Resurrection:Zombie Epic

by Tim Curran

  It was bad. Plenty bad.

  But what was worse was that the dog was not dead.

  As the team members began poking it with metal probes, it began to move with a flabby motion, those white threads coiling and snapping like tentacles. They thrashed in the air like they were looking for something to grab. The team members gave them a wide berth. The dog’s body was just a fleshy, colorless protoplasmic mass that roiled and squirmed. Its head moved on its neck, jaws opening and closing, a tongue like a hollow tube slapping around. It was making a noise…a low, bestial screeching sound.

  A few of Pearle’s men made noises like they wanted to be sick.

  “It’s bad the first time you see these things,” Simmons said, the understatement of the year.

  Back on the screen, the dog was sick or dying, barely moving now and Simmons explained that they’d shot it full of poison. It lay there, eyes unfocused, tongue lolling from its mouth. Its flesh was quilted with protrusions and rolls of fat. The threads coming out of its hide were hanging from it like dead worms. The team had rolled the beast over and were examining its underside. What at first looked to be a double row of teats were not teats at all…but eyes. There were no less than ten eyes that were moist and yellow staring up at the camera. It was like something from a sideshow this side of hell. And then one of those eyes blinked and Waterman nearly fell out of his seat.

  “What the fuck is this?” he said, standing up now. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “It’s as Major Simmons said,” Pearle explained. “A mutation. Now sit down. I will not repeat myself and, Bob, you don’t want to make me do that.”

  Waterman sat down.

  The video cut again and the team had opened up the dog. Wearing elbow-length rubber gloves, autopsy gloves, one of them was digging into the dog’s carcass. He began removing a series of dripping, squirming little things. Pearl knew they were pups, but the full impact of that didn’t hit him until the camera zoomed in on one being held up by those gloved hands. Yes, it was a pup, a hairless and eyeless little thing whose flesh was entirely transparent. It did not have limbs as such, but looping things like feelers. It was an atrocity. Not just some mutation born of radioactive fallout, perhaps, but something that seemed to be evolving into a form very un-dog like.

  After that, Simmons killed the video.

  Nobody said anything for a time. They just sat around in shocked silence. Pearle kept his eyes on Simmons. His eyes were angry, they were accusing. There were things he wanted to say and questions he wanted answered, but that’s not how it worked and he knew it. That was not protocol. And Pearle was nothing if not an obedient soldier.

  Simmons finally said, “So, gentlemen, that’s why we’re sending you to Fort Providence. What is happening there must not only be contained, but eradicated. I’m sure you can image what might happen if this was allowed to spread…”

  12

  So that was the briefing that prepared them for Fort Providence and the ugly pickle jar the Army had its hand caught in. But as it turned out, the 4/1 never made it to Fort Providence. For what was happening there had already spread out of control. And a particularly virulent source of infection was the Slayhoke Penitentiary.

  13

  As luck would have it, Pearle had everything in place before anything happened. In fact, he had things not only in place but buttoned up and snapped down. The perimeter was strengthened and fortified. Anti-personnel devices were set, gun placements ready to rock. Flamethrowers stood ready. And the trench had been dug. The trench was a little trick that Pearle had picked up in Vietnam. Many firebases were protected thus. If the machine guns, mortars, minefields, and airstrikes failed, you lit the trench. It took one hell of a motivated enemy to wade through a trench of burning gasoline or diesel fuel.

  Thing was, Pearle’s boys were starting to feel a little foolish standing around and waiting. They had prepared for a siege and no siege was coming. The NCOs told them to look alive. Lights were concentrated on the outer wall of Slayhoke. Men scanned the few pockets of darkness with night-vision devices. Other than that, there was little to do but listen to the rain falling or to sneak a quick smoke under a tarp, drink a cup of coffee or bitch about the Army in general. And there was plenty of that going on. Now and again, there might be a shriek from inside the prison, but little else.

  Pearle had nearly a thousand of his men surrounding Slayhoke and all of them were itching for a fight. Just ready for the mother of all turkey-shoots when those convicts tried to break free. It was really gonna be something. Of course, none of the enlisted men had been privy to what went on at the briefing and Pearle decided to keep it that way.

