Then, on the bottom of all the boats, slapping and pounding sounds. And along the keel of the lead craft, a muted scratching like something sharp drawn along its length.

The men were panicking, searchlights and flashlights scanning the water and the walls of the buildings, those abandoned docks. The rain fell in a fine spray and there was movement in the water around them. Things breaking the surface and disappearing, bobbing and sinking. Shadows slithering and the stink of mortuaries.

Oates saw a face just above the water.

Only for the briefest of moments, but he put his flashlight full on it and there was no denying the grim reality of it. A face bleached-white and puckered, chewed-looking as if fish had been nibbling on it, strips of flesh hanging from the cheeks and forehead like Spanish moss. Then it slid down beneath the waters again.

“What the hell was that?” Hinks said.

And Oates was going to tell him it was nothing, just a fucking doll’s head or something, but he couldn’t seem to find the words to speak. His tongue felt numb in his mouth. But his brain was thinking: Like a shark, a goddamn shark. That thing showed itself like a shark shows its dorsal fin before it attacks. And when the dorsal goes under…

“There’s things in the water,” Hopper called out. “I saw ‘em…like faces in the water, all around us.”

And right then you could almost feel the terror and the adrenaline pumping into each man. Weapons were brought up and bodies tensed. They could feel attack coming, just not from which direction. And Oates knew it, felt it, lived it, as he’d done so many times before. This was how it felt right before the enemy stormed down on your position: the terror, the juice in your veins, that pervasive sense of the calm before the storm as bodies went rigid and breath was held and nerves crackled with electricity.

“Listen to me now,” Oates said and they all heard him. “I want those safeties off those weapons right now. Anything that shows itself is to be considered unfriendly. Drivers, let’s get these boats moving right goddamn now! Hup to it, Mary Lou or there’s gonna be very little loving and a whole lot of raping…”

They were close.

They almost made it.

If they’d gotten out of there a minute sooner, maybe, maybe. But the water suddenly slapped violently around them and exploded. A white, shrunken arm shot out and snatched Chernick by the wrist and then everyone was shouting and screaming. Weapons were discharged at ghosts and the searchlights cast grotesque shadows everywhere.

Chernick was a big boy who worked the weights every day. He’d been a linebacker in high school and he’d been a golden gloves boxer, so he did not go down without a fight. As that white, slimy arm tried to yank him over the side he pulled away and brought it right up into the boat with him.

It…and what it was attached to.

And when he saw it, when he looked that thing right in the face, he started screaming like an infant, thrashing and squealing. He lost his 16, began punching and clawing at that ragged thing he’d fished up from the water. His nails shredded the waterlogged flesh right down to the bone, but the skeletal hand clung on tenaciously, the fingertips sinking right into his wrist. He flopped and wailed, knocking Jones into the drink just as another white arm looped around Strickland’s throat like an especially soft and blubbery tentacle and he was drawn over the side, a mutiny of clawing hands waiting for him.

Oates thought maybe he screamed himself as he saw what Chernick was fighting with, the searchlight spinning on its base and strobing the scene with flashes of light. In slow, jerking motion, he saw something that might have been an old woman once, but was now a blackened and withered thing like a scarecrow, its clothing and skin hanging in streamers that flapped in the wind like pennants.

Neiderhauser was the first to open up.

Whether he killed Chernick or that thing did when it bit out his throat in a spray of dark arterial blood, it was hard to say. Slugs ripped into both Chernick and the dead woman. She was a pitted and insect-ravaged husk and the rounds from Neiderhauser’s M-16 literally blew her apart into a spray of carrion that filled the bottom of the boat, wriggling gruesomely on the anodized aluminum floorboards…bones and scraps of flesh, things that were both and neither like writhing like worms.

And then all around them, faces camouflaged with wet leaves surfaced.

White, scarified hands reached up the sides of the boats.

A faceless thing rose up to Oates’ right and he hammered it with the butt of his 16. It fell back, making a watery, coughing sound. Then he flipped the 16 over and sprayed the water where it sank.

And then the boats were in motion.

Neiderhauser opened up the lead boat, smashing through a gauntlet of white faces and clutching hands. As Jones’ empty boat was flipped over, Hopper’s boat slammed into it and knocked it out of the way. The two boats raced down that alley, barely making the turns.

