by Tim Curran
Mitch had used up his bag of salt and had lost his rifle after successfully using it as a club to bash zombie heads. Now all he had was a flare. He shoved into the face of a dead thing, kicked another out of his way, effectively punching a hole through the zombie army and making it to the other side. Hubb Sadler was with him and Knucker. The flares were what got them through and kept the dead at arm’s length. They managed to get into one of the corridors where the fighting would be easier. Hardy James almost made it, but a throng of the dead engulfed him and he drowned beneath their numbers.
And Knucker, who was, in Hubb’s own words, “the toughest piece of ass-kicking broad this side of Annie fucking Oakley,” actually cried out and burst into tears as the sight of Hardy being buried alive in that carrion. She went down on one knee as the dead surged after them, reloading her 12 gauge with a sort of calm and care that was surprising. She might have been out in the woods come bird season. For she was no less careless, no more rushed, no less relaxed.
But she was not calm and she was not relaxed. Tears running from her eyes at the sight of her old friend and verbal combatant dying in such a horrible way, she was filled with zeal and rage and the need for payback.
And what she did next was suicidal.
“Knucker!” Hubb called out. “Get your fucking ass back here! Get back here!”
But she was beyond listening to him. Beyond listening to anyone but her own twisted rage. Hardy had been her friend. She had known him since he was a kid. And she did not take that sort of longevity and loyalty lightly. As Hubb and Mitch pulled back, she came forward to meet the grave herds. She started shooting, dropping them one by one, pushing them back until she reached the remains of her friend and by then she’d used every last round. She popped a road flare and jammed it into faces and throats and got a hand on Hardy’s ankle and dragged him back a good ten feet with two ghouls hanging off him before one of the dead, one of the Catholic school girls, leaped on her and vomited a gout of that black juice in her face that instantly blinded her, burning her and bringing her to her knees.
Mitch rushed in with Hubb’s shotgun and blasted five of them out of the way, ducking beneath sprays of that acidic black slime. He pulled Knucker away from the zombies and Hubb limped in to help, a road flare in each fist. They got Knucker away, even brought her shotgun back with them, but that was about all they could do for her because she was already dead. Mitch stripped her vest off her as the dead came for another assault.
Tommy and Deke were separated from the others. Deke threw salt until there was none left and Tommy pumped off round after round. The dead pushed them towards the stairs and by then, they had no idea if the others were even alive. The only thing that saved their bacon was that Hot Tamale was tossing a few of her gas bombs. They exploded against the walls and floors, spraying fire in every direction. This is what drove the dead back and allowed Tommy and Deke to make a not so orderly retreat up the stairs.
Yes, sheer pandemonium.
All over the orphanage, windows were breaking and doors being torn off hinges. Rain and wind blew in along with a foul stink of poisoned tidal pools and things rotting in gutters. Footsteps were heard. Dragging sounds. A raving and a shrieking and a whispering. Peals of disjointed laughter. The walls shook and mirrors shattered. The dead poured in from outside, from closets and cellars and hiding places in a shadowy throng bent on destruction and violence and murder. They were insane, all of them, driven into some wild feeding frenzy.
Mitch steered Hubb into a classroom and tried to hold the door as the dead battered against the other side, screaming and hissing and pounding their fists. They got it closed and locked, but how long it might hold, they did not know.
The crazy thing was, Hardy James was not dead. He’d been bitten and beaten, clawed and stomped, but not devoured. It was Knucker’s brave counterattack that had saved his life. As firebombs exploded and the dead circled around in confusion, he crawled away into one of the offices.
He even managed to get the door shut.
At least for a few minutes.
Then it blew right open, slamming him up against the wall. He tried to force it back shut, but those wormy hands found him, a dozen of them, yanking him in opposite directions. They pulled him by the hair and the arms, the body and the legs. More hands pressed in, hooked like talons, peeling the skin from his face and the meat from his throat. He felt one of his arms get ripped free, one of his knees snap. His left eye was thumbed from its socket, his nose broken, his cheek torn from the skull beneath. They mauled him and crushed him and bit into him. And he went down as they towered over him, greedy and ravenous. All those faces pushed in, looking like watercolor paintings that had run…color and flesh and features oozing from the bone in a seething mass alive with worms.
He died most horribly.
Herb was separated from Hot Tamale.
He made it into the industrial-sized kitchen back beyond the chapel and a swarm of the dead crushed into him, slamming him to linoleum floor. There were dozens of them, pale and blubbery and reaching. He saw one with too many eyes in its face and another whose flesh draped around it like a winding sheet. A dead woman carried a dead baby and a dead man carried a legless woman. He saw a mutated thing which seemed to be composed mostly of open sores and another with a row of fetal hands running down its belly. He saw a woman that was so unbearably white she was nearly phosphorescent and a little girl with too many rubbery limbs scamper right up the wall. He saw the dead and the decomposed, things with too many arms or heads or simply not enough. Some that looked like two or three people melted into a whole, slithering and hopping, unwinding as they came forward. Things wriggled and wormed, flew and stumbled. Things that should have walked, crawled. And others that should have crawled, walked.
