by Tim Curran
Closer.
He practically sank his teeth through his lower lip as they passed the alley…paused, then moved on.
God, he’d wanted to scream.
Looked to be four men, two women. They were in a various states of dress and undress. One of the men was naked. One of the women shrouded in a ratty mink coat. Another of the men carried an axe. Still another had a butcher knife. A fetid odor blew off them.
What chilled Lou the most was not the insanity on an individual level like he’d experienced back in the diner or in the back of his car, but this mass…dementia, this organized savagery where these groups of…psychos, for lack of a better word, formed themselves into gangs and patrolled the streets. The ones that had just passed, for instance. They were grouped with almost military efficiency—two in front, two in the middle, two in the back, equally spaced.
Like a fucking platoon, he thought with a shudder.
And what did that mean? What did that say about all this?
When they stopped at the entrance to the alley, they stopped en masse, as a bunch. Without a word, they all just stopped there. They did not look around. They kept their heads pointed directly ahead, and then, without reason, they moved off at the same time. Like maybe they were plugged into the same brain, some mass consciousness.
It was scary.
No words, no nothing, just wet slithering sounds.
Lou wondered if they were looking for him.
The idea made his flesh go cold, made his brain race with wild thoughts.
Sure, he thought, they’re out hunting. They’re seeking the normal ones, the human ones. Like a cancer they’re searching out the healthy, uninfected cells so they can kill or contaminate them, bring them into the fold, make them like themselves, one huge body of pestilence.
Normal human beings were the abnormal ones now…the ones to be persecuted, exterminated, and maybe infected in this pernicious witch hunt.
But how did they know?
How did they know which ones were infected and which weren’t?
Lou figured it wasn’t by sight or smell, but something more basic, more primal. Maybe a biochemical thing. A chemical signature they gave off. Same way one spider knew another spider and didn’t end up mating with a housefly.
Yeah, okay. All and fine.
Pure speculation and plenty of it.
But it didn’t get him out of this cemetery, now did it?
Crouched behind the dumpster, he lit a cigarette, very badly needing it. He’d wanted to smoke before this, but he hadn’t dared. Now…well, he just had to before he faced the streets again.
When he’d first made his run he found his fogged, reeling brain thinking all kinds of crazy things. Like the fact that maybe this epidemic, this plague was not biological, but supernatural in origin. It was nuts, but what if? Vampires. Zombies. Something like that. These psychos definitely would fit the bill…but the idea of that was nonsense, of course. The guy in the diner had bled, he’d felt pain. Neither of which had stopped him, but it proved he was living flesh and blood. And in this nightmare, God knew, the knowledge of that was something.
And Lou knew, also, that they could die.
A block back he’d found one of them on the sidewalk, a middle-aged woman in a bathrobe curled up like a dead snake. He knew she was one of them because there was foam all over her lips. Her skin was a mottled gray, but he figured that had little to do with her death. Her head was nearly cleaved from her neck, as if she’d been worked on with a crosscut saw.
But it proved they could die.
Maybe he didn’t know what this disease was. But he knew that much.
He butted his cigarette.
He wasn’t going to get anywhere like this.
Steeling himself, he got to his feet, his back and legs protesting with a series of tiny popping sounds. It had been years, too many years, since he’d gotten any real exercise other than walking. And the smoking, drinking, and fatty foods had not helped. Yet, his body was responding just fine when you considered he was on the bad side of forty.
He made to leave the alley.
And that’s when he realized he wasn’t alone.
6
After all these years, the war finally came home.
It finally rose up from the violent collective blackness that is America’s love of combat, of war, of death, and bit Uncle Sam right in his fat, lazy ass. God knew, it had been a long time coming.
Johnny Davis positioned himself high above the town.
He sat in the belfry above St. Thomas Catholic Church.
It seemed like a good place from which to watch the town go to shit. Safe, defensible. He was invisible in his roost. He didn’t think the rabids would find him up here. Most had emerged from the fog as little more than animals, savage evil beasts who knew only knew two things: fucking and killing. But the others? Yes, some of them—quite a few, in fact—were capable of organization, of tactics, of subterfuge.
These were the dangerous ones.
The ones that could and possibly would lead the others.
But if they came for him up here, if it’s a fight they wanted, then it would be a fight he’d give them. Maybe they’d get him in the end, but he wouldn’t make it easy for them.
Johnny was wearing Vietnam-issue tiger stripe camouflage (pants and shirt), waterproof nylon jungle boots, and a black bandanna. It was the way he’d dressed in the war. And when this happenedlike he knew it would eventuallyhe suited up and got ready.
Funny thing was, everyone in Cut River thought he was out of his head, some stoned-out, brain dead, shell-shocked Vietnam vet who lived in a tarpaper shack outside town at the edge of the marshes. Maybe they were right, he often thought. But the real funny thing, the ironic thing, was that he was the only one who knew what was happening here.
Wasn’t that poetic justice?
