by Tim Curran
Rawley was flushed red now. “You just settle down, snatch. You’re real close right now. Real close.”
“Don’t you be calling her that,” Ruby Sue said. “Way I hear it, man, only thing big in Texas is your mother’s hole.”
Rawley stared. He looked for a moment like he might snap, then his face seemed to relax. “Might be some truth to that, sweet thing, so I won’t attempt a debate. You do know how to push a man’s buttons, I’ll give you that.” He made a show of tipping his hat to her. But his finger never left the trigger of his shotgun. He looked at the preacher. “While I keep these folks honest, preacher, have your boys see what they can find.”
Rawley had managed to corral them together now. Even Johnny had allowed himself to be worked. Mainly because he feared for Lisa’s life.
The preacher’s boys were both in their twenties. They found Johnny’s guns right away and then Joe’s duffel. They also found Lisa’s purse, her guitar, assorted personals.
The congregation were getting antsy. They wanted to do whatever it was they’d come to do.
Rawley had stopped smiling long ago. “Listen up. This is how it works. We need a diversion to get out of this place. Those goddamn Yankee crazies are lining up outside in case you didn’t notice. And—”
“And we’re it?” Ben said incredulously. “You feed us to them and you walk right out?”
“You catch on quick for a Northerner, son.”
“And if we don’t care for that plan?” Lou said.
Rawley aimed the shotgun at Lisa. “Then I kill the snatch.”
Johnny looked at Joe who looked to Lou who, in turn, looked to Ben. Then they all looked at Ruby Sue and Lisa. This was it, then. This was the big one. No more fucking around here, death had arrived. They’d spent most of the evening fighting to stay alive, to stay uninfected…and now this crazy bastard Rawley was throwing them to the wolves. The irony, if that’s what it was, was numbing.
Johnny accepted it, as did Joe. Both were fighters, yes, but both were experienced enough to know that you didn’t attack an armed man until all possible hope was vanquished. Besides, it wasn’t just Rawley now; they all had guns.
“Bring her to me,” Rawley said, staring at Lisa with unabashed hunger.
One of the preacher’s minions made to do just that, but Lisa pulled back.
“You either come over here, snatch,” he said, “or I drop you right now.”
Lisa allowed herself to be pulled forward.
Rawley was happy now. “This little girl, you see, is our insurance policy. Any of you fucks try to play hero, she gets it first. Understand?”
They did.
Rawley formed them up into ranks. Ben was in front, Rawley decided, because he didn’t give two shits for his own skin. Next was Joe and Johnny. Ruby Sue and Lou were in the back. Directly behind them were the preacher’s boys. They marched their little group up the aisle between the pews towards the front of the church. Outside, there was the night and all it contained.
“It isn’t too late to become a human being,” Lou said.
Well behind them, the shotgun pressed into the small of Lisa’s back, Rawley said, “But I am a human being. And I plan on staying that way. Wish I could say the same for you, friend.”
The preacher unlocked the front door.
And the shit hit the fan.
It was as if some predestined moment of attack had arrived. Without bugles blaring or so much as a rebel yell, the stained glass windows began to shatter and the siege began. Dozens of rabids began pouring into the church. Their pallid faces were cut and bleeding but it did nothing to erase their zeal. Like an insane hive, they thronged over the pews. Countless others came from beyond the altar. And, of course, before anyone could possibly register their horror or shock, the front door exploded in.
And pandemonium began.
Ben and the others seemed to literally disappear in sea of clutching, clawing white hands. The preacher’s boys started shooting. And that’s the way it was—screams and shrieking, gunfire and shouting, all punctuated by the inhuman gibberings of the rabids as they sought out the last few healthy cells of Cut River, attempting to absorb them into the cancerous body of the new order.
Rawley said, “I’ll be dipped in shit.” He shoved Lisa to the floor and started popping off rounds from his shotgun.
Lisa had barely even hit the carpet when three of the rabids ringed in Rawley. She realized that the crazy redneck hadn’t been trying to save her, but had been trying to shove her at them to buy himself time. Thanks to her own natural clumsiness, she tripped over her own feet and went down. And maybe that’s what saved her. The trio of rabids had no interest in her—they went right at Rawley.
She brought her face up in time to see the head of a bald man get blasted to shrapnel. He staggered backward drunkenly, fountaining blood and collapsed in a heap.
A hugely overweight woman took two blasts to the abdomen before she, too, went down.
The third, a naked teenage boy launched himself at Rawley, spraying foam and slime. Rawley swung the empty shotgun like a bat and cracked his head open. The boy went down to his knees a few feet from Lisa, head split like a cantaloupe, blood oozing down his white face in crimson rivers. He didn’t seem to comprehend that he was mortally wounded. Beyond the mask of blood, his yellow eyes blazed like headlights in a dark tunnel.
He pulled himself to his feet and staggered on after Rawley who was running back the way they’d come, swinging the shotgun in wild arcs.