  Van Thal, an ambitious young corporal from 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, came right out and said it to Pearle. “Sir, if you don’t mind me saying, I think we’re overdoing this. These are convicts, sir. They are not soldiers. Shouldn’t we just saturate the prison with tear gas and take them as they come stumbling out?”

  Pearle was not angry with the question. “You would think that would be sufficient, wouldn’t you, Corporal? But here’s something to live by: don’t ask, don’t wonder why. We do things as we’re told to do them. And when that ragtag bunch of…individuals shows, son? Again, don’t ask and don’t wonder why. Just open up on them like they’re the Hun coming to sack your town and rape your women. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Pearle was more than a little concerned as to what might happen when zero hour approached. He told his NCOs to keep an eye on their men, keep them motivated and trigger-happy. But don’t let them ask questions.

  Exactly ninety minutes after everything was set, it started.

  Later, Pearle would remember it as more than a feeling than any noise or sight. Just a bad feeling that withered his short and curlies and filled his guts with something toxic. Shortly thereafter, there came a distinct moaning sound from behind the walls and then a wailing that rose in pitch. At first maybe just one or two voices, but like a choir, dozens more joined in until there was a screeching wall of noise. The sort of noise that made everyone sit up and pay attention. Because whatever could make a mournful wailing like that, was not going to be anything you wanted to meet up with on a dark, rainy night.

  Pearle himself waited there next to one of the gun emplacementsa big life-eating .50 caliber machine gun, the sort of overkill hardware that commonly cut men right in halfand saw the first walkers come through the gates at a most leisurely pace. Only a blind man wouldn’t have noticed something very funny about this first individual. The walk was all wrong. It was more of a limping shamble than anything else as if locomotion was not coming easily. The walker kept coming, a threadbare and withered thing, its flesh and what remained of it clothing hanging in rags and streamers.

  “What…what the hell’s all over his face?” somebody with a spotting scope cried out.

  Pearle had his own scope and saw it, too. That face was covered in what could only have been moss. A green, slimy moss that hung off what was beneath like a beard, spreading down over the chest and torso like a pelt. It swayed on the flesh and bone beneath from side-to-side as the thing walked. A single eyeball was exposed, shining like an oily marble.

  There was an easy forty-feet from the perimeter to the gas trench and another thirty to the wall itself. Pearle had told his NCOs to make sure that the flamethrowers were not used unless the unfriendlies breached the trench. And he was not lighting that up unless absolutely necessary. He was going to try everything else first.

  The walker kept coming and now a half dozen others were coming through the gates and the lights were picking out the shadowy forms of many more still within the compound. Nobody was even thinking of engaging this particular enemy until Pearle gave them his blessing.

  “Okay,” he finally said to a sniper sitting nearby. “Pop that boy’s cherry.”

  The sniper, a tough little Hispanic from New York’s Spanish Harlem named Ramon Alguerro, looked from Pearle to his target. He presse
d his eye to the scope of his M24 sniper rifle, sighted the walker in. He pulled the trigger. A 7.62mm slug blew a hole dead center of the walker’s chest, but he did not go down. He jerked with the impact, but that was about it.

  Alguerro shook his head.

  No, it didn’t make sense for that round was dead on. It should have blown his heart right out his back with a goodly portion of spine. But if it did, it sure as hell was not slowing this guy down.

  “Holy shit,” somebody said.

  Alguerro wasn’t having this. He worked the bolt on his rifle, inserted another round and popped the walker again. This time right in the forehead. The chest-shot had been an easy killshot, but so was this. Nobody kept walking after this. The slug landed right where Alguerro put it. Everyone saw it hit the walker. It was like planting a round in a watermelon: the top of his head exploded in a spray of tissue and bone. The walker went down. Fell over straight as a post.

  “That’s more like it,” Alguerro said.

  But Pearle was not quick to congratulate him on a fine shot. Because this was a test. That’s all it was. Pearle needed to honestly convince himself that what he was dealing with here was indeed a walking dead man.

