by Curran, Tim
“Why not? I’m not about to live like a mole in the darkness.”
“Sure, but you might draw them things in.”
Darin just ignored that. He knew what was best and he didn’t care for people like Margaret Boyne to be telling him what to do. Miriam Blake had been bad enough. He scratched a stick match off the fireplace brick and lit the lantern. Both wicks caught, an even illumination filling the living room and chasing away the shadows.
“There,” he said. “That’s better. Don’t you think?”
Neither Margaret or her son commented on it.
“I can tell you right now,” Darin said, “that I don’t care for the idea of us being trapped in here. Shouldn’t we try to find a vehicle? My SUV is sitting in my driveway at this very moment. In ten minutes we can be over there and then out of this stinking city.”
Margaret chuckled in the dark. “Really, Lou. Have you forgotten what’s outside at this very moment?”
“Yes, yes, yes, the crazies. We have a gun.”
“They’re more than crazies,” Russel said. “They’re the walking dead. Just like those people said that gave me the Watchtower magazine. Foul abominations and stuff that crawled out of the cellar of hell.”
Darin sighed. “Please, let’s not get into that again.”
Russel shrugged. As with most things in life, it mattered not one whit one way or another with him.
“Are you still doubting?” Margaret said. “After what you saw come into Miriam’s house?”
“I saw people. Obviously mad, but still people.”
“Dead people.”
“Disfigured, certainly…but dead?” Darin shook his head. “I think not.”
“Zombies,” Russel said. “I saw that movie where zombies take over the world. You ever seen that, Mr. Darin? Night of the Living Dead? That was a good picture.”
Margaret nodded. “Yeah, it was. Did I ever tell you, Russel, that I saw that one out at the Hillview Drive-in with your father? Oh, God, that was years ago. Years ago. They showed it with that Japanese picture. The one about the monster with three heads.”
“Ghidrah. Now that was a good one. I think Ghidrah was my favorite after Godzilla. I always hated Mothra, though. I mean, how tough can a moth be anyway? You ever see any of those pictures, Mr. Darin? Any of those Jap movies? Those were something. Godzilla was the best. Some of ‘em were pretty bad, though. Like the flying turtle…what was his name? Gamera? Yeah, that was it. Gamera movies were stupid. But not as stupid as that one with that squid that walks around on the tips of its tentacles. Man, I mean, how could you believe something like that? Ghidrah’s one thing, but come on.”
“Not all the Godzilla ones were good, though,” Margaret pointed out. “Remember that one? Was it Son of Godzilla? The one where Godzilla’s little boy blows smoke rings?”
“Oh yeah, that bit the big one, all right.”
“I always like Rodan, the giant bird.”
“Yeah, Rodan kicked some ass. Remember when he flapped his wings? It made a wind that blew buildings down and stuff. That was awesome.”
Darin just stared at them, perhaps wondering what he’d gotten himself into. The city was besieged by crazies and these two were talking about bad movies. He had a mad desire to slap them both across the face. He tried to be tolerant. Maybe this was how they coped. Maybe that was it. But had these two been students he would have shouted in their faces.
Margaret was obviously enjoying herself. “Ah, I used to stay up all night with Russel, Mr. Darin, while he watched monster movies. I thought he might get scared watching them alone.”
“Was this recently?” Darin said.
They both looked at him, but simply did not comprehend his sarcasm.
“I wasn’t scared. Not of them Jap movies. Some of the others used to bother me, though. I never liked the mummy and the wolfman. I mean, Frankenstein could be mean, but he liked kids and he didn’t kill ‘em much. Dracula? Well, he was greedy and you could talk sense to him, you know? Tell him that if he didn’t kill you, you’d bring him some girls or something. But the mummy didn’t care what you said unless you had some of those Tanna leaves he liked. Mostly, he’d just strangle you. And the wolfman? He’d rip out your throat soon as look at you.”
