Resurrection:Zombie Epic

by Tim Curran

  “Move!” Alona said, shoving her along.

  They were coming at it from the front now, along the overgrown drive, the grounds wild with shrubs and bushes and gnarled dead trees. The grasses were up past their knees and Chrissy kept expecting to find bones twisted in them. Everything around that malefic building was dead. There was no avoiding that. As if the orphanage itself were poisoned and year by year, that poison seeped farther out, contaminating more of the earth.

  On the porch overhang, there were letters chiseled from stone: MANUAL TRAINING ACADEMY, they read.

  That’s nice, Chrissy though. Very homey.

  Finally, they stood at the bottom of the steps that led up to the entrance. The orphanage rose up above them, rotting boards barely concealing the darkness behind those ancient windows. The feeling Chrissy got looking up at it against that gray, overcast sky was not good. This place was filled with death and she could not convince herself otherwise.

  The steps before them were wide and warped, heaved-up in spots from frost. Weeds grew from cracks in them. The railings were rusted, the porch itself wide and long, its boards warped and feathered with mold.

  “Watch your step,” Alona said.

  She led the way up to the massive double doors. One of them stood straight and tall, the other had fallen in. Gaining entrance then would be no problem at all. A smell came wafting out and it described the interior just fine: wood rot and wetness and yellowed bones.

  “C’mon,” Alona said, ducking through the door with apparently no fear whatsoever.

  Inside the stench increased. It was almost gagging, like sticking your head down an old, poisoned well and breathing deep. Just mephitic and cloying. They were in some sort of lobby. Corridors ran off in either direction. A massive staircase set before them. The walls were bowed, the ceilings rotting right through in places from water damage. The wainscoting was wormholed and chewed as if mice had been at it. Everywhere, threading cobwebs and abandoned bird’s nest poking from holes in the walls. The floor was tiled in pink and green, dead leaves blown everywhere, many floating in standing pools of water. Shadows spilled from doorways, thick and spreading. Dust was settled over everything, but much of it had been disturbed as if many feet had trod through it.

  “Well?” Chrissy said. “What now?”

  Alona looked around, saw something leaning in a corner that interested her. A crowbar. “Ha!” she said. “I bet somebody pried that door open and then ran off when they got inside. Probably scared to death.”

  “I don’t blame them.”

  They passed an old office that was empty save for a pile of rotting wood against one wall and an old calendar still hanging on the wall. It was so filthy you could not read what year it was from. The only good thing they’d found so far was that many of the boards had fallen from the windows and light came in. Dreary grayish light, but light all the same.

  “This way,” Alona said, slapping the crowbar in her hands.

  They followed a passageway near the stairs and it led into what might have been a dining hall in the old days. A few long wooden tables arranged in the center. A variety of initials and profanity were scratched into them. Probably by kids, but certainly not while the orphanage was in operation. The place had been closed before Chrissy was born, but there were plenty of stories of it floating around Witcham. And they all agreed on one thing: Bleeding Heart had been a grim, unpleasant place.

  Alona led them away and through a high stone archway.

  “The chapel,” she said.

  Yes, of course. It had been a Catholic-run orphanage and you could almost hear the swishing of the nun’s habits, hear the sound of their sticks colliding with the backsides of naughty children. This was not a place that had been intended to be charming or comforting. It had been rigid and well-ordered and utilitarian, run by stern women who saw no love or joy in what they did.

  The chapel was dusty and dirty in there, cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. The plaster walls rotted through with great holes. Things scratching and skittering in them. You had to descend a few short steps to get in there and Alona did, of course, dragging Chrissy with her. Not so brave now, but clutching her close like a girl with her kid sister in tow making her way through a carnival haunted house.

  The smell in here was not just animal droppings and plaster rot and seeping water, but the overpowering reek of decay. Fleshy decay.

  And they both saw why in the dim light that filtered in.

  They were in a nest of the undead.

  “Oh, shit,” Chrissy said.

  Alona clamped a hand over her mouth.

