by Tim Curran
He could almost feel that communal terror rising in his men again and maybe himself, too. The shadows and rain and stink…and now floating coffins. Jesus.
“Well, hang my cock from the sour apple tree,” Oates said. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
Hinks and Neiderhauser worked the oars again as Oates got on the bullhorn and called out for Hopper and Torrio. His voice echoed out through the flooded graveyard, coming back at him with a whispering sibilance as if a dozen voices out there were mocking him.
He kept working the spot, the beam of light glancing off floating coffins and the greasy surface of the water, picking out a few high headstones and imbuing them with a moonish phosphorescence. That awful, fetid fog rose from the water, the light barely cutting it. Weird shadows and half-glimpsed shapes darted through the gloom. Things splashed and the water rippled.
Oates panned the light around and picked out a lone figure standing atop the flat roof of a sepulcher.
“Shit,” Neiderhauser said.
Oates put the light on it and he thought it was a woman. At least…once she had been. The light glanced off her and she was a blackened, twisted thing, draped in trailing rags that might have been her burial robes or what remained of her flesh, but probably both. Oates pulled the light away from her, something clenching tight in his belly. The rain had subsided to a chill drizzle and the moon chose that moment to break briefly through, bathing that figure in a cold white light. Standing there, unmoving, framed in moonlight broken by the reaching tree limbs overhead, the fog rising up all around her, she looked like some cadaverous prophet touched by the light of heaven.
But she was no prophet and there was certainly nothing heavenly about her.
She was a dead thing, ragged and rotten and emaciated, her face white as a gravestone, punched through with the black holes of her eyes and a crooked, grinning mouth. A dark sap ran like blood from her lips, moonlight reflected off the rungs of her exposed ribs.
Hinks made a gagging sound.
“Well, fuck this,” Oates said, bringing up his M-16 and opening up on that spectral figure on full auto. He hit her dead on, nary a stray bullet buzzing off into the night. The effect was instantaneous. As the rounds chewed into her, she jerked and shuddered, but did not go down. Then she simply exploded, burst open like a jellyfish, spraying black filth over the top of the roof. Whatever that stuff was, it glistened and oozed like marsh slime.
The sudden, invasive stench of putrefaction was nauseating.
Neiderhauser vomited. Right down the front of his rainslicker.
And then the water began to stir, slopping and splashing with unseen motion from beneath. Bubbles began to break the surface all around them, thick and gelatinous things. The water roiled and agitated, rolling with tumid waves that slapped up against the boat. There was an eruption of wet leaves and stinking water and a coffin broke the surface a few feet away. Then another and another. One struck the boat from below almost spilling them all into the drink. It scraped along the bottom with a muted squeaking sound and then worked its way free, jumping from the water and standing straight up before falling back over.
Hinks cried out and took up his M-16.
He began firing into the water, drilling rounds into that slop and into caskets. Just beneath the surface there were faces, white and eyeless things, slowly rising like bubbles. One after the other they came up, silt running from their eye sockets and black bile from their mouths. Some were recent interments, fleshy and puckered; others were wraiths and scarecrows, Halloween skeletons trimmed out in tattered hides, their faces leathery and seamed.
Neiderhauser started shooting, too.
Oates didn’t.
Not right away. The absurdity and hopelessness of waltzing into this horror story just sapped the strength from him. He had seen his share of scary flicks, but never once had he seen a character just lose it and burst out into hysterical laughter…right then, though, that’s exactly what he felt like doing.
But then as spidery arms clawed over the lip of the boat, the humor dried up in him and he started shooting. Not that it seemed to do much good. Some of them exploded like the woman and some of them were just shattered apart by the bullets. Two of them came up into the boat, grasping Hinks by the ankles and he emptied his magazine right into them, popping quite a few air chambers in the process.
And then he screamed.
Sure, he’d been silent and devastated for awhile, but now it was all coming out. Boiling out like poison. A ripping, reeling, wailing scream like his mind had decided to purge itself in one fell swoop. It was high and insane. More pale arms looped up into the boat, clutching hands grabbing him and he fell to his knees, shaking and screaming.
Neiderhauser fell away from him, blocking Oates’ line of fire. Oates tried to shove him away, but Neiderhauser had just simply snapped. He clung to Oates, sobbing and whimpering, and would not let go regardless of what Oates did.
There had to be twenty or thirty living corpses in the water now, most of them surrounding the front of the boat, crawling right over the top of one another as they tried to get at Hinks. With all those reaching arms and clawing fingers it was as if a forest of deadwood was growing up over the bow of the boat. Hinks was almost lost beneath those white limbs and tearing hands.
Oates tossed Neiderhauser off him with a shove and opened up on the dead. He punched a lot of not-so pretty holes through them, scattered a lot of grave waste over the surface of the water, but that was about it.
Finally, he crawled over Neiderhauser and got the engine going.
