by Tim Curran
Deke just threw the poker and tumbled headlong down the stairs, senseless and mindless, overwhelmed by adult anxieties and childhood terrors. He lay on the floor until reality came swimming back and with it, a stark ugliness that he had never known before or even guessed existed. Everything he’d known, everything he’d held dear had been ripped away now and there was nothing, nothing, nothing.
Upstairs, what was left of Nicky still moved, still laughed, still emoted.
“You can’t run, big brother, and you can’t hide! We’re in the water and in the houses and far down below! Not just here, but everywhere, everywhere! We’re all coming through now and we’re all hungry! Deathless and nighted and born of darkness?”
But that’s all Deke could listen to.
He went over to the cupboard by the fireplace and got the can of fluid dad had started fires with. He sprayed it everywhere and then lit the house up with a candle. Drapes burned. The wood by the fireplace. The carpet. The sofa. It all blazed up and, upstairs, that thing was screaming because it knew what was happening, it knew it would be roasted to ash. It knew the flames would send it back to whatever gutter had birthed it.
The house filling with smoke, Deke grabbed up Mr. Cheese and stumbled out into the rain.
34
By the time they reached the Broad Street Overpass that skirted the very outer edge of Bethany Square, Mitch had woven himself into a cocoon. That’s how it seemed to Tommy and that’s pretty much how it felt to Mitch himself. Suddenly, everything was unreal and out of proportion and he felt numb, frigid and thick and senseless. Like he was wrapped in dirty, spitty silk or maybe drugged. Maybe it was the day. Maybe it was seeing dead people walk and watching some crazy old lady divine things from egg yolks. Yeah, all of that, topped off with Lily being gone and knowing, oh yes, knowing that she was gone for good.
“Mitch…listen to me,” Tommy said. “We don’t know anything. We really don’t. Maybe…maybe she…well, I don’t know, but maybe she?”
“Got lost? Went to get a loaf of bread? Forgot to let the neighbor’s fucking cat out?”
Tommy just said, “I don’t know.”
“Maybe you don’t know, Tommy, but I know. I know.”
“Because that old witch lady had a vision from stirring runny egg yolks?” Tommy pulled off his cigarette, moving Lily’s big conversion van carefully down the flooding streets, avoiding stalled cars…and anything else that might be out there. “C’mon, old buddy, I bought the show while we were there, but let’s not go ga ga over this shit. There’s no way she could know and…and she never actually said something had happened to Lily.”
“She didn’t have to.”
“But, Mitch?”
“Don’t…okay, Tommy? Don’t do this to me. Don’t make me argue with you, because I don’t have the fucking strength right now. I can barely breathe.” Mitch took a few deep breaths, amazed as how heavy his limbs felt, at the slow roll of his heart. “Mrs. Sepperley didn’t have to tell me shit, okay? I saw it on her face and I felt it right into my guts. That’s enough for me. Lily’s dead. I know she’s dead. I know that my wife is dead.”
Mitch barely got that part out before breaking down into tears. Those waterworks started rolling, but he fought them back with sheer willpower. Now was not the time. There would be a time for grieving, a time for mourning when the true horror or realization set in, but it wasn’t now. He couldn’t weaken now. If he let go, he’d fall right apart. His seams would burst and there would be nothing but a mess left. And until he got those kids safe and found Chrissy, he refused to crumble.
Tommy’s wrong, he thought. He’s wrong and he knows he’s wrong. His heart is in the right place, but I’m just not up to denial right now. I don’t have the strength to deceive myself.
When they’d got back to Mitch’s house?Mitch out front, running and stumbling and just white with terror and, yes, rage?Rhonda Zirblanksi met them at the door, Rita at her side. They both looked pale and confused and shaky. Rhonda told Mitch what had happened. That Lily said to shut her eyes, went outside and stood in the flooded street. And when she looked again, Lily was gone.
