The Brain Eaters

Chapter 12

Hank Stransky whirled and danced a wild gavotte while his flesh blotched and bubbled and popped and oozed. He was joined by a gyrating middle-aged black man and a slim young girl. Their faces were grinning masks of suppurating boils. They cavorted in an ever-closing circle around a helpless Corey Macklin.

As the wild dancing threesome squeezed in on him, Corey tried to dash between them to freedom, but one or another of them always moved to block him. He struck out at them with his hands, but his blows found nothing solid. Closer and closer they danced, stealing his breath, suffocating him.

Corey fell to the spongy floor, his strength suddenly drained. He tried to rise, but his legs folded beneath him like loaves of soft dough. The three dancers closed in and began to rain blows on his unprotected head.

Bam! Stransky hit him.

Bam! DuBois Williamson.

Bam! Andrea Keith.

Bam!

Corey groaned. He fought his way out of the tangled bedclothes. His mouth tasted like old pennies. He blinked at the light streaming through the crack between his window blind and the edge of the frame.

Bam!

Gradually, he recognized where the sound was coming from. Who the hell would be hammering at his door at this hour?

“Minute!” he yelled. He swung his feet out of the bed and levered himself to a sitting position. His head hurt. His stomach squirmed.

Brandy. He’d been drinking brandy the night before. Cheap, no-name brandy at some joint he’d never been in before. He should have known better. It served him right. Brandy and he had never been great friends. There was no excuse except that it had seemed like the thing to do at the time.

Bam!

“All right!” Corey stood up. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror over his dresser and winced. He looked just about as bad as he felt. “I’m coming.”

After the scene the previous day with Nathan Eichorn, he had needed a drink. He did not want to go to Vic’s. Vic’s had bad vibes these days. So he went somewhere else where he didn’t know anybody. Drank brandy like a damn fool. Came home and had ugly dreams. Now he felt like slow death, and some fool was battering at his door. It promised to be one rotten Saturday.

Without bothering to pull anything on over his underwear, Corey shuffled across the one-room apartment to the door and opened it.

A cloud of cigarette smoke rolled into the room. Doc Ingersoll followed it in. “You look terrible,” he said.

“You woke me up just to tell me that at — at — What time is it, anyway?”

“Seven-thirty.”

“In the morning?”

“In the morning.”

“Balls.”

Ingersoll took the crimped cigarette from his mouth, holding it between thumb and forefinger. “You haven’t been watching TV or listening to the radio?”

“Hell, no. I’ve been sleeping. Trying to.”

“There have been some developments I think you ought to know about.”

“Developments?” Corey’s head began to clear.

“You remember those three cases you were asking me about a few days ago? The three citizens who freaked out violently for no apparent reason?”

“Hell, yes. I remember them. I was just dreaming about them. What developments?”

“It seems like the same thing has been happening to a dozen or so other people starting sometime last night.”

Corey was wide awake now. His head was clear, his stomach tense but quiet. “The hell you say.”

“The hell I do not.”

“Any clue as to what’s causing it?”

“Nobody’s speculated so far. I thought you might want to come down to the plant and take a look at what’s coming in on the wires.”

“You’re damn right I would. Let me splash some water on my face and I’ll be right with you.”

Thirty minutes later they sat across the table from each other in the Herald’s wire-service room. Before them were torn-off sheets of copy from AP, UPI, and Tri-State News Service.

The big story was the spectacular tragedy on board the Dallas-bound airliner out of New York. A passenger — name withheld pending notification of next of kin — had gone berserk and somehow ripped open one of the emergency-exit doors in the coach section. The unnamed passenger and five other people, including a member of the crew, had been sucked out the door before it was blocked by a torn-off panel from an overhead luggage compartment. The pilot had managed to land in Little Rock without further damage or loss of life. Details were to follow.

Corey quickly scanned the airliner story, then shoved it aside to read the local account of the second tragedy in a week at Vic’s Old Milwaukee Tavern. Bartender Vic Metzger apparently attacked two or more customers with a revolver. The toll was three dead and two wounded by gunfire; a dozen others had been hurt in the melee. Metzger was subdued only after he had emptied the gun and police reinforcements had arrived. No motive for the attack was known.

Corey set the pages aside gently. He felt a chill along his spine that was not entirely unpleasant. After a moment he picked up more of the wire copy and went on reading.

In Seattle there had been a number of violent occurrences. The people involved were, for the most part, from respected backgrounds. A particularly grisly story involved an administrator of the University of Washington and his wife who apparently killed each other with their bare hands in their own living room.

Milwaukee was hard hit, especially in the neighborhood around Vic’s Tavern. Although none of the stories assumed a connection, several pointed out that among those who had freaked out the previous night were a number of people who had been present when Hank Stransky died.