And as they did so, Oates saw a woman standing on a loading dock, a withered and eyeless thing with long silver hair clotted with leaves and filth trailing down her gray, seamed face and onto her mildewed burial dress.

She was grinning.

Then the boat broke free of the alley and Oates could see the dark, expanding slick of the river as it slowly consumed River Town. Hopper seemed to see it, too, because he turned away from it just as Neiderhauser did. They flew through a street of tall buildings and into a residential district of ancient weather-vaned houses and then there was open fields which had become ponds and then encroaching trees.

Oates had to pry Neiderhauser’s hands from the wheel to get him to slow down and when he did, Neiderhauser looked like he wanted to scratch his eyes out.

“Settle down! Settle the fuck down before you get us all killed!”

Hopper’s boat went right past them, spraying them with filthy water and leaves. And it kept going and going.

“Rubber baby buggie fucking bumpers!” Oates shouted. “Go after those dumb sonsofbitches! Go! Go! Go!”

And they did.

They raced through the falling rain after Hopper’s boat and they caught up with it soon enough. And it wasn’t until Oates saw the high tips of that wrought iron gate pass behind them that he knew they had just entered a sunken cemetery.

And all around them in the wind-lashed night, they could hear the voices of the dead and the damned scraping up from lungs inundated with reeking water and mud.

And this was how things went from bad to worse for Henry T. Oates.

 

16

There was a dripping.

And from somewhere far away, a sobbing.

Chrissy Barron opened her eyes and they slid shut almost immediately. She was in her bed, she had to be in her bed. Just half awake coming out of a dream, that’s all this was. Just relax and drift off. She heard her mind tell her this and she accepted. At least for a moment or two, then she felt the wetness sloshing around her. Heard that dripping. The sobbing.

Sobbing?

She leaned forward, expecting maybe a pillow, but submerging her face in chill water instead.

She gasped and cried out.

She opened her eyes and forced them to stay open. She was sitting in the back of Heather Sale’s little VW bug, her safety belt cutting a trench into her belly. The car was filled with water. It was right up to her neck. Her entire body felt numb and tingly.

What the hell was going on?

She tried to think and the harder she tried, the less anything made sense. But in the front seat, that sobbing. She recognized it. Maybe everything else was a blur, but she certainly recognized that sobbing.

“Lisa?” she said. “Lisa?”

But the sobbing continued unabated. Chrissy tried to rise, but her seatbelt held her in place. Her neck was sore like she’d gotten whiplash and the rest of her was just numb and senseless. When she tried to move her arms, they felt thick and ungainly. Like rubber limbs somebody had grafted onto her as a joke. She flexed her hands into fists, kept doing so and soon they were tingling madly, almost painfully, but they were working.

“Lisa!” she said. “Heather!”

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Lisa Bell was saying, her head reclined back on the seat. She moved it slowly from side to side, so at least she was coming around and that was something.

As Chrissy tried to work her seatbelt catch with those rubbery, useless fingers, a panic settled into her. She was not the panicky type, that was Lisa’s thing, but it took hold of her and she began to thrash in her seat, fighting to get the belt off. When careful manipulation didn’t work, she tried brute force. Yanking and pulling on it, sweat popping on her brow, her muscles bunching and straining. But it was no good. She was gripped by claustrophobia, the sense that the car was sinking and that she was going to sink with it.

Finally, she relaxed, panting.

The car wasn’t sinking. Oh, it had definitely sank, but the water wasn’t any higher than it was before. Still up to her throat. It was then, as she breathed in and out, forcing herself to relax, she remembered or allowed herself to remember. Heather. It had been Heather’s idea. They were coming back from the Uptown Mall just off Main and Heather wanted to get a closer look at the flooding in River Town. Chrissy had told her she was nuts…it was getting dark, the sun was going down. Time to get home while they could. And that had been Heather’s idea. She was driving Chrissy home, over to Crandon, but she decided to skirt the outer edges of Crandon, get a look at River Town and the flooding…

Then what? Think! Think!

Cable Street. It wound around the outside of River Town, right in-between River Town and Crandon. It was a hilly drive and then they’d come down into that hollow, the road disappearing into a sea of dark water.

“Let’s just plow on through,” Heather said, liking the idea.

And before anyone could stop her, she’d jammed down on the accelerator and they’d raced down there, hitting that water and then something else, something that stopped the VW dead. Chrissy could remember the car flying up in the air, the sudden jolt…then blackness.