Right away, Mitch ran outside, running around and calling Lily’s name and with the state of mind he was in, Tommy figured it was a good thing none of those zombies showed…because they wouldn’t have stood a chance. Tommy went out there after him, of course, but Mitch was wild, completely wild, and after the second time he knocked Tommy on his ass, Tommy dragged himself back into the house. And it was there that Rhonda said what she had been too frightened to say in front of Mitch. That Lily kept saying how she thought someone was calling her name. How the house would sink down to dark, flooded places where there would be people waiting for them. How she’d gone down into the cellar and screamed…and then gone outside.
“She was standing right out in that big puddle,” Rhonda said, tears in her eyes. “There was something wrong with her, but I didn’t know what to do! I turned away for a minute…then she just wasn’t there anymore.”
Mitch had come back about ten minutes later, drenched and beside himself. Tommy poured some Jack Daniels into him and was there for him, for what good that did. But eventually, he had to tell Mitch what Rhonda said. Mitch seemed to understand things that Tommy didn’t then. They went down into the cellar and there was nothing to see but filth backed-up into the stationary drain, some black mud clotting the floor drain.
They stood there for maybe ten minutes and finally Mitch said. “You don’t get it, do you?”
And all Tommy could do was shake his head.
Mitch lit a cigarette and he was shaking so badly he had to use two hands to get it to his lips. “Lily…she’s been in a bad way ever since Marlene killed herself. And somehow, some way, she talked herself into thinking Marlene was down below in the rainwater sewers or some secret lake, who the hell knows. Down there somewhere, waiting for her.”
He didn’t need to go into anymore detail.
Tommy understood…at least, as much as you could understand the mechanics of a delusional mind. The death of her sister had torn her mind and probably her soul wide open. All the good stuff had drained from that jagged rent and what had filled up the void was dark and spooky and demented. Yes, she thought her sister was calling to her. Missed her so much, that even the idea of a ghost or something like a ghost coming for her was just fine and dandy. Jesus, it was a tragedy. A real ugly tragedy. And especially if you’d known Lily before that.
But there were other things that Mitch had not said and did not need to. Things Tommy didn’t dare say out loud. The dead were rising in Witcham, issuing up from flooded graves and walking the streets. In a sane, ordinary world with sane, ordinary physical laws and logic, what they were both thinking would have been ludicrous. The sort of madness that could have gotten you committed. But…what if Marlene had returned? Because such a thing was now certainly possible, wasn’t it?
Mitch had to live with the possibility.
And if, say, Marlene had dragged Lily below into the darkness and dank seas of rainwater and sewage…would she come back, too? Tonight or tomorrow night or a week from now, would she come knocking at the door in the dead of night? Bleached white and waterlogged like the others, nothing but a foul blackness inside of her?
It was the sort of thing that made you want to laugh until you cried and cry until you began laughing hysterically. But it was certainly a possibility, now wasn’t it?
35
“Are you up to this, Mitch?” Tommy said as he came to Coogan Avenue, the shattered barrier there, which certainly looked like something as big as a bus had smashed through those sawhorses.
“Yeah,” Mitch said, not believing it himself. “I’m up to it.”
They stepped out into the wet darkness, clicking on their flashlights. Tommy had his four-ten and Mitch had his twenty-gauge Remington autoloader. Neither of them believed that the guns would do them much good, but they were something. And both men had filled the waterproof pockets of t
heir raincoats with salt. It was crazy, maybe, but they’d seen what salt could do to the newly-risen.
The Zirblanksi twins were with Mrs. Sepperley now. She was old and more than a little frail, but she knew things and Mitch was pretty sure the dead would not mess with her.
“This is better,” Mitch said. “It’s chilly and raining, but it clears my head. That van…it smells like Lily.”
Tommy understood.
They’d taken Lily’s van so they had enough room to pack the kids. It was all-wheel drive, rode up high, and handled the water pretty good.
