Dead Stop (28 page)

“Harley, listen
to me.”

“Okay.”

“I want you to
cut its head off.”

“You want me to
what?! Seriously?”

“Yes.” She felt
foolish as hell talking from inside the stall, but if the inkling of a theory
she had forming was even near correct…if those threads were doing what she
thought they were… “Can you do that?”

“Sure…I guess,”
she could hear the shrug in his voice. “If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I
want.”

“Okay, just a
minute.”

She heard him
approach the body, then stop again. The tarp rustled, and she realized he was
imitating her trick with the tissues and using it as a way to hold its head
still without touching it. There came a surprisingly short period of rhythmic
rustling of the tarp she knew had to be caused by him holding it against the
things head while he sawed on the neck, then the clomp of his boots returning
to the stall.

“Okay, Doc. All
done.”

“Tell me you
aren’t standing out there with the head in your hands.”

“I’m not.” Now
he laughed. “It’s down by the thing’s feet. What the
hell
, Doc?”

“Sorry,” she
grouched and came out the door of the stall. “I’m just rattled and jumpy. And
I’ve got a real bad feeling about what I’ve seen so far.”

“Fair enough.”
Harley didn’t seem insulted and followed her back over to the now headless
body.

Rachel noted the
head laying down between its feet and thought about asking Harley to move it so
she could roll the corpse over and dissect the spine. Then a second idea
occurred and she decided there was no need to bother. Retrieving Harley’s knife
she pulled the thing’s arm out to the side and rolled up its sleeve. Making
sure it’s hand laid palm down on the floor, the veterinarian then cut a long,
slow incision down the back of the forearm. Once finished, she spread the dead
skin apart and immediately spotted what she was looking for.

“See that?” She
pointed to thin grey and white line running between two blackened muscles.

“Yeah.” His brow
knitted as he stared into the incision. “What is it?”

“That’s the
radial nerve. But now it has a companion.”

“The same
stuff?”

“Yeah,” she
sighed. “The same stuff.”

“So what does it
mean?”

“Well, it means
my first theory was correct. When I told Marisa earlier that something had
hijacked these things nervous systems, I didn’t know how right I was. This
stuff has both taken it over and replaced it at the same time.”

“What do you
mean, doc?”

 “I mean
whatever this material is, it operates independent of the host at the same time
it’s fusing with it. I’m afraid what it means to you is that you’re going to
have to go behead all the other bodies in this store. This stuff can heal
independent of injury done to the body, which means you’re probably lucky the
thing you disabled earlier didn’t get back up when you and Marisa went into the
store. I guarantee it would have at some point. ”

“Aw, hell.
Gladys and the other guy too?”

“I’m afraid so,”
She laid a sympathetic hand on his arm. “You saw the trucker Stacey calls
Buddha Boy outside.”

“Yeah,” Harley
sighed. “Crap…”

“I know, I’m
sorry.” She patted his arm then pulled back her hand and turned her attention
back to the corpse. “But now it’s time to solve mystery number two. Why the
hell are these things eating at all?”

“Because they’re
zombies and they woke up hungry? What do you mean?”

“I mean,” she
muttered as she ripped open the corpse’s shirt, exposing a grey chest and
abdomen, “that outside of Hollywood, ‘zombies’ don’t make sense. The pancreas
deteriorates into a puddle of digestive enzymes not long after death, and
literally digests the rest of the organs in the lower abdomen. Embalming only
slows the process, not stops it. There’s a reason the ancient Egyptians used to
pull the organs out of their dead before mummifying them.”

“Damn,” Harley
looked at her with respect. “How do you know all this?”

“Believe it or
not,” Rachel chuckled, “they teach us ‘animal doctors’ a thing or two in
college as well. Heck, sometimes they even let us read books.”

“Sorry. I didn’t
mean it like that.”

“I know, no
problem. The point is, the corpses we’ve seen tonight shouldn’t have any
internal organs to speak of…at least not below the diaphragm. So there should
be no point in them eating anything…yet they do. I wonder why that is?”

Harley shrugged
and said nothing.

