Medora: A Zombie Novel (3 page)

After lunch, Dr. Stark sometimes had a drink. He used to carry a flask with him but he felt too much like an alcoholic so he just reverted to keeping a bottle of Jack in the left drawer of the desk in his office. That kept things simple. He walked up the flight of stairs from his office in the University of Chicago medical school with a Coke from the overpriced vending machine. Bursting from the stairwell doorway, he stumbled upon his secretary Denise.

Denise had a thinly masked smile on her face. “There is a message for you from the Secretary of Health. I have it on my desk.” She paused, waiting for his
reaction.

“What could they possibly want?” Stark leaned against the wall.

“It was Secretary Rambert. He said he wanted to talk to you about your work with CJD so you need to call him back right away.”

“Yeah, okay
,” he said, sauntering away from the desk.

“Where are you going?” She
asked with a taunting tone.

“I’ll be right back, jeez.”

Stark went into the break room and poured his Coke into a Styrofoam cup, wondering why anybody would care about CJD. His work with CJD was what had essentially destroyed his career. Dr. Reginald Stark had devoted nearly 12 years trying to prove CJD was caused by something else and was consecutively mocked in every conference he gave about likely origins the disease had. He was lucky that he still had an office on the sixth floor, kitty corner to the morgue. The smell of formaldehyde creeping into his office every day was welcoming, considering the alternatives.

He
went back by Denise’s desk. She just sat and glared at him with scolding eyes.

“Okay, okay, I’ll call back now
,” he said, walking into the office.

Stark didn’t' have time to pick up the receiver before the phone rang.

“Dr. Reggie Clark, how may I help you?” Denise announced to the caller. “He just stepped in, I’ll send you right over.” She hit hold. “It’s him.”

“Who?”
He asked, already knowing who it was.

“
Rambert. Secretary Rambert himself is calling.”

“Oh, okay, send him through.” The red light on his phone started
blinking. “This is Dr. Stark.”

“Dr. Stark, this is Larry
Rambert, Secretary of the Department of Health. How are you?” The voice was friendly yet hasty.

“I’m
fine, Mr. Secretary. It’s a pleasure and a surprise to hear from you. What can I do for you?” Stark cleared his throat and suddenly felt a nauseous stomach creeping up on him.

“Dr.
Stark, I have been recently reading through some articles that you published concerning your research with Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease or CJD?” he paused.

“Okay, yes.”

“The reason that your articles came to surface was that you published a completely different theory of the cause of CJD than the now widely accepted theory.”

“Yes… How did you find those articles?”

“I had to dig quite a bit to find them. Just so I understand correctly, could you quickly brief me on your findings and how they differ from the other research?”

“Well
, yes, I wouldn’t mind but can ask what this is in regards to? I mean those articles weren’t exactly well received.”

“I understand
that, Dr. Stark. There are recent events that might be relevant to your research and I need to know to what extent. A briefing of your research would be extremely helpful at the present time.” He paused again.

“
Well, I don’t really know where to begin. A lot of time and research was put into all this. At the time, when people started getting symptoms, it was originally thought to be bipolar disorder or a severe case of depression. The families of the patients describe them as being uncharacteristically sad and having a lack of enthusiasm. But when the patients started to lose coordination and visual acuity, everyone over there started thinking that it was a neurological disorder, right away.”

“Over there?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. The first cases started in England and Scotland. Supposedly, people over there were getting CJD because of Mad Cow disease. A lot of young people started showing symptoms. All at once about two dozen cases happened, where these kids in their twenties started to lose coordination. They would have spasmic episodes, forget who they were and there was even a specific case where a girl started chewing on her fingers, having no idea that she was doing it. She had to have her hand amputated.”

“Did you ever see any of these cases personally?”

“Personally? Or course. I worked at a hospital there back in the eighties that had about three or four cases of it. I saw the complete degeneration of a high school kid who was a star cricket player with scholarship offers, but became so affected by CJD that he gouged out his eye with shards of a Coke bottle. It is a terrible disease to watch”

“Did the patients ever attack anyone?”

“No, not really. Rarely. Their motor skills became too slow. They did, however, have to be restrained on a number of occasions.”

“So they never attacked anyone?”

“No, no, not to my knowledge. What exactly are these new findings that you’re talking about?”

“Please, Dr.
Stark, if I may, what did your research suggest about the nature of the disease?”

“
Well, it’s now generally accepted that people were eating the meat of cattle with Mad Cow disease which was caused basically by cannibalism of the cows. The farmers were feeding the cows the entrails of other cows. It caused major neurological problems for the cows, because it made them susceptible to a particular protein that attacks neural tissue. People would eat the meat of the diseased cows, and suddenly, you had a disease that crossed species into CJD.”

