Anthony DeCosmo
The Cannibal Virus
1
The glass doors swung open with a bang and two Polynesian men dressed in white shirts and neat gray shorts pushed a gurney into the clinic. Cheap tin badges on their lapels identified the duo as members of the medical response team; otherwise they might have been mistaken for a pair of nervous caddies.
The clinic's small but neat lobby sat empty; no aging starlets searched for a barbiturate fix, and the nightly wave of wealthy old men in need of Viagra had come and gone back around midnight. Light from a plasma-screen TV playing an American morning show broadcasting from thousands of miles and many hours away flickered on empty chairs.
A hot gust of wind followed the paramedics in and caused the glossy paper of the desk nurse's People magazine to flutter. She looked up from the pages and gave the two men an angry glance, but her eyes changed from narrow and annoyed to wide and afraid when she noted the motionless body atop the stretcher.
Name tags identified the paramedics as Ipo and Maru but they were known affectionately around the private island as the candy men, due to their primary job of distributing medicinal and recreational narcotics.
"He's dead," Ipo said in an exasperated voice.
The nurse — who had earned the cushy job more for her cleavage than for her medical prowess — brought both hands to her cheeks and gasped as if auditioning for a B-grade horror flick.
Maru maintained a small measure of calm and ordered, "Call the doctor. We need him right away."
"Oh my God, who is it?" the nurse cried as she craned her neck to see. "Is that that director guy I met at the casino?"
Maru responded, "No. We don't know who it is. We just found him outside the spa. He was already dead. Look, we need to call Dr. Jaeger."
"That's strange," she said twirling her hair. "The spa is, like, closed this time of night."
Now that a lady was present, Ipo managed to calm his nerves. He then used his grip on the gurney handle as reason to flex his biceps to accentuate his big muscles and chiseled profile. In a tone one step removed from a surgeon on a soap opera he explained, "We think it was a heart attack."
Maru interrupted their eye contact to ask, "Do you recognize him at all?"
She peeked carefully, as if too strong a stare might cause the grossness of the cadaver to infect her.
The body belonged to a middle-aged Asian man carrying an extra thirty pounds on his gut and with patches of premature gray dotting his otherwise black hair. He wore ripped jeans and a badly stained dress shirt.
"Uh, no."
"Doesn't that seem strange to you?" Maru asked. "We don't recognize him, either. There's maybe thirty permanent staff on the island and a hundred or so visitors and here's a guy we don't recognize."
"Looks like a hobo or something," Ipo said. He had finally managed to gain complete control of his nerves thanks to an instinctual ability to focus on impressing chicks who possessed big tits. "Maybe he came in with the luggage on one of the flights."
Realizing that the nurse was going to be of no help, Maru said, "I'm going to go wake Dr. Jaeger."
"You don't want to do that," the nurse warned. "He has an early tee time."
He gazed at her for a long moment and then explained, "Listen, we've got a dead man here. We don't even know who he is or how he got here. I think Dr. Jaeger will be willing to miss his golf game over this."
"Oh." The nurse accepted the explanation. "So what do you want me to do?"
Maru considered and then answered, "Jaeger will need to declare him dead. So just keep him here until I get back."
"Ah, no," she shot back. "Remember that drummer who overdosed last year? A couple of guys got fired because they left him in one of the examination rooms waiting for the doctor."
"Yeah man, she's right," Ipo recalled the same incident. "They don't want shit like that out where people can see it. Disturbs the guests and all. Hell, doc might tell you to wait until morning anyway."
Maru relented, "Okay then, we need to store the body."
"Where?"
Maru rubbed his eyes in frustration and said, "In the back of the storage room behind the pharmaceutical shelves there are a couple of cadaver drawers."
Her face twisted into a blend of revulsion and horror.
"You want me to put him in there? Ah, no, I don't think so."
"I'll help," Ipo volunteered.
"Oh you stupid boot, just do it. I'll be back with Jaeger in a few minutes." Maru considered and then added, "If he'll come, that is."
Ipo and the nurse watched Maru turn and march out of the clinic.
"What is, like, his problem?"
Ipo glanced at the body, then at her, and answered, "He comes a little unglued when things get tough around here. Me? I try to be professional at all times."
"Oh."
He pushed the gurney out of the lobby and down a short corridor past a pair of dark examination rooms. The nurse led the way but nearly stumbled with every other step, as she kept turning and glancing back at the motionless body.
"Don't worry; I'll take care of this. Just help me open up the drawer," Ipo said. "Say, you okay?"
She paused for a moment, stood straight, and told him, "I'm a nurse. I see this type of thing all the time."
As they reached the end of the hall, she pulled a key from the pocket of her tight-fitting white smock.
"I don't know why we bother keeping this locked," she said as she turned the knob. "It's pretty much an open house around here."
"Yeah, sure," Ipo said as he wheeled the gurney inside.
Several rows of tall shelves lined with bins, bottles, and packets of pharmaceuticals filled the room. The nurse flipped a switch and bright lights beamed down from rows of fluorescents built into the dropped ceiling.
"Uh, behind all this," she said as she led him around the shelves toward the back. A pair of dusty square metal doors with heavy latches protruded from the wall there. She approached them cautiously, as if something might jump out.
"Here, I'll get it," the paramedic offered as he undid one latch, rolled out the tomb's metal slab, and wheeled the gurney alongside.
"Pretty spooky, huh?" He made chitchat while positioning the body for the transfer. She stood on the other side of the gurney with her eyes fixed on the oriental man's body, while Ipo's eyes remained fixed on her body.
"Yeah, sure. That's weird … should he be …"
"Say," he said, narrowing his eyes, and then in the most mature voice he could muster he told her, "You do a really good job around here. I just thought you should know."
"Ah, thanks, that's very sweet of you to say," she replied as her eyes moved from the corpse to him.
Ipo sensed an opportunity and formulated his next line, but before he could speak, the oriental man sat up on the gurney, almost as if their conversation had interrupted a deep slumber. It happened so quickly — and without any noise or drama — that their instincts did not kick in. Not at all. The two simply stood still, their brains unable to process exactly what had happened.
Then the man's eyes opened. Eyes coated in a milky white haze like a protective membrane.
Then his mouth opened, too. He lunged at the nurse, finding a patch of well-moisturized skin at the base of her neck, just above her oft-admired cleavage.
She screamed. He screamed. The only noise from the oriental man came from his working jaws as he dove deeper into the struggling woman's throat, fell off the gurney, and pinned her on the cold floor.
The nurse tried to yell again but this time the sound came out more a gurgle than words. Her fists weakly pummeled at the animated cadaver's shoulders.
Ipo scrambled around the gurney and reached to pull the attacker away, but as he did the man with the pasty white eyes changed targets. He turned away from the nurse's neck and clamped his teeth on the paramedic's face.