by Tim Curran
Now he would take it out.
Now he would make her do things.
Make her do things just as he’d made those boys do things.
No, no, it was too much. Simply too much. With every last bit of strength in her, Chrissy let out a piercing scream that could be heard throughout the orphanage.
Grimshanks boomed with fragmented laughter.
Maggots filled his mouth and emerged from holes in his tongue.
His eyes blazed with nefarious, carnal delight.
Here was the violation, the groping and pumping and penetration, the defilement of flesh and soul. The seeding that came before the cutting and the chewing and dismembering. He would make her suck on him and then he would take her sex in his mouth, piercing it with his yellow and decayed teeth, feeling that hot cunt virgin’s blood washing down his throat. And then he would slide into her, pushing deeper and deeper, shooting into her, filling her with acid and worms?
“That’s a fucking clown,” a voice said and then. “It’s got Chrissy!”
Chrissy was certain that her mind had run now like maple sap. For she was hearing the voice of Deke and another voice which sounded suspiciously like that of Tommy Kastle, her stepdad’s old drinking and bowling partner. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.
But there they were.
Dressed in wet raincoats, looking haggard and tired and angry, very angry. They stormed into the room and Grimshanks shrank away, because he knew that what was in them was even worse than what had been in the mob that had beaten him earlier that day down into the grass.
Deke was on his knees, holding Chrissy against him.
Tommy stood there with a shotgun in his hands.
Grimshanks looked afraid, trapped, cornered, in dire straits.
“Hello, Pervo,” Tommy said and his voice was flat and deadly. “I heard all about you. Fruitpie the fucking Magician. I bet fruit pies aren’t the only thing that disappear when you’re around, are they? I bet a lot of kids go missing…don’t they, suck-nut?”
Grimshanks hunched over. His hands came up, his face contorted into a mask of raw animal rage, teeth sharp and bared, eyes fixed and hating. “I’ll tear your guts out, Tommy-boy, and I’ll make your friend eat them! Eat them! DO YOU HEAR ME YOU FUCKING COCKLESS GUTLESS SQUIRT
OF SHIT? I’LL MAKE HIM EAT THEMMMMMM?”
He charged at Tommy.
It was a good bluff and pretty damn frightening to see, but Tommy was not impressed. He cracked a little smile and pulled the trigger. Grimshanks took it right in the belly. He did not fold up or go down like the others, he went absolutely manic and demented. He leaped into the air, bounced off the walls. He flew up and attached himself to the ceiling like a spider. He slid down the walls and wormed over the floors, the whole time steam churning from that hole in his guts. He rushed at Tommy and Tommy fired again, this time catching him with a glancing shot that ripped most of the meat from his upper arm, the flesh there singing and blackening.
Finally, Grimshanks let out a freight train wail of noise, howling and shrieking and everyone had to cover their ears. The clown took advantage of that and hit the boards over the windows like a projectile from a cannon. Some of the boards snapped, but others held.
He hit them and went instantly liquid.
He became a blob that ran and gushed and forced its gelatinous mass between the boards and out into the night where he escaped into the wet darkness. But everyone in that room could hear him wailing and screeching. Because for the first time, Grimshanks was really hurt. He was damaged beyond repair and that screaming of his was part agony and part absolute fear.
Deke was rocking Chrissy back and forth in his arms. She was crying and so was he. Tommy brushed them both with his hands, making contact with them.
“Deke, you take care of her,” he said, heading for the door.
“Where you going?”
Tommy looked back at him, grabbing the lantern, and winked. “I’m going to kill me a motherfucking clown.”
35
There wasn’t much time.
It was full dark and the dead were coming.
Where before they had been content to wait just under the water, staring up with hollow eyes at the people on the rooftop, now their patience had worn thin. They were coming up out of the water. Coming in numbers. And by the looks of it, there would be no stopping them.
“Get ready,” Harry told Chuck. “Stand by with that salt.”
“Look how many there are!” Rita Zirblanski said.
