melt into the padding. The guard stepped back as far as he could in the eight-by-ten-foot room. Then Danko shot Jamie in the head, the report only slightly deadened by the soundproofing.

. . .