And how long ago had that been?

It was dark now…they must’ve been out for awhile.

The feeling coming back into her fingers, she easily popped the catch on the safety belt. And let out a breath, the cruel embrace of that belt squeezing her mercilessly.

“Heather!” she said, sitting forward now, a sharp pain in her guts and shoulder where the belt had dug in. “Lisa! Lisa!”

From Heather there was only silence.

But Lisa was coming around, moaning and groaning. She coughed a few times and raised her head up. “Where…are we? Oh My God! Help me! Somebody help me! I’m drowning! Oh God, help me!”

She began to thrash and wail, crying out things that were utterly unintelligible. Chrissy pulled herself up by the front seat and took hold of her. “Take it easy! You’re all right!”

Lisa turned her head. “What happened? What’s going on?”

“We hit something in the water,” she managed. “Now get your belt off.”

Lisa started to do that and then she looked over at Heather, seemed to realize that there was someone else in the car with them. “Heather? Heather? Heather?” She let out a little scream and started to thrash again. “She’s dead! She’s dead! Heather’s dead”

“Knock it off!” Chrissy shouted at her. “Heather’s not dead! She’s just out cold…”

But then she pulled herself halfway over the seats and saw Heather. Unbelted as usual, she was facedown in the water, her blonde locks floating around like strands of sea grass in a tidal pull. Chrissy grabbed her, pulled her up out of the water, but it was no good. The windshield was shattered and she must have hit when they struck the water and whatever was in it. She could see that perfect bloody impact in the windshield, cracks spiderwebbing away from it in every direction.

Lisa screamed and Chrissy wanted to, too.

Heather’s head was split wide open, the ragged wound running from forehead to the crown of her skull. The water had washed all the blood away and even in the dim light, you could see the bubbly-looking convolutions of her brain, gray and fleshy and just awful.

Chrissy let go of her and she slipped into the water face-first.

She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, Chrissy started thinking. She’s dead because she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.

She turned away, dropping back into her seat, ripples running through the water now. She fought to keep the contents of her stomach down and slid over towards the door. She tried to open it, but it was jammed somehow. She unrolled the window and pulled herself out of it, submerging in that chill, stinking water. Coming up, gasping and shaking, feeling all those slimy things floating in it. She had to get a grip here and she knew it. It was all up to her now. That’s how it worked. Heather was the daredevil. She was the queen and Lisa? Lisa was the basketcase. Sweet and caring, but useless in a stressful situation. She freaked out when she got a B on an algebra paper, became positively suicidal when she couldn’t remember the combination to her gym locker.

Brushing water from her face, Chrissy thought: Okay, you have to do this. You’re an absolute self-centered bitch and you know it, but right now you have to be something else. Can you do that?

She figured she could.

She took hold of Lisa’s door and got it open a few inches. She kept pulling and it opened slowly with all the water, but it did open. Lisa was having an anxiety attack, but that was to be expected. She fought against Chrissy as Chrissy tried to help her. Finally, Chrissy just slapped her right across the face. It was what they did with hysterical people in movies and although she was not a violent person…honey, it just felt right.

It calmed Lisa right away.

She started to cry.

“Knock it off,” Chrissy told her, popping the catch on her belt and dragging her up out of the car. “We have to get help.”

Together, they climbed up the hill out of the water. When they got to the top, they could see River Town spread out to the left and Crandon to the right. Most of River Town was submerged and parts of Crandon were under, too.

“What can we do, Chrissy?” Lisa said. “I’m scared…I mean, I don’t know what I am. But we’re trapped, we’re really trapped.”

“We’re not trapped. We just have to do some wading is all.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Then in River Town, whatever lights were still burning went out and then Crandon followed suit. A thick, unbelievable blackness fell over them.

“Shit,” Chrissy heard herself say.

 

17

This is what happened at the Hope Street Cemetery:

When Officers Pat Marcus and Dave Rose did not turn up for a few hours after what seemed to be a pretty routine vandalism complaint, their empty squad car was discovered parked outside the caretaker’s shack. A brief search of the grounds turned up nothing. And it was this that got the wheels turning. For Marcus and Rose weren’t the first missing cops in Witcham; everyone in the department was still reeling from the loss of Officers Miggs and Heller from the River Town Precinct the night the Black River burst its banks and the disappearance of Eddie Stokely over in Guttertown that very afternoon. It was not good. And every cop in Witcham felt it right down to his or her roots. And as Captain Knoles said, “If we can’t even take care of ourselves…how in Christ are we supposed to take of this city?”