“Those were good flicks,” Margaret said, nodding her approval. “They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore. Now it’s all blood and guts, killers with masks and crap like that. Not like it used to be. Drive-ins are all gone now, too. Hillview’s been closed for years. Wicker Creek is gone, too. I think there’s a trailer court there now. The last one was the Brighton. It’s been closed fifteen years, I bet. Still there, but overgrown.”
Darin sighed. “Can we please stay on the subject?”
“Yeah, you’re right. What were we talking about? Oh, Night of the Living Dead. That was a good picture. You see, Mr. Darin, these people are trapped in this house and the zombies are attacking. They have to fight them off until dawn. Until the sheriff and his men come and kill them.”
“Yeah, that’s what happens all right,” Margaret said. “There’s a colored guy in that one, ain’t there?”
“Sure, but he’s okay for a black guy.”
“All right, that’s enough. You two don’t seem to realize the situation we’re in here,” Darin said, drops of spittle on his lips. “We don’t have time to take a trip down memory lane here. We need a plan.”
“He’s right,” Russel said. “In that movie, those people board up the windows and I think that’s what we need to do. We need to make some weapons, too. Maybe firebombs and stakes and stuff. Anything we can come up with.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what we should do,” Margaret said.
“You two are both crazy,” Darin said.
Then there was the shattering of glass somewhere in the house and there was very little time to debate the comparative sanity of the Boyne’s. Glass shattered and there were garbled voices…or something that sounded like voices.
“Must be the zombies,” Russel said, almost too calmly.
“Yes,” his mother agreed. “I figure they’d be coming. Must have sniffed us out.”
Darin was on his feet. “All right, dammit. The thing to do is to draw them into the house and escape like we did at the Blake house. It’s our only chance. We’ll make a run for my truck and”
“No, sir,” Russel said. “We got to make a stand here and now just like in one of them cavalry pictures.”
“You’re completely out of your mind,” Darin told him.
“Oh, you think so?” Margaret told him when Russel merely shrugged. “I imagine my son knows a little bit more about killing zombies than you do.”
She took the lantern and followed her son down the hallway towards the back of the house where the sounds of breaking glass had come from. It was a bedroom and the dead were trying to get in. An easy dozen of those white, puckered hands were tearing at the curtains and sash and anything they could get their rotting fingers on. Russel knew instantly what to do. It was just like that movie. He went over there and started hammering those hands with his rifle butt and there were so many, it was like trying to squash dozens of wriggling albino spiders at the same time.
“Be careful!” Margaret told him. “Watch it now!”
Darin was scared. He’d have been the first to admit that, yet the absolute absurdity of the situationand the Boyne’s in generalseemed to cancel a lot of that out. They weren’t in touch with reality. Not in the least. Granted, reality in Witcham these days left something to be desired…but these two were something else again. They just didn’t seem to realize the danger those things outside presented. They were like a couple players in some European existentialist film. Too offbeat and exaggerated to be really taken seriously. They had spent a better part of their life watching low-budget horror films and now the veneer between reality and fantasy had been torn wide open, between the real and the blatantly cinematic, and they happily adapted to this. Life was a cheap zombie mo
vie, pass the popcorn, mom.
Good God.
Russel kept at it, smashing at those hands and doing little more than mashing a few of those pulpy fingers in the process. The…crazies weren’t getting in, but then they weren’t retreating from the window either. Had the house sat lower and they didn’t have to reach up like they were, they would have come right in and used Russel as a floormat to wipe their feet off.
Finally, Russel backed away. “Too damn many,” he said. “Just too damn many.”
But not to be discouraged, now that he had his moment on the silver screen, he brought his rifle around and started popping rounds at the hands. He blew holes through moldering palms and blasted some fingers away in sprays of black juice. But, again, this did little to stop those outside.
Margaret, getting her cue from some unseen director, handed Darin the lantern and snatched a crucifix off the wall.
“Here,” she said, wading in, “have a taste of this!”
