Gary Brandner - The Brain Eaters

Before they could move, the latch holding the steel gate shut snapped with a bang. The two guards fell back, brandishing their pistols as the wild, screaming people lurched in through the breech. One of them, a young woman, reached the older guard. Her fingers dug into his face. From where they stood, Corey and the other two men could see the blood spurt out over the woman’s hands as the guard screamed. His pistol clattered to the ground.

The younger guard fired. The woman dropped. The older guard stumbled away, both hands to his torn face. A man from the crowd hit him with a wild swing of his fist. The guard staggered sideways and fell. The younger guard fired again. The man who had hit the guard grabbed at his stomach.

Edge gave a little cry and started to run toward the gate. The younger guard was now firing at random into the writhing crowd.

“Stop it!” called Edge. “Stop! These people can’t help themselves. You’re killing them!”

The hammer of the guard’s revolver clicked on an empty chamber. Two of the men who pushed through the gate hit him, and he fell. They began kicking at his head and his stomach.

Baldwin Edge ran up to the fallen guard, gesturing and trying to talk to the people who were kicking at him. Then Edge, too, was knocked to the ground. His screams were cut off abruptly as a middle-aged man with the strength of madness crushed his throat.

“Can’t we do anything?” Corey said.

“Don’t be foolish,” Kitzmiller said. “Come.”

He took Corey’s arm and began to lead him back into the building. They stopped abruptly as they saw coming toward them through the lobby two men and a woman dressed in the white smocks of laboratory technicians. They reached out toward Corey and the doctor. They were close enough for Corey to see their faces erupting in bloody sores.

As Corey and the doctor turned back, they saw the knot of people from the gate leave the fallen ones and start toward them.

“Here is your story, Mr. Macklin,” Kitzmiller said in a tone of lifeless irony. “Unfortunately, it looks as though you may not have the opportunity to write it.”

The sound of a revving automobile engine made Corey look beyond the crowd of babbling victims to a black Buick that turned off the road and was picking up speed as it headed for the broken gate.

“More of them coming,” Kitzmiller said.

“No,” Corey said. “That’s my car.”

He could clearly see Dena at the wheel, her mouth compressed into a grim line, her eyes intent on the scene before her. The Cutlass hit what was left of the gate, shattering a headlight and carrying the twisted chain link segment completely off its hinges. Dena swerved to avoid the stumbling people, letting the shattered gate fall away from the car as she did so.

She skirted the milling crowd and slammed the car to a stop in the parking area in front of the entrance where Corey and Kitzmiller stood. Corey yanked open the door on the passenger side and shoved Kitzmiller into the car. He started to climb in himself but was pulled back by something clutching at his jacket. He turned and saw the crazed, blistered face of one of the lab technicians. The man had a fistful of Corey’s jacket. In his other hand was a broken glass laboratory flask. As the jagged edge of glass was thrust toward his face, Corey shrugged out of his coat, leaped into the car, and slammed the door. The flask shattered against the safety glass of the side window.

Dena tramped on the accelerator and spun the car back around toward the gate. Corey saw her wince as they bumped over something yielding that lay on the asphalt. Dena set her jaw and drove on, picking up speed. They roared back out through the gate and onto the road, heading away from the shrieking crowd that was spilling into Biotron.

Dena slowed the Buick as they passed through the suburbs of Germantown and Menomonee Falls into Milwaukee. The traffic was sporadic and unpredictable. Corey sat beside her, leaning tensely forward.

“Do you want me to drive?” he asked.

“No, I’m okay.”

Dr. Kitzmiller sat slumped in the back seat, saying nothing.

Dena watched the seemingly aimless progress of the other drivers. “I don’t think people know where they’re going,” she said. “Being out in their automobiles gives them a sense of being in control, but once in the car, they feel they have to move, to go somewhere. And there isn’t anyplace to go.”

“The place for us to go right now is a hotel,” Corey said, ignoring the philosophical observation.

“I detest hotels,” Dr. Kitzmiller volunteered.

“It’s only temporary,” Corey told him, “until we find out what’s happening.”

Kitzmiller was unappeased. “I should be back at the laboratory. There is much to do.”

“It will be a day or so before anybody can go back there,” Corey said. “You remember how it was when we left. We were lucky to get out.”

“The police should have the situation there under control by now.”

“We can’t rely on the police,” Dena said. “They are no more immune to the brain eaters than the employees of Biotron.”

Kitzmiller groaned in the back seat. “I wish we did not have to use that term.”

“We can call them anything you want, doctor, but thanks to Corey here, in the mind of the public they will forever be the brain eaters.”

Kitzmiller sat frowning for a minute. Finally, he shrugged. “After all, what does it matter what they are called? They exist.”

“Even the surgeon general will have to admit that now,” Corey said sourly.

“There must be an antidote,” Kitzmiller said. “Some way to destroy them. I should be working now to find it. All my notes are back there at Biotron. I am useless in a hotel.”

“We can at least do some preliminary planning,” Dena said. “I’ll stay and work with you while Corey finds out what he can about any official moves.”

“I detest hotels,” said Kitzmiller, returning to his original complaint.

“Holiday Inns are very nice,” Dena assured him as a sign loomed ahead of them.

“And it’s only temporary,” Corey said again.

“I suppose there is no choice,” the doctor said gloomily. “I hope you will hurry with whatever you have to do, Mr. Macklin. I should not have to remind you that time grows short.”

Something was critically different at the Herald building. There was the feeling of urgency as people strode in and out of the building with an air of grim purpose. But the difference was more than that. It was more than the missing laughter, the almost total lack of idle conversation among employees and visitors. Something vital to the building was missing. It took Corey a moment to recognize what it was. The heartbeat was stilled. The mighty presses down in the basement were not running. At a time of day when the rumble of the machinery should send a pulse through the entire twelve floors of the building, no papers were being printed.

The city room, usually a scene of semiorganized confusion, looked like a ship in the last stages of abandonment. Fewer than half the usual crew was there, cleaning out their desks. Each was absorbed by his own personal drama. They acknowledged Corey, if at all, with a distracted nod.

He hurried past the worried-looking staff and into the office of Porter Uhlander. The city editor sat behind his desk, hands clasped over his stomach, a vacant look in his eyes.

“What’s going on?” Corey demanded.

“Going on? Oh, hello, Corey. How’re they hanging?”

Corey walked closer and peered at the editor. “Are you on something, Porter?”

“Valiums, son. Wonderful little pills no bigger than a BB. Makes everything bearable. I should have discovered them long ago.”