Gary Brandner - The Brain Eaters

The Plymouth turned off onto a dirt road that twisted off into one of the dense patches of forest. The sway of the car made Eddie’s head hurt like an open nerve.

“Stop,” he said. “I don’t want to go in here.”

“It’s just a little farther,” said the man sitting next to him.

“No. You’re lying.”

The man in the seat next to Eddie tensed. He leaned forward and whispered something to the driver.

“Lemme out,” Eddie said. “No Kitzmiller here. My head hurts.”

The Plymouth pulled to a stop where there was a small clearing on one side of the road.

“This is it,” the driver said.

“Here we are, Eddie,” said the man with him in the back seat. “You want to get out?”

Eddie wiped his eyes, trying to clear his pain-streaked vision. Outside was nothing but the dirt road, the small clearing, and the thick growth of trees — white ash, birch, and bigtooth aspen. No buildings, no trail, no people.

“There’s nothing here,” Eddie protested.

The man with the moustache had already got out of the car. He pulled open the door on Eddie’s side.

“Get out, please.”

Even in his pain and his doubt the lifetime habit of following orders made Eddie lever himself out of the car. His head was about to burst. Something was crawling under the skin of his face.

“Walk over there, please.” The man with the moustache pointed toward the far edge of the clearing, where the encroaching trees formed a thick barrier.

“Why?”

The two men stood side by side, facing him grimly.

“Walk,” said one of them. Eddie could not be sure which one spoke.

Eddie turned, shuffling his feet on the leaf-covered ground. He took a lumbering step toward the trees. Another. Then he stopped.

“Keep walking.”

Eddie’s body stiffened. The inside of his head churned and bubbled like molten lead. His face felt like one of those balloons with eyes, nose, and mouth painted on it. He turned back toward the men.

“Oh, shit, look at his face!” one of them said.

Then they had guns in their hands.

Eddie heard a voice howling in his ear and only dimly recognized it as his own. He charged at the two men. His movements were no longer clumsy and slow. The pain had become so terrible that he had somehow transcended it. His sensory system had taken all it could stand; then it blew out like an overloaded circuit.

The boom of the guns blended with a distant roll of thunder. The impact of the bullets was no more than a small tug at his flesh. Eddie’s hands reached out and seized the nearest of the two men — the one who had sat beside him in the car. He found the man’s throat and closed his fingers like metal claws around the bobbing Adam’s apple and the windpipe. The man’s scream was lost in a sudden rustle of wind through the leaves as Eddie ripped out his trachea.

The man with the moustache fired his pistol wildly. His mouth gaped; his eyes bulged in terror.

Eddie stepped over the body of the man with no throat. He could feel the freshly risen boils on his face begin to burst. He reached for the man with the gun and caught his arm. He yanked on it, and the gun thumped to the ground. Eddie heard the man’s shoulder separate with a crackling sound.

The injured man cried out and pulled free. The pistol lay forgotten among the dead leaves. With one arm flopping uselessly, he dragged himself into the car. Eddie started after him. The engine ground to life, and the driver frantically wheeled around and headed back toward the highway, scraping the side of the Plymouth on a tree as he fought for control with his one working arm.

Eddie took a couple of steps after the fleeing car and stopped. The pain came in short terrible bursts. He felt the warm fluids oozing down his face where the pustules had broken. His mind veered along the edges of insanity. He was dying, and he knew it.

But before he surrendered to death, there was something he had to do. Someone he had to see. There was a debt to be paid, and Eddie Gault willed himself to stay alive long enough to pay it.

Thunder rumbled again, and Eddie started back along the dirt road.

The gloom of the lowering skies outside his window suited the mood of Lou Zachry. He sat slouched in the chair behind his desk in the Biotron plant, wondering if somewhere along the line he could have made a different decision and everything would have turned out right.

Fantasizing, he told himself. Wishful thinking. Not Lou Zachry’s style. He had just slipped away from the afternoon media briefing being handled by Corey Macklin. It had been a string of tired clichés that Corey hadn’t even tried to disguise as real news. The reporters were grumbling, and with justification. They had kept their bargain not to harass Dr. Kitzmiller and the task force. In return, they were supposed to be kept informed at the twice-daily briefings.

Zachry knew Corey had excuses for his spiritless delivery that day. Anybody with eyes could see what was happening between him and Dena Falkner. If Dena was now infested with the brain eaters, it was not so strange that Corey’s enthusiasm for his job would flag.

But damn it, almost everybody had lost somebody. You had to do your job even when you were hurting. That had been Lou Zachry’s code as long as he could remember, and he expected the people around him to live up to it.

Then there were the damn Russians sitting across the road in their air-conditioned limo, eyeballing the gate. Couldn’t those people read English? Didn’t they watch television? If they knew what was happening, how could it matter a damn if one of their people defected or got married or turned queer or whatever they were afraid he was doing?

And there was Kitzmiller. He was no help with his rigid old-time anti-Russian stance when a couple of words from him might send Raslov and his goons on their way. Sure, he had his reasons, but they dated back to another war in another time. Everybody had reasons.

Underneath these major worries, like a fragment of half-remembered music that won’t go away, was the phone call from the woman. She had gotten his number from the newspaper and was calling to warn that Eddie Gault was a victim of the brain eaters and was on his way to Biotron for some crazy purpose. She had refused to give her name, but some vaguely familiar note in the young voice troubled him.

Zachry was well aware of the potential danger if Eddie Gault talked. It was possible, of course, that the brain eaters would make the whole question academic, but Zachry could not wait for Armageddon. Eddie Gault had to die.

He was, in fact, a dead man the moment the brain eaters had entered his bloodstream. Zachry had talked to the task-force doctors enough to know what the little parasites could do to the human brain. He figured he’d been doing the man a favor by sending Quick and Vollney to help Eddie Gault out of this world.

The thought made Zachry wonder where the hell Quick and Vollney were. How long did it take to shoot a man?

Zachry reached for the telephone. He snatched his hand back reflexively as the thing rang just as he was about to touch it. Then he picked it up and cleared his throat.

“Zachry.”

“Lieutenant Purdue at the gate, sir. Agent Vollney is out here.”

“Vollney? What about Quick?”

“He’s alone, sir, and he’s … hurt.”

“For Christ’ sake, send him in.”

Zachry slammed down the receiver and ran out the door, heading for the front entrance to the plant. As he burst out the door, he saw Agent Donald Vollney making his way across the asphalt of the parking area. His left arm hung limp at his side. He clutched the shoulder with his right hand.

Zachry met him at the edge of the walkway before the building and helped him up the low curb.