by Tim Curran
She started wondering if it would really be all that bad.
Then she started thinking about Nancy, what it had done to her before she died. Horrible. Far worse than withdrawal…wasn’t it? At least Nancy was dead now, though, and didn’t feel the pain.
Or was she?
Lisa kept wondering that, too.
She’d looked dead…but maybe she wasn’t, maybe she’d be waking up soon.
Thinking these things only made the shivering worse.
“Listen,” Johnny said to her in a whisper.
She sighed, thinking maybe he was hearing gunfire and helicopters again. She’d heard the first, but not the second. He, however, swore he’d heard it. It seemed to worry him much more than the rabids or what they could do. Maybe he was ready to have a breakdown. Maybe the war was coming back—
No, not gunfire or helicopters.
This sound sent chills up her spine, yanked her mind out of the fog. It was a baby crying. Wailing pitifully. It woke some maternal instinct in her she hadn’t known existed…and it also, for reasons she couldn’t explain, filled her with a gnawing, relentless terror.
Johnny shrugged, spat. “Some kid,” he said.
“Who needs help,” Lisa said angrily, tired of apathy.
He laughed. “You think kids haven’t been affected by this, rock star? Is that what you think?” he said, eyes bulging. “What is it you think I shot back there at the church? What do you think that was?”
Lisa stared at him. “I’m going to find that kid. Help her or him. You can go fuck yourself for all I care.”
She stalked off into the darkness, zeroing in on the crying. The closer she got to it, the more her habit withdrew its clutches. She was pumped with adrenalin now, on a mission from God here, and nothing was going to stand in her way.
She found herself on a block of houses.
A few were lit up, but most were dark. Odd as it seemed, the darkness was gradually holding less and less threat for her. Maybe it was the gun. Maybe it was that she knew those bastards could die now. And maybe it was just experience. After awhile, they said, you could get used to anything.
She stopped before a simple two-story frame house.
A working streetlight on the boulevard washed it down in pale illumination. It had bad windows, old cedar siding. The lawn was overgrown and there was a Ford pickup in the driveway with a flat tire. The body of a woman was twisted-up in the grass, a swath of darkness where her face had been. The sight of her didn’t even faze Lisa.
There was another body in the street.
Another swung from the limb of a tree next door.
So what?
The child was still crying. Very loud, very insistent. It could thank its lucky stars that its cries had brought Lisa and not someone or something else. The porch was screened-in and she let herself in. There was a recliner, an old card table in there. A few boxes of toys, a bag of empties. She saw a pack of cigarettes on the arm of the recliner. Winston. Not her brand, but, hey, they were free.
She lit up, wondering if the flickering flame would draw any unfriendlies in.
But it didn’t.
It didn’t even draw Johnny in. And the fact that he’d actually allowed her to run off like that…well, it both pissed her off and scared her. She dragged off her cigarette, exhaled.
The child had stopped crying now.
She couldn’t be entirely certain she was in the right house.
Sighing, she tried the door.
It whispered in without even a hint of a creak. A mild rain began to fall, tapping on the windows. Wind rattled a loose rain gutter against the siding. She was in a living room—TV, couch, sofa piled with dirty clothes. All terribly ordinary, really, except for the smell in the air of death and pain.
And an empty house.
There was something terrifying about a dark, deserted house, wasn’t there? Empty, echoing, a parade of clutching shadows where only stillness and silence walked.
And this was especially true of Cut River, she knew. The town the devil built.
There was a nightlight on the stairs.
Lisa started up, still smoking, clutching the .357 with renewed vigor now. Near the top, she heard movement. A quick, faint pattering like the fall of tiny footsteps. She could feel fear settle into her again, thick as molasses. If you would have asked her at that particular moment if she had a drug habit, she couldn’t have told you. All that seemed worlds away now. There was only her, three or four steps from the top, and whatever waited in the gloom above.
She tried to swallow, but her throat was full of sand.
Do what you gotta do, then get out. Just do what you gotta do.
She exhaled, her pulse drumming at her temples.
She stepped up into the hallway.
It went a short way, then turned off to the left like an L. She stopped there, listening. She could hear her own breathing, the rush of blood in her head. Outside, the wind played along the eaves, rain dropping on the roof. Her senses were electric, her muscles taut and flexed.
She navigated the bend in the hallway.
A pale radiance bathed the walls from the streetlight outside. There were doors standing open. Bedrooms, she figured. But she was only interested in the one at the end. It was halfway open and beyond was the summation of mankind’s oldest fear: the unknown.
Maybe a terrified child waited. Maybe something far worse.
But she had the gun. Yes, she did have that.
You sonofabitch, Johnny…how could you make me face this alone?
Through the doorway, she could just make out a suggestion of a form. A gray half-shape, a partial outline that looked oddly human. But small.
A child?
She moved further, her own steps like feathers brushing silk.
She dropped her cigarette and pushed the door open.
This one creaked.
The streetlight fed in through a threadbare curtain. The bed was unmade. The body of a woman was stretched out on it, naked from the waist up. Her breasts were mutilated, ravaged by dark gashes and scratching. But were nothing compared to the ruin of her throat.
