Zombie Pharm

By Larry Beinhart

From the author of Wag the Dog, winner of the Edgar Award, Gold Dagger, Grand Prix de Litterature Policier, and NY Times Notable Book of the Year.
It was a visionary idea. Don't just tweak the problem kids. OptimizeTM them all! At the Schools of TomorrowTM. Backed by a pharmaceutical consortium. It was financial genius: "If we get them on medication now, they'll stay medicated for life." The day the pilot project goes public it all goes horribly wrong.
Only one person stands in the way of total disaster and mass murder - Eddie, the slacker, weed dealing school bus driver!
Based on a true story! Well, maybe, not. If not true now, true soon. A page turner. Scary and funny.
You will find this wickedly satirical novel to be great fun even if you have zero interest in zombies.
If you do like zombies, it's all that plus the shuffling, stumbling, and gnawing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Larry Beinhart
• Release date: May 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005852238

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE: BUS STOP

The only hint that this day is any different from any other day, and I’m talking about a string of days similar as a row of yellow school buses, is that a small jet passes overhead when I’m making my fourth stop. This is hardly famine, pestilence, or earthquakes, definitely not a sign of the apocalypse.

I mean not as big as one of those Boeings you might take if you were headed for a vacation in Acapulco, not that I’ve ever made it south of the border. But it’s not real small, like a fighter jet either.

It’s descending, which is pretty rare, since the closest major commercial airport is 87 miles away. So I twist my head out the window and look up. White, bright, and sleek. I figure it for some kind of corporate job. But there’s no reason to think that means anything, at least not to me. The wheels of the bus go round and round, round and round, that’s my life, go along, get along.

The pick up is at the corner of County Road 219 and Oak Plains Drive, a loop with eleven houses, five of them with school age kids, all ready and waiting in nice, clean clothes, with their books and backpacks, right on time like they’re supposed to be.

Harvey has a new lunchbox with a cartoon frog on it and he’s trying to discuss it with Sam, who’s in high school now. Sam acts like you’d expect a teenage boy would to a five-year-old with an amphibian incarnation of Barney. He disappears into the shadow of his hoodie as if it will make him invisible to the rest of the world and turns up his Ipod so that the thump, thump of the bass will carry him off to a planet far, far away.

That upsets Harvey, and he clings to his mother, Debbie.

Some moms wrap themselves in a robe to bring their kids to the bus. Some put on make-up and do their hair. That’s Debbie. And every thing she does goes full drama, making me think that if life pushed her just a little bit harder it would split her into multiple personality disorder. Now she’s the good mother, trying to be firm, but not frantic, Harvey, you know it’s a school day, and it’s time to go. Harvey gets more upset and he throws his arms around her legs and hangs on like, well, like she’s his mom. She tries to coax him, but Harvey knows that trick, and clings even tighter. Debbie shifts to one of her other personas, over-whelmed, over-stressed, and hopeless housewife in desperate need of assistance, and looks at me.

Yeah, well, ok, Eddie to the rescue, it’s not that big a deal. I get out of my seat and go sit on the bottom step of the bus so I’m at kid level. Hey, Harve, you ever seen a six foot frog?

He continues to clutch his mom. His head is buried against her thigh, just below the curve of her buttocks, and a very nice and generous curve it is, and he kind of peeks out at me.

I say, I hear there’s one at school.

He says, No such thing. Ah, a bright child, able to distinguish cartoons from real life.

Sam has a personal commitment to being the last one on the bus. He watches this with great disdain, oh, it’s been such a long, long time since he’s been afraid to go somewhere without his mother. At least two or three years.

You’re too smart, I say to Harvey. But if you ask Penny … then I correct myself, teachers don’t have first names. The school maintains the tradition of hierarchy, Mr., Mrs., and Miss, Miss Sweet, I bet she’ll help you make one in class.

Harvey thinks about that and looks at me with his whole face, not just one eye. He likes the idea, but doesn’t quite trust it.

