by Curran, Tim
“Be careful,” Hot Tamale warned her little group. “They might look alive, but that don’t mean that they are. I say we shoot ‘em to be sure.”
“I say you help feed the third world and go on a diet,” Tommy said.
Hot Tamale took a step forward, very round and very excited. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Mouth. All the fucking people in the world and we got to hook up with a weasel like you.”
Tommy laughed. “Oh, I get it, Hubb. You got this pig with to use as bait. You draw in those zombies and throw her at ‘em, take off running. The meat on her, she’d keep a dozen busy for at least an hour.”
Mitch sighed. “Tommy…”
“You’ll wanna watch that mouth of yours, you skinny-assed little piece of shit,” Hot Tamale said, ready to swing. “Else I’ll shut it for you. How’s that sound? Because if I can’t, Herb here sure as shit can.”
Herb just stood there looking dazed under the brim of his cowboy hat. “Huh?” he said.
“Oh, shut the hell up, you mother-rapers,” Hubb told them. “Mitch, Jesus, what in the fuck are you doing out here?”
So Mitch told him. It was Chrissy. Chrissy had brought them here. They thought she was being held in the orphanage. Hubb said he’d rallied his own troops after the “big flood” as he called it for an assault on that old spook house because the way he was seeing it, it had to be the epicenter of the whole mess.
“You cut off a snake’s head,” Hardy said, “and the body dies soon enough.”
They were much better provisioned than Mitch’s crew. They were all carrying 12-gauge pump shotguns and wore duck hunting vests equipped with ammo pouches. Clipped on the vests were flashlights and road flares. Hot Tamale and Herb carried duffels of gas bombs made from beer bottles with tampons shoved down the throats.
“Gonna have ourselves a wienie roast,” Herb told them.
Knucker held up her shotgun. “Rock salt. We emptied the pellets from our shells and loaded ‘em with rock salt. Them things don’t like salt. It eats ‘em right up. One good round usually does it.”
Another fully-loaded 12 gauge was slung over her back and she handed it to Tommy.
“Let’s do this,” he said.
“All right,” Hubb said, “enough of this cocksucking hen party, lets go do what we came to get done.”
They formed a skirmish line, stopping now and again so Hubb could take a pull off the little oxygen bottle he carried. Side by side, the eight of them moved slowly up the winding road to the old gates of the Sisters of the Bleeding Heart. The gates had long ago fallen down and were knotted in grasses and creepers. The orphanage rose up before them, crumbling and rotting like some medieval castle. Nobody hesitated. They slipped through the gates and re-formed their line. Mitch and Tommy were at one end with Deke, Hubb and the others spreading out in the other direction.
“We got company,” Hot Tamale said.
In the driving rain, they hadn’t seen what was in a little dip just before them. Not until they were almost on top of it. Six of the ghouls were on their hands and knees, feeding on the remains of a couple corpses sprawled before them. The bodies were so mutilated, gutted and gnawed and stripped, you could not tell if they had been men or women. The zombies just kept on feeding, tearing off bits of meat and chewing on bones. It was revolting.
“Holy oh cow,” Herb said.
The zombies looked up now, seeing they had an audience. Two of them were little girls with filthy school uniforms on and plaid skirts. Catholic schoolgirls from hell. They were white-faced and black-eyed, gore dripping from their mouths. The others were adults…or had been. The one that stood up first to challenge the intruders had been a young woman. At least, she looked like a young woman. She was naked, just as cold and white as cemetery marble. Her face was like some bubbly clot of mortician’s wax, set with holes and bulging growths. The lot of it looking like it had melted and ran…tendrils and ropes of it hanging like the strings of a dirty mop, growing right into her chest. She said something that was utterly unintelligible.
The girls kept gnawing on bones, sitting Indian-style on the muddy ground, watching what was about to take place with their huge, glistening black eyes. Transfixed like children watching a scary movie and munching popcorn.
The others stood up with the woman and started forward.
“All right,” Hubb said, “pay attention, you boys, this is how it’s done.”
