by Curran, Tim
He reloaded and kept shooting.
There was nothing else to do.
40
Tommy fired his last rounds and then grabbed a board and started swinging with everything he had, smashing heads that sometimes just collapsed and others that exploded in sprays of meat and tissue and black blood. Blood that was acidic and stinging when it struck him.
He saw more things come through the windows, but these were not men or women or children exactly, but something else. They looked like infants or fetuses, crawling things with too many coiling white limbs and huge bulbous heads. Some were conjoined like Siamese twins. Connected at the head or neck or waist. One of them had a face on both sides of its head and another had three faces stacked up on top of each other. Some were eyeless and some had but a single black, serous eye. Others had just too many. They hopped and skittered and slithered. One of them with no less than two heads and what might have been a dormant third, dragged itself in his direction. It had the requisite number of limbs. Though while those on the left side of its body were withered sticks, those on the right were massive and muscular, the globular white flesh set with thick purple veins.
When it got close, it tried to leap at him, but he swung his board and smashed one of the heads open. Worms and filth bubbled out. He smashed the second head the same way and that morbid thing still lived, hopping about in a crazy circle and spewing black fluid from its wounds.
Another of the freak babies came at him.
Its head was huge and misshapen, eyes the size of golf balls, a yawning mouth filled with overlapping serrated teeth that were blackened and rotting.
Tommy grabbed another board that was sharp as a stake and ran the thing through as it lunged at him. It vomited out black bile and shook like a fish out of water. Its flesh was bloodless and pulsing. Letting out a shrill, piping cry, it did not try and pull itself free from Tommy’s sharpened board…it did just the opposite. Possessed by a stupid, maniacal hate, it began to push itself up the shaft of the board, impaling itself further, but only concerned with getting at the man that had speared it.
Tommy tossed the board with a cry and the thing tried to move still.
More freak babies were coming through the windows, some of them attached together like paper dolls. Others crawled up the walls and some just wriggled about like squids or worms.
Tommy kicked at one that made for his legs, felt another creep up his back. He tossed it to the floor and it actually splattered into a convulsive stew of flesh and black fluid.
And then one grabbed his arms with wiry white fingers. Its bloated, waxy face grinned up at him and then its black teeth sank right into his forearm. He let out a cry and tried to grab the top of its head to toss it free. Its skull was not bone, but some rubbery and gelid material that came apart in his hand. His fingers plunged right through the crown of its skull and pierced the wormy gray matter within.
It let out a wild, whooping cry and fell off him.
And as if answering some unknown call, the freak babies retreated.
41
Hubb kept firing and reloading, firing and reloading.
He made a pretty good show of himself for a man who’d already suffered two minor heart attacks and was on the verge of a third. His left arm was burning, his chest tight and corded. Sweat ran down his face and he could not seem to breathe. But true to form, he wailed out a string of profanities and fired his last rounds until a burst of pain in his chest made him nearly black out.
He dropped his gun.
His eyes fluttered closed and when he opened them, there was a little girl standing there with a hatchet in her hands. Her hair was black and lustrous, stuck to her white face with blood and snot.
“I brought you something, mister,” she said.
Hubb just shook his head.
The hatchet came down again and again and Hubb was beyond defending himself. It split his head open, severed his left hand at the wrist, dug into his throat, chopping and cutting and slicing until he fell over dead.
The zombie girl kept hacking at him until she was splashed red with his blood. Then giggling, she picked up his hand and went back out into the night.
42
Chrissy and Deke worked in unison with road flares in each hand, jabbing them into faces and clawing hands, driving the dead away. But for everyone that fell back, three more took their place.
A dozen of them surrounded the couple, then at some unspoken moment, lunged. The first few got flares jammed into their faces, but the others got what they wanted. Two of them dragged Deke to the ground and he fought like a wild cat, punching and kicking and slashing until he worked himself free.
Several others took Chrissy and tried to drag her to the windows. She fought in their grip. Her nails dug into eyeballs and her fingers slid into pulpy faces. Others joined in, fighting for possession of her. One of them had a face of trailing flesh that looked like a squashed jellyfish, another had a tiny set of mutant arms coming out of its chest. She screamed and fought and then Mitch was there.
He put his last two round into the lot of them.
Several died, smoking and shuddering. Two others made for the window.
What was left behind was a woman who was hideous beyond words. She looked like the others, save that she had been pregnant. Instead of being born, the child had simply been absorbed by its mother’s flesh. It had now erupted from her belly, a thing with flesh like grease, heads thrashing and limbs rising out of the mass like it was trying to escape the bondage of its mother.
Tommy came up and tossed a flare into her lap and she crept away, burning and making a snorting, guttural sound like a suckling pig.
And that’s when they all noticed one thing.
The dead had now retreated.
They were outside the windows, hundreds of them, but they were not coming in.
43
And then it started raining again.
Raining damn hard.
