Edwards shook his head, as if to reply would be redundant, a waste of precious time. Deep in the forest, the snap of branches.
“Do you know anything about Marcus Overton?” Oddy asked.
The man’s mouth unhinged like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Oh, Jesus…”
“What?” Tripwire asked. “What’s wrong?”
Sounds drawing nearer. All around the clearing. Low, choked moans.
“He sent you, didn’t he?” Edwards said. “You landed on that hill, didn’t you?”
“Who sent us?” Oddy said.
“That fucking monster. Anton Grosevoir.”
A spikewave of dread hammered down Oddy’s spine.
“Do you have guns?” Edwards asked. “Get them.”
Crosshairs asked why.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Listen.” Oddy squinted at the tree line. “We’ve been sent to find Marcus Overton, an escapee from the Saugeen Valley Supermax. If you know anything, can help in any way, I’ll make sure—”
“There is no Saugeen Valley Supermax. Never was. No Marcus Overton. There is nobody left. My team is dead. Just me…and you… and them.”
“Them who?” Unnerved by Edwards’s warnings, Tripwire slammed a clip into the DeLisle Carbine. “Who the fuck are you running from?”
As if in preemptive reply, the first one emerged from the sheltering firs. Initially it was as indistinct as the bushes and trees near its sides; then it stepped forward, limping towards the fire’s glow. It shuffled stiffly, as if it had steel rods inserted into its limbs preventing smooth motion.
“What the fuck—?” Zippo said.
“Just shoot it. Now,” Edwards moaned.
It looked human—at least, it walked upright, and possessed the basic appendages of one. But something was fundamentally wrong with its face: it was red and glistening, as if the flesh had been stripped away. It staggered closer. There was a black pit where its right eye used to be. Knotted strands of black hair stuck with cockleburs hung from its skull in rotting ropes. It stumbled on a tree stump and spun like a drunkard. It had, at some distant time, been a woman. One breast hung to her navel, patches of decay blooming across the seam joining it to her chest. The other one was missing entirely, a pulpy round disc where it should’ve been, black and squirming with maggots. Most disturbing were the guts hanging out of her stomach, swaying between her festering legs like a hula dancer’s grass skirt.
“Shoot it,” Edwards pleaded. “Shoooot it.”
Behind the woman was another one, this one male. Tall and once-muscular, his chest draped in the remains of an ice-crusted tee-shirt that read: “WORLD’S GREATEST LOVER.” His flesh was black and bloated and shiny, like a wet innertube. One arm was missing entirely; a bleached shoulder socket peeked through a vent in the fabric. The other arm was stripped of flesh, bones clicking and clattering skeletally. At some point his putrefied neck muscles had been unable to support the weight of his skull; his head hung halfway down his chest on a few strands of tendon, the rest having pulled apart like taffy in the hands of hungry children. Despite the troublesome handicap, his jaws continued to snap fitfully.
Zombies? Tripwire’s mind reeled. Was it possible?
It was Crosshairs who acted first. Raising the rifle and centering the lead zombie in the crosshairs, he exhaled completely, and fired. The Remington kicked solidly against his shoulder and the muzzle spat flame. The back of the dead woman’s head exploded outward, the spray of blood and bone and tissue splattering the bark of a nearby tree. Her body continued forward for a few steps before her atrophied nervous system got the message she was officially dead.
More of them appeared. Inconceivably, they were in worse shape than the first two. Heading the second wave was something that appeared to be female, but, this was at best an educated guess. Its flesh was coal-black, whether from rot or flame was uncertain, and its eyes had been punched from their sockets; they hung pendant on red stalks, bump-bumping against its blackened cheeks in time with its shuffling footsteps. Some of its torso was intact, but much of it was hollowed out. Its ribcage was burst open from the gaseous rot of its internal organs, tatters of flesh hanging in rips and rags; the hollowed cavity had been stuffed with weeds and dead fescue, as though the creature still felt a need its body should be filled with something, anything.
“Shoot them in the head!” Edwards screamed. “Don’t let them touch you!”
Zippo secured the flame-thrower on his back and thumbed the pilot light. Answer cocked his Kirikkales and grabbed a hatchet. Tripwire leveled the DeLisle and fired a burst through the nearest zombie. The bullets punched through its chest, ripping away chunks of flesh, but it continued to advance, moaning, a sound like an old man dying in his sleep.