“Well,” she
muttered and placed the knife at the bottom of the corpse’s sternum, “it’s time
to find out. This might not smell very good..

She braced
herself for the stench, and pushed the blade into the corpse’s belly. The
embalmed muscles were stiff, and it took a surprising amount of effort on her
part to force it all the way in. Then using two hands on the handle, she braced
herself and pulled downward, slowly slicing through the cadaver’s abdominal
muscles until she reached its groin.

“Whew!” Rachel
wiped her brow then starting folding herself two large pads of toilet paper.
“That was harder than it looked. Now, let’s see if we can figure out what makes
these things tick.”

Taking a pad of
tissue in each hand and holding them like potholders, she pushed them into the
incision and pulled it wide. It opened with a wet, viscous ripping sound
magnified by the tiled walls.

A second later
both Rachel and Harley peered into the exposed cavity.

“What the hell?”
Harley muttered. “It’s just more of the same stuff! Only it’s not white.”

The body’s
abdomen appeared to be stuffed with pink cotton candy.

“Actually, this
is beginning to make an ugly kind of sense,” Rachel murmured and used the knife
to probe into the mass. A few seconds later, she retracted the tool with a dark
lump impaled on its blade. She examined it for a couple of seconds, then closed
her eyes and scraped it off against the monsters leg.

“What was that?”

“That,” she took
a deep breath, then exhaled slowly, “was a piece of Gladys. It was being
directly absorbed through the cell walls of the biomass, which is why the stuff
is pink. And that pretty much tells me what it is…”

“It does?” The
tall young man leaned back and looked at her in surprise. “What is it, Doc?”

Rachel looked
down at the dissected corpse for a second, her face a mask of incredulity, then
looked back at him.

“It’s a fungus,
Harley,” she said it as if she could barely believe it herself. “It’s a
goddamned fungus!”

###

“A fungus?” Deke
frowned. “You mean like a mushroom?”

“Not exactly.”
Rachel leaned back against the sink, ruefully aware that once again all eyes in
the kitchen were on her. “A mushroom is a fungus, but most funguses aren’t
mushrooms. They can look like a lot of things…from mushrooms, to furry patches
of bark…microscopic cells…or like this stuff….cotton or hairlike roots. There
are all kinds of them. And now it seems we’ve discovered a new type. One that
can animate a corpse, and can also be passed from killer to victim.”

“Lucky us,”
Grandpa Tom growled. “So not only do we have to worry about all the dead people
from the cemetery up the road, but everybody they killed too. Christ! How many
have they killed here so far?”

“I have no
idea,” the doctor sighed, “but it’s probably safe to assume the big monster who
killed Gerald ain’t the only one out there.”

“So who all do
we know is dead or missing?” Harley asked as he watched out the diamond shaped
window of the kitchen door. “Maybe we can build a rough idea from that. We can
exclude Gladys and the customer in the store…I don’t want to go into it, but I
made sure they won’t be getting back up. And we can be pretty sure Gerald ain’t
going to be either. Holly is a possibility, but since that just happened it
will be a while.”

The room went
quiet as people turned the question over in their heads.

“There was
Arnold, Leon, and Tomas working out back,” Marisa stared at the ceiling, “and
we saw Lizzie…err Libby…walking back there too.” The raven haired waitress
winced at using the nickname on the prostitute when she realized the woman must
have died horribly back there. “And there were five or six rigs lined up.”

“So, about ten.”
Harley nodded. “I’ve been counting and I keep coming up with a count of around
forty of these bastards, so we’re talking about a twenty five percent increase
in their numbers if all those people get up. So far, we’ve only seen one
though.”

“Well, you
aren’t going to see Arnold, Tomas, or Leon,” Stacey said in a quiet voice. Once
again her face took on the tight look from earlier and Deke pulled her in close
beside him. “They were…all over the garage back there. Those things tore them
to pieces.”

Rachel considered
that and realized she had been missing the obvious.