An obscene freakshow of putrefaction and something far worse.
But then a woman took hold of his head and vomited a stream of black mud into his face and he, thankfully, saw no more. He could only hear the screamings and whispering and laughter, the wet ripping sounds as they tore out handfuls of their own furrowed and soggy meat and shoved it into his mouth, made him eat and swallow of their abundant spoilage, but by then his mind was long gone.
Mitch made a mistake and almost died because of it.
There were not one, but two doors leading into that cavernous classroom.
Hubb saw the other one starting to open at the other end. “Mitch!” he shouted. “Jesus whore-fucking Christ! Mitch!”
Mitch raced down there, leaping over a heap of lumber, jumping up just as that door came open and throwing his weight against it, slamming it shut. One of the thing’s hands was caught between the door and the jamb. Those wriggling fingers were severed. They fell to the floor and undulated like fat, deathless worms.
“Now what in the fuck?” Hubb said, panting and pulling off his oxygen mask. “Now what, Mitch?”
Listening to the carnage outside, Mitch had no idea.
30
“Don’t do anything foolish, boy,” Wanda Sepperley told Chuck Bittner on the rooftop as darkness began to descend over the town in folds of the blackest midnight satin. “Don’t be throwing that salt until you got something to throw it at.”
“Just take it easy,” Harry said.
But it was no easy bit, trying to take it easy. For as the shadows lengthened, the dead had begun to come out like worms after a good rain. They were gathering out there in that dirty, polluted water in numbers. They waited just beneath the surface and you could see their faces, white and phosphorescent.
“When are those helicopters coming?” Rhonda Zirblanski said.
“Soon, honey, soon.” She held the girls to either side of her and would not let them go. The cat waited with them.
“There’s got to be a hundred out there,” Chuck said, just sick about it.
Harry was watching them, too. “They want us to use up our salt. They want us to throw it into the water at them. If we do that, then they’ll come up after us.�
��
“That’s right, son. They’re baiting you.”
And they were.
Now and again, one of them would raise a rotting face above the water and call out to those on the rooftop by name. They called out in the voices of friends and loved ones and that was the hardest thing to tolerate. Chuck could barely stand it. The sound of his father’s voice coming from one of those crumbling mouths was bad enough, but it was the voice of his mother lilting into the dusk that truly shook him. Whatever demonic minds fueled the dead, they were not stupid. They knew very well how to torment and exactly what to say.
“You shouldn’t have let me die alone, Chuck,” that voice would say, echoing and echoing across the water. “How could you let me die alone, alone, alone, alone…”
“Don’t listen, son,” Wanda kept telling him. “That’s not your mother. That’s nobody’s mother.”
“How can they do that?” Rita asked. “How can they know those voices?”
Wanda patted her. “They know many things on both sides of the grave, child. They’re not people. They have no soul. Just awful crawling things that were never supposed to have been born. They live on fear and hate and death. They’re weak if you don’t give them power. So don’t listen and don’t ever believe. All they do is lie. They know nothing else.”
Harry lit the lantern to drive away the shadows. “Those choppers will be here soon,” he said and hoped it was true.
Out in that stinking bog of corruption, the undead waited.
31
In the Procton house, down the way from Mitch Barron’s, Russel Boyne and his mother, Margaret, were still alive. The house was the tallest on Kneale Street and they were in an upstairs bedroom on the third floor. They had a battery lantern and a few improvised weapons, nothing more. The house had held when the dam broke, but they were trapped. The water was nearly to the top of the stairs and if it rose much farther…
Russel sat there on the bed with a sharpened stake in his hands. “I don’t get any of this,” he said, pouting like the little boy he in fact was. “This never happened in any of them zombie pictures. Weren’t ever no flood like this.”
“Oh, shut up,” Margaret told him, finally tired of his role-playing. “This isn’t a movie, Russel. This is real.”
“But it’s like a movie.”
“Just be quiet,” she told him.
She heard something in the water. Splashing. A suggestion of movement. She rose up slowly, steeling herself for whatever it might be. It was more than likely nothing, but she had to know.
“What’s that?” Russel said. “A zombie?”
“Shut up.”
At the top of the steps, she paused and listened.
The lantern was still burning brightly. It probably had an hour or more left before they were plunged into darkness. Occasionally it flickered, sending giant, eerie shadows dancing across the walls in a spook show. She peered down the stairwell. The water was rippling. A few bubbles broke the surface. Then more.
She could see something just beneath the surface, a dark, irregular shape that was rising, rising. Something cold broke open in her stomach as absolute dread settled into her.
The waters parted and a head appeared, then shoulders, the upper half of a torso. The head had been bowed, only a nest of filthy leave-caked hair visible, now it lifted and looked at her.
Her insides went to liquid.
Yes, a zombie.
He had only one eye, the other just a black, mud-filled pit drilled into the tombstone gray of his face. His flesh was puckered and pitted with tiny holes, his nose fallen with rot into one central cavity. His lips hung in shreds, his blackened gums pierced with crumbling teeth.