You could probably make one that looks just like the one on your lunch box.

Ferdinanin … he says, or something like that, trying to get to Ferdinand, a name with too many syllables for some five year olds.

Yeah, an orange frog like Ferdinand.

With green spots, he says. Clearly, no green spots would be a deal breaker.

I say, Couldn’t be any other way.

I’d sold it. Harvey lets go of his mother and comes toward me. I give him my hand to lead him up the steps.

Debbie looks at me, all relief and gratitude.

Just part of a school bus driver’s mission, I say, smiling at her.

I turn to go back up the stairs and I notice one other thing that’s unusual. The lead car stopped behind my bus is way back, really far back, maybe ten car lengths. Usually folks stop one or two car lengths back. But on the continuum of warning signs, I put this at irrelevantly eccentric, not even close to totally weird, certainly not out there at ‘Watch out! Aliens have landed!"

Time to get the show on the road, I’ve been holding up traffic too long. I gesture to Sam, his pale eyes hiding deep under his hood, to get on. All aboard for Pleasant Valley School, the School of Tomorrow™. That little ™ thingee is always on the end, even on the lettering on the side of the bus.

There’s only one more little thing to do before we roll.

CHAPTER TWO: HIGH OVERHEAD

Eddie’s bus was a Thomas Minotour configured for 28 passengers. It was powered by GM diesel with a monitor so the driver couldn’t exceed 55 mph. It had been purchased second hand for $10,500. An additional $684 had been spent to paint Pleasant Valley School, the School of Tomorrow™ on the sides and the back.

The jet that passed overhead was a Gulfstream G 650, list price $28,500,000. The Rolls-Royce BR725 engines produced a top speed of Mach 0.925, which is 800 mph. At cruising speed, Mach 0.87, 662 mph, it had a range of 8,000 miles, almost a third of the way around the world in a single hop.

Both the bus and the jet were owned by Calvin Robertson Frost.

Not directly, of course.

The Thomas Minotour was leased to the School of Tomorrow™, an incorporated project of Schools of Tomorrow™, a not for profit, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, very well funded from a variety of corporate sources.

The G 650 had been purchased by an offshore property holding company. It was managed by a leasing company, which contracted it to a shell company in Luxemburg, owned by a consortium. The consortium had great deal of money. It had banking and fiscal relationships. It held patents, formulas, and plans. It had lawyers and contracts. Its principals had meetings and conferences. Its members funded the Schools for Tomorrow™. But it had no actual physical domicile. Not even Google Earth Pro could find its headquarters. No court could claim that it was in their jurisdiction, and there was no place where papers could be served.

There were two passengers on the G 650. Frost himself, who was CEO of the consortium, and Kirsten Geller, the point person for the School of Tomorrow™.

Is it ready? Frost said to Kirsten, speaking softly, but looking at her the way the Old Testament God used to look at one His prophets when He was checking to see if they’d got the message.

It is, Kirsten said. She looked him square in the eye, projecting assurance and certainty, things she was very good at.

Any doubts, any problems, tell me now, Frost said.

Frost had plucked her from a real estate flipping operation.

He’d been at a medical convention at the Santa Clara Marriot, sponsored by one of the pharmaceutical companies participating in the consortium. Kirsten’s event had been in a smaller room down the hall.

When he peeked in, it was her appearance that caught his attention. She was sleek and lean. She had long legs and long, straight blonde hair that reminded him of Ann Coulter, whom he admired greatly, but, fortunately, without the giant Adam’s apple that made some people think Ms. Coulter was a transsexual. No, Ms. Geller had a lumpless, elegant, completely feminine neck.

The room, small as it was, was only one third full, because this was after the real estate bubble had burst. It should have been pathetic. But the woman up front was pitching her product like she’d just come back from the end of the rainbow and was ready to escort anyone who signed up to the exact location where an actual Leprechaun had buried a pot of gold. Then she produced an actual miracle. People signed up.

