by Curran
Even now, stroking his carbine and remembering, Turner could not believe it, could not stomach that poison memory.
At first, they’d thought Oliverez had stumbled into a spider’s web.
The sort of thing some gigantic arachnid mutation might have spun in a cheap 1950’s B-movie. But it was no spider. What Rice and he saw was an intricate network of knotted bowels, strung together in an oily web at the bottom of the steps. Oliverez had wandered right into it, got tangled up in those rubbery strands. Might have fought his way free, if something like a skinless girl hadn’t come racing down that network and chewed his face from the skull beneath.
Because that’s what was happening when Rice and Turner showed.
That skinless girl…maybe twelve or thirteen…was eating Oliverez. His face was gone and her own was buried in the cavity of his belly, pulling out coils of viscera and chewing globs of yellow fat with teeth that were not teeth, but shards of glass hammered into her jaws.
Turner stared at her in the beam of his light. She had eyes, but they were dangling out of her sockets by bleeding optic nerves. Yet, they moved and saw. She looked upon him with such a ravening lunacy, it made his guts slink in cold waves.
Rice ran off.
Turner gave her a few rounds, had been hiding ever since.
And the fact that he wasn’t laughing at it just yet told him he was not crazy. Maybe tomorrow or next week, but not now. Horror and revulsion and hot-blooded anger that God would allow a travesty like this…these things kept him hanging on, kept his edge polished and sharp.
He could hear sounds coming down the corridor, echoes of voices, dragging sounds, scraping sounds. But in that maze of corridors, it could have been around the next bend or upstairs.
Thing was, Turner was lost.
Even when he came to a room with a window, it did him no good: they were all barred like prison cells. But he could see that everyone was still out there beyond the blockade-cops and medics, journalists and the curious kept at bay behind them.
Wishing he still had his headset, Turner kicked open a door and plunged in there, flashing his light around with the sweeping motion of the Colt’s barrel. Nothing, nothing, nothing. He was in a little apartment with a bathroom off to the side.
He came around through the archway, saw a toilet that was filthy and stained brown with ancient rust stains. The sink. A mirror with jagged cracks in it. And Someone was in the tub.
At first he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, only that they were entirely red from head to foot, red and glistening, like a stick man (or woman) dipped in blood and bowels and decomposition, splashed down with a bucket of waste from a slaughterhouse. The tub was filled with human meat, the zombie chewing on a corkscrew of intestines, totally unconcerned that Turner was standing there.
He gave him-or her or it -two three-round bursts that splashed its anatomy off the bone beneath. Slowly, like a ship going down in a sea of blood, the zombie sank beneath the stinking, quivering sea of remains.
Turner got out of there.
He moved down the corridor, came to a room with a zombie splattered in the center of the concrete block floor. Splattered. Looked like he or she had been dropped from some great height, though the ceiling was only eight feet up. The body lay there, a gored plexus of meat webbing out in all directions, strands and streamers of it snaking about. And drowning in that still-pulsating ocean of pulp and tissue was a bleeding skeleton that trembled, seemed to be trying to breath.
It was too much.
Turner ran out of there, paused before another doorway, wondered if he’d ever find sanctuary in this morgue.
Then two slender hands reached out and yanked him into the room, threw him headlong to the floor. The door was slammed shut, a lock was turned. He brought up his carbine, training the light on his attacker.
A woman.
She was naked.
Tall and willowy, her hips nicely rounded and her breasts firm and jutting, she had a sweep of red hair falling down one shoulder. Her lips were moving as if she were trying to find words.
Turner eased his finger off the trigger.
“Please,” she said. “I…I was kidnapped…please don’t kill me…”
She fell to her knees, sobbing and shaking. Turner studied her closely. She was very pale, but not rotted or discolored. A scent of withered roses came off her in a sweet breath.
Turner lowered his weapon.
Jesus, she looked so much like Dierdre.
Too much like Dierdre.