Margaret’s knees were rubber now, she tottered drunkenly, a cold and raw horror spreading through her and stealing the warmth and hope from her pounding heart.
The thing looked at her, fixing her with that one yellow, glistening eye. “The cemetery,” it croaked, dirty water running from its mouth. “The cemetery…yesssss…” From deep inside its congested lungs, a belching, bubbling sound arose and more water and clods of mud vomited from its ripped and hollow throat.
Margaret had gone down on one knee.
It had come no closer. It just stood its ground, raining water and filth and madness. The lantern flickered wildly, casting lurching shadows over its pocketed skull-face.
Russel came forward with his stake. “Get back! Get back!”
“Margaret,” the thing gurgled, “yaaaahhhhhhhhh…”
And slowly, slowly it slid back beneath the water with a steaming sound, mist burning from its hide.
Margaret screamed.
There were others coming from the water now. The one she had seen before was bad enough, a ripped and decayed zombie, running corruption for a face, but these…much worse.
They were faceless, dripping things, their skins and ragged clothing gone an oily black with mud and sediment from the river bottom, gray filthy blankets of fungus where their faces should have been.
With a cry of terror, Margaret hauled her son backwards just as they reached for him. Turning she took hold of the door and slammed it, one of the things' fingers caught between the door and the jamb. The wriggling fingers were severed and came free, landing on the carpeting where they squirmed.
She threw the deadbolt on the door and kicked the fingers into the corner.
And outside the door, they began pounding. The dead. Not just a pounding, but a hammering and a battering and a ramming. The door shook, trembled, cracks running through it. It was just a cheap hollow panel job, not meant to really hold back anything, let alone what was out there now.
Russel stood there with his stake, Margaret behind him with a kitchen knife.
The door came right off its hinges and the dead swarmed in.
Russel fought but they overwhelmed him instantly. Margaret sank her knife into one bloated belly and then hands had her, tossing her back into the water. The dead moved around her, diving and swimming, but they did not take her down with them.
She came up and the lantern was out.
Just darkness.
Russel was maybe in the bedroom or had been pulled down into the deeps. But he was gone, gone, gone and she began to weep, still in the water, clinging to the steps.
If only she could see something.
The water was chill and slimy, things bobbing in it, others things sunken around her. She tried to climb up, fell and went under. She came up, gasping for air, shocked and terrified.
She hung there, with her head and shoulders out of the mire, shivering and mad, thinking things and feeling things and maybe even believing that they wouldn’t come for her. After a time, she moved back towards the stairs, clung to them, waiting for what she did not know.
A drop of water struck her face. Then another.
In the heavy, moist stillness, she could hear someone breathing. Someone was standing over her on the stairs, dripping on her.
“Take my hand,” a voice said, gurgling and waterlogged.
“Oh, please…”
“Take my hand.”
The voice was not necessarily evil or threatening, just morbidly awful like its owner’s throat was packed with wet leaves. She reached out to take the hand offered because there really was no other way. She found the hand and gripped it as it gripped her. It was clammy and spongy, juice squirted from between her fingers. She let out a subtle cry of horror and she was pulled out of the water and pushed against a pulpy, crawling mass. Then a cold and rubbery mouth was pressed against her own and black water was vomited down her throat, filling her.
All things considered, it was not the worst possible death.
32
Don’t breathe.
Don’t move.
Don’t even make a sound.
The dead boys were searching the room now, moving along and patting the walls, pausing to sniff the air like dogs casting for a scent. Chrissy was not only wet with rain, she was wet with hot salty swe
at that ran down her face in rivulets. She could taste it on her lips, feeling it pooling beneath her eyes and filling them, making them sting. It was agonizing. She needed to rub them. She had to. She couldn’t sit here like this, terrified and sweating and cramped. She would go mad.
Alona held her tighter than ever, in a grip like a vice. She would allow no movement, no sound.
But sooner or later, those things would find them.
Quiet.
Don’t stir.
Don’t make a sound.
But how long could she possibly do that? How long? You want to move and you know it. Sooner or later you’re going to, Chrissy. And it probably won’t even be voluntary, just a tendon popping or a muscle jerking and making your arm move. Maybe you should just get it over with.
No!
Good God, no. The idea of those things touching her was madness itself. And if that didn’t turn her mind to slush, then what about the party Grimshanks had planned? Oh, now that was really going to be something. He would have hurt and demeaned her in the most unspeakable ways before, but that was before they had injured him, beaten and broken him. Now he would do things she could not possibly imagine. Things beyond mere horror and agony, fresh and untapped realms of psychotic and lewd violation.
The one with the blond greasy hair was stopped right in front of them now. He cocked his head to the side like a puppy, but it was hardly cute. Flies covered his face and exited his mouth when he spoke.
“Chrissy? Is that you? Reach out and take my hand…I’ll see that he makes it quick, then we can be together. Death won’t last. He’ll call you up just like he called us up…”
Chrissy’s breath was coming very fast now and she could do nothing to muffle its sound. He was hearing it and knowing she was near. This was it. This was really it.