After the war, he returned home in ‘73, worked a variety of jobs—factories, mills, auto garages, even yard work and construction—but found, like a lot of vets, that he couldn’t hold them. The war was too fresh, the atrocities too close for him to simply shift gears from a world of bloody survival and attrition to one of small-town monotony, hypocritical morals and value judgments. There’d been bar fights, petty crime, then the real thing when he’d hooked up with a local motorcycle gang, now defunct. It had all led to jail, the V.A. hospital, and the psycho ward at the state hospital. Nowhere good.
In the end, Johnny was only glad that he had no family to witness the self-destructive wreck he indeed became.
Lot of vets had seen bad things, had experienced mind-numbing horrors that their Main Street, USA upbringings had definitely not prepared them for, but he had seen things far worse.
The war had been history for roughly thirty years now.
He had seen his fiftieth birthday come and go.
And what had he learned in all that time?
Not a thing, not really. Nothing he didn’t know at twenty in the Delta. Sure, he’d mellowed after they let him out of the hospital, he’d gotten a grip on reality again via intensive therapy with other vets. He’d even managed to hold jobs. But what never changed in all that time was that the war still left a bad taste in his mouth.
And, more so, the government that waged it, its citizens who allowed it.
He sat there, cheek packed with chew, thinking, wondering why he hadn’t just gotten the hell out when he’d seen this coming, because he had. Maybe it was that all these years he’d been looking for some action, looking for a good fight, a reason to do some serious damage and now he had found it.
The belfry had been screened-in to keep out birds and bats, but Johnny had cut the screens out with his K-bar. So, up there in the tower he had himself a four-sided gun port. With his Winchester and its telescopic nightsight, he could pick the rabids off a block away. Not that they’d stay down unless you got them just right, but he could still drop them.
He studied the town.
He had a .357 Smith in a hol
ster at his belt, along with a Browning 9mm semi-auto and .38 in his shoulder sack. Plenty of ammo for all three. Then there was the K-bar, a machete, and a sawed-off twelve-gauge pump with a pistol grip.
Loaded for bear?
Damn right he was.
Bears were nothing compared to what he was facing.
What would have been nice would have been some grenades, some Claymores for perimeter defense. Maybe a sixty or an over-and-under CAR-15. Yeah, sure, and while he was at it maybe an RPG and a Stoner machine gun like he’d carried in the war.
He watched the streets and hated what was happening, while knowing something like this was inevitable. He hated the innocents getting caught up in it, especially the children. They always suffered. He didn’t like the government (never voted, thought they were all corrupt, self-serving facists owned by rich special-interest groups) and hated authority in any form. He knew he was a dinosaur with his revolutionary, anti-establishment attitudes that stunk of sixties’ radicalism.
But he didn’t care.
He was getting old and he was going to die this time, probably. And the thought of that didn’t scare him, it energized him. He decided he was just going to watch this get out of hand, wait for those in power to send in the troops to clean this up, to stop it (if they could), and when they came, he was going to start killing them. Until then he would—
Jesus H. Christ, what was that?
He saw it, but didn’t believe it.
Down there, walking up the sidewalk was a woman. She looked confused, dazed, lost. At least, that’s what her stumbling gait told him. Crazy thing was that she carried what looked like a guitar case.
Was that possible?
“Going to a jam session with those animals, dear?”
He took up his Winchester, sighted her with the night scope. He watched her in the field of green, brought the crosshairs to bear right between her shoulder blades. It was the best way to grease someone. A slug in the spine would explode the vertebrae like shrapnel.
Killshot.
He kept watching her, wondering what her deal was.
She didn’t move like one of them.
He didn’t like the idea of shooting, of announcing his presence to the rabids. But this woman, she had to be fucked-up to be wandering around like that. Had to be. Besides, it was only a matter of time before they got her and he needed a target to sight his rifle in with.
He’d save her from them.
Winchester balanced on the lip of the belfry, eye pressed to the sight’s eyehole, he breathed in and out slowly, bringing himself down, willing a total calm to descend over him. Killing in war was a business and had to be handled in a business-like matter.
Nothing personal, bitch.
He applied pressure to the trigger.
7
The voice was clotted, full of dirt: “You got a smoke for me, mister?”
Lou Frawley almost fell right over, knowing he was not only in imminent danger but that he had been since he’d hid out in the alley. The voice belonged to a woman…no, not a woman, a young girl. A teenager, he guessed.
He made his way out of the alley into the streetlights.
He saw no one around. Heard nothing.
He stood there, his throat tight, his heart pounding, wondering if maybe he’d imagined it all. He waited a moment, two, three. Nothing.
What if that girl was still human?
What if she needed help?
Then he smelled something.
An odd odor. Sharp, pungent. A chemical smell. That and a vague stink of decay, like what you might smell at the bottom of a pile of wet leaves. Not revolting, really, simply earthy, unsettling.
He cleared his throat. “Come out where I can see you.”
First, he heard a slithering sound.
It turned his guts to jelly, made him take a few steps back. Nothing sane made a sound like that. It was low and wet-sounding. He expected to see a nest of snakes come slinking out of the darkness, all knotted-up together like when they hibernated, a great tangle of reptilian motion.
He heard a wet dragging sound, heard it getting closer.