  The dead were everywhere, but they were not moving. Dozens and dozens of them were sprawled around like heaps of laundry. They laid singly and in piles, many right on top of others. Men, women, children. Even a few babies clutched in the spidery arms of their mothers. All of them were a ghastly white, their faces and arms and exposed parts set with sores and contusions and lumpy, cancerous growths. Many were covered in flies and some were riddled with worms and crawly things. Some wore dirty clothes, others were naked, and still others had draped themselves in mildewed sheets. They looked like they were just sleeping…some in fetal positions, others with arms thrown over their bosoms or over their faces, limbs awry…but they weren’t sleeping.

  Chrissy and Alona were absolutely silent and they could hear things scuttling in the walls, but no breathing. Not so much as a whisper. Nothing but the buzzing of flies. This was some form of cold dormancy. They were essentially dead, but they would not stay that way and they might wake at any moment.

  Alona tugged on Chrissy’s arm, pointed.

  There was something up on the altar.

  A form leaning up there like a wooden dummy, as dormant as the rest. A man…or something like a man. A wraith dressed in an oily leather coat with a bloody gray shift beneath. His feet were bare, bloodless and mottled. But what was worse was that you could not see his face, for he wore a mask. A death mask that must have been peeled off a corpse…a seamed and cadaverous thing with the eyes cut out and an intact scalp of greasy black hair that hung to the shoulders. The lower portion had been cut away so that its wearer’s mouth was unimpeded. Chrissy could not see much of the face beneath, only that the skin had been peeled away from its jaw and mouth, and what was left was muscle and ligament and sharp yellow teeth clenched together.

  The sight of that thing made her want to scream.

  Made her want to slit open her wrists and drink lye and gouge out her eyes with a dull knife. Anything, anything to be spared the horror of looking at it and the horror that would come when it actually moved.

  There were flies crawling all over it, buzzing and droning, rising in a dark, busy mist and descending once again to feed and lay their eggs. Already, it seemed, some of those eggs had hatched and you could see them moving under that mask.

  Yes, this was the messiah.

  She could not know that, but she did not doubt it.

  This was the messiah and scattered at his dead feet were coffins. Well, maybe not coffins, more like simple wooden crates, but they no doubt served the same purpose. There were no lids on any of them and even in the dusty light, you could see the awful things that slept in them, waiting for their master to call them up like genies from bottles and evil spirits from beyond the grave.

  No, no, this was too much.

  Just too fucking much.

  Chrissy could not let herself be here when they began to wake, when those corpses rose and grinned at her with melting, marble-white faces. And she must be far away when that wraith pulled itself down from the altar. For if she saw such a thing move…what mind could remain intact after such a vision? It would be like gulping down a bottle of Drano and expecting your guts not to burn and liquefy, come splashing out your mouth in a blue foam.

  She would go insane.

  And, yes, she would welcome it. Because the deepest, blighted depths of her mind would be infinitely preferable to what would come next. If that monstrosity
got its hands on her, her end would be legendary in its agony and duration.

  Alona guided her quietly from the chapel and back into the passage beyond. The need to run was strong, but Alona would not have it. Chrissy could feel how tense she was next to her, her muscles standing taut under the skin.

  When they got back to the lobby, Alona directed her towards the stairs.

  “Maybe we should just go outside,” Chrissy suggested.

  “No, we’ll stick to our plan. We’ll hide amongst them. Help will be coming. It’s only a matter of time. I want to be alive when they get here.”

  They started up the stairs, pressing their feet down carefully. The steps creaked, but held. Some of them were in such terrible shape, it did not seem as if they could hold much more weight. They went up slowly, tense and expectant, not knowing what they might be walking into. You could hear the water falling outside, hear it running through cracks and crevices and dripping. Rats scuttled and scratched in the walls. But rats were hardly a threat to them.

