Resurrection

by Tim Curran

  Kerr just ignored him. Kerr was good at ignoring guys like Soper.

  “You’re getting paid for it, aren’t you?” Breeson said, his flashlight beam glancing off the wet faces of monuments. “Christ, think of the check you’re gonna be pulling from this.”

  “It’s not all about money,” Soper told him. “I need to see my family, too.”

  Kerr grunted a little laugh at that.

  Breeson had to hold back his laughter. Yeah, Soper was some kind of family guy, all right. When he wasn’t bitching about the job and how people like Knoles kept him down, he was bitching about his beloved family. His wife who was a shrew that nagged him twenty-four seven and his kids that were little demons straight out of hell sent to torment his every waking moment. Yeah, he missed them, all right. What he missed was his recliner and his TV and his refrigerator. His Wednesday night bowling and his dog and his girl-on-girl movies on the Playboy Channel. Maybe somewhere after those things he missed his family.

  Up ahead, Sergeant Rhymes and Kleets, the dog-handler, paused while the hound sniffed around at the base of a stone urn.

  “Must’ve picked up something,” Kerr said.

  Soper laughed. “Yeah, probably got a good whiff of some bones.”

  They stood there as the rain fell, not hard but more of a constant annoying drizzle that left a wet sheen on your face and made the trees drip and drip and drip. They panned their lights around, the beams looking like bright yellow pencils writing on the night. The tombstones rose around them, some new and shiny, others just worn and leaning and speckled with lichen. And all of them shadowy and crowded, like being in some surreal forest of marble trees.

  The hound pissed against a stone and the men laughed.

  Kleets led him away through a little family plot with stone urns and benches, lots of cylindrical markers that looked like pillars.

  “You guys think all I care about is money?” Soper said, picking right up again.

  “I’m thinking,” Kerr said.

  Breeson just shrugged. “I thought you were big on money, Soaps. I mean, shit, I borrowed two-fifty from you for a burger and Coke that time and it was like pulling teeth getting you to open your wallet. Then day after day, you were after me to pay it back. You couldn’t even wait a week until payday. You remember that? When I paid you, I gave you two-fifty exactly and then you said the burger and Coke had come up to two-fifty-seven. You wanted those seven cents.”

  “I got mouths to feed, don’t I?”

  Kerr chuckled. “You are one cheap sonofabitch, Soaps. That’s why nobody wants to go drinking with you anymore. Rest of us are buying rounds and there you are, sitting on your fucking hands.”

  “Like I said, I got mouths to feed.” He fell silent for a moment or two, brooding maybe.

  Breeson wiped water from his face and thought about getting back to the station house and crawling into a hot cup of coffee. He and the others didn’t spend much time thinking about Dave Rose and Pat Marcus. They all knew those guys, but they didn’t like to be thinking about them or what might have happened to them. There was shit going on in this city that nobody liked to admit to. It was easier that way. So even though the lot of them knew they were coming out here to look for the missing men, they talked about anything but.

  Soper said, “You guys think I’m a cheap bastard, fine. I don’t care. You think I’m a complainer, fine. Again, I don’t much care. You ought to try sleeping in those fucking barracks. I shit you not, it makes me miss the Army. Christ, those racks they got for us are like sleeping on beds of nails. Fucking Russian surplus or something. And that ain’t bad enough, I got to sleep next to Karpinski.”

  Both men burst out laughing at that.

  Up ahead, Ryhmes told them to pipe down, his black face just wet and shiny.

  “Sure, you guys laugh. You have a good laugh,” Soper said. “You know what it’s like sleeping next to Karpinski? He snores all the goddamn time and when he’s not snoring, he’s farting. I mean constantly. Like a goddamn bugler. All night long he’s ripping one off after the other. Two hours into it, goddamn barracks smell like a burst gas main. Jesus. Something’s wrong with that guy. It’s not natural to have that much gas. Smells like he’s shitting his pants.”

  Breeson laughed under his breath.