A child stood on the other side of the bed, its face black with blood.
Lisa, an odd buzzing in ears, found the light switch and flicked it on.
The room exploded with brilliance.
The child…a toddler…screamed at the intrusion of light. Just a little girl, caked with blood, her eyes blazing with that malign pestilence. She cowered from the light. She tottered uneasily back and forth, a child who’d just learned the fine art of walking.
Lisa knew she should shoot her, but she didn’t have the stomach for it.
The child was no real threat. Very small. Insane as all the others, but trapped in a far worse darkness somehow. A darkness the child could never hope to understand. The woman must have been her mother. The woman’s breasts were riddled with teeth marks. The girl must have been breastfeeding in life…and in this living hell, she still was.
Lisa turned off the light and backed carefully from the room, shut the door behind her.
She heard the girl claw madly at the door, wrestling with the knob in futility. Then she began wailing again. Lisa knew she’d never forget that awful, pathetic sound. It rattled through her skull. She heard the little girl pad across the floor, heard the squeaking of bed springs…and then a congested sucking sound as she sought comfort at her dead mother’s breast.
It wasn’t until she was outside that Lisa began to cry.
And then Johnny was coming through the yard.
25
Lou approached the schoolyard carefully.
He still had the shotgun, but he didn’t really know if it had any shot left. The idea of pausing and finding out was unthinkable.
As he moved around the chain-link fence and into the schoolyard itself, he kept an eye cast towards the river, watching for the woman, almost expecting she’d drag her blasted, dripping body after him. In his mind he could see her cadave
rous face, the stagnant river water running from her wounds.
Enough.
He pressed himself up against the brick façade of the building.
It was damp and cool.
The school was single-story, spread out over the dark grounds like a spider, wings extending in every direction like limbs. He was in the back, facing the river the town was named for.
He could hear the flagpole rope out front dinging against the pole.
The entire rear of the school was enclosed by a high storm fence. Kept the kids away from the river, he supposed, and off the ice in the wintertime. He thought the school was probably newer—built in the last twenty, thirty years or so—and had probably replaced some ancient, stone monstrosity of the sort he’d attended back in the bronze age.
That made him think of his teachers and, soon enough, he thought about his third wife, Mara. Mara had been a schoolteacher. She was real good with oral exams…unfortunately, she wasn’t real picky about who she gave them to.
But Lou didn’t blame her. Not really.
He thought about all the women that had passed through his life. Not a single relationship had stuck for more than a few years. He was on the road all the time, but that wasn’t the real problem: he was. He was the only constant in all those relationships, the only thing that could possibly be at blame.
It was funny how it took a situation like this, one of constant danger and stress, to make you finally see your life and the numerous holes you’d dug in it. What was murky and metaphysical before, now was crystal clear.
And didn’t that just beat all?
He started moving again, considering his latest plan of action.
Johnny had said to wait for the sunrise and those things would slink back into their holes. That sounded like a plan.
Lou decided he needed to get up on the roof somehow.
He could wait it out up there. Maybe it was stupid and crazy and suicidal, but if he didn’t rest soon…well, he was no kid anymore.
He kept going.
The dark windows looked at him like sullen, blind eyes. He saw no movement in them and didn’t wait to see any. He made it to the end of the building, sucked in a breath and rounded the corner. He was in the playground now.
Feeling relieved, he walked right out into it.
And right into a nest of them.
And, of course, it made sense, didn’t it?
Where else would they go but the playground? Not human, not anymore, but still the most basal of imperatives held: the need to play. Even beasts of the forests had that.
And so did the children of Cut River.
Lou felt hope and energy run out of him like water through a colander.
They were everywhere.
Their dark, waiting shapes were snipped from black paper. They were perched like vultures atop the jungle gym. Crowded on the merry-go-round and sitting on the swings—not swinging, just sitting there almost as if they’d been waiting for him.
And maybe they were.
Maybe they heard him coming, smelled him perhaps. Animals could do that and these children were animals now, weren’t they?
As if satisfied by his presence, they began to play.
They started swinging, the chains holding the swing seats rattling against their crossbars. The merry-go-round began to turn. The teeter-totter began to move up and down, groaning and creaking in the night. It was surreal, like falling into a dream…or a nightmare.
He sensed motion behind him.
A small hand grasped his wrist. Its grip was surprisingly powerful. The flesh was cold, damp, feeling much like the pebbly skin of a freshly-plucked chicken.
With a cry, Lou turned, pulling his hand free.
There was a little girl standing there.
She was no more than seven, wearing a cute little party dress that was bunched up and stained with dirt. Her face was pallid, eyes like living yellow marbles. She leered at him, lips pulling away from teeth in a depraved grin. She pulled up her skirt. She wore nothing beneath. “Hey, mister,” she seethed with that hissing voice, “you wanna fuck?”
And Lou, maybe terrified and maybe struck by the sheer profanity of it all, brought his hand back and slapped her across the face. She yelped like a kicked dog and fell over.
