Dead Men (and Women) Walking (28 page)

The investigators would
later tell Valerie that Emma hung herself. Valerie didn’t want to
believe it. Emma had never been suicidal, how could she have missed
all the signs? She fumbled through her desk drawer and pulled out
Emma’s file. She slowly opened it up and looked at Emma’s
photo.

“
Oh Emma” Valerie sighed as
she touched the photograph.

She closed her eyes with
regret. The image was so vivid, the white face Emma had described
so many times before was staring at her with a freakish grin spread
across his face.

When he pointed a single
boney finger at her, Valerie’s eyes shot open. She looked down at
Emma’s file as she wiped dribbles of sweat from her brow. A partial
statement of Emma’s caught Valerie’s attention.

“
Every time I close my
eyes…”

By Dilman Dila

I’d spent fourteen nights in
my new job at KP Pharmaceuticals when Billy, the guy I’d replaced,
returned. He was dead. He’d died the week before they recruited me.
The three men I worked with, Jack, Greg and Lou, who’d also worked
with Billy for years, had found him in the toilets down the
corridor with a knife in his back. They were the only people in the
building at the time of the murder. They were the top suspects, but
the cops had failed to zero on the culprit, and so, I later learnt,
Billy came back.

It started as a scratching
on the window at 2:40 a.m. We swerved on our chairs and saw a
masked face. A hat and a scarf masked the face. We couldn’t see the
eyes.

We were stunned. Hundreds of
cameras covered every inch of the pharmaceutical and it was our job
to watch the TVs every night, but none of us had seen an intruder
scaling the perimeter fence, or sneaking past the guards in the
yard, or creeping up the wall to this window.

“
What the hell!” Lou jumped
out of his chair, reaching for his gun.

“
Jeez,” I rushed to my
feet, wiping my piece out of the hip holster. I however knew no
slug would hit the face; the panes were bulletproof.

Jack and Greg were on their
feet too, and they had their weapons trained on the
face.

“
Could be just a prank,”
Jack lowered his gun. “Could be just a dummy.”

We turned to a TV on Lou’s
screen panel. It showed the window from the outside. But the camera
didn’t see anything. The camera insisted there was nobody out
there. Yet here was a face peering at us!

“
A ghost,” Greg
whispered.

Lou flipped a button on the
communications panel and he spoke to all the guards. “Red Alert,
all Eagles,” he tried to sound calm. His lips trembled and the
panic showed on his face. “Red Alert. We got a face – We got
something on our window.”

“
Eagle Two here,” one
responded. “Checking it out. Over.”

It seemed hours before Eagle
Two talked to us again. We stood still, watching the face in
silence. It stared back at us. I now thought I could see eyes deep
behind the scarf.

“
Goddammit,” Eagle Two
said.

“
What?” Lou asked. The
trembling spread to his hands.

“
It’s a man!”

“
We can’t see him in the
TV! Shoot him!”

Suddenly, the face vanished.
We ran to the window and saw two men in the bright yard. The guard
stood about ten meters from an intruder in a hat, scarf and cloak.
His gun flashed. We heard the bang. The intruder, hit on the head,
staggered a little, his hat fell off, but he didn’t fall. His hair
looked funny, as though caked with mud. Eagle Two fired again,
hitting the man in the chest. He still didn’t fall. He walked
towards the guard with a strange gait, as though he had a heavy
body and no joints. That’s when it dawned on all of us that it
wasn’t a man.

“
All Eagles! All Eagles!”
Lou screamed into the radio. “Fire at Sector Zero!”

Eagle Two tried to flee. The
intruder jumped on him. The guard fought back, ripped off the
intruder’s scarf and coat, and the floodlights hit the thing’s
face. It wasn’t a human face at all. It was rotting.

The creature’s teeth sunk
into the guard’s head and ate a huge chunk as easily as you’d rip a
glob off a potato. I think it killed that man to send other guards
a message, for several Eagles had appeared and when they saw the
horror devour their comrade, they dropped their guns and
fled.

“
What in hell is that?”
Greg said.

‘
A zombie,” I whispered. I
didn’t want to believe it. I’d never seen a zombie and the nearest
graveyard was five miles away. But the word jumped into my mind and
I think the other’s thought of it too. Zombie. What could it be
doing here? This was just a pharmaceutical factory. What could a
zombie want here? That question rang in everyone’s head, and the
horror out there might have read our minds, for it picked Eagle
Two’s radio and gave us a call.

“
Hello, Control?” it said
in a man’s voice, it sounded like a long lost friend.

“
No,” Lou said at the same
time Greg was saying “It can’t be Billy,” and Jack was saying “I
must be dreaming.”

“
Yeah,” its human, matey
voice scared us more than its face did. “Yeah. It’s Billy. Aren’t
you glad to see your buddy?”

“
Oh God, no,” Lou
said.

I didn’t know what to think,
whether to laugh at the absurdity of it all or to scream in terror.
My three shift mates were about to crumble into vegetables. Lou
kept muttering “No, no, no,” and Jack couldn’t help saying “Just a
dream! Just a dream!” and Greg lost his breath as he said “True!
True! True!”

“
I’m coming in,” Billy
said, “to find out which one of you killed me.”

He ran for the doors. We
watched mesmerized until he disappeared beneath the patio. Then we
jumped around, to the screen that showed the front doors. We didn’t
see anything. Just the big, plastic doors. They were locked,
bulletproof, bombproof, and it would take more than a truck to
crash through. We heard a thud that seemed to rock the building and
the plastic danced. Alarms erupted. The zombie was hitting the
door. We watched the TV wondering whether this mirage would succeed
in tearing apart the invincible door. It failed.

