Through The Valley

by Yates, B. D.

  "Muddy!" He hissed, stabbing his finger into Muddy's chest hard enough to push him back into Emmit. "Roy said to keep your god damned retard mouth shut out here. The fuck is so funny anyway?"

  Muddy slowly turned to look at Emmit, then his cheeks swelled and reddened like a party balloon and he had to choke the laughter back.

  "I just realized, Poke," Muddy wheezed, "He doesn't know why you all named me Muddy."

  Poke allowed a strained smile at that, a devilish display of tooth decay that seemed to promise vicious intent. Then his eyes softened and the two chuckled together. It was a strange and alien sound in the silence of the woods, but it also felt good. It felt human. It didn't take long for Emmit to get his hollow belly rolling too, regardless of the fact that they all knew they should be quiet.

  "So why..." Emmit panted, "why do they call you Muddy?"

  "Because the first time I saw a Link, I shit my britches so full that I filled my right boot with it. Roy almost turned me away because he said I smelled like a hot septic tank."

  They howled with laughter, and to someone passing by who didn't know any better, they would have looked like three old friends enjoying a winter hike together. Their business was much darker than a simple walk through the woods, and Poke, who had anointed himself their master and commander, was quick to shut the horseplay down. He made a cutting motion with his hand, and once again his face returned to its state of normalcy; a face that looked like it should be pressed between prison bars, threatening the passing guards without a single word spoken.

  "We're wasting time, we've wasted too much already," he rasped, his lips working around his gangrenous gums and teeth. "Some of this Link goo isn't frozen yet. We gotta be getting close to the herd."

  They pressed on, following the path the Links had left for them. Emmit wasn't ready to return to a state of constant stress and fear quite yet. His soul felt tired. He began to imagine that they were walking through a pair of some ill giant's underwear, following a skid mark all the way from the taint to the cheeks. He leaned forward and muttered this to Muddy, which got him guffawing again, and Emmit found that he liked the sound of it. Muddy struck him as a man who had probably been bullied for most of his life for his mental state, and when it came to being bullied for circumstances you couldn't control, Emmit Mills was an expert. He began to strike up bits of conversation with him in between the crunching and sloshing sounds of their journey, and Muddy greeted him with a warm smile and a slightly childish look of surprise each time. The poor man didn't seem to be accustomed to people wanting to talk to him.

  "You mind if I ask you some questions, Muddy?" He was trying to keep his voice down. Poke was staring straight ahead like a hunting dog, either ignoring them or not caring enough to crack the slave driver's whip he had awarded himself.

  "I'll answer them the best I can," Muddy said affably, pivoting to look over his shoulder. Emmit could just make out the misshapen knot of his bad elbow bulging through his “armor”.

  "How'd you break your arm? Not to be rude, it just... looks painful."

  "Because he's a fuckin' retard and he wasn't wearing a helmet," Poke sneered. Emmit felt a hot rush of hatred flow through him like a passing demon.

  Ah, so you are listening.

  "Do they make helmets for your arms, Poke?" Emmit asked, raising his voice slightly and not bothering to hide his derogatory tone. "I've heard of elbow pads, I guess, but arm helmets..."

  "Fuck you, faggot," was the best reply Poke could think of. "Fucking new blood."

  Emmit had been hearing typical bully shit like that for as long as he could remember. It wasn't the insult itself that got under his skin; his skin was much thicker than most people gave him credit for. What burned him was that it came from someone like Poke. He opted not to reply, thus validating Poke's digs at them and maybe even spurring him on to keep his festering mouth running. Muddy didn't seem phased either, and Emmit thought, with a slight tinge of guilt, he's numb to it too. Muddy just grinned and shook his head, like an exasperated single father throwing his hands up and saying, "Boys will be boys."

  "I fell off the roof of the Gas ‘n’ Grab," Muddy said, pushing a snowy pine branch out of his way. The trees were beginning to thicken now, steadily closing in on them like a living maze. Tiny needles jabbed at their hands and faces, breaking off and peppering their clothes. The smell of pine and sap was cloying, but not entirely unpleasant in the tasteless winter air. "I'm a firebug, I guess that's what I done wrong to get me here."