  The corpse sat up.

  “What the fuck?” Alguerro said. “Is anybody seeing this?”

  Oh, they were, all right. You could almost feel a shudder pass through the soldiers. More than one man crossed himself and a few others began to pray under their breath.

  Pearle said, “Seems we have an enemy here that don’t care much for dying.”

  More of the walking dead were pouring out of the gates now, all moving with the same leisurely pace. They were in no hurry. They came forward, the rain falling around them, many of them moaning like B-movie ghosts. And every man poised at the sandbag perimeter just watched as the dead came forward, getting a good look at those pale swinging arms and ruined faces that looked like birds had been pecking at them.

  Outside the south wall where there really was no wall but a high reinforced chainlink fence topped by razor wire, the soldiers were able to see exactly what was happening inside the prison. They saw the prison mortuary building and the muddy, submerged graveyard. The dead that had risen that afternoon and assaulted the prison had, for reasons unknown, returned to their watery graves and now they were rising again. They came up out of that dirty, standing water, slicked with mud and clay, their skins barely concealing the bones beneath. They came up out of the ground like worms. Hundreds of them. An army of the flyblown dead that pressed themselves up against the fence, water running from the numerous holes in their hides.

  And it was this more than anything, that made the soldiers panic.

  These were hard-chargers. These were sky soldiers, troopers of the 1st Air Cavalry Division, a unit that had killed more men than heart disease…or nearly. They had put the hurt to the Viet Cong and the NVA, Serbian guerrillas and Iraq’s Republican Guard. One thing you could certainly say about the 1st Air Cav: they came, they saw, they kicked ass with extreme prejudice. And now they were beyond themselves. Men were screaming and folding up. Men were discharging weapons without authorization. Men were throwing their weapons and deserting. The skein that held together this tough, proud unit was unraveling on a large scale.

  And there wasn’t shit the NCO’s or officers could do about it.

  Back where Pearle was, just opposite of the main gate, he watched the dead swarm out like flies.

  “Gas masks!” one of the NCO’s called out. “Gas masks! Gas masks!”

  The men put on their masks, Pearle included, and the first volleys of tear gas canisters burst amongst the dead in hissing eruptions of white smog. More volleys followed. Thump! Thump! Thump! The smoke spread out in patches of fog and twisting plumes. It glowed in the lights trained on it. And the dead walked right through it, the smoke funneling out behind them like they were on fire.

  Another test and this one a failure, too.

  If Pearle did not believe what he was told at the briefing, he believed now. No men could walk through a wall of gas like that without so much as a shudder or a cough. The rain began to dissipate the clouds of gas and now there were easily forty or fifty walking cadavers emerging from the gates and spreading out in something like a rudimentary siege line.

  They know we’re here, by Christ, Pearle thought, truly afraid of an advancing enemy for the first time in his hard-bitten life. We ain’t gonna stop ‘em with guns and gas. They know we’re here and their coming to chew on our livers and eat our stomachs out.

  “FIRE!” he shouted. “FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!”

  Nobody needed much prompting on that score. The fifty calibers opened up with steady roar, cutting the dead in half and making others literally vaporize. The light machine guns and automatic rifles followed. Tracer rounds lit like fireflies. Mortar teams shelled inside the compound with high-explosive and white-phosphorus rounds. Grenade launchers landed ordinance outside the wall. The dead were pulverized, bullet-ridden, blown to fragments. But they did not die. Body parts writhed on the ground. Hands dragged themselves forwards. Heads screamed obscenities into the night. The no-man’s land on the other side of the ditch became a blazing graveyard of dismembered corpses that could not know death.

  The soldiers were losing it now, shouting and crying and many breaking and running, knocking sergeants flat as they tried to stop them. This was the meat of the matter and it was too much for some. Men suffered nervous breakdowns and some just went crazy with terror and pulled into themselves. And others leaped over the sandbags and charged the dead with fixed bayonets. Officers and noncom’s screamed at them, threatened them, physically and verbally abused them, but it did no good. For hell was offering up its own and it was simply too much.