  Now this was something he could sympathize with. There was something abnormal about Karpinski’s bowels. Breeson had partnered with him for a couple months once and the car would smell so bad you had to drive with the windows open in January. The whole time, Karpinski would be grinning like a little boy, lifting his leg and letting ‘em rip. “Hoo! There’s one for you!” or “Here’s a kiss for you, Breeson!” or “Christ, if that one would’ve had legs, it woulda walked right out of my asshole!” and “That one don’t smell like roses, now do it?” On and on and on. When Joey Hill had gotten killed over in Crandon in the line of duty, Breeson had been selected to be part of the honor guard at the graveside service. Karpinski had, too. There they stood with their dress uniforms on and white gloves, everyone crying and just losing it because they’d all loved old Joey. Whole time, Karpinski is cracking ‘em off. When the honor guard had raised their rifles to fire a three-shot salute, Karpinski had timed the rifle shots with the shots coming out of his ass. It was embarrassing. Breeson didn’t figure anyone there hadn’t smelled those vile bean farts Karpinski had launched.

  “It’s not natural for a guy to be doing that,” Soper said, maybe louder than he intended.

  “Shut the hell up back there!” Rhymes said and this time he wasn’t fooling around.

  The hound was acting funny all of sudden. Kleets was having a hell of a time with him. He’d start this way, then that, turn in a circle, stop dead. Right now, his nose was low to the ground and his hackles were raised. He was growling low in his throat. He was scenting something and he wasn’t liking it much.

  Breeson just stood there, trying to swallow, but his throat was too dry. He had to lick rain off his lips to get it to work. The air out at the graveyard smelled dank and wet like run-off from a subterranean pipe, but now it seemed to be getting worse. He couldn’t put a finger on it at first, but now he was thinking it smelled oddly organic. Like growing things. A smell that had no business in a chill September boneyard.

  A hot, germinating sort of stink.

  Like rising yeast and moist fungi and sporing things…

  18

  “C’mon, boy,” Kleets said. “C’mon.”

  The dog started moving again, pushing between two headstones and leading them around the side of a mossy crypt that was so old it seemed to be sinking into the earth. He started acting really funny again. Starting and stopping. Yelping and straining at his leash. Kleets was trying to calm him, but it wasn’t doing much good. Rhymes was on his walkie-talkie, checking in with the other units. His voice had a very somber tone to it that Breeson had never heard before. Like maybe he was expecting something to happen any time now and it wasn’t going to be a good thing. Van Ibes’s voice coming through the handset sounded about the same.

  “Something funny going on here,” Soper said.

  “Knock it off,” Kerr told him.

  “Sure, if you say.”

  But Breeson was feeling it, too. He didn’t know if it was this black, wet night in the cemetery or that hound acting all jittery, but he was feeling very tense all of sudden. The flesh at his belly just crawling in waves. He kept looking around like he was expecting to see something horrible come slinking out between the graves, something with yellow eyes and big teeth. He thought if someone would have sneaked up behind him and tapped his shoulder, he would have jumped a foot. The graves. The rain. That clinging mist. Man, it made the cemetery look like a set from an old horror movie. Now and again, he caught sight of one of the other squads, their flashlight beams scanning around, their muffled voices carried by the wind.

  Kleets got the hound moving, but the dog fought him all the way.

  “See the way he’s acting?” Soper said. �
��Dogs can sense things we can’t. I had a dog once that?”

  “Shut up,” Kerr told him again.

  And they were all feeling it, Breeson knew, same thing the hound had been picking up on for some time now. The sense that something was very wrong here. That if the graveyard was a puzzle, that suddenly the pieces were not fitting together so good anymore. The atmosphere seemed swollen with dread.

  They moved on, the hound shaking now. The ground was just soft muck and their boots sank right into it. All you could hear was the water dripping and the dog growling and boots being drawn from the mud.