Harry almost told her that he would not let them get her…but could he really promise that? Promise anything that seemed so utterly impossible under the circumstances? Wanda and the twins had the lantern up near the chimney. Harry moved around carefully on the wet shingles with their sole flashlight. Everywhere he played the light, nothing but dead and leering faces.
Jesus, they were everywhere.
To all sides of the house, the zombies were gathered. The water came almost up to the lip of the roof itself and it was thick with the living dead. They crowded up to the roof, five and six and sometimes seven deep, looking almost like concert-goers pressed up to the edge of a stage. White arms were resting on the shingles, faces that were distorted peering up at Harry and the others, those eyes filled with an infinite and unholy blackness. Black tears ran from huge, gelatinous eyes; black blood from the corners of grinning mouths. So many of them, so damn many. There wasn’t enough salt to turn back more than ten or fifteen at best and out there…good God, a seething, hungering graveyard of them.
Mr. Cheese, Chuck’s cat, was mewling wildly now.
“Listen!” Chuck said. “Listen!”
Harry was not listening, though. He was studying the living corpses down below, knowing that essentially only himself and a bag of salt stood in-between them and the people left in his charge. Sure, Chuck would fight hard, but he was just a boy. Just like the Zirblanksi’s were really just kids and Wanda was an old, old lady. No, he was their protector.
And he didn’t stand a chance.
You could have ran. You could have gotten away anytime.
True. True enough. And that was the really crazy, fucked-up part of it all. He, Harry Teal, felon and escaped convict and all-around bad guy, did not want to leave. He was a guy who’d ran with a pretty tough cut-throat crew in Milwaukee. He’d boosted cars to order. He made his living in the streets. He’d spent the past five years in a maximum security hellhole. In the streets, he’d beat guys bloody, he’d even shot a guy once. In Slayhoke, he’d busted metal pipes over men’s heads, he’d stabbed them and beaten them nearly to death when they got in his way or gave him trouble or just failed to show him respect. He had become an animal just like all the others animals out in the yard there. He wasn’t the sort of guy who gave a rat’s ass about anyone. With him it had always been one thing, same as any other criminal: greed. He wanted that folding green and God help you if you got in the way of him getting it.
And now? Now he was playing good Samaritan?
Yes. Yes, that was it exactly. He could have ran off anytime after they’d gotten out from behind those walls. He could have run off on Jacky Kripp. He could have run off after Jacky was killed. But he hadn’t. He’d hooked up with Tommy and Mitch and stayed…stayed when he knew things were bad. More than bad. Just plain awful. A flooding city. The living dead. He got through that gauntlet, the cops would either shoot him down on sight or throw him back in a cage. Regardless, he’d stayed and stayed because Tommy and Mitch had treated him okay. Not like a con, but like a man. Like a friend. They accepted him and gave him something he’d never had before: a good feeling inside. So he stayed to help, because he figured a guy like him was particularly suited to surviving in a clusterfuck like Witcham. Tommy and Mitch were good boys, but neither of them were like Harry. They were not natural-born predators.
And they needed somebody who was.
Somebody who would watch their back and bring hell down on anyone who gave them trou
ble. But it was more than that even. He liked Wanda. She was like the grandmother you never had. The Zirblanski twins were like your favorite nieces. And Chuck? Goddamn, he could have been Harry’s kid in a different world where he hadn’t come up hard in the wrong neighborhood.
In twenty-four hours, less than that, he felt like the bunch of them were family to him.
That’s some sweet shit you’re reeling off there, bro, Harry told himself. But look where it’s gotten you. You don’t have to worry about going back to Slayhoke, because it ends for you tonight on this fucking rooftop, this fucking oasis in this stinking, rancid sea of the hungry dead.
But it didn’t bother him, it really didn’t?
“Harry!” Chuck said. “They’re coming! Listen, they’re coming!”
Listen?
Sure, sure, he was hearing it now. The thunk-thunk-thunk of helicopter rotors. It was getting louder. Louder by the moment. Excited, Harry panned his light over the dead. They were getting restless down there. There was no doubt of it. Something like an extended shiver was passing through them.