The preacher dropped his empty weapon—Johnny’s little .38 snubby—and simply began to pray. The sound of his voice droning monotonously seemed to drive the rabids into a white-hot rage. As the 23rd Psalm tumbled from his lips, he was struck by a wave of them. A few of which were children which hung on like ticks, biting and tearing at his face, throat, belly and legs as the adults hammered him to his knees. Beneath their lunatic attentions, he came apart like a ragdoll.
Lisa crawled away on all fours.
The church was a huge echoing drum of noise. There were bodies everywhere—tumbled, heaped, crawling, screeching.
She couldn’t see any of her new friends, but she did see what was left of the preacher’s congregation. One of the young men with him was being ritually dismembered by a group of children. She saw two rabids fighting over the head of the other man.
The young girl that had been with them (who couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven) was encircled by four or five teenagers, girls and boys. All naked and streaked with grime. They were visibly excited at the sight of their helpless prey. As she tried to stand, they shoved her down. As she tried to crab-crawl to safety, they rained kicks down upon her. Bleeding and bruised and whimpering, they tossed her back and forth like a ball. They were like cats sharing the torments of a mouse. The girl kept screaming and screaming.
The rabids were all grinning, foaming at the mouth, their eyes glassy and reptilian. They closed in tighter, mocking the child’s screams, howling in her face.
Lisa searched frantically around for a weapon.
She found her feet and a hand locked onto her shoulder, spun her around.
She cocked back her fist…and saw it was Johnny. He was banged-up and bleeding, but his battle-scarred face was the best thing she could imagine.
“Oh…Jesus, Johnny,” she heard herself weep. “Lookit them…oh Christ….this place—”
“Fuck it!” Johnny shouted over the din. “Let’s save our own asses here!”
By luck or pluck, he had some of his weapons back—the Winchester and his .357. Pried from dead fingers, no doubt.
He stuck the .357 in her hand, shoved her towards the back of the church. There were more rabids now gathering outside the front door. Oddly enough, they weren’t attacking; they were just standing on the steps looking in with almost puzzled expressions.
Nothing about them, Lisa decided, fit any conceivable pattern.
The young girl was being pulled apart now. A teenage girl was lap
ping at blood from her neck like a kitty with a bowl of warm milk. One of the boys was pushing his penis into her mouth.
Lisa turned away, unable to look anymore.
She could not sup on any more horrors. She was full now like a barrel, overflowing.
The woman who’d been with the congregation had her own troubles.
Two rabids—an elderly woman in a windsuit and a bearded man wearing only a flannel shirt were pulling at her from either side, teeth bared. They were growling and snapping and drooling. Like lover’s playfully sharing a joint of beef, they began taking turns with her, each biting chunks of meat from the woman’s face and neck. There was such primitive, barbaric pleasure to their actions it was literally unspeakable.
Lisa and Johnny ran up the aisle.
Behind them, the deranged throng from outside began to rush in. There was no more time to witness the fall of civilization as such.
“They’re not people!” Johnny shouted, as if to convince himself of the same. “Not people…”
From the altar, more rabids came.
The initial offensive consisted of three adults, all men. An unlikely threesome they were—a business man in a soiled three-piece suit, barefoot, wielding a broom handle; a gangly farmer-brown type in bib overalls and a greasy Case cap, Junior Samples from Hell; and lastly, a huge, lolling fat man wearing the uniform pants of a cop with a badge pinned to his rolling fish-white belly.
If they hadn’t been so positively sinister in intent, it might have been laughable.
Johnny shouldered the .30-06, sighted, and blew the cop’s head to fragments. He did the same with the farmer. They fell into one another, dead, but their limbs continued to jump and twitch. The businessman with the broom handle vaulted over them and came on, his club held above his head for a deathblow.
He got within four feet of Johnny and Lisa.
Before Johnny could pull the trigger, Lisa brought up the .357 and shot him in the face. The back of his head exploded with a spray of meat and bone. The impact threw him up against a pew and over it.
Johnny took her by the hand, led her forward.
They weren’t far from the doorway that led to the rectory. It was just beyond the altar. Twenty feet at most. But in their situation, it might have been miles.
Behind them, the rabids were swarming like hornets. The church was filled with their screechings and howlings.
The door to the rectory suddenly slammed open and two more showed themselves.
Two twin girls, naked and scrawny, their ashen flesh black with streaks and blotches of oil and dirt like they’d been crawling around in a mechanic’s bay. Their blonde hair was matted with leaves and sticks, stringy strands of it hung limply over their faces. They could’ve been a set of porcelain dolls, so white, so perfect…except for their eyes—liquid yellow and fixed with a wolfish hunger.
They came on, arms extended, fingers clutching and clawing.
“God forgive me,” Johnny said.
And killed them both.
After that, both Lisa and he were finished.
They shambled forward, through the rectory and out into the night. They met no resistance and that was a good thing because, by that point, there wouldn’t have been much they could’ve done about it.
They made it out into the courtyard, out into the misting, damp night.
Holding each other, they fell behind a wall of cedars and trembled. Lisa sobbed and Johnny did, too, realizing it was the first time he had cried in thirty years. It went against the grain of who and what he was, but the tears felt good.
They proved he was still human.
22
Lou was armed and dangerous and pretty much out of his head.