He stepped forward with Hardy and Knucker. Hot Tamale and Herb stayed back.
As the dead came up out of that dip, Hubb gave the signal and the three of them opened up. They spent two shells each and the effect was devastating. The 12 gauge rounds hit their marks easily at such close range. One of the adults actually exploded in a spray of gray flesh and rubbery bones, lots of that black fluid. The others did not come apart. Pieces of them were blown off, but they still stood. At least, for about a second or two and then the rock salt did its business. What happened then was like some crafty, visceral piece of Hollywood special effects magic. The zombies moaned and cried out and literally folded right up, smoking and steaming and melting. Flopping about on the ground in the rain, their skins bursting open and letting forth a tide of black goo and worms. And that was about it.
“Shit,” Deke said, turning away.
The smell that came from them was hot and nauseating, like thousands of boiling dead fish.
“Works even better than table salt,” Tommy said.
28
Chrissy had thought that one thing was coming after Alona and her, but now she just wasn’t so sure about that. Whatever was down the hallway, it sounded as if there were more than one. She could hear the slap of bare feet, many feet, and now they had just stopped down there. Somewhere.
The waiting began.
Chrissy and Alona huddled in the dimness of that room Alona had shuttled them quickly into. It was a big room they were in. With what light came in through the rotting planks nailed over the broken windows at the far end, Chrissy could see that it must have been some sort of dormitory at one time. She could just imagine rows of metal-framed beds lined up against the peeling, mustard-colored walls. But now, it was just a long and dusty closet with cobwebs draped overhead and dust on the floors that had to be an inch deep. It was just filthy in there. The remains of broken beer bottles on the floor, cast-off cigarette butts, old leaves, rat droppings in the corners. A great hole was eaten through one of the walls. It was so big you could look into the room next door. The ceiling was drooping from water damage, many of the tiles having dropped to the floor. The air was thick and damp, stinking of plaster rot and something like old urine.
Chrissy and Alona squatted against one wall, holding onto each other. They were both sweating and shivering, tense and waiting. They were in a hell of a fix and they both knew it. Other than the crowbar Alona had, they were pretty much defenseless. The only thing in the room that could be used as a weapon were those shattered beer bottles.
But they were over near the door and Chrissy did not want to go over there.
And that was another problem: the door would not close.
Its frame was so swollen from damp rot that it simply would not shut. You could only get it partially closed before it wedged tight and even then it was still open an inch.
They were coming.
Whatever was out there, was coming. Perhaps they’d been standing around in indecision for a time, but now they were coming. Chrissy heard them with a sinking feeling in her chest. They were coming and there was no way to stop them. And, of course, she was not so naïve as to believe that what was coming up that shadowy hallway were people. No, of course not. These were dead things and she could smell the earthen boxes and narrow ditches they’d crawled out from. They came on with a stink of wet soil and green mildew and decayed shrouds. Any second now they would spy the partially open door and come right in in a mist of flies and grave stench.
Alona had the crowbar in her hands. She was holding it like a batter, breathing very fast.
Out in the hallway, they could hear the sound of nails being dragged along the walls and then something very peculiar: a slapping, thumping sound as if whatever was out there were guiding themselves along like blind men…by feel. The stink grew stronger. There had to be at least four or five of them judging by the shuffle of bare feet. They were nearing the door, patting the walls as they came.
It made no sense.
Surely they could see the door cracked open.
More thumping, bumping sounds. They passed by the door and the sound of flies buzzing passed with them. Their footfalls were mucky and moist. Down the hallway they went, slapping the walls, dripping and rotten and infested with vermin.
Chrissy and Alona looked at each other.
Alona shook her head.
Was there room for a glimmer of hope here? Chrissy wasn’t going to let herself believe that. There’s no way in hell those dead things weren’t going to find them. Just no way.
The footsteps were returning now, slow and inexorable. Those things were not slapping the walls now, but just running their hands along them. The noise it made was like wet dishrags dragged over concrete. She could hear them breathing with a sound as if their lungs were filled with sludge.