Some of the names Corey recognized. They were men he had laughed with, drunk beer with, and argued sports with. Two of them had bowled on the tavern team. One had gone to pieces while digging in the garden and had attacked neighbors with a shovel. The other had started screaming suddenly at the dinner table. While his horrified family watched, he picked up his two-year-old daughter and threw her against the wall. The man was being held in the violent ward of the Milwaukee county jail. The little girl was in critical condition, with possible brain damage.

“Damn, damn, damn!” Corey said under his breath.

“Pretty bad,” Doc Ingersoll agreed.

Corey rose and started for the city room. “I’ve got to get busy.”

Doc Ingersoll glanced down at the scattered wire copy. “Somebody you know?”

“What? Oh, yeah, slightly.”

“Sorry,” Doc said. “You going out to see them?”

“Later,” Corey said. “I’ve got to get on the phone now.”

Ingersoll took a deep drag and coughed for several seconds. “I presume you’re not calling to comfort the widows and orphans.”

Corey threw a look back over his shoulder. “You want to be Mother Teresa, you go ahead. I’m a working reporter, and this is a story, Doc. This is a capital-S story, and it’s right in my lap.”

The older reporter watched through a curtain of smoke from his smoldering butt as Corey hurried out.

At his desk in the city room, Corey matched the names of the victims that were mentioned in the wire stories against the telephone book and came up with a list of numbers. He also noted the names of the hospitals where they were taken and added the police and any government agency he thought might be involved. When he was through, he had a pageful of telephone numbers.

He started with the families and friends of the victims. Few of them were willing to talk to the press, but those who were told chillingly similar stories. The victims had shown no abnormal traits in the past. They were usually healthy and in the prime of life. Only during the past week had they displayed any symptoms of illness. Those included a rash or mild infection of some sore on the skin, a brief flulike period of low fever and aching joints, and finally the headache.

Corey scribbled rapid notes as he talked, coaxing answers out of bewildered, grief-stricken people. All part of the job, he reminded himself. At least he wasn’t jamming a microphone into their faces.

When he came to a break in his list, he dashed back to the wire room for late input and took a few minutes to plot the reported cases on a map of the United States. It was clear that the attacks were clustered around three population centers — Milwaukee, New York, and Seattle. There were stories of scattered incidents in other parts of the country, including the wild man on the airliner. That one, however, could be counted as New York, since that was the originating point of the flight.

Next Corey went after the hospitals. From them he got little information. Victims who were not killed during their violent seizure had to be put under restraints. No, the patients were not in any condition to be interviewed. No, the hospital authorities were not prepared to offer any theories on what had happened to the people. No, they did not want to talk to him later.

Probably waiting until a camera crew showed up so they could be on television, Corey thought irritably.

Without much hope, he went on to the last batch of numbers on his list — the various governmental health agencies. He got only brusque negatives from the city, county, and state. Finally, he was put through to a U.S. assistant secretary of Health and Human Services in Washington.

“Yes, I’ve heard the reports,” the assistant secretary told Corey when the connection was finally made.

“I’d like your comment,” Corey said.

“I don’t see that there’s anything to comment on at this point in time.”

“We are talking about the same thing, aren’t we? The sudden violent attacks on people here in Milwaukee and on both coasts?”

“Well, now, we’re not convinced that there is anything statistically abnormal in the situation.”

“I have the reports right here in front of me,” Corey said, fighting to control his rising irritation. “There are at least twenty reported cases so far, and more coming in every hour.”

“Twenty hardly seems to be excessive. Over any given twenty-four-hour period I can show you figures that would suggest a raging epidemic of anything from measles to bone cancer.”

“We’re not talking measles here,” Corey said. “We’re talking about perfectly healthy people who suddenly go crazy. Do you know how many dead there are?”

“I’ve heard reports. Unconfirmed, I hasten to add.”

“You said epidemic a minute ago. Are you willing to call this an epidemic?”

“Nothing of the sort,” the assistant secretary said quickly. “I was merely using the analogy to make my point.”

“Which is?”

“That the data we have is insufficient basis for any conclusions.”

“At this point in time,” Corey said sarcastically.

“Exactly,” said the assistant secretary, missing the inflection.

“How many of these violent seizures will it take before the government admits that something unusual is happening?”

“That’s a speculative question that I can hardly be expected to answer.”

“Then the Department of Health and Human Services has an official ‘no comment’?”

“I have not been appointed spokesperson for the department.”

“My call was put through to you.”

“I happened to be in my office when your call came in. My field is personnel administration.”

“All right, no official quotes. Do you have any private theories?

“I can think of one possibility. Mass hysteria.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Of course I’m serious. Do you remember a couple of years ago when we had the big AIDS panic?”

