by Tim Curran
Oates let out a scream, jumped to his feet and opened up on that little girl on full auto. The bullets punched into her and she exploded like a jellyfish in spray of slime and black blood and gray tissue. She burst and splashed them with her filth. Then there was nothing but bones on the stairs and a skull bouncing its way down.
Oates fell to the floor, his head filled with a screeching white noise.
And from somewhere very far away, he could hear Neiderhauser talking to him, yelling at him, trying to make contact. But there was no contact because the lines were down and what coherence was left in Oates by that point told him that those lines probably would never come up again. At least that’s what he thought, but he underestimated the resiliency of the human mind and its innate gift for reorienting itself to new circumstances. It got shaken for a time, but it overcame.
Neiderhauser was sitting on the floor with him, his eyes looking like holes somebody had drilled into his face. Oates had seen guys in the war aging rapidly because of what they saw, but he’d never seen a face like that before.
“What that thing said…did you hear what it said?” Oates mumbled.
“It said for you to be nice, that’s all it said.”
“Nothing else?”
Neiderhauser shook his head.
Jesus, it had all been in his mind then. But he didn’t believe for one minute he’d imagined any of it. That thing had told him those awful truths, it knew things it could not possibly know, only it hadn’t said them out loud. Just in his head. Or maybe he was just crazy.
But that was okay, because they were both crazy now. Crazies in a crazy city. It almost made sense.
Getting up, Oates said, “C’mon, let’s make that roof.”
8
Harry Teal kept hoping he was going to wake up and it would be like one of those movies where they say, oh, it was only a dream. That’s all it was. He was hoping he would wake up from some fever he’d picked up handling the stiffs out in the mortuary maybe. Wake up in his cell with the hacks banging on the bars with their sticks. But he knew it wasn’t going to happen; it was all true. He had been out in the prison cemetery with the others, digging up all those muddy graves, and he had seen the dead rise and he had hid in the mortuary with Jacky Kripp and the others. It was all true. Ugly and brutal and just impossible, but it was true, all right.
“I got plans, Harry,” Jacky Kripp said. “And I’m counting on you to be with me. Are you with me? Are you part of what I am?”
“Sure, sure.”
“No, I mean are you really with me?”
Harry told him that he’d been with him since his first week at Slayhoke and that hadn’t changed. Of course, it had changed, now that they were free, but that wasn’t something you told Jacky Kripp. He liked killing people too much.
It was just the two of them now.
When the dead assaulted the prison and utter pandemonium broke out, they’d waited it out in the mortuary. Then, on Jacky’s orders, they’d made a break for it, got a truck and drove right through the front gates. No problem. There was no one in the towers. All the guards were dead and being eaten. They lost Mo Borden, though. Big, ugly Mo. He’d held off the zombies while they got in the truck. Mo could have killed any man at Slayhoke, taken on two or three at a time, but he wasn’t up to the living dead. And when a dozen of them fell on him, he was buried alive. When they hit Witcham, Roland Smythe ran off and they never saw him again.
“Ain’t that just the way with guys like that?” Jacky Kripp said. “You do ‘em good, you hand feed those motherfuckers and take ‘em under your wing, soon as they learn to fly, they take off. It don’t surprise me none. Roland weren’t nothing but a fucking jig.”
“I thought he was your friend?”
“Yeah, so what? A jig’s a jig, right? Fuckers turn on you soon as they can. I run into that prick again, you know what I’m gonna do to him?”
Harry sighed. “Kill him?”
“Kill him?” Kripp thought that was funny. “You watch too much TV, Harry. You guys always think people like me go around killing. Not so. See, what I’d do is break that fucker’s kneecaps with a baseball bat and then I’d shove the big end up his ass, leave it there. Then that black prick would just wish he was dead.”
Good old Jacky. You could count on the guy to be a violent, intolerant sonofabitch. Stir, out of stir. On the streets, in a club. Even in a city that was sinking in a flood, same old Jacky, always ready to straighten some guy out that didn’t dance when he snapped his fingers.