But this was not water falling from the sky. It was something solid. Something that came down in a violent, lashing crimson torrent. Mitch and the others stood there, not knowing what to think or what to make of it. This was a red rain. It struck the walls of the orphanage with thudding, splatting sounds that were disgusting and meaty. Then that red, liquid rain poured right through the windows.
It was filled with falling, ropy shapes.
Not rain.
But worms.
A rain of red worms.
The first deluge of them were squashed by the fall, breaking open on impact. But they kept coming and coming and coming until the floor near the windows was a foot deep in thousands of looping and twining red worms. They were tangled together in a single mass of brilliant red undulant motion that began to break apart.
The worms were coming for Mitch and the others.
They uncoiled themselves from that squirming mass and began dropping to the floor. The first few just laid there, almost sluggishly like grass snakes waking up after a long winter’s hibernation. Almost like they were dazed. But others followed and they were very active. Some of them were easily a foot in length, segmented and violently red, obscenely thick and excreting a transparent jelly. A few of them rose up and tasted the air with tiny puckering mouths.
There was no getting beyond the absolute revulsion they inspired.
Mitch and Tommy, Deke and Chrissy…they were all feeling it. Some macabre and self-destructive part of their brains wondering bleakly what it might feel like to have one of those things slide up your pant leg or get under your shirt. Maybe slide across your belly or put that puckering mouth against your lips. You could not look at things like that without being offended almost atavistically. The human mind recoiled at the idea of worms in general and when they were profuse like this, it was appalled to great depths. For mankind had a long association with squirming, serpentine shapes and hated them on sight. For Mitch and the others, they were seized by a primal instinct which told them to stomp those things, to crush them
under their boots. To exterminate them. Because if you didn’t, they’d breed and infest and you just couldn’t have that, now could you?
Mitch didn’t know about the others, but to him worms were just worms. Until they gathered in numbers like this. And especially since he had seen these very same worms slithering in and out of the walking dead, infesting and feeding upon them. And now they had come down in a rain. An actual rain.
Not good.
Not good at all.
“They’re coming across the floor,” Chrissy said. She was a long-time detractor of anything crawly or slinking and these things filled her with horror.
More worms unknotted themselves from the central mass. No less than fifty or sixty of them were moving at Mitch’s group.
“What do they want? Why are they doing this?” Deke wanted to know. “They’re worms. Worms don’t hunt people.”
“It’s that fucking Weerden, Mitch,” Tommy said. “This is one of his little tricks, you know? A funny little game to him.”
“Grab the last of those flares,” Mitch said.
Chrissy refused to do anything but press herself up against the wall. She knew that fear of such things like these was a clichéd female thing, but she honestly did not care. Let the men handle it. She just didn’t do worms.
Tommy, Mitch, and Deke popped the flares and guttering red flames shot out, spraying sparks and lazy clouds of smoke.
“Come on, wormy. Got something for you,” Tommy said.
Maybe the worms were driven by Weerden, but they were still essentially worms, regardless of their apparent mutation. And worms did not understand fire. They did not understand what it was like to burn. Not until they got too close. Then they understood, all right.
Tommy gave them the first taste.
Not that Mitch was surprised. Even as a kid, Tommy had been practically fearless. The first kid to step on an especially large and ugly spider. The first guy to shoot some growling, strange dog with his slingshot. The first one to pick up a snake or swing a dead rat around by the tail. The first guy into a fistfight and the last one out. He was in his element here. Maybe it was not especially smart under the circumstances, but he figured that if clowns from hell didn’t scare him, worms weren’t about to.
Two or three got within range of his boot and he put the flame to them. The flare burned especially hot and it sliced them right in half. Their severed bodies writhed on the floor.
“Just fucking worms,” Tommy said.
Mitch and Deke were at it, too, by then. On their knees, they passed the flares before them in wide arcs and the heat drove most of the worms back. Those that didn’t retreat, were fried. Within five minutes, there had to be a hundred smoking, blazing worm carcasses.
“God, that stinks,” Chrissy said.
Mitch laughed almost automatically.
“This works good,” Deke said, seeming to enjoy himself.
“Sure, until you guys run out of flares.”
Then what? Then what happened? The worms kept coming and Mitch and his little crew tap-danced around, trying to squash as many as they could before the little buggers got up their pants and started biting, started tunneling like borer worms? Because if those things got them down, they’d be buried in their numbers.
“Hey!” Tommy called out into the night. “This ain’t working, Weerden, you fucking scab! Try something else!”
Mitch was going to tell him that you didn’t challenge something like Alardus Weerden, something dead yet alive, something that was practically immortal if you believed the regeneration stories they’d heard at the Army base. You didn’t go and piss off something like him that had been on both sides of the grave and many times. Jesus Christ, he was a warlock for chrissake. What if he could call up a storm or raise a demon or something like that?
But he didn’t do any of those things.
And maybe Weerden had nothing to do with what came next, but nobody believed that for a moment.