“Chrissy,” one of them said, a boy apparently, with a hissing sound like air leaking from a tire. “We know you’re here. We can smell you.”
Chrissy felt nettles in her stomach, piercing and sharp. They knew she was hiding. Not that someone was hiding in general but her specifically. What did that mean? Jesus, what did that mean?
“Chrissy, Chrissy, Chrissy, come out and play,” the voice said.
It was joined by another that came from a mouth filled with vomit: “Chrissy, Chrissy, Chrissy. We can feel you…we can smell you. Are you playing hide-and-seek? Do you like games?”
Still more voices, all of them thick and oozing and awful, in unison now: “Chrisssssseeeee…Chrisssssseeeee…Chrisssssseeeee…”
All of them were the voices of boys, wet and slopping, but boys all the same. What did that mean?
The terror that swept through her and settled into her was solid, physical, palpable. Her heart was hammering and her breath was coming in short, sharp bursts. Her skin felt so tight, she thought she would literally burst open. And inside, it felt like her stomach was pulling up into her chest, making her feel woozy and nauseous like she had when she was little and got car sick. Alona held onto her tightly. She would not let her go. And that was a good thing, because if she had Chrissy would have bolted right out the door and right into the waiting arms of those…monstrosities.
One of them was paused right outside the door, the one with the hissing voice that seemed barely audible above the buzzing of the flies. “Chrissy pissy, you better come out. Grimshanks wants to play with you. He said we have to find you. We’re having a party for you. He wants to do to you what he did to us. Chrissy, tell me where you are.”
Then the vomit-voiced one: “Chrissy, Chrissy, Chrissy…where is sweet little Chrissy? I can hear your heart beating.”
And then the others in unison again: “Chrissseee…Chrisseee…CHRISSSSSEEEEE…CHRISSSSSEEEEE…”
She couldn’t take it anymore.
She simply could not.
She’d been through a lot and seen things she even now could not honestly believe, but this was beyond even the horror of that fucking clown. This was beyond anything her mind could contain and accept. Those hideous voices, wavering and eldritch and hissing…it was tearing her apart on the inside. Getting into her head and filling her brain with a suffocating, blind madness. She had to run. She had to do something. Even diving out that window and breaking bones below was better than listening to this insanity.
The door slammed open and hit the wall, chunks of plaster and chips of paint raining to the floor. Chrissy gasped. She could not help herself. She gasped and what was standing in the doorway heard her.
But what was it exactly?
A boy, yes, what had once been a boy. Twelve or thirteen, no more than that at the time of his death. He was naked, his torso dark with filth and dirt, caked leaves and fuzzy growths of some morbid fungi that seemed to flutter as he breathed. His hair was blonde and ratty, hanging over his face in greasy coils. You could not see more than that, because it was covered in hundreds of fat bluebottle flies crowding in to feed on what was beneath. He held his hands out like somebody playing blind man’s bluff, feeling in the air, looking for something to touch.
“I can smell you, Chrissy,” he said in his hissing, windy voice. “Grimshanks says we have to bring you back. Bring you back to play. You’ve been bad and he wants to play with you. It won’t be nice, Chrissy.” He took a few steps into the room, searching with his hands. “It won’t be very nice at all. But you won’t be alone. We’ll be with you. I’ll hold your hand, Chrissy, while he does those terrible things to you. I’ll hold it tight so you won’t be alone. Alone the way we were when he brought us into that cellar and did those awful things to us day after day before he slit our throats and buried us in the dirt.”
Chrissy made another sound and his head craned in her general direction. This was not a gasp, but a whining sound in her throat as she tried to suppress the scream that scratched to get out. But Chrissy knew now. She knew why they were all boys. Why they were naked. Grimshanks’ victims. Yes, these were the boys he had kidnapped and taken down into his basement to torture and violate as he himself was once tortured and violated.
Another boy stepped into the room, equally as filthy and rotting and flyblown. But his lower torso was clean and white. You could plainly see the black and jagged ruts from a knife where he had been disemboweled by the clown. And lower down…nothing. Grimshanks had emasculated him completely.