“As I recall, quite a few of those people who thought they had AIDS really did,” Corey said.

“My point is that a whole lot more people did not. Here we have a few isolated cases of aberrant behavior in scattered sections of the country. You people of the media scramble to report them, and immediately healthy individuals everywhere start feeling the symptoms. It’s called the medical students’ syndrome. Show them an exotic set of symptoms and immediately a good percentage will start suffering them. Mass hypochondria, if you like.”

“Is that for publication?”

“Absolutely not,” The suave tone of the assistant secretary wavered. “You asked me for a private opinion, and that’s it. As far as the Department of Health and Human Services is concerned, the situation has not officially been brought to our attention.”

“Goddamit, that’s what I’m trying to do,” Corey yelled into the phone. “If you’re not going to talk to me, then put on somebody who will.”

“I’ll give you back to the switchboard,” said the assistant secretary. “They’ll connect you with our chief of public relations.”

“Shit!” Corey banged the telephone back into the cradle and sat glaring at it like some loathsome animal.

“How’s it shaping up?” Doc Ingersoll wheeled a wooden swivel chair over next to Corey’s desk and dropped into it. He laid down another sheaf of wire copy, scattering a light coating of cigarette ash as he did so.

“Nobody will admit anything,” Corey said. “The victims who are still alive are in no condition to talk. Relatives and friends are bewildered. Hospital officials aren’t saying anything. The Department of Health and Human Services does not admit that a problem exists.”

“Sounds like you’re on to something.”

“Bet your ass I am.” Corey consulted his notes. “For some reason, people are going suddenly, violently insane. The only link I have so far is geographical. The victims are adults of both sexes, and all races, as near as I can make out.”

“Not quite true,” said Ingersoll. “What do you mean?”

The gaunt reporter leafed through the sheets he had brought with him, pulled out a page of AP copy, and handed it to Corey.

The story had a Long Island dateline. It told of an eight-year-old boy who was being kept in bed, suffering severe headaches. Suddenly and without warning, the child had run screaming into his parents’ bedroom and attacked his mother. By the time the father, with the help of several neighbors, could pull the child off, the woman had been blinded.

The boy was taken to a nearby hospital, where powerful sedatives proved ineffective. He was subsequently placed in restraints “for his own safety.” Doctors could offer no explanation for the attack. The father reported that the family had witnessed a berserk cabdriver plow into a crowd of pedestrians a week earlier, but the incident had not seemed to affect the boy.

Corey looked up at Doc Ingersoll. “Kids, too.”

“So it would appear.”

Corey yanked the plastic dust cover off his typewriter. “Let me know if anything else comes in.”

“Will do.” Ingersoll pushed himself up out of the chair, coughed, and headed back toward the wire-service room.

After a quick check of his notes Corey spun a sheet of copy paper into the machine and began to type. He was working on the third page when he heard a gurgling sound close to his ear. He turned his head and saw the overhanging stomach of Porter Uhlander.

“Didn’t expect to see you here so early, Corey,” the editor said.

“Why not? It’s a working day.”

“You aren’t due in until noon.”

“Doc Ingersoll got hold of me early,” Corey said without breaking the rhythm of his typing.

“Ingersoll?”

Corey nodded. He wished the man would go away and let him work.

“I, uh, was wondering if you’d decided about the Houston job.”

The clatter of the machine stopped. Corey looked up into the jowly face of the editor. “Houston? Are you kidding?”

“I’m not trying to rush you, Corey, but I’ll have to make some staff changes and — ”

“Porter, don’t you know what’s happening?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“The Stransky story. My story. It’s blowing up into something really big, and I’m sitting right on top of it.”

Uhlander looked pained. “Mr. Eichorn specifically said he didn’t want any more play of the Stransky thing.”

Corey grabbed a handful of wire copy and shoved it at the editor. “For Christ’s sake, read this.”

Uhlander took the sheets reluctantly and read for about fifteen seconds. “Well, um, it does look like there may be something here.”

“May be? May be? Porter, this story could make me. Make the Herald. By tomorrow it will be in every sheet in the country. And on TV. But we’ll own it, because we got it first. The rest of the world will come to the Herald to find out what’s going on. How does that grab you?”

“Don’t you think you’re making more of this than it is?”

“If I am, it will be forgotten in a week. But if I’m right, and this thing grows — Porter, I’ve been waiting a long time for this. Don’t try to slow me down.”

The editor returned the pages of wire copy to Corey’s desk. “Before I make any commitments, I want to talk to Mr. Eichorn about it.”

“You do that,” Corey said, resuming his attack on the typewriter. “In the meantime, you might get makeup to leave me a nice hole on page one.”

Porter Uhlander turned and walked heavily toward his office. His stomach rumbled.