  Emmit ducked under a low hanging branch, burdened by a thick frosting of heavy snow. Naturally, a large clod of it plopped off and landed squarely on the back of his neck, melting instantly and trickling all the way down the juts of his spine to the crack of his ass. That, too, wasn't entirely unpleasant. He was grateful for his "armor", but it was growing stiflingly hot under all those layers.

  "Arsonist," Emmit said to himself, rubbing at his neck. "Were you going to blow it up Muddy? That probably would have killed you, man."

  Again, Muddy began to giggle. The thought of his own death, which was not as far off as he probably believed, seemed to be just another joke on par with a nickname he got from crapping himself.

  "I didn't try to torch anything, I just wanted to see. I wanted to see what I had to do if I ever wanted to blow it up. I was trying to watch the man from the gas truck, when he was putting the hose in the hole. The cops had been after me for a while, but I mostly tried to light up old ugly buildings that were empty. One time though, there was this homeless camp. They were living in one of the buildings I lit up. It was just an accident though. I never killed nobody on purpose."

  Emmit swallowed hard, nodding and thankful that they were walking. It made it hard to maintain eye contact, and Muddy's confession might have been a little harder to stomach if he had had to look into the man's bright but simple eyes. No, the patchy back of his head worked just fine.

  God, we really are all criminals here. But at least I didn't kill anyone... right?

  That part of his brain was still a blank chalkboard. There were remnants of something there, but it had been hastily erased into a grayish-white smudge, leaving behind shadow memories that existed just outside the edge of thought, like a random forgotten word that dances on the tip of one’s tongue. Emmit didn't think he was capable of taking the life of an innocent person— but then again, he never would have thought himself capable of robbing a bank either.

  Muddy had been talking the entire time Emmit had been out in space. He slipped back into the conversation as slyly as he could.

  "Yeah, I mean... we all did what we did," he said lamely.

  "Yes sir. So, I'm running like mad because from up on the roof, I could see the cop cars coming. It looked like Christmas lights. I guess I wasn't too hard to follow, and a big tank of gas is a real prize for a firebug. I tried to slide down the ladder real fast like they do in the movies, but I fell. Tried to catch myself with my arm. I heard it break, you bet your ass I did. It sounded like when you crack your knuckles."

  Emmit cringed at that thought. Up ahead, he could see Poke stealing the occasional curious glance over his shoulder. Perhaps he had never learned why Muddy's arm looked the way it did, and the curiosity was superseding the need to push them around.

  "You didn't go to the hospital?"

  "Couldn't," Muddy said, kicking at something in the dingy snow under his feet. It looked like the stained sash from someone's bathrobe, lying discarded in the mush like a dead snake. "The cops would have found me there. 'Course they did anyway, not too long after. I was kinda happy that they caught me, because it hurt so bad I couldn't sleep, and I kept puking up any food I was able to steal. Anyway, that was years ago. I can't use it much anymore, but I do okay."

  Poke had stopped and was kneeling, touching something on the ground. He scooped it up and stood with it, staring down at it with his jaw clenched. Emmit could see his taut cheeks flexing as he ground his teeth together.

  "Links are close. Rea
l close. I think it's time we shut the fuck up, kids," Poke whispered. He flipped something small and round into the air, where it turned end over end like a coin. Emmit reached out to catch it on impulse and immediately regretted it.

  What slapped into his palm was a severed human ear, trailing stringy tendrils of purple tissue. The ear had begun to fold in on itself like a dried flower petal, and if he held it up to his eye, Emmit could look all the way through the hole that someone had once used to hear.

  "Want some jerky?" Poke said, grinning his black grin as Emmit made a disgusted grunting noise and threw the ear into the snow.

  "That's why they're called Links," Muddy said joyously, barely containing his laughter. "Their skin looks like beef jerky, and Roy—"

  Two arms were suddenly around Emmit's midsection, wrapping tightly and digging all ten fingers into his clothes like an eagle's talons digging into a juicy fish. He didn't have time to scream. The grip was vice-like, unbelievably strong. It became hard to breath in seconds, and in the haze of his panic the club slipped out of his fingers and thudded into the snow. He felt himself being pulled backward.