“And your research doesn’t conclude that
CJD was the cause?”

“
I never once thought that it was caused by CJD.”

“Really?”

Stark was silent for a moment and then spoke. “There is no doubt in my mind that whatever was happening to those kids was not caused by Mad Cow or CJD.”

“What makes you say that?”

“What they had wasn’t a neurological disease at all. Well, it is in that it does infect the brain, but I think it affects every cell of the entire body. CJD affects only the brain. These patients had a massive shutdown of every body system, not just the brain. The body no longer coordinates with itself. Each cell can suddenly produce its own energy without the help of the rest of the body. In a sense, every cell in the body became a rogue cell.”

“Interesting.”

“Yes, they no longer were one person made up of many cells, but a mass accumulation of cells that no longer work together to form one organism. That’s why the patients couldn’t walk, talk, or think straight. They were no longer themselves and they essentially lost their identity as a person. In other words, they became senseless animals.”

“Was there ever a vaccine found?”

“No. Hell no, they were never cured. The patients all died. A few clinical trials in England took in a lot of these patients. I’m not sure what they tried with them exactly. Maybe some new medication at the time. Obviously, it didn’t really work out.”

“Do you know the name of the company
that did the trials?”

“Oh, no.
It’s been a long time now. I do remember working with a doctor that was involved with the pharmaceutical company that did the trials. I believe it was a Dr. Crimmel, although I didn’t get to know him very well.”

“I see.”
Rambert paused to jot down some notes. “So how was it controlled, what prevented an epidemic?”

“
Every single one of the patients was quarantined and taken away to an offsite facility. They contained it very well. They also claimed that the laws they enacted to stop farmers from cannibalizing the meat stopped the spread, but I never really believed it.”

“Why didn’t you believe it?”

“Because I performed autopsies on about a dozen corpses and every single one of them had died with some type of cancer.”

“They all had cancer?”

“That’s right. Don’t bother looking that up, because you won’t find a single report that says so. All the researchers denied it.”

Rambert
cleared his throat. “Dr. Stark, did you ever see people with CJD ever act… cannibalistically?”

“
Again, I don’t think it was CJD. I always asserted that it was something entirely different, and no, they never did anything like that.” Stark breathed heavily with impatience.

“Yes, okay. I was also wondering about your career prior to getting into medicine. You studied physics for quite a while?”

“Yep.” Stark was becoming briefer in his answers. “I received my doctorate in electromagnetism from Caltech. I taught for a few years there as well.”

“
Wow, that is very impressive. What made you switch over to medicine?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I didn’t want to waste my life in a lab, so I went to medical school. Now I’m wasting my life in a lab.” He laughed.

Rambert returned his laugh and then spoke more sharply. “Dr. Stark, your research may be relevant to recent occurrences and the Department of Health requires your assistance in the matter.”

“Okay,
sure. I can fax you over some of my personal notes.”

“No, no we need to you to come to Washington immediately.”

Stark paused and looked at his calendar, stalling. “Uh, well, I’m looking at my calendar, I’ll ask my secretary to see when I can make a flight out. It could be a few weeks.”

“Flight accommodations have been arranged to leave from Chicago O’Hare Airport in two hours to bring you to Washington. You will be debriefed when you
arrive, not over the phone, since all details at this point have become classified. I will leave the flight itinerary with your secretary”

“
Okay,” Stark uttered weakly and transferred the call to Denise. He looked down at his hands and then opened the left hand corner of his desk for his bottle of Jack, forgetting about the Coke.

“Hey, guys, come on in.”

Two men dressed in battered sweatshirts and faded jeans stepped into the foyer of the Sanders home. The taller man had a mustache and thick sideburns that reminded Ellen of a
seventies disco dancer. They glanced around the house, arching their necks at the ceiling trying to show some sort of authority as handy men. Ellen led them down the wooden planks of the unfinished stairs into the dank basement. The men noticed a slight cling of mildew in the musky air.

“
Okay, so we'll start with this room here, towards that corner there…” The worker with the mustache pointed to the corner of the room that was enveloped in a ray of sunlight bursting from a window well above. The manner with which this man looked around at the house and smirking had an eerie quality that started to bother Ellen. He seemed too much at ease.

Sh
e quickly responded, “Yes, okay. Gary, right?”

“Yeah, I'm Gary,
and this is Scott.” Scott smiled and weakly waved at her.

“I think starting in this room would be fine
. Do you think you'll be able to get the bathroom finished today too?”

“
Well, it depends. I thought you were going to have some moldings in place for us. Are you going to need us to put those in now?” His voice rose with annoyance.

“You'll have to do that too, so whatever more time it takes is okay with
me, guys.”

