'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
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.'
'All right, agreed.' Stroud had finally gotten him off the phone when Leonard shouted for the other two men to gather round him.
'I've got it ... I've got it.'
'We may have to give it what it wants,' began Leonard, 'but it isn't going to entirely trust us to do so.'
Stroud and Wisnewski stared across at one another, each man shaking his head in confusion. 'Do you want to explain that, Samuel?' asked Wiz.
'You were wrong about the 500,000 it wants, Wiz.'
'I know the Etruscan numerals, Sam, and--'
'Yes, it wants that number, but that number is not the same as the ones it has inflicted with this disease of ... of control.'
'What does it want?' asked Stroud. 'What do you mean, Dr. Leonard?'
Leonard got up, his back aching from the hours looking over the documents. He paced a moment before saying, 'The zombies are an army.'
'An army?'
'To do its bidding. They will become it; it will become they. They are an extension of it. They will move in this world for it, because it cannot leave the confines of the earth in any other form. The Etruscan writer says that it is trapped by the wind if it comes out of the earth on a warm day or--'
'Or if it is raining,' finished Stroud.
'Yes, how did you know?'
He told them about the experiments that Kendra had conducted on the substance that had oozed from Leonard and Weitzel.
'To think this vile thing once inhabited my body,' said Leonard, quaking.
'Go on, Sam,' said Wiz. 'What else? How will it gain its sacrifices if not by taking the zombies?'
'The zombies will herd the rest of us to it, surround and force people into the pit, into the ship ... preferably alive.'
Stroud thought of the attacks on him by the various zombies that he had come into contact with. He recalled the crazed man with the claw hammer.