  More walkers poured forward, some of them little more than skeletons. Some with creeping funguses where their faces should have been. Many were half-eaten and many more bloated and spongy things that called out to the soldiers, telling them exactly what they would do to them when they finally reached them.

  The firing continued and the dead were pierced by shrapnel and bullets, but they did not stop coming. Here were throngs of skeletal things and things like wraiths that had pulled themselves up out of the prison boneyard. Here were hundreds of convicts that had been very much alive that morning marching alongside guards. Punched with bullet holes, they still came on, black blood spurting from their wounds. Some were blown to fragments by tripping landmines, but most came forward with a deadly fixity of purpose. Nothing was going to stop them. They were coming to feed. There was a feast in the offering and they planned on getting their fill.

  Pearle was just beside himself.

  He ran up and down the top of the sandbags, shouting and screeching out orders to troops that were simply too mad or too frightened to obey. He kicked men that were in shock and slapped those that were not putting out a steady volume of fire.

  “THIS IS NOT S.O.P.! THIS IS NOT S.O.P.!” he screamed. “YOU CANNOT DESERT ME! YOU CANNOT ROLL OVER AND PLAY DEAD! YOU CANNOT LOCK UP ON ME! DO YOU UNDERSTAND? DO ALL YOU SIMPERING NIPPLE-SUCKING MAMA’S BOYS UNDERSTAND THAT? I CANNOT HAVE YOU DOING THIS! IT IS NOT S.O.P.! NOT S.O.P.! NOT S.O.P.!”

  But in the light of what else was happening, the once high and mighty and somewhat dangerous Colonel Pearle seemed completely trivial. Men actually laughed him. Some of them were completely mad. Soldiers had contorted faces and chattering teeth and tearing eyes, they laughed at everything and anyone and particularly the walking dead. They were not to blame for thinking Pearle was a buffoon placed before them for their mutual amusement.

  But mad or not, Pearle was not about to put up with it. Just to show them how totally humorless he was, he pulled his sidearma silver-plated Browning Hi-Powerand shot a young rifleman right through the left eye.

  The dead were closing in on the trench now.

  White phosphorus shells erupted around them, lighting many on fire. Yet, they came on, the phosphorus blazing on them, leaving tra
ils of white smoke in their wakes. Some of those in better shape began moving quite quickly at the trench. They were not slow in mind nor in action. They knew, perhaps, that if they got across that trench and rushed the perimeter, they would simply overwhelm what soldiers remained. A great number of them came forward, burning from sprays of phosphorus and from contact burns. Their flesh sizzled and popped. Some of them fought madly to put the flames out, but others didn’t seem to care.

  It was at this moment in the 4/1’s turkey-shoot that they noticed something else: the dead seemed riddled with worms. Not just your average maggots, though those were certainly in attendance too, but long, red, elastic-looking worms that filled empty eye sockets and draped from mouths, moved beneath those ashen mottled skins and coiled from wounds. These were the same type of worms that Harry Teal and the others from the prison mortuary crew had discovered feeding on the corpses in the potter’s field graveyard earlier that day.

  But whereas those worms were simply parasiticone of Mother Nature’s little helpers that sped along the process of decayand essentially harmless to living things, these worms were different. They had changed. Mutated. They had been like living red licorice whips before, now they were thicker, bloated almost. Oily red things looking for flesh to despoil. It was almost like the dead were hosts for them. And some of the walkers…they were infested. Literally infested. Their bodies were set with dozens and dozens of holes and bullets had had nothing to do with it. These were not bullet holes, but worm holes. Tunnels the worms had created as they fed on the corpses.

  In the bright lights and spotter scopes, they were plainly visible sliding in and out of the corpses.

  And then they saw something that was perhaps worse. If anything can truly be worse than the living dead infested with looping red worms. The ground beyond the trench was not only scattered with the still-moving litter of the dead, arms and legs and fingers and heads, but with free-moving worms. Many were sliding free of the shattered anatomies they had once fed upon, but many, many more seemed to be independent.