Moriah

by Monchinski, Tony

  * * *

  Having torn the splint off his wounded limb, Dee raced along as fast as his one good leg allowed. Each time he stepped down on his shot, broken foot, the pain fired like lightening up his leg into his spine and brain. He could feel his boot filling with fresh blood. He hopped through the grasses, following the green glow lights Kevin and Riley had left. Chase was screaming bloody murder at him from the building.

  He’d dropped from the window into the rhododendron beneath, the bush breaking his fall. He wondered if Chase would think to do that. He was betting the munt wouldn’t. He was betting that Chase would think he’d come down the stairs, and that Chase would come down the stairs. Let Chase deal with all those dead things coming up the stairs.

  As the night died and the morning sun rose, Dee spied a little boy in the grass. It was the child he had seen stealing from the house, running away by himself, in the opposite direction of his sisters. The little boy Dee had waved to in the window. He sat there, listless, his head down.

  “Kid, come on!”

  The child raised its head, fixing Dee with its baleful gaze. Dee saw the wound in the boy’s throat, the blood sopping the kid’s clothes, the grass under him blacker than the grass around him. As the zombie opened its mouth and cawed at him, Dee gave it a wide berth. Shocked and saddened, he didn’t even think to shoot it.

  Lest Dee lose sight of them in the grass, the chemical light sticks were spaced two to three meters apart. Dee knew their chemiluminescence would lead the mutant to the boat just as easily as they were leading him. The thing—Dee had trouble thinking of Chase as a man—was not screaming at him any longer, which could only mean it was out here in the ebbing dark, after him.

  He thought of picking up the chem lights and scattering them but dismissed the idea. Dee couldn’t physically bend down and retrieve each light, not with his leg and foot, which were already slowing him down enough. And doing so wouldn’t put Chase off his trail.

  Chase, Dee didn’t fool himself, already knew exactly where he was going.

  A zombie was standing with a glow stick in hand and Dee bypassed it, noting the creature’s flat, broad face and heavy brow, its round shape and short stature. The undead cocked its head and watched Dee pass, its tongue protruding from its mouth. Its life had been marked by Down syndrome, its afterlife by an olid-debasement.

  Dee followed the illuminated trail into the trees, brushing low-lying limbs aside, rushing under indistinct trunks in the opaque shadows. The ocean smell was stronger here, and under it, something else. A moan from nearby gave him a start. Dee turned in the direction of the sound, shuffling ahead sideways, tracking with the revolver. He saw nothing in the dark and wasn’t going to wait for it to materialize.

  Breaking from the trees, Dee hopped across the sand to the pier. The boat had already pulled away, idling out past the dock. Riley yelled his name when she saw him. Dee made the pier and started across it, stumbling and falling, the wood surface slippery and stinking. He landed on his back, unharmed, amid the stench of diesel fumes, realizing Kevin and Riley had doused the pier with fuel. He regained his feet as quickly as he could, lurching past the upturned fifty-five gallon drums, one still seeping fluid.

  “You!”

  The cry brought Dee up short in the center of the dock, the diesel stink nearly overpowering. He looked past the edge of the pier to the boat waiting in the water. Riley beckoned him—a flare gun in one hand—her eyes wide at whatever sight she beheld behind Dee.

  Dee turned to face Chase, the outside of his Drover coat sopping with diesel from his spill.

  Chase had stepped from the trees, dragging a zombie with him. One arm was under the zombie’s chin, the other across its forehead. The undead gripped a drumstick in either hand and its arms flailed wildly as Chase manhandled it. In the hand that pinned its forehead, Chase gripped a side-handle baton.

  “You!” Chase Hlooked down at the zombie in his hold, as if he had forgotten about it, and, spotting Dee, could not be bothered with the dead thing any longer. He wrenched its head with a grunt, snapping its neck, pushing the undead away from himself.

  Chase trudged to the foot of the pier and halted, his face wrinkling in repugnance at the diesel stink. Craniofacial malformation had left his eyes wider spaced than normal while radiation had wreaked havoc with his thoracic curvature. One clubbed foot trailed along behind him.

  “You.”