And now she knew why they weren’t zeroing in on them: they were blind.
All of them were blind as maybe she had suspected all along.
Both of them in the room had no eyes and the other three waiting outside the door had none either. Just black, mutilated pits where their eyes had been. They had not been removed carefully either, but gouged out savagely with something like a butcher knife that opened the sockets in hacked star-like shapes.
This was the one with the voice of vomit: “Chrissy? Quit playing games! You’ll only make him angry!” He sniffed the air with the maggoty channel where his nose had once been. “She’s here…she’s close…I can smell her hot little cunt…”
“Find her…feel her out…she’s here…she’s here…”
The others outside the door were fly-covered, too, just buzzing husks, oozing with slime. They stood out there like Yuletide carolers, their ruined mouths whispering her name again and again: “Chrissseee…Chrissseee…Chrissseee…”
They were all in the room now, moving about with outstretched hands. Flies lit off them and crawled up the walls, buzzed over Chrissy and Alona’s heads. They crawled over their arms and hands. One of them settled onto the tip of Chrissy’s nose, rubbing its forelegs together, seeming to be looking right into her eyes. The tickling of it was maddening.
“Chrissy, we can’t see you,” hissing-voice said. “Grimshanks cut out our eyes so we couldn’t watch what he did to us. He does not like to be watched. But he’ll let you watch when he starts cutting between your legs…”
29
This was the house of the dead.
That’s what the orphanage was.
As soon as Mitch and the others got through the front door and into the lobby, the dead came swarming out to meet them in numbers. The sun was poised to set and this is what brought them out, perhaps.
“Holy cock-knocking Christ,” Hubb said and it began.
The zombies were not stupid. They seemed to understand tactics of a sort. They could have leaped on Mitch and the others when they came through the front door, just took them violently there by surprise. But they did not. They waited until Mitch’s crew got into the lobby and then they came out, catching that little group in a pincer encirclement l
ike soldiers surrounding and containing an enemy unit. They sealed the gaps. Mitch’s crew was right in the middle of a pack of them. They poured out of corridors and rooms, surrounded them, got behind them, too, so there was no escape out the door.
This is how it ended.
At least, the zombies thought so.
They came no closer, but held their ranks, ready to push in and crush the intruders. And what a motley crew they were. Yes, bloated and white and dripping, corpses from rivers and quarry deeps and bogs. Their faces were oozing and soft and pulpy, riven with worms and cloaked in flies. Some had eyes. Some barely had faces. They all seemed to be melting like wax figurines, ropes and runnels and threads of white and gray flesh hanging from their faces and hands and fingers. Red looping worms slid from eye sockets and hung from mouths and slithered from honeycombed breasts and swollen throats. That black juice ran from nostrils and lips and holes bored into puffy faces. Fat green leeches hung from the undersides of arms, pulsing and flaccid. Faces were furry with grave mold and spongy with decomposition. Every last bit of those creatures was infested and wriggling and moving.
“Give ‘em hell!” Hubb shouted and that’s how it began.
Mitch felt utterly useless with his Remington, being that he had no rock salt shells like the others. But he brought it up and worked the pump, punching holes through that advancing swarm of carrion. When his shells ran out, he started throwing salt and that did wonders.
But not like the rock salt shells.
Nothing could match the destruction those wrought. The impact of the salt was devastating. When it hit one of them, hundreds of salt pellets would drill right through those moist fungal hides and the zombies would let out a wailing, inhuman screech as they literally boiled and burned up from the inside out. And this within what seemed seconds. It was like an incendiary grenade had been detonated inside them.
The zombies poured forward and the defenders just kept shooting and shooting. The first wave fell into a writhing mass of putrescence, smoking and steaming and popping. But the others just came right over the top of them and with that many, there was just no way they could be held back. As the melting, hissing corpses on the floor piled up into a hip-deep charnel stew of worms and shuddering flesh and that repulsive stench of mass graves, the others clawed and leaped and crept forward and in such sheer numbers it quickly became pandemonium.