He knew it was not because Dierdre had been dead seven years now. Leukemia. Turner had been with her through it all. Saw his love, his only true reason for getting up every day, slowly eaten away by the disease. And then she was gone and he turned his mind hard, tried out for the HRT so he could spread some of his pain around, give it back to bad guys and terrorists.
Turner felt cold and hot and confused, didn’t know what to say or even how to speak. It took time to fill his lungs with air, to wrap his mouth around some words that would make sense.
He licked his lips, said, “They…they’ll be storming this place, maybe they already are. I’ll protect you…”
Turner saw a candle on the table and lit it, loving the light and warmth it threw. He went to the woman.
She was still shaking and whimpering, all that lustrous red hair in her face. Turner set his weapon down, went to her. Was surprised…or maybe not at all…when she threw her arms around him, put her lips against his.
He felt her in his arms then, pressed up against him and she wasn’t dead and how could this possible be? She was cold and shivering under his hands and he felt his penis unfurl in his pants. Jesus, now and of all places. But the woman seemed to want it, too, for she was kissing him harder, pushing her tongue into his mouth.
Turned pulled away, said, “Not here, we can’t-”
“Please,” she said, kissing his face, his throat. “Oh please.” And then her tongue was at his ear and she was saying things and unzipping his Kevlar vest. Turner was helping her, pulling his coveralls off and growing dizzy then as she began to stroke his cock.
He took one nipple in his mouth, licking and tasting it and feeling a strange sort of warmth spreading beneath the skin. And it was exciting and liberating and, dear God, she had been right. In a situation like this, what better thing could a man and woman do for one another?
Turner pushed her onto her back and spread her legs. She hooked her ankles behind his back and guided him in, positioned him properly. But she wouldn’t let him enter her. She gripped the globes of his ass, teased his cock with her moist sex and then, staring into his eyes with a voracious appetite, she thrust him into her with a delicious force and And Turner screamed.
Screamed as his penis was impaled on something in there, ripped and gouged and slit. He tried to pull out, to push off her, but her legs were wrapped around him and she clung to him tenaciously. He saw the blossom of blood at their hips, saw that raging demented hunger in her eyes.
Like the others, just like the others.
Thrashing together, trying to fight and only succeeding in wounding himself further, Turner ignored the white-hot blades of pain and felt his fingers brush the stock of his Colt carbine.
She saw him bring up the weapon and fixed him with a raw, unflinching hatred. Her eyes oozed filth like infected sores. Turner brought the stock down on her face again and again and again until it split open like a knife-cut, until the skull beneath cracked open and what was inside, was exposed. Worms. Knotted, squirming lengths of blood-red worms moving in and out of her brain, slipping now from her eye sockets.
Turner fell off her, his penis hanging in shreds now, blood running down his legs and pooling at his hips. Shards of razors were still embedded in it. The woman had stuffed herself with them. Turner crashed to the floor and closed his eyes against the agony, the defilement.
He did not open them again.
*
Now that Silva was taken away in an
ambulance, heavily-medicated because it was the only way to get him to stop laughing at the wonderful joke he kept trying to share with the others, Runyon was in charge.
He did not want to be in charge.
He had been in the comm van when the truth was told first by Red and Blue Teams, then by Green.
Runyon did not want to believe it, felt himself slowly going mad, but given the fact that the TAC units had not been heard from in nearly thirty minutes now, he had no choice.
Something had happened in the compound.
Whatever it had been, it was bad enough to take down twelve highly-trained, highly-motivated men. Take them down and silence them. And Runyon had a feeling, it was far worse than mere cultists.
So Runyon rallied his troops-two back-up TAC units, some thirty sheriff’s deputies and state troopers, and an infantry platoon from a local National Guard base. Armed, pissed-off, and scared, they moved in formation at the compound. Armored vehicles knocked the barbwire fences down and Runyon’s army followed in their wake.
The siege was about to begin.
