Page 77 of Stay Buried

“I know, sorry,” Ash said, smiling a little. Mal liked to get her with jump scares, but she knew real-world gore and body trauma freaked her brother out.

“But it came back, right?” Malcolm said. “The flu came back.”

That’s what Gram had said. The story they’d both been told their whole lives.

“No… I don’t think so,” Ash said, shaking her head slowly. She wished like hell she could go back in time, ask her mother what she knew about all this.

What might her mother have told her if Ash had said yes to that meeting for coffee?

Listen, her mother whispered to her now.

“People started getting sick, yes, but it doesn’t sound anything like influenza, or any other transmissible respiratory disease I know of.”

“For real?” Malcolm asked. He stepped away from the trunk and settled onto the bed next to her.

“Yeah. First off, it began with the horses.”

Her face was flushed, her heart beating a little harder. She knew she’d discovered something important, something big. She wished she had her laptop and an internet connection—there were so many zoonotic diseases, some very rare, and so much was still poorly understood in Frankie and Dr. Endicott’s day. She wasn’t even sure how long they’d been using modern stethoscopes in 1919, for God’s sake. With access to PubMed and a few other medical databases, she might be able to narrow it down. She’d try to go to the library later, see if they had a computer she could sign onto for an hour or two to see what she could find.

Ash continued, “Every horse in town was sick within twenty-four hours. The symptoms were primarily respiratory, but they becameaggressive—like going crazy and ripping each other apart type of aggressive. They shot the horses, but the next day, Thomas Endicott saw his very first patient with the same symptoms.”

“So, what? It, like, jumped from horse to human? Rabies maybe?” Malcolm asked.

“That’s what Dr. Endicott thought at first, but it wasn’t. There are all kinds of diseases that start with animals—swine flu, bird flu, Ebola, hantavirus, the list goes on and on. If I remember right, something like sixty percent of infectious diseases in humans are zoonotic.”

“Come again?” Mal frowned at her, rubbed at his beard.

“Zoonotic. They can be traced back to animal origins.”

Mal grimaced. “How does a person get a sickness from a horse? Did they, like, get sneezed on or something? Or was it from a bite?”

Ashley shivered at the idea of a sick horse sinking its enormous teeth into human flesh. She thought of the horse her mother had been riding in her hallucinations: the blood-specked foam around its mouth, the yellow glowing eyes. It was just like Frankie’s description of the sick animals.

“I don’t know,” Ashley said. “But I’m pretty sure who patient zero was.”

“Who?” Malcolm asked.

“The knackerman.”

“I’m sorry? The knackerman as in the weirdo who is currently going around terrorizing this town, painting creepy pictures on doors?”

“I mean, obviously not the same guy, but there’s got to be a connection. Frankie writes a lot about the knackerman in her diary. He lived outside of town, at the top of a place called Saw Meadow Hill. He was who you called when a large animal died. He hauled them away, tanned their hides, made glue, that kind of thing. I guess it was an important job back then, maybe as important as town doctor, in a way. So when the horses got sick in 1919 and died or were shot, he was called like normal, to cart away their bodies. When he showed up in town, hewas sick. Same symptoms as the horses had: fever, labored breathing, jaundice, and erratic, violent behavior. He trashed the exam room when Dr. Endicott and Frankie were trying to check him out. And then…” She hesitated, not sure how much detail to share with Malcolm.

“What?” Mal asked.

“He got very sick very quickly. Lost consciousness. In the night, Frankie woke to check on him, and neither she nor Thomas could find a heartbeat.”

“So he died?”

“That’s what they believed. But in the morning, he was gone. So they must have been mistaken—I don’t know how sensitive their stethoscopes were, it’s not like they could put him on a monitor, look for brain activity.”

“Okay, but it’s also not like it was caveman times, or they were amateurs.…”

Ash nodded. “Yeah, of course. But apparently he got up and walked out of the house while they were all sleeping, and proceeded to rove around the town, attacking people. Maybe making them sick too.”

“So we’re talking about a for-real fucking zombie plague here?”

“Mal, I don’t think—” She held up a hand in acome on nowgesture.