by Tim Curran
He remembered his gun and brought it up.
Something struck him in the chest and he went on his ass.
The head.
With one fluid sweep of musculature, she’d flung the head at him and with such force it was like being hit by a medicine ball. The wind was literally knocked out of him. He’d lost his gun and she was advancing like a starved wolf that had separated a weak stag from the pack.
She dove on him.
He fought with everything he had left which wasn’t much. She overpowered him effortlessly, pinning him to the floor and slavering his screaming face with kisses, with licks from her long discolored tongue which was so cold, so very cold…like a snake from a meat locker. Drool washed over his face and he fought hopelessly as she licked a spot at his neck and playfully nipped it with her teeth, sucking up the blood that ran out like an infant at its mother’s teat.
He was locked down by her glaring vulpine eyes…and suddenly, was liking it.
And then there was a gunshot.
Followed by a second and a third.
The woman went taut, began to shudder, her mouth split open into a bestial cry of defeat. She howled and screeched and then slumped forward, vomiting a sea of black blood and toxic waste all over him.
Lou kicked free.
Johnny was a few feet away, but his weapon was lowered. He was looking past Lou at the rabid woman clawing her way up the wall with snake-like gyrations of her trunk.
Ruby Sue was standing there, gun in hand.
She was bloody and beaten and looked like she’d just escaped from a tiger cage. But her eyes were normal, if not glazed and empty. They mirrored recognition of those she saw in the corridor.
The woman pulled herself up the wall, three gaping bloody holes in her back. She turned and leered at her attacker with poisoned eyes. She growled and snapped her jaws and spit out clots of blood and phlegm. Her eyes found Lou and fixed on him with that vicious, boiling hatred.
And then Ruby Sue shot her in the head.
She slid down the wall slowly like a raindrop down a window, leaving a smear of gore behind her. But not for one moment did her manic eyes leave Lou’s own. Even in death, cheated of prey, like some morbid human lioness, that flat and cold appetite remained.
Ruby Sue looked down at her, stepped over the armless body of a soldier. “Well,” she said very nonchalantly, “let’s get moving.”
Lou sat there on his ass, bitten, clawed, bruised and bleeding. Through a mask of blood and bile he began to laugh. In fact, he began to cackle madly as if it was all the funniest thing he’d ever heard of.
Ruby Sue took him by the arm and helped him to his feet.
“So you finally went crazy, eh?” she said. “Well, goddamn, it’s about time, man.”
Nobody bothered to ask her what she was doing there or if she’d been infected. It was pretty much a given thing by this point: outside of Lisa, there were no more virgins among them.
They all had it.
They all had tasted the teeth of the rabids and carried the dark secret of Cut River within them.
Johnny was in the lead again.
Lou was the rear guard man.
Ruby Sue helped Lisa along.
No group of soldiers had seen worse action than they, had waded through more blood and viscera and insanity. And even if by some crazy, impossible set of circumstances one or more managed to survive, they would never be the same again, would never be whole, would never be human as such.
They were moving lower now, almost at a staggering crouch.
The corridor was so thick with smoke it was like to trying to suck breath from the tailpipe of a Buick.
“Door should be just ahead,” Johnny said to them, leading on.
He stopped suddenly, hearing a shrill cackling sound.
It reminded him of fingers drawn over a blackboard. Not even remotely human. An elderly woman wearing the bedraggled, bloody remains of a bathrobe squatted in a doorway. She dropped what she’d been nibbling on—a human hand.
Her voice was wet and congested like the lungs of an ammonia victim: “How’s about a kiss, handsome?” Then the voice dissolved into a hissing like acid dissolving flesh.
She stood upright and came at him, drool spraying from her lips.
Her hands were almost at his throat when he pressed the trigger of the automatic he’d taken from the dead soldier. Her body jerked as a volley of three rounds punched through it. Her eyes glazed-over, went wet and vitreous, translucent like high-gloss enamel. She stepped back, fingering her wounds.
Johnny shot her in the face and she pitched stiffly over, trembling on the floor, arms slapping at her sides. Ichor and filth bubbled from her lips and she went still.
Another woman came to take her place.
She wore a short business skirt slit at the thigh and high heels, but nothing more. A river of foamy drool flooded from her mouth and painted her large, jiggling breasts like a slime of oil. She opened her mouth and let out a peal of wailing torment at them. Her tongue flicked across her lips and she spat a wad of mucus into Johnny’s face.
He brought his 9mm up.
Hands on her knees, she rocked from side to side like some child daring to be hit with a ball. A stream of sour-smelling urine ran from beneath her skirt and rained to the floor. Her flesh was glistening with plague excretions, issuing a sharp, caustic mist.
But she did not attempt an attack.
Johnny pumped four rounds into her.
The first went between her legs, missing entirely. The next went into her thigh, the others into her belly. She spun around bleeding and screaming like a woman in a padded cell.
He shot her in the chest, pulverizing one breast into a drooping sac of meat.