As he did so, a teenage girl wormed up over the other dead ones and pulled Hinks to her like a lover. You could no longer hear his frantic screams over the hissing and howling of the undead. Her face was gray and fringed with mildew, her eyes black and shining and starkly translucent. She gripped his head with two pulpy hands, black juice running from her nostrils. Her stare was vacant and remorseless. Then her mouth expanded like the blowhole of a whale and she vomited a stream of black mucus right into his face. It was thick and viscous, hanging from his cheeks like snot.
And that was about all Oates saw.
He jerked the throttle and reversed the boat backwards, Hinks and his dead friends falling off the bow. They he worked the stick and brought the boat surging forward, bouncing off coffins and the tips of monuments and rotting faces. And then he had the engine at full boar and there wasn’t anything that could stop them. They crashed through the branches of trees and slammed against the roofs of vaults, knocked caskets out of the way and he could see the spiked tops of the gates. A single coffin floated past them, the lid opening and a thin, withered arm snaking out.
Neiderhauser was still screaming himself hoarse as they passed out of the cemetery.
And Oates, about to lose his mind, reached over and slapped him across the face.
“Don’t you fold on me,” he told him. “Don’t you dare fucking fold on me.”
21
It took what seemed hours to go just a few blocks.
When they said Witcham was flooding, they weren’t kidding. As Deke Ericksen moved through the inundated streets, he decided that “flooding” didn’t really cut it here, because Witcham wasn’t just flooding, it was goddamn sinking.
And somewhere out there, Chrissy Barron was maybe lost or worse.
Now he did not know that to be true, but somewhere in his guts he was convinced of it. He’d been over to her house twice now and she still hadn’t made it home. There was only her mother there, talking about dead people in drains and that was really something wasn’t it? Chrissy had been telling him that her mother had lost it ever since her twin sister Marlene killed herself and now Deke believed it completely.
The first time he’d gone over there, she’d freaked him out with all that talk and made him think of his dead kid brother Nicky. Something he did not want to be thinking about anymore than he already did. Especially with what had happened over at Hillside. He’d left th
ere that afternoon, something black and disgusting bubbling up the bathroom drain upstairs and Lily downstairs talking to someone in the other bathroom.
Just bullshit, man, he told himself. You didn’t hear what you thought you heard. You couldn’t have. It was just Lily mimicking another voice.
But, despite the absurdity of dead people speaking through drains, he could not convince himself that Lily had faked it. Sure, she was off the deep end…but that voice, gurgling and wet, it had not sounded like Lily at all.
Deke pushed it from his mind.
He’d gone over there again before sundown and Chrissy was still gone, Mitch still out looking for her, and Lily had been…what? Too lucid, too calm for somebody that imagined dead people talking to her from drains. Deke hadn’t hung around. Something about Lily was eating a hole through him and he left right away.
He’d been canvassing the streets ever since.
It was a bad night. The rain still falling and the water still rising and now and again he’d hear a National Guard chopper overhead, but that was about it. The city not only sounded dead, it felt dead.
But maybe that was his imagination.
God knew, he was plenty keyed-up.
In some of the lower-lying areas of Crandon, the water had come right up to his chest and now with the power out and no lights to be had…well, it was just bad. Real bad. Deke kept feeling things bump into him and he could not see what they were. Could have been floating tires or bodies for all he knew.
He was wasting his time and he knew it.
The chances of finding Chrissy on foot were astronomical. She was probably holed up with Heather Sale or Lisa Bell. And if the phones had been working, it would have been easy enough to check.
Deke decided he had to give up looking, just head on home. The only thing that had kept him out this long was the certainty that Chrissy was out there and needed his help. But drowning out in the streets wasn’t going to help her any.
In his raincoat, the water up to his waist, he made for the higher areas of Crandon, away from River Town and the river itself.
He wished he’d given up earlier.
Because there was something infinitely claustrophobic about Witcham now. The flooding. The dark. The sounds you heard. He had his dad’s hunting knife with him. Something had told him it was best to be armed, so he’d taken the knife and now he had it out, all those sounds in the shadows getting to him.
He kept thinking about Lily Barron.
Those crazy things she’d been saying. Dead people down in the sewers. It made him think that all those sewers and even the Deep Tunnel System he’d told her about were connected with the streets drains all around him. Maybe he couldn’t see them, but those drains were everywhere and he knew it. They’d all backed up, flooding the streets with rainwater and probably sewage, too. Whatever had been down in that coveting, wet blackness, had been vomited up into the streets now. The idea of that chilled him. He kept picturing all those living dead people in the water around him. Sometimes he almost thought he could smell their rank stink and feel their lewd presence. Dead things that were monsters now…rotting and watery, but whose minds were sharp and lethal.
Stop it for chrissake.
Words to the wise. He kept on this way, they were going to have to commit him. Maybe he’d get to share a room with Lily. Again, that wasn’t nice, but he was feeling suddenly very uncharitable.
All of them we lost through the years, they just went below into that secret sea and that’s where they are now. All the brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and children, they’re all down below in those secret tunnels waiting for us.
God, Lily was insane. She had to be.
But insane or not, it made him think of Nicky.