  “What?!” Dee yelled back a challenge. When Chase had been an unnamed presence out there—something Dee and the others feared was following them—an aura had accompanied his presence. A nightmare quality attended his being, an ascription of dread on the part of Dee, a fear that they faced something insurmountable. Out on the pier, revealed for all to see, Chase was big and nasty, yes, but facing his awfulness in the certainty of dawn, any trepidation Dee may have felt melted away, replaced by anger.

  This was the thing that had killed his friend, had told him it’d killed Bruce.

  “Come on, munt!”

  A demoniac look stole over Chase’s malformed visage as he raced forward, dragging his clubbed foot. Riley was screaming at Dee from the boat as he straightened the Python, firing—

  “What munt!?”

  —and missing, the recoil jerking his arm up, throwing off his aim as—

  Chase crossed the space between them, a wild, barbarous glare on his face

  —Dee firing a second round, Chase jerking to the side as the bullet tore through his shoulder—

  “What you gonna do, munt?”

  —the revolver’s hammer striking an empty chamber following the third discharge, the final round errant.

  Dee holstered the weapon, infuriated. “What you—” He limped at Chase, his jaw set. Chase had the truncheon overhead, bellowing. They collided, a tangle of arms and animosity, muttered curses and slipped boots seeking a secure foothold on the slick deck. Chase brought the baton down, Dee blocking his arm, hugging it, dragging the limb across his body, putting his hip into Chase and flipping him over onto his back amid the diesel. He leaned down and delivered a devastating right hook to Chase’s macrognathiac chin, Chase’s head rebounding off the wood.

  A glow shone in the distance behind them, the buildings they’d vacated engulfed in flames.

  Dee drew his fist back to land a second blow but Chase’s leg snaked out, snapping into Dee’s wounded limb, taking him off his feet. Lying on his side, his jacket soaking up more of the diesel, Dee lashed out like a mule, his boot catching Chase in the chest and torso. Each time Dee’s foot connected, Chase grunted and tried to get a hold of it, and each time Dee ripped his boot free to deliver another kick.

  Riley sighted down the barrel of her AR-15.

  Chase finally managed to latch onto Dee’s injured foot. He squeezed and blood welled from the eyelets of Dee’s combat boot. Dee screamed and flopped over onto his back. Chase pulled Dee’s wounded foot and leg into his stomach and used it to steady himself as he rose, one leg slipping out from under him in the fuel, until he stood, towering over his supine opponent.

  Riley fired and the zombie that had stepped onto the dock behind the two combatants dropped.

  Chase looked out past Dee towards the woman on the boat, the woman lining him up in the front iron sight post of the carbine. He flicked his tongue in and out of his mouth at her as he crouched down behind Dee’s raised leg, presenting less of a target. Riley fired and the air near Chase’s head snapped as the round broke the sound barrier. Satisfied that the woman couldn’t shoot him without risking injury to her friend, Chase turned his attention to the man stretched out beneath him—

  Just in time to catch the butt of the Python between his eyes. Chase blinked, stunned.

  “Keep—”

  Dee let him have it again, clutching the revolver by its barrel.

  “—your tongue—”

  Chase tried to react, tried to squeeze Dee’s foot, but Dee’s next blows disoriented him further.

  “—in your—”


  Chase’s grip on Dee’s boot loosened and Dee pulled his foot free.

  “—fucking mouth—”

  Sitting up, Dee continued to hammer away at Chase’s face and head—

  “—you rude motherfucker!”

  —until the other fell away from him, draped over the dock, moaning dazedly.

  “Dee!”A rifle cracked and Dee looked up in time to see a zombie pitch from the dock to the water below. “Come on!”

  He got up, glancing back once at the thing lying there, one of its arms covering its face, a purely defensive measure. Dee turned his back on the grotesquery, on the undead lurching onto the dock behind them, several slipping and falling, littering the pier. He limped ahead. Each time he set his foot down, waves of agony gripped him and he felt blood squish between his foot and the boot sole.

  Riley screamed something at him that he couldn’t understand and a blow from behind knocked Dee down. He hit the drenched wood and slid forward a short distance. Instinctively he scrambled to get up, slipping on his bad foot, looking back towards whatever had taken him off his feet.