And it was about that time, that the zombies started coming out of the compound. Zombies led by members of TAC units Red, Green, and Blue that still had their limbs. The living dead poured from the diseased carcass of the compound like worms out of pork.
And the real battle began.
EULOGY OF THE STRAW-WITCH
It was in Boone County, Nebraska, that Strand first heard tell of Missy Crow, the old straw-witch what could call the dead up out of their graves. And if it hadn’t been for the fact that Mama Lucille had passed of the consumption not two days before, Strand probably wouldn’t have paid such a tale any mind.
He never had before.
Boone County was hot as hell’s own skillet in the summer and cold, white, and bitter from December to first thaw. And maybe those extremes did something to people there. Boiled their brains to mash and made ‘em start thinking funny things. Things they might be ashamed of by day.
But at night it was different.
The wind would come moaning across the plains without much more than a few silos or a cottonwood thicket to stop it. The corn would rustle with the sound of hollow breathing and the shadows would creep and whisper. And if you listened to the wind speak, you might hear scraping voices telling you things you did not want to know or hear a low malevolent howling from the dry ravine. These things worked a dark alchemy on the soul and, soon enough, gathered in bunkhouses and at firesides, tales were told of things that lived that should have been buried and things that walked that should have crept. Yarns would be swapped of deserted farmhouses and the pale loathsome things that crawled in their dank cellars or stared out from the rotting hay of crumbling barns with peeled, yellow eyes.
And sometimes, you just might hear about Missy Crow, the straw-witch, and the things she could do and those she would never attempt, which were few. Such stories might get you to thinking impure thoughts and particularly if you’d just buried your mother two days before.
*
That’s how it was with Strand.
At the Broken Arrow Saloon, well into his cups, grief punching a hole in his belly like an awl, he listened to a skinner name of Lester Koats and heard all he needed about the old straw-witch and her wicked ways.
“Missy Crow were born of straw-devil and witch-wife,” Lester said, his boozy breath hot and sour. “She can call the dead up out of their graves with a song and whistle demons to her hearthside like a hound brought to heel. She talks with ghosts and commands vile spirits and has herself rode through the holes between the stars themselves with evil shadows that feed on men’s souls.”
Lester kept on with the tale-spinning until Sheriff Bolan came over and broke the whole thing up, letting Lester see the hard gleam in his eye and the nickel-plated Army. 44’s that rode his hips. Lester took the hint and disappeared out the batwings like a bad stink.
Bolan put one callused, thick-fingered hand on Strand’s arm, said, “You don’t want to be listening to that fool nonsense, son. Stump-water hag like Missy Crow can only bring you six inches closer to hell. So do yourself a favor, just go on home and mourn your mama proper.”
Strand told Bolan that he would do just that, yes sir, straight away.
But he had no intention. Grief can be an immense and stark machine. And once caught in the terrible grinding of its gears, your sense of perspective can be worn smooth as those teeth bite into you and empty you.
When he got home, he told Eileen his intentions.
“But that’s…that’s blasphemy, Luke,” she said. “It’s unholy, it’s witchcraft! You can’t be a party to that! The dead have to stay dead…it’s not natural to bring them back.”
But Strand did not listen. He could not explain what fever burned in his brain or how since his mother’s death there was no shine left in his soul, only a terrible dark graininess.
So he went up to the Oak Grove Burial Ground with a shovel and exhumed Mama Lucille with that big old harvest moon grinning high above like something hungry.
And maybe that was an omen.
*
It took three days of hard riding to find the straw-witch.
Three days in which a hot wind of crematoriums blew across those range grasses and buzzards circled in a sky the color of dead bone. Scarecrows creaked in rustling corn patches, smiling and pointing the way, always pointing the way. Strand rode alone through that lonesome far country, swatting at flies and mopping sweat from his sunburned brow. He searched every dusty corner of Boone County. And in the wagon, Mama Lucille was still stitched in her linen shroud, resting silently in the crate which had brought her grandfather clock some years before, packed in dry ice so she would not turn.