She thrust the cross into the flurry of hands. One of them grabbed it with no ill effect and almost yanked her right out the window with it. As it was, she fell over and several hands took hold of her. One had her around the throat. Another tore her hair out by the roots. And another…what seemed to be that of a woman, with a couple finely lacquered Lee Press-On Nails still on her fingers…scratched welts across her face and cheeks that looked oddly like racing stripes.
“Russel!” Margaret screamed. “Help me! Help me! They’ve got me! The dead have got me!”
Darin did his bit to save her. He walked over there with the lantern, seeing if light would drive them off. It didn’t. It just illuminated that closely-pressed ring of faces outside the window and forever erased any doubts he’d had that they were just crazies. He saw those faces and let out a low scream or something like a scream. Dear God. All of them rotting and dripping and oozing with slime. Eyes missing and skulls thrusting through faces. No, there could be no doubt now.
Russel charged in, shooting and hammering at them. Fighting for his mother’s life and managing to free her, along with a hand that was clutching her throat. And this was the ultimate denouement to this little episode of madness. Margaret hit the floor and that severed hand would not let go. It had hold of her throat and it planned on squeezing the life out of her. She turned about three shades of blue, went purple, and then Russel was on his hands and knees, trying to yank that hand off.
“Are you gonna help me?” he shouted at Darin.
But Darin primly shook his head. “No, I’m not.”
Russel freed the fingers one at a time, snapping them free until the severed hand had nothing left to grip with. It fell to the hardwood floor, thumping around for maybe two or three minutes before going still. The fingers following suit.
The zombies were gone from the window.
Russel dragged his mom into the hallway and let her catch her breath. The whole time, he just shook his head as he stared at Darin. Darin thought Russel was going to yell at him for not assisting, but that didn’t happen.
Sweaty and breathless and amazed, he said, “Man…what a rush.”
PESTILENCE
1
Even with the rising of the sun, darkness still held an awful sway over Witcham. For it was in every flooded cellar and musty-smelling closet and shadowed attic. You could not only see it, you could feel it. The city was a great, murky, misting graveyard washed by that slimy sea of death and putrescence. A disinterred coffin yanked from moldering earth, its dirt-clotted lid thrown open in brazen violation. Yes, the sun came up and showed you things you did not want to see. And chiefly, what it did was made all the dire imperfections of the city all that much more apparent as bright stage lights might make you see every childhood scar and blemish on an actor’s face. The daylight came, probing and digging and revealing, a bright and shining scalpel that cut through layers of dark and cancerous flesh, exposing the dank malignancies and pulsing anatomy beneath.
It was a long night.
A night that buried the city, that filled its hide with worms and the rising sun was the autopsy that showed you the depth of disease and putrefaction.
2
At Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus, Hubb Sadler and Knucker and Hardy, along with Hot Tamale and Herb, formed a war cabinet. This was their city. This was the city they had grown and lived in and like a loved one, they were not ready just yet to throw dirt in its face. So all through that bitter, sleepless night, they planned on re-taking it, wrenching it from the grip of unhallowed things that sought to turn it into a great morgue.
Hubb was loving it.
He hadn’t done a lot of smiling since his brother Chum’s ticker had exploded in a soup of blood fifteen years before and he’d hit the floor behind the counter, deader than a halibut in a dry bucket (on his way down, Chum, true to form, had said, “What in the dick-fucking Christ is this?”). Hubb had weathered that storm as he weathered them allwith a vile temperament and a variety of profane adjectives on his tongue. But he was liking this. Loving it, in fact. Wasn’t much old Hubb loved these days besides the sound of a cash register ringing and its drawer filling up with folding green stuff, but boy oh boy, now this rising dead business. Now that was putting the wind back into his sails. He’d buried his brother fifteen years back and his wife ten years ago and since that time, truth be told, Hubb hadn’t been doing much but hanging on. Just existing. Life and its assorted bullshit pretty much having squeezed the guts from him like a stepped upon cricket…but now he was getting some of that back. Really getting it back. He’d been hanging on and hanging on, too damn pissed-off and ornery to die, like maybe he’d been waiting around for something that would show him he was really a man again. And this was it. Sure, maybe he was overweight with a bad back and fallen arches and his left knee had been shot up by the gooks during the Korean War. Maybe he had a prostate the size of a honeydew melon that dribbled piss like a leaky garden hose. Maybe the Docs said his rheumatism and lumbago weren’t going to get better this side of the grave and that his cholesterol and high blood pressure were bad enough to kill five men half his age. And maybe his dick hadn’t done any dancing in yearseven that sweet young college girl, Mindy, with the flowing raven hair and tits like cruise missiles hadn’t put any sauce back in his sausage, and you were talking about a girl that made boiled lasagna noodles stand up hardbut here he was, feeling like a man again. Maybe physically he was on the wrong side of seventy, but psychologically he was feeling thirty again, ready to knock cocks with the best of ’em just like he’d done in the old days. And how was that for coming back from the grave, ma and pa? Jesus Mary-humping Christ…how was that?