  Chase brandished one of the partially emptied fifty-five gallon drums like a battering ram. He had the drum at his knees and then jerked, his whole body into it, momentum and his own brute strength cleaning the barrel to his shoulders. He took a step towards Dee, pressing the barrel overhead, intent on crushing the bald man with it. Chase caught the streak of the flame as it rocketed towards him and managed to drop the barrel back down to chest level, shielding himself. The flare the woman on the boat had fired lodged in the drum and sputtered like a sparkler. Chase guffawed before heaving the barrel overhead once more, triumphantly.

  The diesel pouring out of the barrel ignited from the sparking flare, cascading down Chase’s arms, chest and torso. He dropped the barrel and howled, wind-milling his flaming arms in opposite directions.

  Dee lunged towards the end of the dock, going for the boat, using his hands and feet. He saw the orange rescue float on the water, connected to the boat with a nylon cord. The diesel burned slowly, igniting the dock and advancing after him. Chase writhed in the flames, beating at the fire devouring his body, bellowing incoherently at the top of his lungs.

  “Jump, Dee! Jump!”

  His Drover coat afire, Dee launched himself from the lip of the dock towards the boat and Riley, towards the float. He fell short of all, hitting the water and sinking like a stone.

  Riley yanked off her boots, ignoring the blazing forms careening about the dock, enkindled zombies screeching in agony. She pulled her shirt off over her head, not concerned for the withering forms that pitched from the pier to sizzle and smoke in the waters below. Riley pulled herself up onto the gunwale using the grab rail.

  “Kevin!” She yelled before diving off the boat.

  She opened her eyes but could see little in the murky waters, a faint glow where the deck burned above. Riley kicked her legs and parted the waters with her hands. She found Dee where she had seen him go under, bubbles rising from his mouth and nose as he struggled. The weight of his coat had sunk him, the duster open and floating above him like some cape. She helped him free his arms of its sleeves and they broke the surface of the water together, Dee sputtering, “I can’t—I can’t swim!”

  Riley had her arms under and around him, keeping his head out of the water. She found the orange float and drew it over.

  “Dee—hold this! Hold this!”

  “I’ve got it—I’ve got it!”

  “You’ve got it?”

  “I’ve got—”

  A hand took her ankle and yanked Riley under the surface.

  She twisted her body to face it but couldn’t see what it was. Her foot recoiled and the thing would not let her go, dragging them both towards the seabed. She feared it was a zombie seeking to bring its teeth to her flesh and she kicked out with her free foot, impacting something. Whatever the thing was, it released her and Riley shot to the surface with a few powerful kicks, breaking from the water, gasping for air, nearly landing on Dee’s back.

  “Riley!”

  “Dee!” She raised her feet under her, refusing to let them trail in the water. “There’s something down there!” The raging red flames of the pier gave off toxic black clouds. Zombies wobbled on the beach, wrapped in flame, pitching to the sand. Others stood about, looking vaguely disturbed, watching their brothers and sisters burn.

  Riley held on to Dee while Dee held fast to the float, Kevin drawing them to the boat.

  * * *

  They left the dock burning behind them in the early morning light, the wooden structure partially collapsed and submerged. Great rollicking flames licked up from the exposed surface, its smoke marring the first blush of morning, joining that of the blazing house.

  “I hope he burns until there’s nothing left.” Riley’s loathing was apparent from her tone, from the way she nearly spit the words out of her mouth.

  “Riley.” Dee’s tone was calmer, his wounded leg and foot throbbing. They’d stripped him of his soggy pants and boots and he sat there in his underwear.

  “I hope he lived long enough…” the vindictiveness left her inflection “…to feel it.”

  “Its okay, Riley.”

  “There’s no chance, is there?” Kevin asked from the boat’s controls. “About Bruce?”

  Dee considered all they had experienced this morning, what he had seen and what had been said to him by the creature now cremated. They could go back and look for Bruce—for what remained of their friend—and they would not like what they found. They could go back and look for the two little girls, but he doubted they were alive, and if they were, he didn’t think they’d let themselves be found. They could go back and see how many zombies were on the beach, outside the strip mall, under the water tower. They could do all this, but Dee knew they shouldn’t and they wouldn’t, so he simply answered Kevin’s question with a no.