And that was the signal.
The others were coming now, sliding off their perches like crocodiles from the muddy banks of a jungle river.
And Lou was running.
He moved with a speed he thought had abandoned him in his twenties.
He sprinted around the front of the school and the first thing he saw were three yellow school buses parked at the curb. He turned and saw a boy making good time on him. He was older boy, maybe a sixth grader.
Without remorse, Lou went down on one knee and pulled the trigger of his shotgun. The buckshot nearly tore the kid in half.
As Lou got back to his feet, he saw that it had done just that. The kid was mewling like a sick cat. Divorced of his legs and pelvis, he was dragging his upper body across the grass, teeth still snapping.
Lou tried the door of the first bus.
Locked.
Their footfalls were pounding through the grass now.
The second bus.
Locked.
He turned and saw their ashen faces coming through the darkness.
A dead man now, he went to try the third bus and the door was standing wide open. He fell through it onto the small, mat-covered steps. He hauled himself in and threw himself towards the chrome lever by the driver’s seat. He pulled it with everything he had and the folding door snapped shut.
And then they were all around the bus, howling and shrieking, the bus rocking as they threw themselves at it.
Lou was crouched on the floor, trembling.
It was about that time that he saw the guy in the driver’s seat.
26
Ben was still alive, contrary to popular opinion.
He was still alive and he was still at the church. Yes, he was in bad shape—the rabids hadn’t gone easy on him. He was bitten, clawed, scratched, his body a map of bruises and contusions and swollen cuts.
But he was very much alive.
Soon after the final members of Rawley’s gang had been murdered, the rabids, leaving Ben for dead, had slipped back out into the night like shadows, back to the hunting grounds of Cut River.
Ben accepted certain things now.
They had bitten him and the germ, or whatever it was, was inside him now, too. He could feel it beginning to work. It didn’t waste any time.
Maybe there was a certain clarity that came with knowing your end was imminent, but he believed everything Johnny had said. He hadn’t been certain before—not one-hundred percent, even though, crazy as it sounded, it made perfect sense—but now, yes, he believed.
And conversion of faith had come at an expensive price.
This disease or what not was simply too insidious to be of natural origin or freakish mutation, it had been designed to do what it was doing…by assholes in white lab coats with no more compassion or respect for human life than terrorists planting a bomb in a hospital.
Maybe he was being too hard on them, but he didn’t think so.
Like Johnny, he had lost all respect for the power brokers of this country.
But that was over now. Soon, it wouldn’t be his problem.
He was in the dining room of the rectory of St. Thomas’ Catholic Church. On the dining table, shrouded by a white sheet, was the form of his dead wife.
It was the result of a short cut. A quicker way home from the casino. It had cost the life of his brother-in-law Sam and now his wife, too. And before long, Ben himself.
He was alone.
The rabids had abandoned the church, dragging off the dead with them.
The church was silent.
Ben sat in a chair in the corner, the chandelier burning at a low setting. It had to be that way—Ben had an aversion now to bright light. A voice of optimism kept tel
ling him he was just tired, but he knew better. There was a numbness in his fingertips. His limbs were trembling. Spastic convulsions ripped through him now and again. He was nauseous, feverish, his head aching. His throat was dry and constricted…but the idea of water made him violently ill.
He had the germ.
He was infected with Laughing Man.
It was inside him, working its malignant magic. Soon, soon…
He went to the table, drew the sheet from Nancy’s still body.
Dear sweet Jesus my wife my wife oh God oh God oh—
He tightened his jaw, pressed his lips together. There was no time for emotional outbursts now. He would keep watch over her body until dawn, then he would kill himself. He had a big carving knife from the kitchen drawer.
Nancy’s face looked compressed, eyes sunk deep into their sockets. She had a gray, mottled pallor, lips bloodless and flaccid. He lifted her again, checking for lividity. If she was truly dead, then her blood should have settled—but it hadn’t. Rigor had not set in, either. Her limbs were supple and limp. But he could find no pulse, no heartbeat, no evidence of respiration.
And her flesh was cold.
Terribly cold like a body pulled from a frozen lake.
What did it all mean?
Is this how it happened? Some near-death coma, some bastard form of suspended animation or metabolic suspension occurred and then…and then…
He covered her.
She was dead. She had to be dead.
He sat back down, maintaining his deathwatch. There was a painting of the Last Supper on the wall. Nearby, a simple wooden crucifix. It made him think of horror movies he’d seen. Cadavers rising from the mist of death, being held at bay with religious symbols. But that was fiction, dark fantasy channeled with religious myth.
He sat in his chair, slumped forward.
Fatigue swept over him.
He kept drifting off, his limbs aching, his eyes heavy. The only thing that kept him from passing out were the convulsions that ripped through him at irregular intervals. Sweat poured in rivers from him…icy, sweet-smelling perspiration.
He drifted off again…then his eyes snapped open.
Something had changed.
He wasn’t sure what, but something. Was it cooler in the room? And what was that smell, that whisper of raw decay? Maybe it was all in his imagination, maybe it was only in his dreaming brain.