Dead Stop - Dead Stop Part 23
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Dead Stop Part 23

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."

"Is this wise?" She folded her arms and fixed a level look at him.

"It's actually my specialty, doc. I know what I'm doing. Besides, I've got Marisa watching my back."

"Fine," Rachel sighed, "if you're going to be out there then put some extra effort in looking for a way out of this place. There's something I didn't say earlier because I didn't want Deke and Stacey to hear it, but I think you two need to know this.

"Oookaayyyy..." Harley and Marisa stopped and looked at each other, then back at her.

"Gerald may have been right about something else, too," the veterinarian continued. "This stuff may infect living people as well."

"Mierde!" Marisa hissed, "Are you serious!?"

"Yeah," Rachel looked from one to the other, "It would be slower, because we have something dead people don't...an immune system. And it would probably depend on the seriousness of the initial exposure, such as being wounded by one of these things. But there is a good chance we've all been exposed to one degree or another."

"But you're saying," Harley frowned in concentration, "that those of us who were actually clawed by those things have the greatest risk."

"Yes. And bites are likely even worse. While I've tried to clean all the wounds, those are the injuries where people are actually getting infected tissue come into contact with internal tissue of their own. And the deeper the injury, the greater the risk of infection since I can only clean so deep."

The two chewed that one over a second before Marisa put her free hand to her forehead.

"Oh no...Benny."

"And Deke," Rachel whispered. "Those two have the worst exposure. There is no way I got everything out of their wounds. But Harley, you and Stacey aren't out of the woods by a long shot. You guys are a close second on the danger list. And if these things have been releasing any kind of spores, then we may all be infected. The truth is, we would have been better off if Gerald's virus theory had been the case. This could end up being a lot worse."

"So we're screwed." Marisa dropped her hand and met Rachel's eyes with a level glare. "Nothing we do really matters because we're all going to turn into these things anyway. Or at least some of us are.

"Maybe. I still think it's going to depend on the severity of the exposure. We need to keep a close eye on Benny."

"Keep an eye on Benny? Why? Nobody is doing anything to Benny!"

"Easy," Rachel soothed, recognizing the flash of protective anger in the waitress's eyes. "It's nothing like that. I'm a doctor, remember? I don't hurt people. Besides, there is another reason I'm bringing this up."

"What's that, Doc?" Harley cut off whatever Marisa was about to say.

"I may have a solution to this problem...if we can just get to it."

"What do you mean, 'get to it?'"

"Well, the one bit of hope in all this," Rachel continued, "is now that I know what I'm dealing with I can start approaching it as something to be treated. I have an anti-fungal medication out in my truck that may go a long way towards protecting us, if we can get it before being infected too long."

"You mean you can cure this stuff?" Marisa brightened visibly. "Holy hell, Doc! That changes everything!"

"No, I didn't say that," Rachel cautioned. "I said I could fight it. The medicine in my truck would need to be administered early in the infection. Fungal infections can be real bastards to beat once their deeply entrenched, and this stuff appears aggressive. I've got other medicine at my office which would work a lot better, but you let this crap go on too long and I don't know if even it would work. Once it has taken over the nervous system, I doubt anything could save a person then."

"So our priorities have changed," Harley nodded, "Got it."

"We need to get to my truck or somewhere else I can get some medicine. Either way, we have to get out of here."

"What am I looking for, if I make it to your truck, doc?"

"Harley..." Marisa warned but the tall man held up his hand.

"It's in a red tackle box with a white lid," Rachel answered. "You'll find it in the large toolbox in the back of my truck. Just lift the lid and it should be right on top to the right. The toolbox is locked, though. If you come up with a way to go for it, be sure and get the key from me first."

"Right. Anything else?"

"Not really," the veterinarian sighed, "other than to emphasize that time is not our friend here. Having Deke and Stacey get supplies keeps them busy, and gives them something constructive to keep their spirits up, but holing up and trying to wait these things out is probably not a realistic option."

"Understood." Harley changed direction and headed back towards the kitchen. "I had been thinking we would spend today hiding out back here and try something tomorrow night, but if we are running out of time then I'll go straight to Plan B."

Rachel watched the tall man go back into the kitchen and head for the restaurant door.

"Plan B?" She caught Marisa's arm as the girl started to follow after him.

"Beats me, Doc," the girl grouched, "I didn't even know what Plan A was. He never tells me anything. We're gonna have to work on that."