And this is what brought twenty cops out to the Hope Street Cemetery after dark that night. They came with guns and attitudes and a dog team borrowed from the State Police. Yes, the damn rain was still pissing down and there was every possibility that the dogs wouldn’t be able to scent their own balls, let alone track two missing cops. But Knoles didn’t care about that. The city fathers were shitting all over him and if he wanted to save his job, he had to at least make a good show of it. Because like the mayor herself had told him, “For the love of God, Captain, what kind of half-assed dog and pony show are you running over there?”

And Knoles honestly wasn’t sure himself.

So he siphoned off every extra available uniform he could get, even though there weren’t any extra available uniforms. His people were already pulling twelve and sometimes sixteen-hour shifts. The overtime alone was going to throw the city budget into an uproar. Let alone the bitching the cops themselves were doing.

Lieutenant Van Ibes was running the search and he broke his men into four five-man squads, each with a dog handler and each given a particular quadrant of the boneyard. And given that the cemetery was spread out over some two city blocks, that was plenty. Just a misty, rainy run of hedges and trees, hollows and low hills, stones and crypts thrust from the waterlogged ground like bad teeth from rotting gums.

Donny Soper pulled the duty and he was not happy about it. As they followed the dog-handler and his hound at the stone wall at the back of the grounds, he told Breeson and Kerr all about it. “I haven’t seen my wife or kids in three days,” he said, his black slicker shining with water. “You believe that shit? Three fucking days. I been pulling double-shifts courtesy of that prick Knoles. They got me sleeping in the barracks out back. You guys don’t have to do that. You got seniority. You got the years on me. You get to go home. But me? No, I get to bunk in that dirty, ratty old barracks. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, they haven’t even been used for nothing but storage since the fifties. Then Knoles gets this bright idea of clearing it out and setting up cots. And who gets to sleep there? Me and all the other idiots who don’t have the time in.”

Kerr just ignored him. Kerr was good at ignoring guys like Soper.

“You’re getting paid for it, aren’t you?” Breeson said, his flashlight beam glancing off the wet faces of monuments. “Christ, think of the check you’re gonna be pulling from this.”

“It’s not all about money,” Soper told him. “I need to see my family, too.”

Kerr grunted a little laugh at that.

Breeson had to hold back his laughter. Yeah, Soper was some kind of family guy, all right. When he wasn’t bitching about the job and how people like Knoles kept him down, he was bitching about his beloved family. His wife who was a shrew that nagged him twenty-four seven and his kids that were little demons straight out of hell sent to torment his every waking moment. Yeah, he missed them, all right. What he missed was his recliner and his TV and his refrigerator. His Wednesday night bowling and his dog and his girl-on-girl movies on the Playboy Channel. Maybe somewhere after those things he missed his family.

Up ahead, Sergeant Rhymes and Kleets, the dog-handler, paused while the hound sniffed around at the base of a stone urn.

“Must’ve picked up something,” Kerr said.

Soper laughed. “Yeah, probably got a good whiff of some bones.”

They stood there as the rain fell, not hard but more of a constant annoying drizzle that left a wet sheen on your face and made the trees drip and drip and drip. They panned their lights around, the beams looking like bright yellow pencils writing on the night. The tombstones rose around them, some new and shiny, others just worn and leaning and speckled with lichen. And all of them shadowy and crowded, like being in some surreal forest of marble trees.

The hound pissed against a stone and the men laughed.

Kleets led him away through a little family plot with stone urns and benches, lots of cylindrical markers that looked like pillars.

“You guys think all I care about is money?” Soper said, picking right up again.

“I’m thinking,” Kerr said.

Breeson just shrugged. “I thought you were big on money, Soaps. I mean, shit, I borrowed two-fifty from you for a burger and Coke that time and it was like pulling teeth getting you to open your wallet. Then day after day, you were after me to pay it back. You couldn’t even wait a week until payday. You remember that? When I paid you, I gave you two-fifty exactly and then you said the burger and Coke had come up to two-fifty-seven. You wanted those seven cents.”