  "Thieeeeeef," came a sandpaper rasp, inches from his ear. Every strand of his body hair stood on end, his skin erupting in goose flesh the way it had always done when things were still good with Kelly, when she would whisper things into his ear with her lips barely, just barely, touching his flesh.

  "Don't touch it!" Muddy and Poke shrieked at the same time. Emmit paid them no mind; he had no control over himself anyway. The panic reaction was on autopilot. He looked down at the stiffened arms that held him, the flesh free of clothing and rotting even as it froze—

  —Christ it does look like jerky I'll never eat jerky again I swear to baby Jesus I'll never eat it again—

  —and although he knew better, although he could remember the searing pain of touching one of the monsters, he grabbed at one of the bony arms with both hands and began yanking on it, twisting it, trying to break it. The adrenaline gave him superpowers; he felt no pain, not at first. He was somehow watching all his fingers at the same time, biting into the dead flesh, feeling the rigidity of the cold and leathery skin. There was a dry shredding sound like old fabric being ripped apart, and a hunk of meat the size of a New York strip steak came off in his hands. He watched the rubbery flesh stretch and snap like taffy. The maroon sinew and tendons, the ones left intact and still loosely attached to the bones beneath, flexed and pulled as the Link continued to clench him.

  Abruptly, Emmit felt like he had actually grabbed a New York strip steak— right from an open flame. The black, hateful bite was boiling into his palms.

  "Fuck, shit!" He screamed, launching the hunk of meat through the air like a grotesque football. He was still being dragged, but he spared a moment to glance down at his seared hands. He had to; it was like when you got a deep cut, a real good one that wouldn’t stop bleeding. It almost didn't feel real unless you kept staring at it.

  Sure enough, both of his hands were now blackened to match his arm.

  Even with the Link muttering drunkenly in his ear he heard a swift whistling sound, like a gust of wind shrilling through a drafty door frame. Something long and dark rocketed past his face, sickeningly close, close enough to nudge the frames of his glasses up and lightly kiss the corner of his eye.

  There was a wet slicing noise as Poke withdrew the spear, and the Link that had been gripping Emmit became dead weight. Emmit heard the slack body thud into the snow with a sound like a sack of rotten potatoes falling from a kitchen table. Poke was shouting, pointing at Emmit's feet as his rotting mouth morphed and formed the different shapes of words. The tip of his spear was adorned with a purple-gray clot of hair and fluffy jelly that looked a little like old lasagna. Everything moved in slow, silent motion.

  Shock, snap out of it, shock, snap out of it—

  "They're everywhere Papa, we gotta move!" Poke bellowed directly into his face, loud enough to hurt and force his ear canals to contract. The sound of his voice and the stench of his breath was a merciless assault, but effective, nonetheless. Emmit felt his club slam against his stomach, and he fumbled to clutch it with his newly tattooed hands.

  It sounded like they were surrounded by cicadas. The frozen landscape around them was suddenly buzzing and humming with sleepy, grating voices. Hundreds. Thousands. To Emmit it resembled the crowd at one of his beloved wrestling shows, the noise of everyone filing in and finding their seats. No cheering or booing yet; just quiet conversations and movement, multiplied by tens of thousands. Silently deafening.

  The cluster of trees ahead of them began to spasm and twitch as if caught in the throes of an earthquake, and then he saw the first wave of them. Horrible, disheveled figures, slouching and stumbling, clutching and raking at the air in front of them with gnarled hands and fingers that were little more than tight skin and bone. They were shoulder to shoulder, every visible inch of open space suddenly filled with walking corpses. They writhed against each other as they slowly advanced, the swarm of bodies and limbs pulsating like a patch of oversized maggots. Branches were cracking and popping behind the men too. And now, off to their right as well. The sound of death approaching seemed to come from everywhere all at once.

  We walked right into the horde.