Frost bought her a drink, fed her dinner, and brought her up to his suite. He watched her as she crossed one long leg over the other and let her high-heeled shoe dangle. The whole time she never stopped selling, ‘the time to buy is when the market is at the bottom … the greatest opportunity is right now.’ It was like being with Tony Robbins, a walking, talking, smiling, emoting, cajoling, 24/7 infomercial.

Frost made a decision. He offered her a job. She accepted. Frost said good night. When she left he called a highly regarded escort service and ordered a pair of leggy blondes sent up to his suite. He had, so far, never regretted either decision.

But then, there had never been so much at stake.

CHAPTER THREE: COMMODITY EXCHANGE

Sam finally climbs in. He does a slow drag, like the bus is death row and his seat at the back is the one that’s wired up. I laugh and say, Come on, Sam, we gotta get a move on. Help me out, here.

He says, Good morning, Eddie, making fun of the way the little kids say it to me.

We touch hands, slide them across each other, then curl our fingers up for a fist bump. OK, alright, it isn’t just the chill handshake of the month.

What I’m trying to say is, things have a way of working out, you know, there’s a flow to things, one thing sort of moves toward another, and they meet, that’s how little trickles of water become streams and they become rivers. I admit it; I’m dancing around this here. In the moment, in it’s own context, it seems totally chill, I won’t say right, not wrong though, just neutral, but I know that hearing about it just flat out, it sounds really fucked.

Look, the big deal over at Schools of Tomorrow™ is that all the kids are on meds. All of them. Every single one of them.

The teachers and the staff, too. I’m supposed to be on meds. This is not because Pleasant Valley is a privatized mental institution packed with the weird, the wacked, the demented, and the damaged. Yeah, we’re all a little screwy, but mostly within the parameters of what you would call normal. In our natural state we’re about the same as any other random population packed into an institution of lower learning.

The deal is that normal is considered insufficient. They want everyone to be Optimized™. They’ve put their thingee on that word, too, and I can’t even think the word, let alone say it, without mentally hearing a little ding sound on the end.

That’s sort of how it started, I think. I didn’t particularly like my Optimized™ me over my regular me, even though, I admit it, my ordinary walk around self comes off as a slacker doper kind of guy, what my high school guidance counselor, who expected more of me, would’ve called an underachiever. Which, in the circumstances, is OK. Right, I drive a bus, I take care of my little sister, Sarah, who’s in Penny Sweet’s kindergarten class with Harvey, and if I were to put myself in maximum achievement overdrive, there’s no place to drive it to.

The other thing you should know is that these pharmaceuticals they’re distributing, while they’re basically the same as the meds you might be familiar with, your Prozac, Ritalin, Welbutrin, and the rest, they’re next generation. I don’t know the science of it, but think turbo, turbo-Paxil, turbo-Xanax, turbo-Adderall.

One of the differences is the speed of efficacy. Some meds are instant pudding, you swallow the pill, your brain turns to vanilla. But some of them, like your Prozac types, you have to take them for weeks or months before you get adjusted. Not the turbos, they do the job with just one dose.

Most of the kids accept being Optimized™ the way they accept the food in the lunchroom, that’s what’s served, so that’s what you eat. Some of them really like it. But some of the kids, like Sam, don’t. So he palms his doses or cheeks them, then spits them out.

When we slap hands in the morning, he’s got yesterday’s pills in his palm.

So here comes, like admission #2. I’m a fan of the herb, like Ben Harper says the gift from the earth. That’s what’s in my hand, and we swap. Marijuana is an herb and a flower. God put it here. If He put it here and He wants it to grow, what gives the government the right to say that God is wrong? Willie Nelson said that. Eighty albums and ten Grammy Awards, you can’t say it did him any harm. Oh, yeah, don’t forget, marijuana is medical in 22 states already, more to come. So, dude, it’s medical and it’s nature’s way.

I turn back toward the front, slipping the pills in my collection box, and I see Debbie standing by the driver’s side window, looking in at me, very pretty, but full of angst.

You OK? I say.