She turned and clawed at the air, barked at the ceiling, eyes rolling madly like marbles on a roulette table. A steady stream of something black and oozing poured from her wounds. The raw bile of human evil. The stuff that flowed in the veins of child molesters and rapists and mass murderers. She shook all over like a wet, stinking dog, then went down in a heap, spasms running through her.
Then the survivors were moving again and they could hear more gunfire and much closer. Not only small arms, but heavy machine guns now. What sounded like helicopters buzzing the building as if they were hunting wasps on a mission.
Then the door.
It was locked. Johnny put a few bullets in it and threw it open.
He led the way in followed by Ruby Sue and Lisa. Lou came last.
Only he never actually made it in.
Because he heard them coming: the pounding feet and hissing voices and knew there was too many this time, just too many. He turned and decided it was as good a place as any to make his last stand. He thought of matinees as a kid, old movies on TV. Heroism. It had never been in him. Not until now. And he decided that heroism, though once a very unthinkable, abstract concept, made perfect sense now that he didn’t give a flaming shit about his own life and had absolutely nothing to lose.
“COME ON GODDAMMIT!” Ruby Sue called out to him and Johnny said something familiar.
“Go!” he ordered them. “It’s Alamo-time, people! I’ll hold ‘em off!”
His eyes connected with theirs one last time and some sliver of hope, of selfish survival lodged momentarily in his mind: Just what in fuck’s name are you doing, Lou? What do you hope to accomplish here? But there was no real answer to that, only a warm pervading sense that for the first time in his life he was doing something completely unselfish and damn if it didn’t feel good.
He shut the door behind him, pressed his back to it.
They were coming, maybe drawn by the shooting or the rich smell of fresh blood, regardless, they were coming.
He saw them moving out of the smoke, swimming out of the murk like piranhas. Jesus, so many.
Hundreds?
Could there really be that many?
Was it even remotely possible?
He chewed down on his lip until it bl
ed, his guts gone to jelly, as utterly terrified as he’d ever been in his entire life. So many of them. God, how he wanted to run, to make it easier on himself and fuck the rest.
But he wouldn’t.
Not this time. And not ever again.
And maybe the true measure of a man, of a human being, was how he faced death. Not biting and clawing like an animal, like them, but as a human being.
As a man.
As the rabids poured forth he suddenly saw them as they were: a hive. A mass army under a single set of imperatives and drives. A single cold, relentless intellect. Like ants or wasps they lived only to serve the hive, to crush intruders, to gather food and defend their lair.
And that’s how they came at him, scampering forward like rats, all teeth and eyes and clutching fingers. He was what Terra had called a norm and, yes, he was the enemy and they could smell it on him.
Mostly, the ones that came for him were children.
He wondered if he’d encountered any of them back at the playground.
He brought up his guns, one in each hand, feeling oddly like a gunslinger in a surreal, nightmarish western and started shooting. They absorbed his bullets and, although some fell, the mass crawled and hopped and lurched forward.
And then he was out of shells.
Staring into their cruel, sadistic faces, he said, he shouted, “I AM NOT THE ENEMY! DON’T YOU SEE THAT? THE SOLDIERS! THEY’RE THE ENEMY! THEY’RE PART OF WHAT MADE YOU LIKE THIS!”
But those baneful white faces did not care.
They came on, a noisome throng, rustling and slithering and growling and hissing. He could see their sharp teeth and the pawing nails at the end of their pallid hands, the matted hair and yellow eyes like harvest moons rising above blighted October fields.
Yes, they came on in a swarm, totally detached of humanity, human insects ritually purging the hive of dangerous elements much as our ancestors might once have done under a boiling black sky of slaughter. Theirs was a fixed society and there was no room for those who did not fit seamlessly into the mass.
Lou heard his voice scream as they got closer, as he smelled their dark stink.
They circled around him and pressed in slowly, in no hurry whatsoever.
As he felt their cold fingers open furrows in his face and their teeth divorce him of flesh, all he could think of were their eyes. Those phobic, predatory pits.
He kept watching them until his own eyes were torn free from their housings.
36
“We’re all going to die,” Lisa heard someone say. “All of us. It all ends here. This is where it all ends for us.”
It took her a moment or two to realize that she was saying it.
She wasn’t entirely sure whether she was dreaming or awake and in this goddamn town, did it really matter? Because that was one thing she was sure of—she was still in Cut River. She could feel fresh air brush her face. Fresh, damp, yet carrying the smell of smoke.
So they’d made it to the roof, had they?
No matter, it was all coming down now and there was little she or any of the others could do but accept it and pray it happened quick.
She knew she personally couldn’t take much more.
Her nerves were frayed and her body ached and, God, this is what the junk had done to her. The one night of her life when she couldn’t afford to be anything but sharp, she’d fallen apart.
She was awake now.
The world was ending and she could smell the smoke and feel the fear of those around her. Although it was night, she could see plumes of smoke drifting against the retreating face of the moon and smell the burning stink of the town as it died. Beyond the rooftop, the horizon was blazing orange and red and yellow like the perimeter of hell itself.