On the heels of the peeled zombie came a half-man: somewhere along the way he’d misplaced his legs. But, with a determination borne of extreme hunger, he dragged himself along using his hands. Due to the gaping hole where his legs were once attached, and the combination of rocks, weeds, and bushes, much of his insides had been tugged from his body cavity and now trailed behind him, a rotting anatomical smorgasbord. A silver fox tore at a long gray-green rope of intestine that played out behind the zombie like a grisly umbilical cord. He neither noticed nor cared, focusing on Zippo with eyes that leaked gummy fluid like those of a sickly animal.
More appeared every second, pouring out of the trees like rats from a burning building. One was dressed in a red Mountie uniform, the brass buttons tarnished brown, the icy fabric crackling like dull metal as it advanced. Another looked young and recently dead; a Nikon camera with a spiderwebbed lens hung on a strap around its neck, cutting deep into the curdled flesh.
“Jesus,” Zippo muttered. “Look at all the dead fucks.”
Oddy nocked the HK21 heavy-machinegun on his right hip and let it rip. .223-inch belt-fed rounds passed through the firing chamber at the rate of ten-per-second, exiting the muzzle at 3,250 feet-per-second. The results were spectacular: bullets slammed into trees like a buzzsaw, wet splinters exploding in all directions. Oddy trained the barrel on the self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Lover and watched as the lothario’s body was ripped to shreds, yellow pus and clotted innards spewing from the bullet holes in foul-smelling rivulets. The force of the slugs knocked Romeo on his back and his free-floating head split open on a sharp rock. Curds of blood-dappled brain spurted wildly. Oddy let out a war-whoop and blew at wisps of smoke curling from the gun barrel.
Answer approached the peeled one. It tracked him blindly, as an earthworm might, rotting arms outstretched. Answer methodically placed bullets through each of its legs. Kneecaps shattered like china plates and the zombie plopped down in the snow but continued forward. Answer stepped back, shielding his eyes, and brought the hatchet down into its face, blade hacking at an angle into its open mouth. Its eyes stayed open. Not even a flinch. A thin stream of dark blood pissed around the blade. It grabbed at the handle, and Answer’s attached hand.
Answer pulled the hatchet out of the zombie’s face, shearing the remains of its nose off in the process, and struck again, but higher up this time, splitting the charred dome of its forehead. He wiggled the blade back and forth, like a woodsman trying to extricate his axe from a knotty bit of wood. A fissure transected the zombie’s skull down the center and then both halves fell away. It looked like a ladybug opening its wings. Its brain was alive with maggots and red winged insects, some of which were crawling the hatchet blade. With the detachment of a surgeon, Answer inserted the gun between its remaining teeth and, angling the barrel slightly upwards, blew its head into sticky red confetti. “Huh,” he said.
“More coming out of the woodwork over here!” Crosshairs hollered.
A third line advanced sluggishly. Their sloth was due in great part to their degree of decomposition. The few that could walk did so haltingly, their muscles having reached a level of decay so as to render locomotion a speculative endeavor. One of them, perhaps a w
oman, perhaps once beautiful, lurched forward jerkily, as though she were a marionette controlled by a Parkinson’s-afflicted puppeteer; her liver, a black-grey sack dimpled with milky lesions, slipped through a deep gash in her side, which she ground into mush underfoot. Another—legless, armless, sexless, rotted to the bones—pulled itself through the snow using its mostly toothless mouth.
“Let me do you a favor,” Zippo said, training his flame-thrower on the nearest crawler. The weapon hissed a lance of flame that consumed the zombie from head to hips. Zippo traced its limbs with fire, watching flesh transform into crusted ash. The zombie continued to press forward until it reached Zippo’s feet. It stared up at him, fire pouring out of its eye sockets like two flaming sambuca shots, and began to gnaw on his boot. Zippo grimaced with something close to pity before bringing his other boot down on its skull, the force of which caused broiled gray matter to spurt in black, pus-threaded jets from its ears and nostrils and eye sockets.
Crosshairs took a knee and racked the bolt smoothly before picking off three zombies with explosive head shots. His final shot sheared off a deadhead’s skull to reveal a brain half-consumed by a family of mice who’d chewed their way in through an ear.
“Damn you, go down!” Tripwire screamed at a particularly tenacious zombie. He’d torn its arms off with the DeLisle and punched a softball-sized hole through its neck. Still it came. Tripwire pulled the trigger to hear a dry click: out of ammo. The dead thing reached for him. Skeletal fingers hung with strips of rotting meat brushed his parka, yellow nails ripping the fabric with terrifying strength. It smelled of a slaughterhouse sluice-grate.
Tripwire pulled out his K-Bar. Stepping back, he slashed across the thing’s pendant belly. It opened up like someone had jerked the seam on a Ziploc bag full of medical waste. Decayed viscera splashed across the snow. The zombie, spurred by some vestigial instinct, bowed and attempted to gather up its truant intestines. Tripwire brought the knife up into its face, burying five inches of tempered steel into its left eye. He stepped back and kicked the hilt in the manner of a football punter. The blade passed through the zombie’s diseased brain-pan to exit, in a little gout of gore, at the tip of its spinal column.
Unnoticed amidst the carnage, a single deadhead slipped under the radar: an infant, or something that had once been one. Its skin was glistening and slick with a coating of mucous-like slime. A shred of placenta, rotting black, was perched atop its bulbous bald skull in a travesty of a baby’s bonnet. A great deal of undeveloped intestine drooled out of its anus in soupy loops, riddled with holes pecked by hungry ravens. The infant deadhead pulled itself along by its hands, as its feet had been hacked or eaten away.
Oddy drew a Webley as one of the fleeter zombies made a stumblebum lunge for him. Oddy dodged left, cat-quick for his size, grabbed the thing’s outstretched arm—like grabbing a sausage casing filled with cold jelly—and tore it from its socket. As the zombie lacked eyebrows, eyelids, or a jaw, Oddy was unable to tell if the loss of its limb left it feeling surprised, or outraged, or blasé. He rendered all conjecture a moot point by jamming the Webley’s muzzle into its pus-slobbering nasal cavity and pulling the trigger.
When the gunshot died away, he heard shrill, horror-struck screaming.
Edwards.
Who was being eaten by the very small but very persistent deadhead. He writhed on the ground, kicking up puffs of powdery snow. The tiny zombie had clamped itself onto Edwards’ right eyelid; his skin stretched like salt taffy before tearing loose. Edwards’ lidless eye was horridly round and wide, cornea threaded with bright stitches of blood. The man’s screams felt like ice picks sliding into Crosshairs’ ears. It’s the ultimate dead baby joke, he thought wildly. Except the joke’s on that poor fuck.
“Jesus—Jesu!” Edwards blubbered, swaying to his feet. “Get it off…get it aaaawwwff!”
The dead baby grasped Edwards’ ears as he flailed in a shrieking circle. Its toothless mouth was battened over Edwards’ eye socket like a leech. A sickening pop as it sucked Edwards’ eye from its cup. Edwards’ screams intensified, boots mashing the infant’s trailing innards into paste.
Its grip on Edwards’ ears slipped and it fell. But its descent was checked by Edwards’ ocular stalk, still attached to his eye, which resided in the dead baby’s mouth. Edwards spun in a pain-frenzied dervish. Blood gushed from his socket. “Ag!” he screamed. “Ag! Ag! Ag!”
The baby clung resolutely to its prize until the stalk broke, gummy red cord snapping back into Edwards’ socket like an overtaxed elastic band, the baby tumbling into the snow. Moments later, Answer’s booted foot came down on its head. Crunch.
Zippo looked around: bullet-riddled and blade-reamed bodies lay around the campsite. Arms and legs and heads were scattered akimbo, mouths still opening and closing. The syrupy-sickly smell of rotting and burning flesh. Organs dappling the ground like misshapen gemstones…
And a half-blind man clutching both hands over an empty, blood-jetting socket, screaming, “It ate my eye! The fucking thing ate my fucking eye!”
Tripwire retrieved the First Aid kit and knelt beside Edwards.
“Take it easy,” he said. “Lay still.”
“Take it easy? A fucking dead baby just ate my fucking—”
“Chill, son,” Oddy soothed. “Gonna be fine.”
“Boy doesn’t look so hot to me, Sarge,” Zippo said.
“Shitcan that lip.”
Tripwire pumped a syrette of morphine sulfate into Edwards’s chest. That quieted him down. Then he soaked a wad of gauze in Dextram and poked it into the empty socket. Edwards lay back, semi-comatose with morphine and shock.
Crosshairs summed up the group’s feeling: “No…fucking…way. That did not just happen.”
But the bodies and parts of bodies surrounding them stood as undeniable proof it had happened. As if to hammer the point home, a decapitated head near Zippo’s feet began to make gluttonous sounds through a mouthful of brown bile.
“Tell this one here nothing happened,” Zippo said, smashing at the head with the flame-thrower’s butt.
“But these people are dead,” Crosshairs said, steadfastly refusing belief. “The dead do not get up and walk.”
“Or crawl,” Oddy said.
“Or eat.” Tripwire.
“Yet here they are, defying all reason.” Answer.
Edwards moaned fitfully. Bloody petals bloomed through the gauze.
“You think it’s true, what he said?” Zippo hooked a thumb at Edwards. “No Overton, no prison? Then what the fuck are we doing here?”
“Perhaps I can shed some light on that, gentlemen.”
The voice came from behind them.
A smooth, buttery voice that turned their collective bone-marrow to jelly.
They turned to face the speaker.
Who was, of course, Anton Grosevoir.
— | — | —
War Zone “D,” South Vietnam
July 15th, 1967. 20:49 hours.
The central hut.
Wet ripping noises came from inside. A sound like waterlogged canvas splitting down the seams. Then a wretched scream, choked off in mid-stream. More noises: moist and sucking.
“Jesus Christ, Sarge.” Tripwire’s breath hot and ragged in Oddy’s ear. “What could it be—some kind of animal?”
“Not like any animal I’ve ever seen,” Gunner’s knotty, farm-strong hands trembled around the Stoner’s molded handgrips.
Oddy, who’d seen the hanging shapes inside the hut, shapes resembling flayed human corpses, was, for the first time as unit leader, unsure of how to proceed. On one hand, they had a clear objective: destroy the weapons shipment, kill every VC they encountered. On the other hand, he was possessed by a primitive and instinctive urge to flee, an impulse stirred by whoever or whatever was in that hut. He glanced across the clearing where the flanking team was hunkered. The pinprick glow of Zippo’s pilot light indicated they were ready to engage on his signal.
The VC officer arra
nged his remaining troops in a rough firing line. Eight AK-47’s were nocked on eight shoulders, eight barrels trained on the hut. Autofire and muzzle flash lit the night. Bamboo stalks shattered like brittle bones. Black blood, the blood of the dead, spattered from the hut’s mouth. Hut supports snapped. The soldiers paused to reload.
It was the last thing they’d ever do.
The moment before the creature emerged, Oddy was rocked by a feeling of complete and utter helplessness. He felt like a small child being pulled, kicking and screaming, to the dentist’s chair, or a puppy dragged by an incensed owner to have its snout smeared in its own shit. There was nothing he could do to stop what he was about to see. His limbs felt shackled, his eyelids pierced with fishhooks and tugged wide, his heart and mind forced to confront the dawning reality.
A form took shape, melting out of the darkened hut, revealing itself with aching slowness, inch by inch, limb by nightmare limb.
“Dear God,” Crosshairs whispered as every monstrous appendage, every unfathomable proportion, every heart-stopping dimension flayed themselves into his cortex with hellish clarity.
In its totality it was unlike anything they had ever seen, although portions of its anatomy were dimly recognizable. It was short and squat, capable of walking on two limbs, or four, or six. Some of these limbs terminated in cloven hooves, others webbed digits, or suction-cup discs, or nail-tipped claws.
The body was skinless, thick cables of muscle knitting together an alien skeletal structure. Bristly hairs grew through raw tendons crawling with black flies. The head was scooped inwards like a shovel’s blade; two flaps of skin rose from its shoulder blades to encompass the skull in the manner of a cobra’s hood. The eyes were huge and multifaceted, like a dragonfly’s, mouth spanning half its face, studded with row upon row of needle-sharp teeth. A pair of tarantula-like fangs, long and black, curved below the creature’s jawbone, dripping venom that sizzled the moist earth. It regarded the VC soldiers with horrible understanding: like a malicious child peering at bottled insects.
The Preserve Page 13