  The hound stopped before a flooded grave that sat in a little low dip. The water had spread out and consumed three or four other graves. Looked like a little fish pond, dead leaves floating on its surface. The hound was smelling something there. He sniffed the water and then jumped back like something had nipped at him. He froze up in a straight line, one forepaw extended like a pointer and his tail straight as a poker. A low whining came from his throat. Kleets yanked him away and the dog took off fast, leading them on a merry chase through a series of graves. Then he started to snarl and fight, snapping at the leash, his own tail, and even Kleets. There was a row of hedges before them. High enough so that you could not see over them.

  “Hell is wrong with that mutt?” Rhymes wanted to know.

  They stood around again, sensing something but not knowing what. Rhymes got on his walkie-talkie and his voice was practically a whisper. Everyone played their lights around. Nothing to see but those high hedges sparkling with raindrops, tombstones and gnarled looking trees.

  “We just gonna stand here?”

  “Shut the hell up,” Breeson told Soper this time.

  They were all listening and listening hard. They were hearing something, but they did not know what: a sodden, slippery sort of sound like wet snakes coiling around each other in a ball. Slithering, undulant. And something beneath it like a muted hissing, the sort of sound a radiator makes as it cools in the summertime.

  The dog took off and Kleets with it.

  Around the hedgerow they went and so fast that Kleets could barely stay on his feet. Rhymes and the others followed suit, running through that muck and the pools of standing water. Through patches of mist, around burial vaults plastered with wet leaves and…and that was as far as they got.

  “Jesus Christ,” Soper said.

  They were all seeing it and to a man, they weren’t sure what it was. Not really. For the cemetery before them and as far as their lights could reach was alive. It was growing and pulsing and blooming. Snotty strands of some white morbid fungi were growing right up from the saturated ground in a great webby growth of pale tissue that was moving and coiling, shining like oil. The gravestones and markers and obelisks were consumed by a pulsating, slithering plexus of living material that reached from the ground and right up into the trees. It was threaded from branches to monuments in sheer plaits and heaving tarps. All of it viscidly alive and smelling of putrescence.

  The hound took off running in the opposite direction and Kleets did not try to stop him.

  “People,” Soper said. “Growing…like people.”

  And that’s what it looked like. For sprouting like buds from that network of fungi were dozens and dozens of faces…men, women, children, terribly white and distorted, unformed like the faces of fetuses. Embryonic. Not only that, but winding loops of tissue and things that were trying to become limbs. Breeson saw hands erupting from a womb of fungi. You could see the impressions of fingers pressing against the membranous material and then the skin ruptured like a hymen, the hands bursting free like they had just been born. And not just one hand, but ten and then twenty, many of them blossoming from the same bulb. Hands growing upon hands growing upon hands.

  “What…what kind of fucking freakshow is this?” Rhymes wanted to know, his voice filled with desperation and disgust.

  The others said nothing. What could be said?

  Arms were snaking free, chalky and mottled. Long exaggerated fingers splaying out, webbed together, but wriggling and alive. Solid masses that might have been bodies eventually…some even had the mounds of female breasts. And heads, of course. More all the time. Sometimes singly, but often three or more heads joined together or a single head with more than one face. And in one particularly gruesome instance, there was a rising, knobby pillar set with dozens of screaming faces piled one atop another like carvings on a totem pole, individual faces and faces melting into other faces.

  And what was the very worst thing was that this was not some mindless, freakish growth.

  For that entire network was getting excited at the arrival of the cops. It was undulating and creeping, spreading out, multiplying. More faces bursting free. More clutching, deformed hands. Things twitching and writhing and emerging. Yes, it was all reacting to their arrival and the faces, though they lacked eyes and had only hollows where eyes might be placed, were looking at them, heads craning on rubbery necks to get a look at them. Faces pushing out of gelatinous masses with horrible juicy sounds, mouths opening and closing like they were trying to breathe.