Flashlight beams panning the murky night around them, Mitch and Tommy started down the hill towards the rising water. Near the bottom, the lake that had drowned Bethany was black and leaf-covered. Some crates and cardboard boxes bobbed in it, stray branches and a couple bald tires, some other things obscured by the leaves. You could smell the stink of the river, the backed-up sewers and the ever-present smell of rot which was even more pronounced down there.
“After you,” Mitch said.
Tommy wiped a sheen of rain from his face and stepped into the mire. Mitch followed him. He wished they’d had time to bring waders, because the water was chilly and slimy-feeling, filled with submerged things that bumped into his legs. Things he just didn’t want to know about. He could just imagine the diseases simmering in that noxious organic stew of standing water and putrescence. It felt thick and muddy, full of suspended sediment. A mist steamed from its surface.
“I’m thinking I ain’t gonna like this,” Tommy said.
And Mitch was pretty much thinking that neither of them would. There were guys, he knew, that got paid to wallow in festering muck like that, but Tommy and he weren’t those kind of guys. He just wondered what sort of germs and contamination he was breathing in.
Bethany was an old place any day or night. Filled with old houses and old, rotting buildings, some restored, but many just decaying like Witcham’s industrial past. The streets here were narrow and winding, cut by snaking alleys and countless archaic cul-de-sacs. But on a night like this…with the flooding and the rain and the lack of electric lights, well, it was simply black and haunted and menacing. The buildings and high houses around them were netted in shadow, leaning out over the streets like they wanted to fall. The flashlights only cut ten, maybe fifteen feet tops into the stagnant brew coming off the water. Droplets of rain lit in the beams like tiny insects, falling and streaking. Things rustled in the shadows, splashed and squished. You could hear water running from rainspouts, things creaking and rattling in the wind.
They moved on slowly, panning their lights about, hearing sounds but never seeing what made them. The weave of darkness was claustrophobic and crushing. They stepped down carefully, never knowing what lay beneath that soup or if they might step into an open manhole or if the street beneath them might have given away to subsidence.
Tommy said, “Remember when I told you how bad that mortuary I worked at was?”
Mitch nodded. “Yeah.”
“Well, this is worse.”
Mitch believed him. Because he didn’t think anything could be worse than this. Worse than the smell and the dark and the way it made him feel inside. For as impossible as it may have sounded, everything seemed miles away now. Not just people and life, but everything he had been through and even the dire knowledge that he would never see Lily again. All that had been swept away by the stark immensity of this particular, awful moment. It felt like the city was closing in around them, pressing down with a ghastly weight, rising up like a great hand that wanted to crush them. He could feel something like a thousand eyes watching him, studying him, making him feel his own impending death which would not be quick and silent, but brutal and dirty.
“What the hell’s that?” Tommy said, his voice sounding like it was coming from somewhere south of his throat.
Mitch put his light on an irregular series of humps covered in leaves. But not covered enough, because he soon made out a white arm and then an ashen face, a single leaf clinging to its forehead and accentuating its pallor. The eyes were sunken, the lips shriveled like an old lady without her teeth in. A beetle crawled out of the nostril and then crawled back in. The entire body was blown up with gas, immensely round and barrel-like.
They moved around it nervously, just waiting for it to move.
“I guess…I guess I can handle corpses now,” Tommy said. “Long as they don’t move.”
They passed another bobbing body floating facedown in the classic dead man’s float. Its back had been laid open right to the spinal vertebrae. Something had been at it. Something with teeth. The water went from around their waists to up above their bellies as they moved through a dip and then it sank back down a few inches.
If Mitch had closed his eyes, he would have thought he was crawling through a subterranean pipe. The falling rain, the steam, the echo of dripping water. God, he’d never felt so completely unclean like he’d been wading in a septic tank. He had a nasty desire to scratch his skin off.
They moved on, hoping beyond hope that Wanda Sepperley hadn’t led them on a wild and deadly goose chase. The stink was not only pervasive, but palpable. Growing stronger the further they went. It was a flyblown, squalid odor…excrement and piss, rot and wet decay, surely, but something else, too. A living smell like what you might smell at the bottom of a rotting pile of leaves or under a green, mossy log. There was a rich, almost heady vitality to that stink. The odor of something that wormed through the bowels of corpses or perhaps its breath, the breath of something low and vile that chewed on putrefying carcasses.