  “Fuck.” There were tears in Kevin’s eyes as he turned his full attention to the throttle. “That fucker.”

  “Kev, we need you alert on the tiller there.”

  “It’s the helm, Dee.” He pushed the throttle wide open. “The fucking helm.”

  Riley stared silently back at their wake.

  The motorboat glided through the sound, a lagoon prodigious and wide. They could see no sign of land on the other side, though Elmore had told them it was there. The tide subsided with the new day, revealing expansive shoals, gravel bars upon which mis-piloted and abandoned vessels had wrecked themselves. They passed capsized hulls, holed and rusted, vessels half sunken. In the deeper, clearer water a catamaran was plainly visible, submerged beneath their path. Empty life jackets floated on the water, faded from the merciless sun.

  The dock and land were lost to them, and as they journeyed east an object loomed on the horizon, a contraption of immense size and voluminous girth. A cruise ship, somehow misplaced here in the sound, its deep draught effectively anchoring it in place. Kevin steered their boat closer for a look at the passenger liner. Its flat transom canted lower in the water than the bow, the retractable dome over an aft pool cracked and vented. A waterslide was visible on the deck, the bridge long abandoned by the living.

  “I knew there couldn’t be people on it.” Kevin looked away from the cruise liner. About the wraparound promenade, the undead tottered on their sea legs, motioning towards the passing voyagers. Reaching out to the smaller boat, one after another they crested the deck-side railing and flopped from the cruise liner to the blue waters below, disappearing with splashes. They followed one upon the other, mindless, deadened lemmings.

  Riley and Dee stood transfixed, watching them plunge one after the next. “There’s got to be…” Riley thought about it in her head. “The sea floor is probably carpeted with those things.”

  Dee looked down into the water and wondered as to the secrets enfolded in its depths.

  When he looked back, he saw nothing he recognized. He thought about the thing that had chased him to t
he dock, the thing that had blasted through walls to get to him, the thing that had killed Bruce.

  He mulled over the manner in which Bruce had perished. Alone on a water tower, watching and waiting. Dee envisioned the thing climbing up, rung after rung, its movements stealthy and noiseless, catching Bruce unawares. Bruce had been feverish from his shoulder wound. He would have been easier to dupe than ever before, easier to sneak up on. Could he have been asleep?

  Dee wouldn’t countenance that Bruce had nodded off—not up there, not even in the condition he was in. They’d all known they were being followed. And they knew whoever was on their trail was not a friend, that whoever was pursuing them was either related to the little redhead and her troupe, to the munts, or to an unknown and potentially hostile third party. Whoever it was—out here—they wouldn’t have been coming in peace. There was no way Dee could believe Bruce would have slept on such a threat, metaphorically or literally.

  He considered Bruce’s last thoughts. Had he seen the thing that called itself Chase? If he had, was Bruce shocked by its appearance? Had it pushed him or had it grabbed him and thrown him from the tower? Images of the beast haunted Dee. The wispy hair sprouting in patches from its head. The curve of its body, its spine warped. The size of its chin, its lower jaw sticking out like that. Dee had seen it clearly on the dock, seen it as the flames licked over its body, consuming it. Maybe it wasn’t as disturbing as its brethren they’d faced on the battlefield—definitely not—but it was a sight to behold.

  He reflected on the earlier battle, on the way those things had stood there with their father, one of them toting Fred’s stuffed cat. They’d lined up, relishing the task at hand, the carnage they were about to visit on Dee and Riley and Kevin. And then Bruce had stepped up and obliterated them with the grenade launcher.

  I should have been up on that tower, Dee thought, not for the first time. Not him. Yes, a part of Dee’s foot was nearly blown off and his leg might be broken, but he could have made it up the ladder. Two arms and a leg, he could have pulled himself up. The thing was, Dee hadn’t wanted to let Riley out of his sight. He hadn’t wanted to be away from the woman. When Bruce had volunteered to man the tower, Dee hadn’t argued too strongly against it. His own selfishness had resulted in his friends’ demise.