It tried our window next. We
cowered against the wall, watching wide-eyed as Billy hit the
plastic panes. He had maggots for eyes. We knew he wouldn’t succeed
because the windows were of the same material as the door. He
stopped. He’d smeared goo on the panes. He grinned at us, the
maggots in his eyes squirmed. We thought he’d go away having failed
to gain entrance.

He knew the building and he
remembered where he could get glass to break. The ground floor
toilets. He broke the windowpanes and squeezed in through a tiny
hole that a normal man wouldn’t have managed to use, but he could
afford to scrape off a lot of his skin and flesh. On one screen, we
saw his clothes piled on the verandah. He’d stripped to ease his
entrance. On another screen, we saw chunks of rotting flesh stuck
on the window and maggots creeping down the walls. We however still
couldn’t see him.

“
He’s coming!” Lou
whispered. “I didn’t kill him!”

I was numb with the thought
of a rotting man walking through the corridors, heading for the
second floor security room called Control. I thought it would be
best if we fled from the room, but on second thought, I decided we
were safer in Control. Billy had failed to break down the front
doors and our window. That meant he wouldn’t be able to break
Control’s steel door. Moreover, he’d demonstrated that he couldn’t
walk through walls. He wouldn’t get inside Control.

“
Nobody killed him,” Greg
too feared to raise his voice. His whisper was barely audible. “He
knows it! We were buddies! We didn’t kill him! So why does he come
to us?”

“
We were all in here at the
time of murder. The camera showed us all in here. He is mistaken.
None of us killed him.”

Quick, shivering, Lou called
Denis Pemprey, the Security Manager. Mr. Pemprey must have been
having a bad night. He picked the phone the moment it
rang.

“
Denis!” Lou whispered. We
all noted he called Mr. Pemprey by first name. Mr. Pemprey had been
a regular security man before he made it to manager a few months
ago. The two could’ve been friends then and the friendship lived
after the promotion. “It’s Billy! He’s here!” I think Mr. Pemprey
said something rude. “But he’s here!” Lou was frantic. “He ate a
guard! He’s coming up! He wants to know who killed him!” I think
Mr. Pemprey hung up. “Denis? Denis? Oh shit!” Lou slammed the
phone. He smashed the set to pieces against the wall.

“
I didn’t kill him!” he
screamed. He kicked a desk as he yelled. “I didn’t kill
him!”

“
Billy’s coming,” Jack
said. He looked at his gun, then threw it away and collapsed onto
the floor. He lay supine, spread-eagled, face white, eyes wide open
as though in death. I thought he’d die of shock. He now said,
“Billy’s coming,” repeatedly.

“
Did you kill him?” Lou
yelled at Greg. His voice competed with the alarms that split the
night. Lou looked like a victim of electric shock. His hair stood
on his head. His eyes were wide and full of terror. His face shone
whiter than the walls. He spoke without breathing. “Did you kill
him?” He shook Greg by the collars.

“
I didn’t!” Greg shouted
back. “Why would I? He was my best friend, forgodsake!”

Lou shoved Greg hard and the
latter fell against a desk. Lou turned his madness on
Jack.

“
Jack!” He drooped over the
supine man, shaking a fist, yelling. “Jack!” He gave the picture of
a coach urging a boxer to get back on his feet after a KO. “Did you
kill Billy?”

“
Billy’s coming,” Jack
said. “Did you put that knife in his back?”

“
You did it!” Lou screamed.
“You killed Billy!” I feared he’d kick Jack, but he didn’t. “That’s
why you’ve fainted at the thought of him coming back! You killed
him and you know you did it!” Lou raved. He paced about like a
pendulum gone crazy.

The cops had questioned
Jack, Greg and Lou for hours. According to what I heard, they each
had a motive.

Jack planned to marry
Billy’s ex-wife, Ginny. She, as caretaker of Billy’s son, would
inherit the fortune Billy had in turn inherited from an aunt. With
Billy dead, Jack and Ginny would become rich.

Greg, Billy’s best friend,
was deep in gambling debts and Billy had mentioned him in his will.
Billy was more valuable to him dead than alive.

Lou hated Billy. They say
Billy blew the whistle about Lou dozing on duty, and that killed
Lou’s bid to become Security Manager.

“
Hi folks?” Billy said,
still using Eagle Two’s radio. “I’m at the door. Open
up.”

Jack leapt out of his swoon
and Lou stopped his pacing. We scrambled for the window. We
couldn’t get out. We pressed against the windowsill and kept our
eyes on the door. Billy’s voice was human, that scared us more than
the half rotting creature we’d seen outside, the man with worms for
eyes. If he had a demonic voice, probably we’d have understood, but
a human voice... I sweated and it stunk like urine. I couldn’t go
pale unlike my three friends, so probably there was no sign of fear
on my face.

The camera’s still couldn’t
pick him out. We stared hard as though that would make him appear
on the screen. If we didn’t open, he wouldn’t get in. The alarms
meant cops would soon be here, and probably they’d save us from
this terror.

“
I can open this door,”
Billy said. “I have my key.” The key was an electronic card. It
could open only the door to Control, a door that remained locked at
all times. Probably it was a design of fate that Billy forgot his
key at home the night he died. “They didn’t clean out my apartment.
I found it in the coat where I’d forgotten it. But I give you all a
chance. If you didn’t kill me, open the door and I won’t hurt you.
If you did, say so and I’ll be merciful.”

“
Who killed him?” Lou
whispered. “We can’t pay for one man’s crime. Was it you Jack?”
Jack tried to speak. He failed. His throat made a horrible,
swallowing sound.