But really putting a name to it was impossible.
For this was the stench of the resurrected. Things rotting, yet animate.
“I’m not seeing any bus,” Tommy said, the fear so thick on his voice it dripped.
“A little farther,” Mitch said. “I think…I think the street turns just up ahead.”
He pushed on ahead of Tommy, like a knife cutting through spoiled loops of viscera. And as that smell worsened, became impossibly acrid and sweet, he waited for something misshapen with long yellow teeth and bleeding eyes to rise from the muck and take a bite out of him. Now and again, the chill water would become infused with a warm stream like somebody had just emptied their bladder into it. But then it would pass.
Mitch felt it before he saw it, as he’d been feeling it for some time now: the sense that they were not alone. He brought his shotgun up, gripped the stock with his hand.
“Oh, shit,” Tommy said.
Not even ten feet from them, a grotesque and angular form rose up, caked with leaves, its face hanging like gray ropy moss from the yellow bone beneath…if you could even describe it as a face, for it looked more like some morbid fungi that might web the corners of a sunken tomb. Mitch could see its white teeth and the black holes where its eyes should have been. It was holding out its hands as if it wanted something.
So Mitch, feeling all the badness and madness filling him, gave it something.
He gave it a round of birdshot at point-blank range, steadying the Remington with his flashlight hand. The boom sounded like a missile erupting from a silo. It echoed off the faces of houses and buildings, went rolling over the rooftops like distant thunder. The round blew a hole in its belly big enough to hide a cantaloupe in. But the thing did not fall. It jerked from the impact, made a screeching sound, and a great quantity of flesh and meat sprayed into the water behind it.
But that was it.
It swayed back and forth, smoke rolling from the hole in its abdomen. There was a mucid, slushy sound that was infinitely repulsive, reminding Mitch of what a diseased placenta expelled from a womb might sound like. There was that sound and then the thing’s bowels fell out of its belly in a mutilated tangle, like snakes peeled raw, dropping into the water along with a gush of black slime.
Still, it did not fall.
It stood there, a watery sound coming from its mouth as if its throat were filled with soft, soggy th
ings. It was trying to talk and God only knew what horrors it might tell them of were such a thing possible.
Tommy couldn’t stand it anymore.
He stuck his flashlight inside his jacket and brought out a fistful of salt. And without further ado, he took two, uneasy steps forward, said, “Here, have some seasoning, you ugly sonofabitch.”
He tossed the salt at it and right away the thing began to cook, to shrivel and smoke and sputter like bacon fat on a hot griddle. The thing coiled and clawed and made a sharp hissing sound that was probably not its voice at all, but the sound of that salt dehydrating it. Its flesh went soft and plastic, as did the tissues below, and then they literally melted from the skeleton beneath, pissing into the grimy waters. And the most ludicrous thing of all, was that skeleton, the framework still stood. It was a horrible thing ribboned in tendon and sinew and mats of bubbling flesh. But it stood, smoking and trembling, and then it simply collapsed into the water, steaming, sinking from view.
Tommy made a gagging sound.
Mitch was glad his belly was empty.
Trying to blink it away, he hooked an arm around Tommy’s elbow and dragged him on forward. They had to reach that bus and they had to goddamn well reach it now. There was no time to freak out, no time to puke or try to make sense of that which was utterly senseless.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
They splashed forward and Tommy seemed to understand that, suddenly, time was of the essence. They had to get it done and get it done now. Sure, they’d only encountered one zombie. And that was enough, thank you very much, but Mitch had this wild idea that they were like rats: when you saw one, the rest of the pack wasn’t very far behind. And maybe it was something more than that, like maybe these things were like wasps or bees. A hive mind. When you did something to one, they all knew it. When one was injured or killed, maybe the others knew it, too.