"Sounds like our creature," said Wisnewski.
"Remarkably so," agreed Stroud.
"And this fellow Esruad ... He sounds familiar to me, too," began Leonard. "I must go over some old notes of my own. If memory serves, he was a kind of prophet, soothsayer. Very little is known about him, but recent archeological breakthroughs in Tuscany have provided a few rays of light."
Wiz added, "No Etruscan literature other than funeral inscriptions survives, which makes this little piece of paper priceless."
Pulling at his tie Leonard continued, "Until recently it was near impossible to understand all but a few words, but the alphabet is a mix of Roman, Phoenician and an unknown tongue--very likely the Etruscans' ancestors. They traded with the Greeks and the Phoenicians, and most of what we know about them is told us by these other peoples."
"Right at the moment, I think it more prudent to understand the creature," said Wiz. "We can play history games later. What does it say about destroying the thing?"
"Esruad was unsuccessful."
"Obviously."
"It took 500,000 lives in the year 793 b.c. There was no stopping it."
"Just as I said, 500,000 lives," replied Wiz.
"But not the lives of the zombies. They lived on after with the guilt of thousands of others on their hands. They--the diseased ones--herded the healthy ones into the pit. When the creature was sated Esruad convinced his people that it must be removed. Using mostly slave labor, this was accomplished. It had gone into a dormant phase, during which time Esruad removed it and placed it on a ship. It was buried in the ship, packed in its own earth ball, and literally sent off into what was then space. It was buried months later, far beyond the seas, still inside the belly of the ship, along with the bones of those sacrificed to it."
"The land beyond the sea ... here and now." Stroud began to pace the room wondering if this was some kind of eschatological rite of passage for the creature, the "last thing" to come. Every religion had a last coming, a last end to history, a final conclusion to the grand pageant of mankind on earth. He began to wonder if the lives of 500,000 were not a small price to pay. Wisnewski and Leonard were quiet, perhaps with the same thoughts, Stroud guessed.
"I wonder if 500,000 lives will be enough for it this time," Wisnewski said, as if reading Stroud's mind.
The three archeologists looked again at the strange Etruscan lettering as if an answer lay somewhere in the writings of an ancient. "We sure as hell can't do what Esruad did," said Leonard. "What? Give up hundreds of thousands of lives to it, pray it goes dormant again? Attempt a removal? Send it off into ... into outer space or to the bottommost realms of the deep?"
"No, it must be housed in earth," said Stroud.
"What?"
"We don't know what kind of evil would be unleashed on the planet if it were to come into contact with salt water or even the vacuum of space. If Dr. Cline's experiments told me anything, it is that we must keep it away from water. Water only makes it airborne."
"What do you suggest, then?" pleaded Leonard.
"Esruad constructed a stone enclosure around the ship," said Stroud, "in what was an uninhabited land."
"Environmentally sound thinking," said Wiz.
"The best he could do in his day," continued Stroud. "We've got an obligation to do better, we with all our modern technology."
"Meanwhile," Wiz said acidly, "it's back and it's waited a long time for a meal."
Stroud nodded. "And it looks like we're it, unless we can find a way to beat it."
"Esruad couldn't find a way."
"I still have some yet to decipher," said Leonard. "Just thought you two ought to know what I've learned."
"Good work, Samuel," said Wiz.
Stroud agreed. "Yes, very good work."
Leonard went back to work. A worried Wisnewski took Stroud aside and asked, "How much of this do you think men like Nathan and Perkins and our Bill Leamy are going to buy? Before it is too late, I mean."
"Wiz, my friend, it may already be too late. If what Sam says is true, this army of comatose people will soon awaken to rise up against the rest of us, and we'll be forced to either destroy them or be destroyed."
"Imagine a sentient, diabolical being with the power to exact such tribute from the human race."
"Sentient, yes. Diabolical, yes, to every degree. And the worst of it is that it will turn us against one another, Wiz. That it will feed on humans is only the tip of the iceberg; that it will set in motion evil working through mankind for eons to come, this makes this thing from below satanic."
"We've got to find a way to fight back."
"Couldn't agree with you more."
"Cline's antidote, the stuff that helped Leonard ... is it the answer?"
"Afraid not. She tells me that it is only working in a small fraction of the cases. Most have succumbed too completely to be reached. It seems to help only in cases not too far advanced."
"So all these comatose people, all these madmen running about the city like wolves in packs ... it's all a fermentation process, and when the fermenting is done..."
"Then we'll see the city fall like a house of cards as men are turned against men, as the sacrifices begin."
-10-
At St. Stephen's Hospital in the middle of Manhattan, Dr. Kendra Cline and her assistants continued to work tirelessly on an antidote that wouldn't throw the victims of this plague into a catastrophic fit that, for some, had ended in death. Leonard had been the rare exception. She theorized that the protective wear and the fact he and Stroud and Wisnewski had been breathing untainted oxygen had gone far to combat the ravishes of the paralyzing disease. To date they had had only a handful of successes. Those who were infected simply were not responding to the treatment, except to die of it, which, as the grim word getting around the hospital had it, wasn't such a bad cure, given the alternative of a vegetative state.
All the hospital's equipment was strained beyond the limits.
She heard a noise outside the lab, some disturbance, people cheering. Her intercom buzzed. It was Mark, shouting, "We're seeing some activity in here, Dr. Cline. You'll want to come see for yourself."
"Activity? What kind of--"
"They're coming around, all of them, on their own."
"The comatose patients?"
"Yes."
"All of them?"
"Yes. Come quickly."
She could hear her staff cheering in the background. So why did she feel a cold wave of eerie fear grip her heart? There was something on the other side of her sane world, scratching with a satanic talon to rip sanity from her. She could feel it close at hand like the rush of the A/C whenever she sat below the vent. Like something trapped in the wall, scratching to get in ... or out.
She was suddenly aware of an ominous silence outside. She got up and rushed to the monitoring room, where she stood frozen with the others this side of the glass that separated them from the walking zombies on the other side. What was at first thought a remarkable, unprecedented medical phenomenon was fast becoming a nightmare. The people whose limbs worked, who had snatched out their IVs, dragging them along behind, unfeeling, unthinking and unseeing, stared back at the fully living with green-hued eyes that bored through them. The jubilation of Cline's staff had ended abruptly with the realization that these zombies had the use of their limbs and muscles but not their minds. It was clear that they were like so many marionettes, their bodies manipulated by unseen hands.
They raised their hands and arms in unison and pounded with all their combined weight against the thick glass partition, which resounded with a barrel noise as it held. They brought their combined force against the glass a second time, a third, a fourth, as the interns, nurses and doctors watched in horror.