Gary kept arching his neck and darting his eyes around the room with the same authoritative mood from before. He stopped and gestured toward Ellen. “Is your husband going to be home in the next few hours?”

Ellen hesitated before answering the question with an unintended pause of suspicion. “He…”

“
It’s just that we want to know if he might have other specifications in mind.” Gary smiled confidently.

“
Well, no, he won't have anything else in mind so you won't need to bother with him.” She swung around and started for the stairs. “But he is in and out all day at different times. He’s usually here around three.”

“Huh, that's
funny. When I talked to him over the phone it sounded like he was in the advertising biz.”

Her lip curled with a sense of antagonism. “Yes he
is, but what difference does that make?”

“
Well, if he works at one of the advertising firms downtown it seems like it might take him a bit longer to get home than three o'clock in the afternoon.”

“The hours he works has no bearing on you laying carpet in this basement.”

“Oh, I didn't mean to offend you, Ma'am, just wanted to make sure I got my facts straight.” He stared at her.

Ellen now noticed what bothered her about this man's presence in her home. He had confidence in his body language and speech in a foreign setting, like a scam artist manipulating a target for an ulterior motive. His smile bothered her more than
anything else. 

“My husband will be home when he arrives.” Her eyes panned across the room to the other worker who stared blankly at her. “You can get started and if you need
anything, I'll be upstairs expecting a visit from a friend.” She briskly stomped up the wooden stairs, knowing that the last thing she said was a lie and it sounded like a lie.

“
Oh, don't worry about us, Ma'am, we'll get started. Maybe we'll bother you for some water in a bit.” He heckled from below the stairs at her empty footsteps.

Ellen walked into the kitchen and started wondering about where
Keith kept that gun. Then she silently laughed at herself and started making lemonade for the men who were in her basement.

*****

Keith actually started to get a little work done. He thought of four new ideas to pitch to the cough syrup people about color schemes and ad time slots. The last meeting had ended with the disappointed look of the owners staring back at him from across the table and Janice explaining to them about how things are supposed to run in this company. He stared back at them in complete indifference, realizing that he hated his job because he didn't care about the work.

He
stretched his arms, peered outside his office, and saw Dave sauntering down the hallway toward him. The expression on his face was a mix of blank unawareness and vague focus, as if he was detached from what he was currently doing and analyzing an unseen complex math problem in the back of his mind.

Keith waited for him to approach. “
Hey, where have you been for the last hour? Janice was looking for you and I didn't do too good of a job covering for you.”

Dave brought his eyes up to Keith. “I just got some really bad news.”

“What happened?”

“It turns out that after Lindsey left my house last night she got pulled over by a cop for swerving all over the road. When the cop got out of the
car, she just took off. She started a twenty minute hot pursuit all over Jersey.”

“What? Why did she run?” Keith leaned forward in his chair.

“I don't know, but she crashed into a restaurant and…”

Keith winced, “I know the rest
. It was on the news this morning.”

“
…she had a gun and was shooting at the cops. I can't believe it. I don't understand how she could do that. They killed her on the spot. She's dead and I can't understand it.” He looked off through a window, avoiding eye contact.

Keith paused and let out a long sigh. “I'm
sorry, Dave. I saw that on the news and I had no idea it was her.”

“Her sister called me and said she was screaming at them and not making any sense. She was just a crazy person shooting a gun.”

“Was she… drunk? Or…” Keith treaded lightly attempting to sound sensitive.

“I never s
aw her do any drugs and she drank sometimes, but nothing crazy. I mean, I didn't know her that well, so who knows what she was into.”

“Are you going to be okay? Were you two very close?” Keith began to search the archives in his mind for the generic sympathetic phrases that one uses in situations like this.
He had known Dave not to take personal tragedy too well. When his father died suddenly ten years ago, he went missing for three days on Lake Michigan curled up in a rowboat without food.

“
No, I'll be okay. I've just got to let this sink in.” Dave too was searching for the typical phrases of a person in shock.

“Let's get something to eat after work, or why don't you come over for dinner with me and Ellen tonight?” He raised his eyebrows
in a show of emotional support.

“Yeah, yeah that's good.”
He numbly walked away. As soon as Dave turned the corner, Janice came rolling down the hallway. Her lips curled downward towards the fatty jowls of her neck creating deep dark points at the sides of her mouth. It gave her face the appearance of an over exaggerated frown. Her forehead glistened under the white lighting of the office. Keith had become accustomed to the general disdain that he had for this gigantic woman.

“
Keith, are you ready for the meeting? We have the cough syrup people coming in about ten minutes.” She scowled above him in his chair.

Keith was about to respond but was abruptly interrupted by a cutting stench around him. It was an acrid odor with the quality of decaying organic matter. His mind quickly began to conjure up images of maggots and rancid
meat, beginning to grasp what the possible source of the smell could have been. Janice readjusted her body weight in an attempt to show her impatience, which created a greater waft of the smell from the wake of air movements. Keith slowly realized the horror that the smell was actually coming from a human being.