“You know, now
that you mention it, I might have been wrong. You’re probably not going to see
any of the initial victims,” she mused aloud. “These things woke up hungry, and
there are a lot of them. They probably pretty much devoured all the people they
first ran into. But by the time they got to the big guy, they must have already
eaten a bunch of people and weren’t so hungry. They still chewed a pretty good
bit out of him too…but he might be the only one.”

“Let’s hope so,”
Harley replied. “Because he bothers me. He’s not just bigger and stronger; I
think he operates on a different level than the others as well. I don’t like
the way he occasionally looks around. None of the others do it, only him.”

Rachel thought
about that for a moment too.

“It may be due
to him having a fresher nervous system for this stuff to work with,” she
theorized. “He might be more advanced than the rest of them. The way he acted
when he attacked Gerald and Holly would certainly suggest it. He went right to
the driver’s side door and smashed in the window instead of scrabbling at it
like the others.”

“Okay then,”
Harley looked around the kitchen, “in that case I think we need to find a way
to block this door. The one to the store locks, but this one doesn’t. Somebody
might want to think about organizing a quiet run up front to the store while
it’s still dark and pulling all the food they can get back here.”

“Is that safe?”

“We don’t have a
lot of choice. We also need to knock out this hallway light so it doesn’t shine
through every time the door is opened and catch something’s attention. I also
recommend no more trips out of here unless it’s to the bathroom, and be sure
and go before dawn. I think the rain is already starting to ease up as it is so
these things are going to be able to see inside soon.”

“How long is it
till dawn anyway?” Rachel rubbed her eyes and stifled a yawn.

In the last few
hours she had been in a fight for survival at the back door with man-eating
monsters, raced to stop one man from bleeding to death, tended four other
wounded people, consoled one half hysterical young woman, and performed her
first autopsy on the body of a human being. She was exhausted. And the truly
frightening part was the knowledge she was one of the last uninjured and
healthy people in the room.

The cuts on
Harley’s forearms were superficial, the result of grappling with the monster in
the store, and he ignored them. Marisa’s foot injury seemed minor, but Rachel
knew it hurt and could be a problem if the girl had to move fast. Deke’s
shoulder was worse from punching Gerald, and the doctor knew the muscle
probably needed to be stitched up to prevent it from tearing even further.
Stacey’s arm lacerations were painful but not debilitating, but the massive
bruise on her ribs had to hurt. And Grandpa Tom…

…she was way
over her head with that situation. Whatever happened to the old trucker was
probably going to happen, and she could do damn little for him. He looked a lot
better, but she noticed he still hadn’t found a reason to get up off his crate
yet. He needed a hospital…now. The same held true for the little janitor, lying
bundled on the floor.

So if something
happened to Harley or Marisa…it would be time for Dr. Rachel Sutherland, DVM to
put on her action hero cape.

But until then,
she could really use a nap.

“It’s four in
the morning, doc.” Stacey pointed over at a time clock on the back wall. “It
will start to lighten up in about two hours. Sunrise won’t be for almost
another hour afterwards though.”

“Okay then,”
Rachel realized Harley had just left the delegation of chores to her, “then we
better make the most of it. Stacey, can you and Deke sneak up to the store and
start bringing food back here?”

“Sure. C’mon,
Deke.” The two headed down the back hallway, hand in hand.

“Tom?” she
turned to the old trucker on the crate, “I don’t want you to push yourself, but
I could use some of that male handiness with mechanical stuff I’m sure you’re
just brimming with. Everything big in this kitchen looks bolted down, and I
would appreciate it if you would just kind of look stuff over and see which you
think would be the easiest to get loose and be used to block the door. Can you
do that?”

“No problem,
Doc.”

“Well Harley,
that leaves…hey! Where are you two going?”

Harley had
already started down the hallway towards the store, escorted by Marisa and her
bat.

“I’m…err…” he
spared a quick glance at Marisa, “…
we’re
going to get a better look at
things. There is a storeroom next to the coolers on the store side, and I
wanted to check it for tools and stuff. Then I intend to find out more about
what we’re up against. When I was dragging those bodies into the store cooler I
noticed some rungs set in the wall going up to a hatch in the roof.”