  Chrissy held onto Alona as they went up. She was trembling and sweaty, literally on the verge of falling to pieces. Fear had not just entered her through every pore, but had consumed her. She could almost smell its thick, noxious odor clinging to her. If any place in the world could realistically be called haunted, it was this place. Yes, maybe it was just brick and wood, mortar and nails and marble…but it seemed so much more. You could almost smell the evil seeping from every crack and wormhole, a gassy and violent odor like the excrement of ghosts, a spiritually rancid emanation that made your guts curl-up in your belly.

  Nothing wholesome, nothing good could smell like that.

  Up they went, expecting the worse but getting nothing but the sounds of rats scampering and scratching in the walls. The corridor at the top was very shadowy, the air moist and almost slimy. They checked it out room by room, but saw nothing dead or nothing pretending to be that way.

  “Listen,” Alona suddenly said.

  Chrissy did, her heart hammering. She heard nothing at first, but she was feeling everything. The orphanage was like some rotting coffin they had been thrust into. All around them she was sensing movement, crawling shadows and creeping things. It was all brewing darkly in her soul, making her want to scream so badly that she had to press a hand to her mouth.

  And then she heard it.

  Behind them, maybe coming up the stairs, a rustling and secretive sound as something dragged itself upward. As it came, a hot and flyblown odor wafted from it, becoming stronger and more nauseating by the moment. She could hear something like fingernails being dragged up the staircase banister. A clotted, rasping noise that might have been breathing. Dear God, any moment now it would be upon them, a grinning and morbid malignancy with hollowed yellow eyes

  Alona grabbed her and pushed her through the first doorway they came to, into a dim, dusty room that was long and narrow like a hospital ward in an old movie. There were boarded windows on the far wall.

  Whatever it was, it was upstairs now.

  They could hear its shuffling footsteps and they were coming.

  Getting closer and closer.

  27

  Mitch saw it, felt he was being seen.

  There was Crooked Hill, as it had always been called, and capping it, the orphanage. Sisters of the Bleeding Heart. A three-story pile of crumbling brick, the sort of grim and harrowing place that etched itself into the mind instantly as a place of ghosts and the restless dead. How could it be anything else? It was built in 19th century Midwestern Carpenter Gothic style, tall and dark and forbidding, just a crazy-quilt of tall and narrow windows, overhanging eaves, and razorbacked gables. A catacomb of rooms leading into rooms, attics and cellars and crawlspaces and leaning stairways. Its roof was jagged and sharp and rising like mountain peaks in some expressionistic film, each one sharp enough to slit open the belly of the sky. And on them, ancient lightning rods and rusted weathervanes and soot-covered stacked chimneys leaning precariously this way and that. A great and rambling surreal tomb.

  What had they been thinking? Mitch thought then and there. What in the name of all that’s holy had they been thinking when they converted that relic into an orphanage? Just the sight of it is enough to inspire nightmares and breathless dreams of haunted houses. What had children thought when they were brought here? Or did they even think? Did the sight of that architectural graveyard simply rip their minds open and make them scream themselves numb?

  “Jesus,” Tommy said. “I can almost feel it waiting for us.”

  Deke swallowed as they drifted up towards Crooked Hill. “When I was…when I was in Junior High, we came up here on a dare. And you know what? We made it to the front door and they we turned and ran.”

  Mitch did not doubt that.

  When he was a kid the place had actually been in operation. He’d even known a few kids that had lived there. And although they’d claimed that the place did not bother them, he’d never believed it. For on a clear day, you could see that monstrosity practically from anywhere in the city, a great heap of black bones lording over Witcham itself. And now, right now, he could sense all the nights locked up in the old place, the dismal lives spent in its guts, the horror and despair and godawful loneliness that dripped from the walls like blood.

  And as he looked at it, feeling the childhood terror he’d had of the place spreading out in his belly, he felt something else. Something electric and inexplicable.

  Chrissy.

  Chrissy.

  Chrissy.

  Chrissy was in there.

  “Let’s go get Chrissy,” he said.

  “If she’s there,” Tommy said.

  “Oh, she’s there, all right. Can’t you feel her?”