Thing was, Harry didn’t blame Roland.
Roland had done the right thing. Jacky was bad enough behind the prison walls, but he was no better outside of them. He was an animal, a predator. He wanted something, you got in his way, you went down. You could smell the trouble and badness wafting off a guy like him. You hung with him, he’d involve you in shit that you didn’t want any part of.
When they hit the citydriving a Department of Corrections van, no lessboth Roland and Harry had been pretty rattled with what they had seen. But not Jacky. He took it in stride. The dead were walking? Yeah, no shit? What’s that to me? That’s how it was for Jacky. He was crazy like that. You could have dumped a guy like him in the hottest stretch of hell and he would have immediately acclimated himself, been forming a tough crew and running rackets by the end of the week. Harry wished he could just shrug it all off. But as hard as he’d gotten in Slayhoke, the dead coming back to life just scared him white inside.
They ditched the van right away.
Jackie drove it right into a flooded section of River Town and watched it sink up to its windows. Problem solved. After that, they needed a new ride. Jacky said that the entire Black River Valley was at flood stage, Witcham going under, so nobody would be looking for a couple runaway cons. It was the perfect time to jack a car and drive out of the valley. Nobody would ask questions and nobody would stop them.
On foot in Crandon, just off The Strip, the business district, Jacky had slipped off to take a leak and that’s when Roland had taken his walk. But before he did, he pulled Harry aside and said, “Listen, man, you and me, we been tight. I’m telling you now to ditch Jacky first chance you get. You saw how he was inside and he’s gonna be worse out here. He ain’t right in the head. Guy’s a fucking psychopath. You stick with him, he’ll have you robbing banks and raping women. Get you in a bigger mess than you already in.”
With that, Roland ran off into the night.
Jacky wasn’t happy about it, was downright pissed and evil when he found out, but he got it out of his system by tossing a brick through a deli window. Power was down, no alarms. Harry and he sat in the dark by flashlight, eating cheese and sausage, drinking wine. After years of that slop in the joint, real food tasted great.
When they finished gorging themselves, Harry said, “Okay, we’re out. We can make this happen. The mess this city’s in? We can walk right out. So what’s out plan gonna be?”
“We need a car, then we’ll see,” Jacky said. “You never bopped with me outside the joint, Harry, but you better believe I know how to live.”
“I believe it. You did pretty good inside, all them hacks eating out of your hands.”
“You know why they did that, Harry?”
“Because you owned ‘em, you fed ‘em the green and they danced to your own tune.”
“It was more than that. I wasn’t paying off the cons out in the yard, but they showed me respect. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Fear, Harry. They respect me because they fear me.”
“You can be a bad dude, Jacky.”
“You wanna remember that.”
They made their way back outside and one of the first things they saw was some old guy with a stalled car. A red Crown Victoria. Big, nice old ride. It had stalled in the water. There was only about a foot of it there on Michigan Avenue being that it was high ground, but the old guy had hit a puddle and soaked the distributor.
Right away Jacky w
ent over there. “You need help, mister?”
The old guy got out of the car. “Christ, she stalled on me.”
“Need to dry your distributor off,” Harry told him.
The old guy popped the trunk and he had a few suitcases in there, looked like he was leaving town and that was probably a smart thing. He got some rags for Harry and Harry went to work by flashlight, popping the cap and drying it out. While he was doing so, Jacky hung over him, that crooked grin on his hard face.
“Nice ride, eh, Harry?”
“Sure.”
Jacky went over to the old guy who was leaning up by the trunk.
“Sure want to thank you boys. I owe you one.”
“No problem,” Jacky told him. “You got a crowbar, my friend needs it.”
The old guy was only too happy to help. He found it in the trunk and handed it to Jacky and right away, Jacky got that evil gleam in his eye when he had a good piece of iron in his hands. Maybe the old guy saw it, too, by the glare of the trunk light.
“Thanks,” Jacky said and swung it at the old man, knocking him to the ground where he thrashed in the water. Jacky hit him two more times, splitting his head open. “Life ain’t fair, you old fuck.”