“Give me that salt, Chuck,” he said to the kid.
“I’ll fight them off with you, Harry.”
God, what a kid. Harry put an arm around him. “I got a better job for you, Chuck. A more important one. When that chopper gets here, I’ll need you to get the women aboard it. Okay? I need you to do that for me.”
Chuck sighed. “Okay. I guess.”
“Good man. Get up there by the chimney with them. Get ready.”
Chuck didn’t really like the idea, but he did it. That’s the kind of kid he was. And truth be told, Harry would not have recognized the old Chuck Bittner had he seen him. That selfish, arrogant little beast had died now and what rose from the ashes was about as fine of a boy as you could imagine.
“There!” Rhonda said. “Look! I can see it!”
So could Harry. “Thank God,” he said.
Coming through the mist and the falling rain it looked like some alien craft approaching, lit up, search lights scanning the waters, raindrops suspended in its sweeping beams.
“Get ready!” he shouted to the others.
“We’re ready and willing,” Wanda said.
The girls let out a cheer.
Harry waved the flashlight over his head.
The chopper was getting closer now. It had seen their lights and it was coming. It was on a direct route to them. Nothing could stay it now.
Below, the dead were moving.
“Shit,” Harry said under his breath.
He’d used up all the shells. All he had now was that bag of salt.
The dead were massing, crawling up out of the oily waters like fish. Not rising up on their hands and knees like men and women, but crawling on their bellies like mutant worms, slinking and slithering. From all sides of the roof, they were coming, pulling themselves from the water and wriggling their way up the wet shingles.
The helicopter had made Kneale Street now. It was very loud. Some guy on a loudspeaker was calling out to them.
“Harry…” Chuck said.
“I see them. Just get ready.”
The dead surged forth. So many in the lantern light that Harry knew that he and the others would not just be overwhelmed, they would literally be buried alive. His flashlight beam glimmered off their eyes which were glistening and gelid like the eggs of frogs. They looked like they would pop in a surge of filth if you poked them.
The helicopter was nearly to the roof now.
It was so loud that Harry could not hear what the others were saying. Not really. Though he could sense the panic in their voices. The chopper wouldn’t make it in time, not unless something happened.
And Harry was that something.
He started throwing the salt. Racing around the inclines of the roof, tossing salt. Much of it washed away in the rain, but enough found its intended targets that they pulled back, burning and steaming and crying out.
The helicopter was overhead.
The basket was coming down. Both of the Zirblanski twins were in it with the cat, crowding into it while Chuck held it steady in the rotor wash that was kicking up water and mist and a foul, moldering stink. Harry waved to the twins and they just looked back at him with horror in their eyes, knowing he was sacrificing himself so that they might escape.
The basket was coming back down now.
Chuck was shouting to Harry.
Harry waved him off and tossed what salt he had left at the advancing army of the dead. They were coming from all sides now, swarming like ants, hissing and scratching the shingles and gnashing their rotten teeth.
Wanda almost lost control of the basket.
She didn’t weigh much more than it did. Harry raced over there on his hands and knees, slipping once and sliding precious inches down towards those clutching white hands. He got up and got hold of the basket just as it would have tossed Wanda airborne.
“Harry!” Chuck shouted.
“Just get in for chrissake!”
He got Chuck in there and the basket started up and the dead were almost on them. Wanda would not make it either. But she didn’t seem to be too alarmed about that.
The dead were close now.
So many it was almost impossible to differentiate between them. Just a raging, compressed graveyard machine of skullish faces and bloated faces and wormy faces, scraping fingers and clutching fingers and fingers that were skeletal hooks. Moving, advancing, eyes like wet cinders and faces that were cold and white like new moons.
“Caught up with me at last, have you?” Wanda said, clinging to the chimney. “Crawled out of your slimy graves and dark pest-holes to put your teeth and claws to this old woman, eh? Well, you don’t frighten me! Not a one of you! Filth and disease and canker and pestilence! That’s all you are! Things to be salted and staked and burned out like infection!”
