Robert Walker - Zombie Eyes

Dr. Samuel Leonard was fit to be tied. He wanted out. He wanted news and information. He wanted to talk to Wisnewski. He wanted to talk to Stroud. He was shouting these things when Stroud walked in and said, "Samuel, it's so wonderful to have you back!"

"Get me the hell out of here, Abe!"

"Processing it right now. Dr. Cline's seeing to the details."

"Where are my clothes?"

"Brought you some things from your home," said Wisnewski, who stepped in.

"Arthur! It's so wonderful to see you. I'm so anxious to get back to work," Leonard said as the two embraced.

"Put these on. We're breaking you out of here," Wiz told him, smiling. "So good to see you, Sam."

Downstairs they found Kendra Cline, who had finished processing Leonard. She told him that he was a free man.

"Free, yes," he agreed. "Free from hell."

He had recalled nothing beyond a horrid, overwhelming and engulfing feeling of being held down, trapped, the entire time he was under.

Stroud told him that he knew the feeling, and this made Kendra Cline look askance at him, trying to determine his meaning. She hadn't spoken very much to him about the previous night, nor he to her.

Wisnewski grabbed some flowers that were on a nurse's duty desk and began to give them out one at a time to patients along the floor. Save for this, he showed no tendency toward his earlier "madness." He greeted each patient with a large smile and a big "How are you, today?" This turned a lot of heads.

Stroud meanwhile brought Leonard up to date, ending with the fact that the parchment and the bones confiscated from the death ship were waiting for his examination.

"You don't propose we go back into that ... into that hole, do you?" Leonard said, trembling, his first sign of anxiety since coming out of coma. "Is that what you all have planned for me? Is it? Well, you can save yourselves the trouble. I'll be damned and gone to hell before I'll go back to that ... that ship."

This made Wisnewski rush to Leonard. "You old bird, these people, this city is counting on us to--"

"I'm no hero, Simon. Neither are you!"

"We must do what we can."

"It could come again for us anytime ... anytime!"

"All right, take it easy," said Stroud.

Kendra also tried to calm him. "You will not be forced to go anywhere, Dr. Leonard. You've been through quite enough already."

"Yes," he agreed, "through hell and back."

"Will you at least come to the lab?" asked Wisnewski. "To look over the items we brought back?"

Leonard looked from one face to the other, biting his lip. "All right ... all right. But no, I will not go near that place again."

"Agreed," said Stroud.

Wisnewski made a muttering sound as he left ahead of them for the waiting car, not hiding his disappointment with Leonard.

"Come along, Dr. Leonard," said Abe Stroud, ushering the other man, who nodded and allowed Stroud to guide him.

"I'll be along later," said Kendra. "I don't want to leave things in a mess here, and I want to break in the new guys."

"Sure ... sure," said Stroud, "and about last night."

"Yes?"

"I ... I hope we can do it again sometime."

She smiled warmly. "Me too."

Dr. Samuel Leonard's expertise was philology: ancient written documents, hieroglyphics and symbols. He had unraveled and unlocked more secrets of past civilizations than anyone living on the planet. Wisnewski brought him the parchment in a protective cover, flattened out to its worn edges, looking like an Arabic treasure map of bizarre origin. The paper was a yellowish gray, stony-looking. It told a full tale, the strange Etruscan symbols spilling over the edges, and there were no margins at either the top or the bottom.

Wisnewski told Leonard that he had worked up a theory to the meaning of the cryptic letters and numbers, working as best he could with his more limited knowledge of ancient lettering. He pointed out that the figure of 500,000 seemed to refer to the number of human lives that must be sacrificed to the Overlord, some creature of the Dark Side that threatened to destroy all Etruscan life if its hunger for human life was not fulfilled.

Wisnewski explained all this while placing the document below the two-foot-wide magnifying glass.

Leonard seemed at first oblivious of Wisnewski and what the other man was saying. Stroud watched both men carefully. Leonard now said calmly, "You don't know what you're talking about, Wiz. Stick to your bones."

It was curt for Leonard, uncharacteristic; but he now launched into studying the document, saying it could take hours, days, before he knew what each word meant. He asked them to be patient. "You can't rush a thing like this. You do, and you make bad interpretations, assumptions, and then you base everything on a fallacy."

"Fallacy?" asked Wiz, but Stroud put up a hand to him, indicating the prudent thing to do now would be to leave Leonard to his work. Leonard went into a kind of work-induced trance familiar to Wisnewski, and so the white-haired older doctor nodded and gave Leonard his leeway.

As Leonard worked, Stroud and Wisnewski huddled around a table with coffee and the bones that had come out of the pit. Wisnewski was still involved in studying these, but for now Stroud told him of the progress that Kendra Cline had had in combating the disease in people who were fortunate enough to have only a mild case of the "supernatural flu." Wisnewski was amazed to learn the details, hanging on Stroud's every word. He was particularly curious about the residue the disease left behind which seeped from the ears and other orifices of those affected.

"I'd wondered about that," said Wisnewski.

"You expelled some of it, too? While you were in Bellevue?"

"Excreted is the operative word," he said, and left it at that.

The hours passed slowly, with Stroud helping Wisnewski build a complete log on the bones and with a silent Leonard going at the document in a grueling, nonstop examination which was creating extensive notes. Leonard was mesmerized by the document and several times noises escaped him but no words as yet.

Nathan had interrupted their work twice with phone calls, demanding to know of their progress. Stroud fed him what he thought prudent. On the second call, Stroud told him of Wiz's theory of the 500,000 sacrifices. Nathan gasped and said, "Is that it? We're supposed to sit idly by and watch hundreds of thousands succumb to this disease and do ... nothing?"

"Dr. Cline's already informed you of Leonard's recovery and what that means."

"But if this ... this thing in the pit wants 500,000 lives, what's our antidote to that? There is none! If it doesn't get what it wants ... what then?"

Stroud hesitated before saying, "The whole of the city, we believe. So far, there are as many unanswered questions as there are--"

"I don't want to hear about unanswered questions, Stroud! I want results. You promised when I got you Wisnewski that--"

"I promised you nothing, and we're going at this night and day, and we're doing our goddamned best."

"I'm running interference for you scientists, Stroud, and you have no idea the pressures I'm holding back off your asses, so level with me! Do we have a shot at beating this thing or not?"

"Yes, yes, we do, but we need time to develop--"

"We don't have time. The goddamned dogs and cats and rats in the city are getting it now! They've attacked people, further spreading the disease."

Stroud thought of the neurological causes of the disease as they were explained to him by Kendra Cline. It seemed perfectly logical that animals would be affected as well. "Commissioner Nathan, I promise you ... as soon as we have a defense against this thing--"

"Yeah, well, I'm not so sure there is any defense anymore. Five hundred thousand! Christ, Stroud, do you know there are people in this city who would gladly sacrifice that many for the sake of themselves? Let's keep this information under wraps, understood? I can just see the headlines on that."