“Jesus, Jacky…you didn’t need to do that,” Harry said.
“Sure, I did. That distributor dry?”
Harry swallowed. “Sure.”
They got in, Harry behind the wheel and drove off slowly.
Harry wasn’t liking this. Already, Roland’s warning was coming true and it was only just beginning. Jacky was only getting warmed up.
“Should be a sign here somewhere,” Harry said, “show us how to get to Highway 6. That’ll lead us to the freeway and out of the valley. I remember it when they brought me to Slayhoke.”
“What’s your hurry?”
“I wanna get the hell out of here, that’s what,” Harry told him.
“I say we stay awhile, this city’s wide open. Let’s have some fun.”
Harry knew it was going to be trouble. There was no other way with Jacky Kripp. So when the headlights splashed over two teenage girls walking up the side of the street, Harry felt something go bad inside of him.
“Stop the car,” Jacky said.
“We gotta get out, Jacky.”
Jacky put this gray steel eyes on him. “I said, stop this fucking car.”
Harry did.
Jacky unrolled his window. “You girls okay?” he said, putting it on real smooth and full of concern.
The tall one was dark-haired and the short one was blonde. They both looked like they’d been dragged through the underbelly of hell, soaking wet and shivering.
“Our car,” the brunette said. “It went into the water.”
“Hop in,” Jacky told them. “We’ll take you home.”
They never thought for a moment what they were getting themselves into. The town was flooding and they thought help had finally arrived. Who could blame them for hopping into the back seat where it was warm and dry?
“What’s your names, girls?” Jacky asked them, one arm hung over the back of the seat.
The blonde looked to be in shock or something. She just stared off into space and the brunette kept her arm around her. “This is Lisa and she’s had a rough time,” the brunette said. “I’m Chrissy. I live over on Kneale Street.”
Jacky grinned. “Chrissy, eh? Oh, now that’s a pretty name. A real pretty name. Ain’t that a pretty name, Harry?”
And Harry felt that bad stink coming off Jacky suddenly get much worse.
9
At Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus, in the wee hours of an awfully long and strange night, the basic facts of the matter were being threshed out.
“What you got here is a haunting,” Hardy James was saying. “Goddamn whole city is haunted and that’s the name of that particular tune.”
Hardy had been going on about this for some time now, following this thread of reasoning and filling in the blanks with bullshit, as was his way. But that was Hardy. He was nothing if not a legendary bullshit artist. Though his name was Hardy James, he’d been known through his seventy years as “Hardy Jim” and “Jim Hardy,” though now in his declining years, “Hardy” was all you ever heard. He’d been rambling on about ghosts and hauntings, mainly reeling off things he’d caught on the Discovery Channel during Halloween week along with the plots of a few old movies, spicing the whole thing up with his own brand of high-smelling bullshit.
“Sure as hell,” he told his audience. “Ghosts. And if they’ve come back, then you can bet there’s a good reason for it. They want something and they won’t go until they get it.”
“Ahhhhhh…ghosts. That’s a bunch of shit,” Knucker said, cracking her bony knuckles. She generally started most sentences with “Ahhhhhh” as if she had to wind up something before the words would come out.
“Haunted?” Hubb Sadler said. “What kind of cockfucking nonsense is that? I ain’t seen no ghosts. Just them other things and not one was carrying its fucking head around or dressed in a sheet.”
Knucker chuckled. “Ahhhhhh…that’s just bullshit, Hubb. Don’t pay no mind to Hardy Jim here. He just likes to talk. You give him an opportunity and he’ll make up a story.”
“You should mind your mouth so you keep your friends,” Hardy told her. “Besides, you got a better explanation? Dead people walking around and what not? You telling me that ain’t a haunting?”
“They’s not ghosts,” Hubb said. “I don’t know what they are, but they’s not ghosts.”