Stressed, she says, and she is tight around the mouth, tense in her shoulders.

Ahh … stressed … what kind of stressed?

The kid … money … all this shit … this nothing shit.

Gotcha, I say. I’m thinking some turbo-Welbutrin, which will make it all seem like life’s supposed to be the way it is, and maybe some turbo-Xanax, to make it more fun. I pick out some pills from my passed-on-from-the-kids selection and hand them to her through the open window.

She holds out some cash … what can I say, school bus driver’s pay is school bus driver’s pay and one other thing about School of Tomorrow™, sure as hell, there are no unions here. When I reach for it she holds on and puts her other hand over the back of my hand. It’s warm and sexy and very, very needy.

Hey ... she says.

Yeah?

You around later? I mean ...

The guy she lives with, not Harvey’s dad, but the one after the one after that, is a guy I know pretty well. He was a couple of years ahead of me in high school. Now he works for the electric company. It pays pretty good, but you know if the weather’s bad and trees are crashing down on power lines and floods are coming up over the roads and into people’s homes, he’s out there where it hurts. I say, Mike’s a friend of mine, Debbie.

Yeah, she says, not so much disappointed, but annoyed, like her cable's gone off and she’ll miss her reality shows. Then she adds, some place between bitter and resigned, … the guy code.

I say what we all say, even when someone’s half a gasp from dead, It’ll work out.

No, she says. No it won’t. I just keep ‘adjusting’ myself to live with it, that’s all I do, mother’s little helper ...

I try to lighten it up, be a little humorous. They’re really good little helpers though, state of the art, top of the line.

Yeah, she says, with a laugh, an unhappy little laugh, without a smile.

Hey, it’ll get better. I figure it will, as soon as the meds kick in. Also there are plenty of guys who don’t have any kind of code when it comes time for jumping bones.

Sometimes I just want to ... get the hell out of here. After high school, my dad took me to Mexico, for a graduation present.

Yeah, I remember, I say and I do. We were all envious, beaches, pina coladas, sunshine, and some special dream of freedom. But right after they came back, Debbie’s dad disappeared.

That’s what I want to do, she says. That’s what I think about, every damn day.

I don’t say it, but me, too.

CHAPTER FOUR: SOMEWHERE IN ASIA

Round about the cauldron go, in the poison’d entrails throw …

There is a holding pond. It bubbles and seethes like the cauldron of the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

… eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, adder’s fork and blind worm’s sting, lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, for a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

This pond is no mere iron kettle. It’s almost seven miles long and two miles wide.

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, … liver of blaspheming Jew, gall of goat, and slips of yew … nose of Turk and Tartar's lips, … make the gruel thick and slab.

The pond holds the waste from two coal burning power plants, four chemical plants, a silicon chip manufacturer, three legal coal mines and, as a guess, fifteen unregistered mines, two pharmaceutical companies, twelve large manufacturing facilities and an unknown number of small ones.

It’s laden with compounds of zinc and of arsenic. With n-hexane, with mixed isomers of xylene, 1-chloro-1, 1-diflourethane. It’s seasoned with heavy metals, chrome and cadmium, manganese and molybdenum. All cooked up in sulfuric, hydrochloric, formic, and nitric acid. Dosed with methyl ethyl ketone, chlorodifluoromethane, trichloroethylene. Stewed with benzene, ethylbenzene, trimethylbenzene. Concentrates of uranium and thorium, from the ashen wastes of coal, simmer, scorch, and scald, and bring the hell broth to a boil.

Every day, more solids are dumped from trucks, more liquids pour in through pipes. The pond gets larger. The pressure on the levees grows heavier.

CHAPTER FIVE: PURITY OF PURPOSE

Frost looked at Kirsten, measuring, evaluating, looking for any tremor, any hesitation, for a sign that she knew of some mistake and covered it up, that there was some private doubt that she kept suppressed. But she stood up to his gaze like a marine on parade. Finally he said, You’re ready to go?

You were right, she said.