Like Johnny, he’d survived the initial onslaught when the rabids poured through the front door of the church by simply being overwhelmed. The rabids bowled down first Ben then Joe and Johnny. The latter slammed into Lou and pitched him on his ass. The rabids went right over the top of them, trampling them to the floor.
Maybe it was sheer momentum.
Maybe they saw the men behind them with the guns and knew they were the ones who had to go first.
Regardless, Lou, bruised and banged-up from being used as a welcome mat, managed to crawl out the front door.
Scrambling away on all fours, something struck him in the back—a shotgun. It must’ve been tossed aside by one of the rabids as they fell on its owner. And now he had it. It was sawed-off right in front of the pump and he knew without a doubt it was Johnny’s.
And now, here he was, back on the streets of Cut River once again.
Alone.
A voice in his head kept telling him he had to hang on until dawn…but that was hours and hours away. He pretty much accepted the fact that the others had to be dead. Maybe by sunrise he’d run into one or more of them again…and have to kill them. He wasn’t sure he was ready for that. His tank was empty and everything seemed gray and hopeless.
But something in him told him to fight on.
If they were going to get him—and by virtue of their sheer numbers it seemed very likely—then he was going to make them pay for it.
A block from the main drag, Chestnut, he collapsed behind a parked Tony’s Pizza truck and weighed his options. He thought of getting in a car again and driving all night. If the tank was full and it was an economical job, he could cruise around until first light.
But he dismissed that idea; it would only draw attention.
He considered walking out of town again.
It seemed the only rational choice.
It didn’t seem conceivable to him that they could have every avenue of escape covered. Maybe the roads…but, Christ, Cut River wasn’t that big. It was bordered by woods and fields to all sides and where it wasn’t, there was the river. There had to be an opening somewhere. The only alternative to that was finding yet another (supposedly) defensible position and waiting out the night.
Fuck that noise, he thought. You don’t know how many rounds you have. Do the sensible thing and get the hell out.
Okay, then. Which way?
Chestnut slit right through the center of town. Main arteries fed off of it in either direction. Those were out. To the east, the town was flanked by the river. To the west, the cemetery, the trainyards, some warehouses, and what had looked to be a trailer court. Beyond that was open country.
He’d already tried the cemetery and that was no good. Those ghouls were thick in there.
The river?
Why the hell not? Maybe if he got in the water, cold as it would be, he could quietly follow the riverbank out of town. Regardless, it was better than dying on the streets.
Staying in the shadows, he crept up to Chestnut, pressing himself to the brick façade of a jewelry store. He was stunned to see that he was only a block or so away from where he’d parked his Pontiac. It was still there, he saw, across from the Town Tap. He felt a hollow yearning in his belly. The car had brought him to this graveyard. It was his only true connection with the real world.
He wiped a hand across his mouth. Chewed his fingernails.
He felt like he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Sighing, he shook his head. He couldn’t let himself weaken like that.
As he squinted his eyes, he could see shadowy forms moving not far from his Grand Am.
He thought: Cocksuckers, dirty, vile inhuman cocksuckers! Reducing me to this! I should go down there and kill ‘em all! Waste those godless pricks!
He wiped dampness from his brow, part mist, part sweat. He had to keep it together. He couldn’t afford to lose it now. This was his last chance. No doubt about that.
Steeling himself, he held the 12-gauge out before him and, crouching down low, jogged soundlessly across Chestnut. On the other side, he ducked into a dark alley and waited. Five minutes. Ten. Safe. They would’ve shown themselves by now if they were going to.
It took him maybe twenty minutes to maneuver the darkened streets.
; The moon was still riding high, bloated and wide like a dead man’s eyeball. It created threatening shadows and illuminated the terrain. Bad and good. He saw no one, heard no one.
The only thing that stopped him was the sound of gunfire far in the distance.
Then it was gone—just a muted series of poppings, then nothing.
He wasn’t even sure he’d heard it. It was so vague that there was no way he could judge its direction. Maybe some of the normal ones were still alive and battling it out.
No matter, because he wasn’t going back.
If he got out, he’d bring the Marines back with him.
The houses began to be separated by vacant, weedy lots, industrial sites. Black windows reflected the moon, reflected the lone hunted man, but nothing more.
In the distance, he saw the river.
It wound like a black, glistening snake through the countryside. There was mostly open country bordering it on either side. Lou saw what he thought might be a pumping station off to the far left and a schoolhouse to the right. In-between there was a public access road and a boat dock.
But he saw no boats.
He saw only the moon riding the dark waters.
Okay, tough guy, he told himself, this is it. You wanted to go for a swim? Now’s your chance.
There was a fringe of trees near the dock. It would be the best point of entry.
He darted across the grass to the trees. Once in their shadows, he allowed himself to breathe again. He could smell the river now—wet and fishy. A cold mist blew off it. Its current was slow, but steady. The waters were dark and looked very deep.
He slid off the grassy bank.
The water was like ice, sluicing around his legs. He had to bite down on his lower lip to suppress the yelp of shock that twisted in his throat. Good Christ. If he stayed in too long, he’d be looking at serious hypothermia. Following the riverbank was out of the question now—he’d have to make a quick crossing.