  Soper ran off and Kleets did, too. They all heard them splashing away and who could really blame them? Because this, this was an atrocity. Whatever that oozing, shifting cobweb of flesh really was, there was no getting around what it was trying to be. It must have started germinating far below in those buried coffins, perhaps, filling them with degenerate life, feeding on the raw materials of the bodies down there, absorbing them like colonies of pale toadstools. Then bursting free from those boxes and growing through the soil in a fleshy white mass like some hungry cancer, an intricate system of rootlets, becoming an immense fruiting body that drained the charnel earth of grim nourishment before erupting from the waterlogged ground as a whole and giving flower. And now it was above ground, covering the earth and stones and bushes and crawling right up the trees in an unbroken circuitry of excrescence. Imitating what had given it life, crudely replicating what it found in those caskets far below.

  Yes, Breeson knew, that was exactly what had happened. What was bringing the dead back in this city had now resurrected an entire cemetery. The knowledge of this made him want to drop to his knees and cry.

  Everything out there was moving and worming, boiling with pestilent life, limbs reaching and hands fluttering and faces opening like crypt orchids. Mouths were opening and shutting, things like colorless tongues licking spongy lips.

  “Get out of here!” Rhymes suddenly said, shocking them all out of it. “Now! Get the hell out of here!”

  The web of flesh was agitated now, everything squirming and stretching, faces popping from central masses like bubbles. There were hissing sounds and slithering noises, the sound of that fungi in motion as it began to really move, spreading out in the direction of the men themselves. Contorted mouths opened and screamed with agonized voices. The voices of men and women and children, but shrill and piercing, or low and clotted. A wall of noise that masked the movement of the fungi itself.

  The ground began to tremble.

  Trees began to shake and stones began to tumble over. Men cried out and the cemetery earth rumbled like an empty belly. Great rents opened everywhere, headstones falling into the earth, trees falling over and the ground itself vibrating like an earth tremor was sweeping through it. Limbs fell from the oaks overhead. Mausoleums shook and swayed, many of them crumbling into heaps of shattered concrete. The men tried to find their feet, but were thrown to the ground, into each other, tossed over the heaving earth. That fungi was whipped into a wild agitation, creeping in every direction, it seemed, multiplying itself. Something white and lashing like a tentacle yanked Rhymes screaming into the night. Chasms were opening everywhere as the skin of the graveyard simply sheared open in dozens of places.

  And it was surely not from any seismic activity.

  Breeson, stumbling along, avoiding falling trees and tipping monuments, saw clearly what it was all about. That horrible fungi was the c
ause. For it was like an iceberg in its own way: what you saw above the surface was just a fraction of its total volume. And now the rest of it was coming up, unearthing itself, tearing itself up by flaccid white roots. It vomited from the split earth like some seething, steaming infection in mounds and pustules. A heaving mass of noxious gray-white jelly that was veined purple and red and blue, faces and forms and limbs swimming up out of the tissue, hundreds of bulging pink eyes opening.

  Breeson saw Kerr fall into a pit of that rising flesh, heard the mucky, slopping sounds as he sank into it.

  All across the cemetery, men were screaming and crying out for help and begging for mercy. Five or six cops came running in his direction and were literally swallowed alive by what oozed from the ground.

  In the end, it was only Breeson who made it to the front gates, the graveyard alive and roiling and consuming behind him. And by then, of course, he was completely out of his mind, happily so.

  19

  “At first, it’s only a sliding and a dragging…a creeping noise coming out of the woods at you,” Cal Woltrip said to the children gathered in the shadowy bus. “But you can feel it getting closer, making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. And by then, heh, heh, it’s too late, far too late. For the thing has found you, the thing is coming closer and closer?”

  “Just stop it,” Tara Boyle said.

  “?and you can’t run, you can’t hide. You can only scream as it drops down out of the dark and winds around your throat, squeezing and sucking your brain out.”

  His brother Kyle giggled. “Yeah, you can hear it sucking your brains out.”

  “What is it?” Alicia Kroll wanted to know. “What does it look like?”

  Cal laughed like a horror movie host: “Heh, heh, heh.” He was holding one of the flashlights under his chin so that his face was mired in shifting shadow. “It looks like a brain…a living, crawling brain with a spinal cord that’s like a tail. That’s what it wraps around your neck…that’s what holds you while it sucks the brain out of your skull…”