Old Hubb felt renewed and revitalized, ready to slap ass and slide meat, praise God in the highest. So he rallied his troops like a general, gathered weapons and mapped strategies. Their time was coming and when it did, they would not shrink from duty. They’d meet those zombies, dicks in hands, and give ‘em the randiest fucking this side of hell.
3
Outside the city, at the Fort Providence Military Reservation, there was a silence of cryptyards and grave hollows. A vile-stinking mist blew through the high security installation. Rain fell. Things rotted and other things moved. But nothing truly living or natural breathed there. The corridors were empty. The rooms untenanted. The pestilence that took the city, it would soon be known, was born here and what had crawled from that toxic womb, was hell itself.
4
And Mitch Barron and Tommy Kastle? They had slept. That was something. They had slept and that if nothing else kept them sane. Mitch could not remember ever having been so tired, so worn, so empty before. After the nightmare at the mannequin factory, they had gone back to Wanda Sepperly’s, Tommy and he and Harry, their new friend. Wanda let them in and Mitch had to wonder if she ever really slept at all. But then, he knew that the sleep of the old and the sleep of the young were entirely two different things. The Zirblanski twins were zonked out in one bedroom, so Mitch and the others took the o
ne across the hall. He and Tommy both took a bed; Harry got the floor. Harry didn’t seem to mind. A sleeping bag on a carpeted floor beat the shit out of a state rack any day, he pointed out to them.
“Listen to me, Harry,” Tommy had told him. “You say you only stole cars. Okay and fine. Just don’t try any shit, okay? We got an old lady out there we’re real fond of and a couple girls sleeping across the hallway that Mitch and me cherish, so don’t do anything that’s gonna piss us off.”
You could see Harry didn’t like that much. Like any other group in society, criminals had their foodchain, they had their surface feeders and their bottom dwellers. Even an armed robber or a car thief could look down his nose at, say, a pedophile and feel good about himself. “See, that’s how it works when you’re inside. None of us think we’re fucking Boy Scouts,” he explained to them. “We know we’re bad boys and troublemakers. But there’s a pecking order, see? There’s rungs to the ladder. The more brains and balls it takes to pull your chosen crime, the more respect you get. A jewel thief or a bankrobber have guts and brains, so they get respect. They’re up on the top. But a rapist or a child molester are just gutless trash, so they take the abuse. Guys who torment helpless women and children don’t rank real high in our system. Inside, I have a bad day and I feel shitty about who and what I am, I go knock the teeth out of some baby-raper or serial killer and that makes me feel better about myself. Yeah, I know how that sounds. But life inside and life outside are two different things. I guess what I’m saying is, I’d slit my wrists before I’d stoop to hurting innocents.”
“Fair enough,” Tommy said. “Just remember, we’re letting you sleep here. We’re trusting you.”
“And you can. You saved my life.” He laughed then. “Even women don’t excite a guy like me the way a nice vehicle does. Like that truck of yours, Tommy. We were in Milwaukee? I’d jack that sonofabitch in about three minutes tops. Within an hour, she’s stripped.”