  Maybe Tommy could and maybe he couldn’t and maybe he had shut down things like feelings because you didn’t want to be emoting in this place. They rowed the boat up to the hill, took hold of a bush and pulled themselves in. When they were all out on the grass, they dragged the boat up in case they needed it later.

  Mitch figured they had roughly thirty minutes of daylight left. That wasn’t a lot, but it would have to do. It seemed wrong going into the orphanage in broad daylight, even if that broad daylight happened to be rainy and misting and overcast, the light dull and leaden like it were strained through motheaten cloth. It seemed like you couldn’t go into such a place until after nightfall, like maybe the doors wouldn’t open until the sun had set. Midnight, would have been better. Midnight on an especially dark and wind-blown Halloween night.

  But he figured for places like the orphanage, Halloween was every day.

  Side by side, they moved up through the trees, not saying a word. There was an old churchyard near to where they were, flanking the ruined hulk of an equally old church. Mitch knew where the orphanage itself was, led them towards it. They stumbled through the moist undergrowth until they came to a road. Its pavement was buckled and frost-heaved, but it beat the shit out of the woods.

  The rain started coming down hard again, pelting them and stinging their faces, reducing visibility to just a few yards. They kept moving, drenched and heavy. The ground was a sluicing bog of mud. The dead could have been anywhere in that sodden grayness. Anywhere.

  “If I ever get dry again,” Tommy said, water funneling off the brim of his baseball cap, “I mean really fucking dry, I don’t know what the hell I’ll do with myself.”

  “Rain, rain, rain,” Deke grumbled.

  Mitch would have complained, too, but the way he was looking at it, at least the rain was just water. It could have been that yellow rain that melted people. The road up to the orphanage was a river now. Water was rolling down hill and trying to wash them off their feet.

  Squinting in the rain, Mitch said, “A few turns and we’ll be there.”

  Tommy opened his mouth to say something and there was a load booming sound, a cracking sound. Gunfire. Something sprayed into the brush just ahead of them. It was muffled by the driving rain, but there was no mistak
ing it.

  “Shotgun,” Tommy said, pushing himself and the others into the ditch at the side of the road. Right into some three feet of standing water.

  “You missed,” a voice called from the trees. “You goddamned well missed. What kind of monkey-assed, shit-fucking shooting was that?”

  Jesus Christ, Mitch thought, that voice. It was

  “Hubb Sadler,” Tommy said. “That’s Hubb Sadler.”

  Of all goddamned things.

  “I can’t get a clear shot in this rain, now can I?” Knucker said.

  “You better leave the shooting to them what knows how,” Hardy James said.

  The three of them began to bicker back and forth until Hubb started to shout at them, calling them a bunch of “silly, useless, dick-happy cock-knockers.” Tommy was chuckling and so was Mitch. Deke was at a loss as to what was so funny about them being shot at by this bunch of nutcases.

  “Hey! Hubb Sadler!” Tommy called out. “Lower your goddamn gun! We’re friendly over here.”

  A moment of silence punctuated by the pouring rain.

  “Who’s that? Who in the name of the fuck-humping Christ is that?”

  Tommy identified himself. “I’m with Mitch Barron. We’re coming out. Don’t be peppering our asses or we’ll shoot back.”

  “Come out slow, you fucking asshole,” Hubb said.

  Tommy laughed. “Same old Hubb.”

  Tommy and Mitch led the way forward out of that chilly, flooded ditch and up the road until the figures of several people were visible in the trees. Sure, there they were, the Three Musketeers or The Three Stooges…depending entirely how you looked at it: Hubb Sadler, Hardy James, and old Knucker herself who could drink any living man under the table and had been one mean-assed arm wrestler in her younger days. But they weren’t alone. With them, dressed in yellow rain slickers were a couple others from the store: Hot Tamale and Herb.

  “Be careful,” Hot Tamale warned her little group. “They might look alive, but that don’t mean that they are. I say we shoot ‘em to be sure.”

  “I say you help feed the third world and go on a diet,” Tommy said.