The dead were still out there, but there was something with them now. Some huge, amorphous shape that crept up to the windows like a spreading hood of shadow. Maybe crept wasn’t the right word, for this moved like a wave, a great dark wave heading ashore and when it hit the building, the classroom shook.
And Mitch thought: Oh good God, what is that coming at us? What is that?
His first sensation was the stink it brought with it: a high, almost yeasty smell of fermentation like apples that had gone bad, gone to a soft decaying pulp. That was the smell. Only amplified a thousand times into a low, black stench that got down in his belly and tried to yank his guts out. His second sensation was its size. How it seemed to literally absorb the dead that waited in its path. And his third was when it struck the building: everything shook like a train had just tried to bash through the wall.
Chrissy was actually pitched onto her ass.
“What is it? What is it? What is it?” she kept saying.
But they all saw soon enough. It was a great wave of gray-white jelly, an immense creeping mass that filled the windows, pulsating and oozing and horribly alive. It struck the building, great blobs of itself pressing through the windows like moist, greasy dough forced through holes with incredible pressure. It spilled into the room, fleshy and convulsing, its outer skin transparent so that you could see things like coiling roots and thick red and green arteries that throbbed beneath. Its surface was set with great pustules and trembling mounds, a ropy cobwebbing of white and undulant fibers growing over it like a net.
Somebody screamed and Mitch was pretty sure it was himself.
Though they couldn’t see outside because it blocked the windows, they did not doubt its colossal bulk. For the walls were creaking as was the entire orphanage. That thing could maybe have swallowed it alive.
“What the fuck?” Tommy said.
As it came into the room, it fell over the worms and vacuumed them right up into its mass. Whatever it was, it would absorb and assimilate anything that it came into contact with. Anything of flesh and blood.
“It looks…it looks like that thing in the pit,” Mitch said. “At the base.”
And it did. That quivering mass of shapeless flesh that Osbourne had shown them. That massive undulating horror that they had grown from Weerden’s tissue. Perhaps it was that very thing, Mitch thought. When the dam broke, it probably flattened Fort Providence like everything else. The base would have been right in its path. The research compound there was probably stripped away and this horror was set loose, to devour and consume and engorge itself. Maybe this wasn’t that thing, but it was something pretty damn close.
“A fucking blastema,” Tommy said.
It poured into the classroom, massing in front of the windows. It did not flood forward and overwhelm Mitch and the others. Instead, it began to grow, to divide, to do something. White pulsing tendrils emerged from the mass and began snaking over the floor, up the walls, spreading over the ceiling like albino rootlets as seen via time-lapse photography. Yes, the walls, the ceiling, the floor was thick with them. But before any of those seeking growths reached Mitch and the others, something else happened. It looked like the thing was germinating. All those great pustules and lumps and cancerous looking mounds began to split open and out came…people. Or parts of them. Perfectly white hands erupted and clutched at the empty air. Arms came out, fingers wiggling at their ends. And then faces. A hundred faces, a thousand faces. So many albino faces that they crowded in for space. All of them were a ghastly white like the walking dead themselves. All were hairless. Most were fetal and unformed. None had eyes, just contorted, gasping mouths. And everyone of those mouths began to scream with the high, agonized wailing of the damned.
More limbs sprouted.
Not just faces now, but entire heads.
And then entire bodies, marble-white mockeries of men, women, children, even infants. They began to emerge from the central crawling mass, screeching and moaning, trying to pull themselves free with their hands. They were not just whit
e, but perforated with tiny holes and grotesque nodules that popped and spilled that black blood. Their skins were set with a pale green and blue vein tracery. More of them sprouted all the time. Some growing from the bellies of the previous or sheering others asunder as they flowered with a moist, ripping sound. Bodies divided into two and three and four, single heads split into twos and threes with sprays of gray slime. Faces were overrun by other faces. Embryonic things like mutant babies emerged. Multi-headed things. Things with dozens of limbs. All of them connected to the central mass.
And all along the flowing, rippling mass of tissue, more things were born and more and more and more. A forest of reaching hands and thrashing limbs and sightless screaming faces.
It surged forward and Mitch pushed the others toward the doorway.
Better to face off against the dead than be absorbed by this hideous mutation, to be pulled in by those hands and feel those puckered mouths on your own. Tommy threw open the door, the sound of those screaming mouths just absolutely deafening. Mitch knew they would not escape. There was just no way. And out in the corridor, more of that surging tissue was rolling in their direction with a million faces.
“Mitch…” Chrissy said with absolute desperation.
And then something happened.
Something incredible.
Something that they would not have believed if they had not been there to witness it.
It started to rain.
Not worms and not water, but something else. A violent lashing storm as if the heavens had been split open and the orphanage and everything for miles around it was deluged in its blood. It poured and poured, hammering down so loudly that Mitch could not hear what Tommy was saying.
But then he didn’t have to.
He could smell what it was: the yellow rain. The same sharp, acrid stink that Tommy and he had smelled when the rain killed those cops outside the Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus.