by Tim Curran
He kicked it open and a dry, awful animal stink wafted out at him.
Wrinkling his nose, he drew the Mag from its holster, his palm sweaty on the rubberized grip. The stink of age and death were apparent, but there was something more, a ghost of something haunting this place and he could not honestly put a name to it. Inside, he found what appeared to be offices with harsh metal desks and uncomfortable plastic furniture. File cabinets. There were papers scattered everywhere and a calendar on the wall five years out of date which would have put it at about the time of the Outbreak.
Interesting.
Next, he found himself in a high-ceilinged room that was nearly perfectly circular. It was filled with wreckage, but apparently it had been some sort of med lab judging from shattered lab glassware, culturing vats, microscopes, and drug cabinets. All of which looked like somebody had taken a sledgehammer after them and then danced a merry jig on the fragments. Like everything else, there was easily an inch of dust covering them which gave them the look of artifacts mired in silt from a sunken ship. There was a stainless steel table, a dissection table maybe, and the remains of a corpse upon it…though maybe corpse wasn’t quite right because this thing was a mummy, little more than a skeleton sheathed in a leathery sort of flesh that had cracked open from the dryness, spilling a powdery film. Its skullish face and exposed rib slats were threaded with cobwebs.
Slaughter had some ideas about the lab, but nothing concrete.
Not yet.
He kicked around at the debris on the floor, raising twisting clouds of dust that made him cough. Just junk. Glass, papers, rubber tubing, what might have been dirty surgical instruments and spent needles.
The most interesting thing in there was what was set into the walls: cages. They were empty, steel mesh doors thrown open. Whatever had been in them was long gone, yet a dankness still held inside them. That weird ghosting animal stink.
Slaughter went into the next room.
Another office. There was a zippered case of DVDs on the desk, a few stacked file folders, books on pathology and microbiology, loose papers. He opened the folders. Mostly scientific notations, and nothing he could understand. Beneath them was a logbook of some sort. The entries written in a precise hand read:
Stillwater 7 subjects Sept. 6
Black River Falls 23 subjects Sept. 14
Maiden Rock 3 subjects Sept. 29
Plum City 5 subjects Oct. 4
Prescott 12 subjects Oct. 13
It ran on and on like that, page after page. There was no doubt in his mind what it all meant: this was some sort of experimental station where victims of the Outbreak were brought for medical and biological study. After the worms started raining from the sky and the countryside was overrun with the living dead, the healthy ones ran east so nobody would have known about this place or objected to what they were doing here. The compound was a concentration camp of sorts.
Slaughter was going to leave the room when he noticed the circuit breaker door. It was partially open. There were dozens of breaker switches for the different rooms and buildings, outside security lights, etc. At the top were two red switches. One said generator and the other said battery.
For the hell of it he flicked generator but there was nothing.
When he flicked battery the lights came on.
“Still got a charge,” he said under his breath.
Which gave him an idea. There was a TV and DVD unit on a stand in the corner. Using a rag he found in the desk, he wiped the dust from them. He turned on the DVD player and got a green light. The TV came on with a field of static. He chose a DVD at random from the case and put it in the player. After more static, he watched images of worms that were being cultivated, dissected, held out for inspection wriggling in forceps, then a series of microscopic images which must have been tissue samples and sectioned worms. There was no sound, which made it all kind of eerie. The video kept pixilating randomly and it went back to static…then, for just an instant, like some kind of flashing subliminal sort of thing, he saw a face…then he saw it again.
Then nothing but static.
He stood there, feeling a worming unease in his belly. It was surely nothing, yet that unease was growing and he could not adequately understand why the face disturbed him so much. Only that it did. His belly flipped over. A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead.
He knew he hadn’t imagined it. When he closed his eyes, the image was still burned onto his retinas: a man in a black hat whose face was an almost violent shade of lunar white, a cratered/pockmarked face with brilliant pink eyes staring out.
Swallowing, Slaughter backed the DVD up to the worms and played it through the static. No face. Nothing. He tried it again and then three more times after that.
No face.
Maybe it was an optical illusion, man.
But he did not believe that.
He tried another DVD. Blank. Then another. About halfway through, things stared to heat up and get interesting.
Of course, that was purely subjective.
Because what Slaughter saw was sickening.
The video showed an Asian girl of maybe ten or eleven who was without a doubt one of the newly risen judging from her stark gray-white complexion and vacant, shining eyes like pools of gasoline. She appeared to be tied to a chair. There were several gaping holes in her face that were acrawl with maggots. She was opening and closing her mouth as if she was speaking and Slaughter was glad there was no audio. Her face and throat were bulging from some sort of motion beneath and if he wondered what that might be, he didn’t have to wonder long because what was nesting inside her started coming out in a writhing, almost liquid profusion: worms. Not maggots. Maggots would have been pretty pedestrian. No, these were the fleshy red worms that fell from the sky and reanimated the dead. They came out of her nostrils like snotty ribbons of red licorice and slithered from her ears like scarlet snakes. They were huge and bloated unlike any he had seen before.
The girl offered the camera a cadaverous smile and more of the worms came pouring out of her mouth in a slimy, stringy bile and by then she was shuddering and contorting, her flesh cracking open and spilling an oozing tide of the things that swarmed over her, coiling and undulant, until she became just a hothouse gush of putrescent infestation that existed only to birth the worms in ever-increasing numbers.
It was hideous.
As he made to shut it off, that face, that ghoulish white face with the pink eyes, flashed across the screen three more times. He knew he had seen it. He backed the video up but it was not there. It was just not there. His unease grew. He began to get the most unsettling feeling that something was going on, something of a personal nature. Something intended for him and him alone.
Slaughter killed the video.
That was enough.
If that face was intended for you then what the hell does it mean? What can it mean?
He watched two more videos but saw nothing. Nothing at all. He stood there, balanced between belief and skepticism, between sanity and a yawning black pit of madness.
He refused to think about it anymore. The girl. He thought about that girl on the video.
He didn’t know exactly what that was about either but he didn’t like it. In his experience, which was considerable, the worms came out of the sky in worm rains. Check. They crawled into the dead and reanimated them. Check. If you got caught in the rains, they would get inside you as small crawling larval things and you would die within twelve hours and then, sooner or later, you’d rise back up. Check. Generally, when you killed a worm zombie (as they were often known) a single worm would crawl out, looking for a new corpse to invade. Check. These were the things he knew to be true, but never, ever had he seen something like the girl in the video who apparently was like some kind of worm nursery.
And did that mean the worms had jumped up a step in evolution and found a better way to multiply or, and worse, had the scientists at the compound in their research created that situation on purpo
se?
Slaughter did not know.
Right then, he did not know about a lot of things.
He went over to the wall to the breaker box and killed the juice. Time to get back out on the road. It was at that moment that he heard sounds from the other room…stealthy footsteps that were not so stealthy with the sound of glass crushed beneath them.
Shit.
He drew the Combat Mag and, trying to be quiet, stepped over to the doorway. As he got there he heard a voice in the other room, scratching and discordant like a fork drawn over a blackboard: “I can smell the meat…I want to taste the meat,” it said, pausing and making a slurping noise that sounded, if anything, like a kid sucking up noodles from a bowl of soup. “Where is that meat…I can smell it…but where is it? Why won’t it come closer?”
He walked out into the lab and there was a zombie standing amongst the wreckage, a woman…or something with the general form a woman, a pulping, bioplasmic, gangrenous, fleshrot mass of female anatomy that was glistening and dripping, alive with the swollen vermicular motion of dozens of glossy green hoses that snaked out from between her legs and pulsed from her belly like slit bowels. They erupted from her tits, filled her mouth and eye sockets and grew out of her head in creeping, pulsating ropes like the snakes of Medusa. They were parasitic and jelly-slimed, a peristaltic crawling mass with tiny barbed mouths that pissed a cabbage-green milk as they infested the hobbling necrotic husk of liquescent decay.
Slaughter had seen some shit in his time that made his blood run like Freon and filled his belly with dry ice, but this was beyond all that.
He took one fumbling step back and then another, his head rioting with the flyblown sewer stench of the thing.
“I smell the meat,” she said, moving ever forward, knowing he was there and smelling him, but having no eyes with which to locate him, and Slaughter didn’t think those suckering green tubes counted.
The noodle-sucking sound he heard in the office was the sound of those hoses sliding in and out of her mouth with a moist and rubbery noise like greased eels.
The idea of being embraced by the walking dead was bad enough in of itself, but the idea of this thing taking hold of him and burying him in the carious depths of its own pupal, ichorous flagellation was too much even for the strongest stomach.
As she came forward, he brought up the Combat Mag.
He didn’t hesitate because he couldn’t hesitate.
She heard him, began shambling in his direction, hissing with the motion of those green hoses and he opened up on her. The first round put a hole through her as big around as a fist, spraying black blood and wormy mucilage against the faces of the cages. She screamed with a shrill whining sound that was utter defeat and he put the next bullet right in her face, blowing her head apart into a thousand flying bits of bone, blood, brain matter, and oily green tissue. She took two more ungainly steps and did not fall down so much as she collapsed into a fleshy graveyard emulsion of yeasty and putrid raw matter boiling with red worms and wriggling green hoses tangled in the yellow-gray lattice of her bones.
Slaughter wasted no more time: he ran past her remains and out of that building into the dry heat outside, going down to his knees and gagging out a foamy vomit from his mouth. He breathed in and out, his hand so sweaty the .357 dropped into the dirt.
Finally, when his head stopped reeling, he picked up the gun and stood uneasily in the afternoon sunlight. He lit a cigarette and smoked it carefully, almost lovingly, letting the charge of nicotine chase the ghosts from his head.
As he smoked, he knew the smart thing to do, the reasonable thing, was to get on his scoot and eat some road.
But no one ever said he was smart.
Determined, maybe, and fatalistic, probably, but never smart.
He knew there was more here and he felt that right into his shivering marrow and before he left this fucking cemetery, he planned on finding out what.