One of the dead came up over the apex of the roof, making for Wanda. She didn’t see it and she didn’t seem to care. Its face was little more than withered, flapping leather that looked stitched and pulled into the general appearance of a face, but missing the mark by miles. It had no eyes. And its flesh…it crawled over the bone, fluttering with a wriggling motion. Another came up behind it and its own face was nothing but a nest of creeping worms, burrowing in and out of the flesh.
Harry knocked two zombies away from him and made it to Wanda just as the dead things took hold of her. He hit old worm-face with a bunched fist and that face simply sprayed and fell apart. Wanda screamed once as the thing that had her broke her over its knee with a wet snapping. She died right then.
Harry went wild.
As they came at him, he punched and kicked and clawed, tearing faces from the skulls beneath and breaking off limbs and burying his fists into moist, swollen bellies.
The helicopter was still hovering up there, the basket swinging beneath it. The backwash of the rotors threw rain in Harry’s face, almost plucked him off the roof. A gunner up there was firing rounds into the dead, drilling holes through them, but it did little good.
Last stand.
This was it.
“Come on, you fuckers!” Harry shouted at them. “Come and get me!”
There was an old antenna pole bolted to the chimney. Harry yanked and pulled on it until it popped free. A weapon. He smashed heads and impaled bodies and made one hell of a show of himself, swinging and bashing and gutting his attackers. But by then there were hundreds closing on him, a flurry of reaching white hands and pallid faces crowding in on him.
They buried him alive.
But to his credit, he fought like a maniac right to his last breath.
36
“Hey, Pervo!” Tommy shouted up the narrow attic stairwell. “I’m coming to get your ass!”
Grimshanks was up there hiding and Tommy knew it. He’d hunted and tracked enough game in his time and followed enough blood trails to know that he was getting close. It was nothing you needed to be told. You could feel it. You co
uld sense it with some primal mechanism of the hunt. And right then, Tommy was feeling it right up his spine. In his belly. In his balls.
I got that slimy fuck and he knows it.
Grimshanks must have come in another window after squeezing out the one on the second floor. Tommy had gone up to the third, moving on gut instinct and nothing more. It wasn’t long before he found that smear of black juice on the wall, the drops that led here to the attic stairs. The stench of Grimshanks’ burning flesh was acrid and pungent, nauseating. There was no mistaking the smell of a zombie that had tasted the salt.
Smiling, Tommy mounted the stairs, the shotgun in one hand, the lantern in the other.
“Hey, sucknut!” he called out. “What you gonna do when I come for you?”
Nothing but silence.
Tommy was not dismayed, only all the more vigilant. That goddamn clown was up here and the drops of black blood on the steps were evidence of that. Tommy followed them step by step, ready for action. Ready for old Fruitpie to come barreling down at him at any moment.
“Hey, Puddles? Come out and play…”
He made it to the top of the stairs, holding up the lantern, casting a wide swath of light in every direction. Hunched shadows slid around him. The attic was huge and dusty and mildewed-smelling. About what you’d expect. Ancient rafters overhead, shuttered gales on the sloping walls. Crates and boxes and old rolled-up rugs rotting away in the warm darkness. It stank musty up there. Cobwebs were draped above Tommy’s head, lots of rodent droppings everywhere.
A few stray rats skittered away at his approach.
“Hey, fuckface!” Tommy called out. “I’m gonna do to you what you do to kids: I’m gonna fuck you real bad! You hear me? Huh? You hear me, Giggles?”
There was a roaring like that of some primeval beast and something came rushing out of the darkness and hit Tommy. Hit him hard enough to knock him over and almost down the stairs. But he managed to hang onto the 12 gauge. The lantern went sailing. It thudded into a beam and crashed to the floor, shattering, all that lantern fuel spilling out. The fire tasted the old wood and a wall of flame lit up.