Hardy thought it over for a time. “Okay, then zombies. Just like on TV. The walking dead. I seen a show about that. They got zombies down in Haiti. It’s not shit, either. They got ‘em working in the cane fields. Some lady on that show, some colored lady, she said she was driving up the road down there in Haiti and she’s sees her brother chopping cane. Only thing was, they buried her brother a month before. But there he was, eyes all glazed and funny, and him chopping that cane.”
Hubb pulled off his oxygen mask. “Them shows ain’t shitting real, Hardy.”
“This one was. One of the documentaries. Zombies work the cane down there. Witch doctors rise ‘em up and steal their souls or something. The rich guys that own them plantations, they hire them witch doctors to bring ‘em back. Cheap labor or something.”
Hubb said, “Zombies? Jesus, of all the cockwongling nonsense I ever did hear.”
No, Hubb was not believing that zombie shit. Witch doctors and all that sort of crazyass late show nonsense. Besides, where the hell would you find a goddamn witch doctor in Witcham or in all of Wisconsin for that matter?
“Witch doctor, my fat hairy ass,” he said.
After what they’d seen that afternoon when that crazy kid put his Intrepid right through the front door and what came afterwards, no onenot even old hardassed Hubb himselfdoubted the enormity of what was happening in Witcham. The city was flooding and, yes, the dead were walking. But zombies and witch doctors. Jesus, now that was like them Saturday afternoon horror shows he used to see when he was a kid over at the Rialto. Always had Bela Lugosi in ‘em. Crazy, cheap shit with titles like Voodoo Man and Zombies on Broadway.
Well, it had been some kind of day…but Hubb just wasn’t up to any of that Bela Lugosi shit.
But something was happening and those people out in the streets…well, by Christ, they were dead and they were walking.
After Mitch and Tommy and most of the others left, Hubb got the Intrepid pulled out of the front of his store and then spent the next few hours answering questions from cops who wanted to know what had made their officers out front literally melt. But what could Hubb or Hardy or Knucker tell them?
Nothing.
So that’s what they did tell them.
With Knucker and Hardy’s help, he had shored up the great rent in the front of the building with sheet metal and plywood fixed into place with drywall screws. That was a start. They were safe.
But what came next? T
hat was the question.
Same question they’d been chewing on all night. The lot of themHubb and his crew, Hot Tamale and her husband, Herbjust too damn wired-up on caffeine to do much sleeping.
“Ahhhhhh…zombies,” Knucker said. “That’s a laugh. Comic book shit.”
“Well, that’s what they gotta be.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because they’re the walking dead, woman. And that’s what you call the walking dead. Zombies. Jesus H. Christ, your mother didn’t raise ‘em for smarts, now did she?”
“Ahhhhhh…shut up.”
“Or looks,” he said. “Show said them zombies do what their masters tell ‘em, unless you give ‘em salt. That sends ‘em back to their graves.”
“Salt?” Hubb said.
“Sure, salt. Makes ‘em remember they’re dead.”
“I believe it,” Hot Tamale said.
She had been silent for some time which was just not like her and now she was speaking. They all gave her the floor. She stood herself up, a real sight in her skin-tight cherry red outfit.
“See, this afternoon, I talked with my cousin Liz,” she told them. “Those dead ones don’t like salt. She said one of ‘em came out of the basement of a store over in Elmwood and some lady threw salt at it and it shriveled right up. Just like a fucking slug, she said. Salt. They don’t like it much.”
Hardy nodded. “Makes all the sense in the world, don’t it? You get slugs coming up out of the ground and you salt ‘em. Kills ‘em or drives ‘em off. Same with these zombies.”
“Well, now we got something,” Hubb said, as happy as Hubb could be. “This makes some shitting sense.”
“Ahhhhhh…but that don’t answer why or how.” Knucker looked at them all, each in turn. “Well, does it? Does it answer why they’re coming back?”
Hot Tamale fielded this one. “Well, it’s the same as I said today. It’s that Army base. It’s Fort Providence. This all started after that explosion. Those eggheads out there have been messing with things they should have left alone. Has to be.”
“I been hearing things for years,” Hardy said.