It was time to run, but he couldn’t.
Like the aftermath of a head-on collision, he just had to look.
She came out of the alley on her belly, eyes lit yellow like Christmas bulbs. She was grinning, a wild and deranged smile, all teeth and gums, a froth of foam coming from her nose, her mouth. She slithered along on her belly in a hideous, side-to-side serpentine motion. Her hands were out before her, clawing at the pavement as she came on, the fingertips scraped to bloody nubs.
And Lou, who’d grown up in the mean streets of Milwaukee and had witnessed the aftermath of a gangland execution before his twelfth birthday, fell back, but did not go down.
His head grew dizzy, his lungs seized up and ached from the lack of air.
Then it came, from down deep, somewhere distant and primal, a ragged manic scream that made his bones rattle.
It snapped him out of it.
Like a snake, an emotionless voice told him, she moves like a python, a crawling, legless thing.
And the crazy part was, she moved very quickly.
When she was within a few feet—about the time he screamed—her head and torso rose up like a cobra preparing to strike. He could see that her abdomen had been rubbed raw, her breasts worn to bleeding sacs that hung like skinless polyps.
He also saw why she moved like a snake-woman.
She had no feet.
There was nothing beneath her ankles, just crusted, ragged stumps.
Her bleeding hands reached out for him. “Can you help me, mister? Can you? I’m sick, mister…help me…” she asked, her voice black and soulless. Her tongue came out, seemingly five or six inches of it, white and swollen, tasting the air and looking for life to steal. “Please, mister, I’m so cold…help me…”
But he couldn’t help her.
He couldn’t even help himself.
For one crazy moment while his mind teetered on the edge of some yawning black pit, he almost went to her, pulled her into his arms. He could almost feel the chill of her damp flesh against his own, smell her acrid chemical stink, feel her teeth sinking into his throat.
He ran.
His brain a hive of turbulent thoughts, he kept going, not caring if he ran into a pack of the psychos as long as they would make it quick. That girl…she was inhuman, a thing from the slime of evolution, an obscenity. All he could see was her grotesque form in his brain, inching forward like a slug.
He had a pretty good idea he was going crazy. But there was nothing to stop it now. He just went with the flow, a twig caught in a stream heading out to the dire, churning sea of eternity.
Then he tripped over something and went sprawling face-first into the street.
He split his lip, tasted the blood, and felt the pain. His eyes welled with tears at the hopelessness of it all.
He couldn’t accept this shit.
He couldn’t accept that some lunatic prick of a god had tossed his ass into this…this bedlam. So he lay there, waiting for the end. He had run blind from the snake-woman, didn’t even know where the hell he was anymore. At least before he’d been eyeing up cars, looking for one with a set of keys in it. Now…now he was just lost.
He pulled himself up, saw what he’d tripped over.
Another body.
This one was crushed, splattered.
A man, or what was left of him. It looked like he had taken a swan dive off the roof of the building behind him—three stories up—rather than become like the others.
Or maybe he’d been thrown off.
Lou went to him, not shocked by his slaughtered remains. A corpse was a corpse. Much better than those things that pretended to be people. He had something in one undamaged hand. Lou reached down to see. The dead man’s stiffened fingers were locked death-hard around it. Lou snapped them free.
A gun.
Sweet Jesus, it was a gun.
; A revolver. A little .38 police special.
Lou broke it open. Not a shot had been fired. Looking around like maybe someone might take it from him, tell him it wasn’t allowed in the game, he clutched it tightly in his hands.
He saw the big building in the distance, the place he thought was maybe city hall or the municipal building, an island in the storm. Armed, he would go there now.
They haven’t beaten me yet.
This part of town, though partially lit up, showed the abuse of the storm. Trees were split open and tumbled across sidewalks. Cars wrecked. Plate glass windows shattered, storefronts ravaged, doors kicked in. And there were more bodies, of course. Four of five of them sprawled on the walks, another (headless) lying in the street.
It made him wonder how much was the storm and how much was the psychos out venting themselves.
It was about then that he heard the sound.
First he thought it was running feet in the distance. But as he listened, he understood all too well. Clomp, clomp, clomp. The sound of paws on concrete. The rattle of collar chains.
Dogs.
They came around the corner just ahead, three mongrels trotting side by side. Two bigger ones—shepherd and setter mixes—and a smaller beagle mix. They came forward, tongues flopping from side to side, moving with an ordered, businesslike efficiency that belied a set destination.
Then they stopped dead.
They saw Lou, raised their hackles, began growling.
Lou brought up the gun, made ready.
His heart skipped a beat when he saw the fierce yellow of their eyes, the foam dropping in clots from their tongues. The small dog launched itself first.
Lou put a bullet in its head.
The slug punched through its left eye and scrambled its brains. It flopped over, squealing. The other two approached it, more interested in their fallen comrade now than Lou. They sniffed its twitching corpse. Then, without hesitation, they began to devour it.
But were they devouring it?
They seemed to be ripping it open, yanking out lengths of viscera, chewing them, tearing them and vomiting them back out again. Their only purpose here seemed to be mutilation.