  Muddy looked terrified, his eyes bulging and in constant motion. His grin had been replaced by a pained grimace. Emmit could see his breaths puffing out rapidly, little clouds of vapor seeping between his bared teeth. He was terrified, but he was collected and holding his own. His deformed arm was tucked close to him and out of the way as he did exactly as Roy had instructed him to, using his skinny body to stabilize his spear as the Links began to approach him. They were in a semicircle, a mumbling, grasping C shape that began to close in around him. Muddy thrusted forward, driving the tip of his spear into the Link closest to him— it was the corpse of a young man, a teenaged boy most likely, dressed in the tatters of a NASCAR shirt that draped down over soiled blue jeans. The link had no eyes and no nose left. From its hair line to its sneering upper lip was nothing but exposed skull, ripped flesh and rubbery cartilage dangling from the savage wound like corn husks caught on a wire fence.

  Muddy's spear lodged itself in the Link's neck, just below its motionless Adam's apple. The brittle skin around the tip sunk in, turning the flesh there into a bloodless, sucking mouth. There was an audibly soggy pop as the spearhead exited the back of the Link's neck, slimed with dark brown blood that looked more like congealed tobacco spit. The Link's head rolled back on its shoulders, that same fluid now dribbling out of its mouth and staining its pale chin.

  "Gahhhhhhh," it gurgled, its smile never faltering. Being impaled seemed to be orgasmic for it, even as whatever sinister force that powered it began to fade and it dropped to its knees. Muddy twisted his body and the spear ripped free, leaving a tunnel of meat and gristle through the thing's throat.

  Behind Emmit shambled out the remains of a priest, still dressed in its flowing black robes. The tarnished crucifix hanging around its neck bounced and swayed with each of its shaky, uncertain footsteps. It struggled in the deep snow, lifting its legs high in the air as it moved as if it were in a marching band. Even over the dissonance of the building battle he could hear the joints and tendons popping and snapping like the branches around them.

  The priest's milky eyes were fixed on Emmit, unblinking and unwavering. The flesh of its cheeks bunched and cracked as it grinned, impossibly wide. Goosebumps rippled up and down Emmit's back, the thin hairs swaying like seaweed on a riverbed.

  "Sinnerrrrr," it said, reaching to embrace him. "Gunman."

  Emmit stared at the dead thing's hooked hands coming toward his face, his own hands beginning to ache and protest from the cold and the force of his grip on the wooden handle of his club. The priest had no fingernails left; only the blackened, sunken quicks remained. They looked like ten crusted ink wells.

  Emmit screamed. Not in fear this time, but rage; it was hot and primal, surg
ing up from deep inside him like a rush of lava erupting from the jagged throat of a volcano. He swung the club around behind his back, bringing it up and over his head like a woodcutter preparing to split a log. He felt every small muscle in his body, from his stiff neck to his scrawny legs, tensing and pulling. He was about to give this undead fuck everything he had.

  Emmit's aim couldn't have been better, even if he had been carefully aiming. The weighty end of the club crashed down like a controlled demolition and connected solidly with the top of the priest's skull, making a sound like two heavy rocks knocking together. The priest's head was obliterated instantly.

  The top of its skull flattened out like a spent bullet, the brain and everything under its scalp splitting apart and flowering open into a visceral plateau. Both of the thing's eyes were forced from their sockets, hanging from deformed holes and jostling against its crumpled wax-paper cheeks. They swung like pendulums by wet tangles of nerves. Brain matter burst from the priest's ears, spewing out like steam from an angry cartoon character's ears and nearly bringing Emmit to the point of hysterical laughter. The priest looked like it was laughing about it too. Even as its knees folded beneath it and it collapsed into the snowdrift it had struggled so hard to navigate, the ceaseless smile remained.

  A pair of Links immediately took its place, stepping carelessly into the soup that drained from the cranium of their fallen comrade.

  My son, Emmit thought darkly. These things want to keep me from my son.

  "My son!" He bellowed mindlessly, insane with a potent cocktail of fear and adrenaline and rage. He swung the club like a baseball bat. One of the Links, a bearded corpse whose stiff muscles bulged under the garb of a construction worker, took the brunt of the impact on its left forearm. The bones splintered at the elbow, bending the arm the wrong way into a perfect 90° angle break. The force of the impact sent it corkscrewing back into the foliage, its dulled orange safety vest flapping behind it. Emmit heard a small, breathless chuckle as it began the arduous climb back to its feet.