* * *
That he wasn’t alone in the compound became more apparent with each step he took. He had no doubt there were more zombies here…or, mutations of the same…but that wasn’t all. He was certain he was being watched by someone that hailed from this side of the grave and he wished they’d show themselves already or take a shot at him. After what he’d seen in the lab, a little running gunplay would be just the thing to purge the darkness that filled him like a cup.
He kept going, out past another row of blockhouses until he came to a wide open field that was cut by a ditch that had to have been 200 feet long and at least half that in width.
It was filled with bones.
One skeleton could either unnerve you or make you feel somewhat sympathetic for the plight of its owner, but a mass grave like this that was nearly filled with them…well, it inspired awe and fear and despair. It looked like one of those bone pits from Majdanek or Birkenau that you saw on the old newsreels. There had to have been at the very least the remains of hundreds and hundreds of people in there. Adults, children, like some kind of wicker sculpture made of bones and skulls. None of them had died recently, for this was old death, bones gray or gleaming white with ancient dark stains upon them, riddled from the teeth of rats and the beak work of carrion crows and buzzards.
If any of it had been remotely recent or there had been but a single shred of meat to be had there would be flies below and ravens circling overhead.
Slaughter stared down in it, kicking a jawless skull into the pit that had been wedged precariously on the edge. It leered at him. It mocked him. He could almost hear its hollow laughter in the back of his head. All you are, boy, I was once, and what I am, you shall soon be. Hee, hee, hee. Ain’t that just a kicker? He turned away from the pit, and as he did so he saw a shape dart from behind one of the blockhouses.
He sighed, not much in the mood for hide-and-seek. Whenever he played that game he usually came away with death on his hands and, after staring in that pit, he just wasn’t up for it.
He heard scuttling, dragging footsteps.
Well, if it was a zombie they would have come right after him. A few of them returned from the grave with a certain amount of cunning but that was usually after dark. During the daytime they were all little better than deadheads, things that fed on the dead (or living) and were not ashamed of the fact.
No, not a zombie.
A person.
Maybe afraid, maybe just crazy, which brought up a whole new slate of troubles because the insane ones were as bad as the wormboys and sometimes worse because you really never knew what to expect.
Slaughter kept his eyes open, ready for what was coming.
He felt vaguely uncomfortable turning his back on the bone pit. A dark thread of superstitious terror was pulled tight in his head, but he knew there was nothing to worry about.
He started walking back to his bike, figuring he’d seen enough to give him a pretty good hypothesis about the sort of place this was or had been. Originally, it was probably some sort of military installation. Then, following the Outbreak, it became a research station where they were trying to figure out the worms, how to stop them maybe. Then, apparently, that ended and it became a Flesh Farm, one of those awful places you heard about like a Nazi extermination camp where gangs of wormboys herded the living to be fed upon at their leisure.
Now it was just a memory.
As he walked back past the lab building, eyes watching every shadow and every darkened doorway, hand on the butt of the Combat Mag, he could hear his stalker out there following his progress, keeping behind the buildings and out of sight.
“You can show yourself anytime, citizen,” Slaughter called out. “I ain’t gonna bite you.”
His voice echoed out in the desertion and that other moved about, failing horribly at its attempts to practice stealth. Finally, Slaughter heard footsteps behind him and whirled around to see an old man leaning up against the porch of a blockhouse. He looked like some grizzled desert rat from an old movie. All he lacked was a mule and a prospector’s pic
k. He looked fairly harmless with his soft gray eyes, slouch hat, and matted white beard, but Slaughter did not care for the shotgun he carried.
“You plan on using that?”
“No, son. It’s empty. I’m no threat to you.”
“Name’s Slaughter.”
“Rice. Martin Rice.”
“What’re you doing here?”
The old man set his shotgun on the porch and then eased his ass up next to it and it wasn’t easy. He looked frail; his limbs stiff, his back paining him some.
“What am I doing here?” Rice repeated, as if that was a pretty funny question. “Well, son, let me tell you. You probably already figured the sort of horror house this place was at one time so I won’t go into that, but now and again I come here to see if I can peg a few stragglers that come up from below.”
“Below?”
Rice took some time and explained it. Slaughter was right in thinking the compound had first been a military installation. It was built during World War II to house German POWs, then afterwards became the Kennebrau Proving Grounds during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts when artillery units used it to test their guns in the field out back. In the 1970’s it became a weekend training camp for the National Guard and then, following the Outbreak, a biological research facility that was part of the U.S. Army Medical Command.
“They were studying the worms. Trying to figure out some way of containing them, eradicating them, and coming up with a vaccine that would make people immune to the infection of the larva.” Rice shrugged. “But they never did. That’s when we were sent in. You see, the scientists became infected and pretty soon this was zombie central. They started capturing people and bringing them here.”
“Flesh Farm,” Slaughter said.
“You got it.”
“You said ‘we’ were sent in...”
The old man laughed. “I might not look it now but I was, some five years ago, a full colonel in the Army. I commanded the 1st Brigade of the 25th Infantry. Our job was to clean this place out. Long before we got here, about ten miles east in fact, we ran into serious resistance…”