“Don’t you be worrying none, Mama,” Strand would tell that soundless box at the evening’s fire as the wind walked and talked. “I’ll get you fixed up proper, see if I don’t. We gonna find that straw-witch. Maybe tomorrow.”
But it was a long pull and a lonely one, just Strand and Mama Lucille’s crate, and those gloss-black geldings that were none too happy about what they were carrying in the wagon.
Along the way, Strand asked farmers and range hands about Missy Crow and he heard high tales of the sick being cured and storms being raised and fevers being conjured. But when he inquired of the dead being raised up, he was met with a stony silence as if he were mad. And maybe he was. He did not linger any one place long, for once he started asking questions, folks seemed to be sizing up his neck for a swing from the sour apple tree.
Three days into it with a little advice bought with trade whiskey, he found the straw-witch’s cabin on a distant fork of the Loup River, just sitting there all by its lonesome in a wild hayfield like a headstone in the heather. There was no road going in and none coming out, just a bumpy ride across the hay meadow that smelled hot and yellow and crisping. And maybe another smell, too, one that made the geldings whinny and splutter, but Strand was gladly ignorant of.
The witch’s cabin was a simple affair with log walls and a sod roof, plank shutters banging in the wind, the whole thing congested in chokecherry and bracken, knapweed and wild sumac so that it looked not like something built, but something grown. It was shaded by a single spidery and dead scarlet oak whose branches were strung with what seemed hundreds of bones and bottles. When the wind kicked up, the bones rattled and the bottles moaned.
That’s a witch-tree, Strand told himself when he saw it, something inside him running hot and acidic. That’s a conjure-oak.
And maybe it was at that.
For as that warm-dry Nebraska wind exhaled across those empty miles, those bones rattled like they wished to walk again and the breeze blew across the mouths of those bottles in a lonely, hollow dirge.
As Strand dismounted before a low, sloping porch, he noticed that there were a half dozen scarecrows woven from cane straw nailed to uprights twisting from side to side in the breeze. Lots of other things dangled from the porch overhang, like sculpt
ures of twine, straw, and sticks. An old woman sat beneath them in a wicker chair, rocking back and forth. She wore a patchwork calico dress and a denim scarf at her head, a clay pipe locked tight in her seamed lips.
“Well, well, well,” she said, exhaling a cloud of smoke that stank like burning pine, “so ye’ve come, have ye, Luke Strand? Just as I knewed ye would.”
Strand stood there in his rumpled suit and dusty bowler, his throat dry as fireplace soot. “You heard? You heard I was coming?”
The old lady spat off the porch. “I did not and I did not need to, son. I know things as I’ve always knowed things. I knewed you was coming just as I knewed what you would bring in that wagon. How? Mayhap I divined it in the bowels of hog or from the bones of a stillborn child or sprinkled moondust in an open grave…and does it matter?”
Missy Crow had a face fissured and flaking-brown like that of an Egyptian mummy. When she grinned with that awful rictus, it seemed that face would split open like dry brushwood. There was a jagged pink scar running across her throat and disappearing behind her ears and it looked like a crooked mouth that wanted to open up and spit at you.
“Yes, Luke Strand, that there scar is from the noose,” she said in that voice of deserts and dry washes. “Tyler County, West Virginny, it was. The good and god-fearing folk there strung me up for witching and the practice of necromancy, which be the conjuring of spirits. They left me to swing near on three days from a black elder with birds pecking at me and flies nipping, until some good Christian gent cut me down and planted me proper. Three days later, aye, I kicked my way out of the grave and visited them what had done me harm. But ye haven’t come to hear my yarning, have ye?”
Strand swallowed. “I heard you can do things. Things like in the Bible.”
The straw-witch pulled at her pipe. “Did ye now? Do ye hear that I call up plagues and storms of locusts? Boils and frogs, blisters and blights? That I can cure yer firstborn and curse yer adultering wife? Is that what ye heard, Luke Strand?”