She suddenly realized that her head was cradled in Ruby Sue’s lap and that Ruby Sue was droning on and on.
“…it was never nothing personal, girl, you have to understand that. That manager of yours…well…he played with the wrong people. The day you came here, I guess that would be today or was it yesterday? Fuck it. They found him, dragged him out of hiding and, well, you get the idea. They whacked him out, you know? Joe was hooked up with…well, I guess it doesn’t matter…but he got the contract on you and that brought us here. It was never anything personal. You believe that, don’t you?”
Lisa didn’t really care.
In the back of her mind, sure, it explained things, but it seemed so trivial now. What did any of it matter?
She blinked her eyes and saw Johnny.
Saw the way he was looking at her.
His eyes radiated a certain fuzzy warmth and she was pretty certain that in these few short hours he’d fallen in love with her. She smiled at him and it felt good to do so. She imagined she looked a real fright, like an extra from an Italian zombie movie.
But he didn’t seem to care.
“We made it?” she said.
He nodded. “Yeah, finally.”
Ruby Sue stroked her face. There were tears in her eyes. “Joe didn’t…he didn’t make it here. Not this time.”
“Lou?” she said.
Johnny shook his head, looked away.
So it was only the three of them now. She guessed it really didn’t matter. She could hear gunfire and explosions and figured the army, or whoever those people were, were closing in, cleansing the town of its infected elements. Which, she knew, would include them eventually.
“I think the shit’s about to get deep,” Johnny said.
And he was right.
“I don’t mind dying,” Lisa said to him, “as long as I’m with you.”
37
Johnny smiled at her in the glow of the burning town, beneath the baleful eye of the full moon which was slipping away now into the western sky. He wanted to tell her many things, but there was no time. War had broken out below and there was gunfire and explosions and screaming and dying. A main force group had probably made it up to the third floor and encountered the mob that had gotten Lou.
Hell was breaking loose now.
The rooftop was pretty much the same as Johnny remembered from when he was a teenager. There were two maintenance sheds up there as well as some sort of radio shack with an antenna climbing into the hazy sky. Probably for the police and fire radios.
The three survivors were hidden around the side of one of the sheds, backs up against the projecting outer ledge of the southern exposure. They were on the only flat expanse of roof. The rest was all sheer and pitched, jutting domes and towers and you name it. Behind them, if you were to look up above the four-foot ledge, you could see the town burning.
Johnny had looked for some time and then forced himself to look away. The destruction of his hometown wasn’t as pleasant a thing as he’d once envisioned.
They were waiting for the killers.
Crouched in a tight little formation, they were waiting to die.
Ruby Sue said, “Maybe we should just get the fuck out of—”
“Quiet,” Johnny whispered.
They were coming.
The only true advantage the three of them had was that their assailants did not know precisely where they were. Maybe they had a general idea there would be something up here, but not who or what. The door on the far side swung open and out came a soldier, moving low and defensively, M-16 cradled in his arms. His vision was obscured by his hood, so he had to stop and scan his surroundings from time to time.
“He’s mine,” Ruby Sue said, picking up her rifle.
The soldier was followed by three others, part of a recon team.
They would check the roof and if there was trouble, they’d call in a main force body. They fanned out, paying particular attention to the radio shack. The first guy crept over near the maintenance sheds.
Ruby Sue got a bead on him with her M-16, aiming the barrel in the general direction of his upper body. It was unlikely she’d miss—the bastard was close enough to spit at now.
In his hood, he hadn’t seen h
er yet.
Then he did.
As he made eye contact (or what passed for it under the hood), Ruby Sue pulled the trigger. He took two three-shot bursts directly in the chest. His rifle went one way and he went the other, his arms flaying, his suit painted red. He hit the ground kicking and wailing and gurgling, trying in vain to strip his hood off. In a moment or two, he was still. Only the stink of cordite in the air remained.
The other three charged out, shooting in every conceivable direction.
Using the .30-06, Johnny dropped both of them with head-shots, their visors exploding with blood and meat.
The last man carried a flamethrower and he squirted a barrage of fire in their general direction. It struck one of the sheds and lit it up. As the guy tried to make it back through the doorway, Johnny shot him in the tanks and there was eruption of fire as burning fuel engulfed the man and everything around him. Like a villager caught in a napalm burst, the guy danced around wildly before collapsing in a blackened, sizzling heap.
There was more gunfire then, coming from the stairwell.
Lisa screamed.
Near where the body of the first soldier lay, a white and skeletal hand swung up and over the ledge, a rabid pulling itself up onto the roof. It was hard to say whether it was a man or a woman.
Lisa looked over the ledge and saw chaos.
The parking lot and courtyard below were a hive of activity.
There were assault vehicles with searchlights scanning the night, scanning the building. Hordes of rabids were attacking groups of soldiers and there were the continual reports of machine guns and small-arms fire. Grenades were bursting and flamethrowers spitting out streams of flame. A lot of dying and screaming and madness. The stink wafting up from down there was the smell of crematory ovens—thick, pungent, and nauseating.