He’d loved that kid, but had never told him so or even realized it until the funeral. And by then it had been too late. They always say to tell the people you care about how much they mean to you…but who really does and who doesn’t wish they had when it’s too late? Nicky. Nicky-boy. A.K.A., The Drainage, Butt-Wienie, Pain-in-the-ass-little-shit-that-could-never-leave-me-alone.
Oh God, but it all hurt so much, remembering.
It made Deke think of the funeral. The memories were all distorted and surreal, like something reflected from sideshow mirrors, but they never let him go. Never. He remembered the room over at the Styer Funeral Home. All done up in cranberry velour and he’d overheard his Uncle Jake say that it looked like a French brothel in there and he hadn’t known what a brothel was then, but now he did. And it almost made him laugh. Almost.
He wished then as he wished probably every day since that he’d told Nicky that he’d loved him. But what would Nicky have said to something like that? Deke, you so cwazy, you a cwazy cat. Nicky had trouble with that R-sound and had been going through speech therapy for it. Something Deke had teased him about, of course. But isn’t that what big brothers did? Sure, they picked on their kid brothers, belittled them, made fun of them.
That’s what they did.
But surely they weren’t supposed to stand around in dusty, flower-smelling funeral homes and stare at their kid brothers lying in coffins. No, there was something criminal about that. Before Nicky’s funeral, Deke had known nothing of death. His grandparents had died before he was born and there’d never been any pets to teach him the realities of death. Death was like alien abduction or something equally as exotic…it was for other people. You heard about it, but you didn’t really believe it. Not really.
But then came the Styer Funeral home.
That perfectly awful cranberry room.
And Nicky lying in that little silver casket in his powder-gray burial suit and tie, hands folded primly over his belly. Deke could remember it all so vividly that sometimes he thought the memory was not real, but something manufactured by his fevered mind. Nicky had not looked like Nicky. He had looked fake, unreal. He had been compressed or sunken, as if death had taken something big out of him, something that had filled him and in its place they had inflated him with gas, then allowed him to deflate. They had rouged his cheeks to give him that boyish glow, but beneath Deke had seen something darker like maybe his flesh had gone purple or black. His lips were shrunken, his body like that of a waxen dummy that had been left out in the sun too long, allowed to melt and sink and thicken. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but what was in that casket that everybody cried over just looked absolutely phony.
It wasn’t until later that Deke had cried.
And then much later still, he’d began to have nightmares. He’d wake up in the dead of night certain something had come into the house, that something was standing darkly out in the hallway or maybe in the closet, just breathing. And he knew that something was Nicky, but Nicky come back from the dead, Nicky risen from the grave, stinking and dark and covered with dirt and worms. It got so bad that Deke had had to sleep with the light on for nearly six months. And even so, he’d come awake certain he could hear his brother breathing in the darkness outside the door or in his old room, playing with his toys, sitting there, moldering and falling apart, leafing through comic books or playing with plastic army men by pale moonlight. It was bad. And even with that light burning, he still had the dreams that he would wake from, certain Nicky had been standing over him as he slept, blowing foul grave breath in his face, clots of rank soil dropping from him.
And even now, eighteen months after the funeral, he still would dream of his brother. But not good and sweet and happy Nicky, but a fusty and vile thing that whispered from beneath the cellar stairs
Okay, that was enough.
Deke wasn’t going there anymore.
He had to get a grip. Nicky was dead. It was tough and it was ugly, but that’s the way life was. Even at sixteen, Deke knew that. Yes, he loved his mom and dad, but he did not respect them. Could not respect what they had allowed Nicky’s death to do to them. And more than anything, he would not allow himself to become like them, things that should have been shoveled into the
grave with his brother.
Deke was up on the sidewalk now.
The water was only up to his thighs and that was at least a little better. He had about four more blocks to go before he reached home and that was a damn long way in the darkness and water.
He hoped that Chrissy was safe, even though he suspected she was in trouble.
He rounded a corner with infinite slowness. He passed by a few dark, brooding houses and then saw one lit up by candles or lanterns. Someone was still alive down here in the low-lying areas of Crandon then. That was reassuring. He hadn’t seen anyone in hours and even then they’d been in the far distance…muted voices, the occasional sound of oars on a boat or a motor cutting through the drink.
Deke stopped.
Christ, he was tired.
Maybe I should go into that house, he thought, rest up for a couple minutes. They probably wouldn’t mind seeing me.
The front door was standing open.
Deke made his way up there, the house sitting on a low hill that brought it up out of the water and he desperately needed to get out of the water. He was beginning to feel like a frog, bloated and heavy and waterlogged. He moved up the walk, then up the porch steps. The water receded to around his feet and he felt heavy, ungainly.
In the house, the light was coming from the living room. He followed its glow, splashing along the carpet. The house smelled dank from all the rain, but it was nice in there. Water was dripping, but there was no rain in his face.
There was no one in there.
Even without looking farther than the living room, he knew the house was empty. The silence there was huge and echoing. Whoever had lit the lantern was gone now. It sat lone and forgotten on the mantel above the fireplace next to a bunch of framed photographs. Deke went over to look at those pictures, maybe he’d recognize someone.
Something shrilled and he jumped.
The phone.
It rang again.