Temp
orarily recovering, he answered, “Yes, I'm ready to go. I've got some good ideas for them... it should…” he let out a cough, overcome by the noxious air. He stared up at her and noticed a yellow tinge in her face that seemed to be originating from her chest and back. Her hair was damp with moisture and clung to her temples and cheeks. She stood with her mouth open, breathing much more heavily than she usually did. He noticed her white fingers grasping the edge of his desk, her arm almost imperceptibly rattling back and forth to sustain her balance.

He looked up at her oval, leaky nostrils. “
Hey, are you okay? You look... sick.”

She paused in momentary disbelief. “Keith
, I won't take this from you! I'm not going to be subject to your delusions.” She wasn't screaming but speaking loudly enough for people down the hall to notice.

“What? I'm
sorry, but you don't look well.”

“Just get to the meeting,” she barked and attempted
to exit the room much faster than her physique would allow, stumbling over her high heels. She left a viscous residue on the table where her palm had been. Keith quickly and methodically opened the window to his office and squirted hand sanitizer on his desk. He had an overwhelming desire to tell the world his story.

In the meeting
sat three men with one identical facial expression of annoyance. Janice sat opposite them with Keith at a reasonable enough distance from her that it wouldn't be noticeable that he was intentionally distancing himself from her. Keith began to explain his various proposals on a projector, which cast filaments of dancing light onto the wall. After he droned on in a monotonous tone for a while, he began to realize how boring he must sound.

Before he could worry any more about the
presentation, he noticed a slight gurgling sound being generated from Janice's throat. The three men also noticed. She sat, wide eyed, staring past the heads of the three men. Keith halted the presentation and looked over at her. Intermittent snoring perforated the gurgling sound, while the entire room sat watching and waiting in momentary disbelief.

Keith held his breath and leaned over to her.
“Janice... what's going on?”

She didn't
respond, but the snoring stopped. Her eyes stared vacantly at the wall. The room was completely silent for a moment except for the faint whirring of the overhead projector.

One of the men leaned forward, “I think we'd better call an ambulance.” He paused and with an alerted voice added, “I think she needs an ambulance.”

Keith nodded, relieved that the man was being sympathetic of the situation. He began to look around the office to summon some help but people were only paying attention to dimly lit computer screens. The smell that was issuing from Janice was now palpable to the three businessmen silently watching the scene. One of the men had his suit sleeve cupped over the front of his face.

Keith leaned in closer to Janice and shook her shoulder. Nothing in her body stirred
except a few momentary jiggles of fat in her face. He brought his ear closer to her face, certain she was not breathing. There was no movement of air coming from her.

One of the men across the table notice
d the alarm in Keith's face and made an inept attempt at being useful. “Maybe you should put a mirror under her nose to see if she's breathing.”

“I'm going to go get some help.” Keith turned to the door but stopped abruptly when he heard Janice say in a silent, dull voice, “No,
no, I'm fine.”

He spun around and saw her looking up at him, her deeply set eyes squinting. Keith could only stare back at her, feeling perspiration building on his forehead.
In what seemed to be an insurmountable challenge, even for a heavyset person, Janice then proceeded to get up from her chair. She was having trouble with the basic act of rising from a chair; not being able to coordinate the sequential movements of raising her body with her arms, and then letting her legs take the weight to lift up. She was using her arms and legs at the same time, which made her body spring upward and then violently crash back down onto the suffering, swivel office chair. After several attempts of this, she eventually slithered right out of the chair and fell to the ground, knocking the chair to lazily slide in the direction of where Keith was standing.

Through the entire
calamity, the three men appeared aghast and amused simultaneously. Finally, one of the bald men got up to help her. Keith and the bald man started to lift her by her shoulders, both cringing at the smell, but trying not to make it too obvious. They attempted to set her back in the chair, but she managed to make it to her feet and was able to stand freely, staring vacantly. She crudely pushed the bald man out of her way and stood in front of the projection screen, the shades of light and color streaming across her face. She stood with an eerie silence and a blank expression.

When men have grown so accustomed to proper social etiquette for the majority of their
lives, they become unfit to register psychotically bizarre human behavior rationally. For the four men that stood in the conference office, this was the case. Janice bent her neck down as far as she could and began to thump the back of her head methodically onto the projection screen behind her. With each hit, the sheet rock of the walls vibrated, shaking the motivational posters hanging above her. They simply watched for a few seconds, not being able to react. She had hit her head with enough force that every time she brought her head up, blood began to spurt. It splattered in the projected light and started to drip down the wall towards the carpet.