“I got mouths to feed, don’t I?”

Kerr chuckled. “You are one cheap sonofabitch, Soaps. That’s why nobody wants to go drinking with you anymore. Rest of us are buying rounds and there you are, sitting on your fucking hands.”

“Like I said, I got mouths to feed.” He fell silent for a moment or two, brooding maybe.

Breeson wiped water from his face and thought about getting back to the station house and crawling into a hot cup of coffee. He and the others didn’t spend much time thinking about Dave Rose and Pat Marcus. They all knew those guys, but they didn’t like to be thinking about them or what might have happened to them. There was shit going on in this city that nobody liked to admit to. It was easier that way. So even though the lot of them knew they were coming out here to look for the missing men, they talked about anything but.

Soper said, “You guys think I’m a cheap bastard, fine. I don’t care. You think I’m a complainer, fine. Again, I don’t much care. You ought to try sleeping in those fucking barracks. I shit you not, it makes me miss the Army. Christ, those racks they got for us are like sleeping on beds of nails. Fucking Russian surplus or something. And that ain’t bad enough, I got to sleep next to Karpinski.”

Both men burst out laughing at that.

Up ahead, Ryhmes told them to pipe down, his black face just wet and shiny.

“Sure, you guys laugh. You have a good laugh,” Soper said. “You know what it’s like sleeping next to Karpinski? He snores all the goddamn time and when he’s not snoring, he’s farting. I mean constantly. Like a goddamn bugler. All night long he’s ripping one off after the other. Two hours into it, goddamn barracks smell like a burst gas main. Jesus. Something’s wrong with that guy. It’s not natural to have that much gas. Smells like he’s shitting his pants.”

Breeson laughed under his breath.

Now this was something he could sympathize with. There was something abnormal about Karpinski’s bowels. Breeson had partnered with him for a couple months once and the car would smell so bad you had to drive with the windows open in January. The whole time, Karpinski would be grinning like a little boy, lifting his leg and letting ‘em rip. “Hoo! There’s one for you!” or “Here’s a kiss for you, Breeson!” or “Christ, if that one would’ve had legs, it woulda walked right out of my asshole!” and “That one don’t smell like roses, now do it?” On and on and on. When Joey Hill had gotten killed over in Crandon in the line of duty, Breeson had been selected to be part of the honor guard at the graveside service. Karpinski had, too. There they stood with their dress uniforms on and white gloves, everyone crying and just losing it because they’d all loved old Joey. Whole time, Karpinski is cracking ‘em off. When the honor guard had raised their rifles to fire a three-shot salute, Karpinski had timed the rifle shots with the shots coming out of his ass. It was embarrassing. Breeson didn’t figure anyone there hadn’t smelled those vile bean farts Karpinski had launched.

“It’s not natural for a guy to be doing that,” Soper said, maybe louder than he intended.

“Shut the hell up back there!” Rhymes said and this time he wasn’t fooling around.

The hound was acting funny all of sudden. Kleets was having a hell of a time with him. He’d start this way, then that, turn in a circle, stop dead. Right now, his nose was low to the ground and his hackles were raised. He was growling low in his throat. He was scenting something and he wasn’t liking it much.

Breeson just stood there, trying to swallow, but his throat was too dry. He had to lick rain off his lips to get it to work. The air out at the graveyard smelled dank and wet like run-off from a subterranean pipe, but now it seemed to be getting worse. He couldn’t put a finger on it at first, but now he was thinking it smelled oddly organic. Like growing things. A smell that had no business in a chill September boneyard.

A hot, germinating sort of stink.

Like rising yeast and moist fungi and sporing things…

 

18

“C’mon, boy,” Kleets said. “C’mon.”

The dog started moving again, pushing between two headstones and leading them around the side of a mossy crypt that was so old it seemed to be sinking into the earth. He started acting really funny again. Starting and stopping. Yelping and straining at his leash. Kleets was trying to calm him, but it wasn’t doing much good. Rhymes was on his walkie-talkie, checking in with the other units. His voice had a very somber tone to it that Breeson had never heard before. Like maybe he was expecting something to happen any time now and it wasn’t going to be a good thing. Van Ibes’s voice coming through the handset sounded about the same.

“Something funny going on here,” Soper said.

“Knock it off,” Kerr told him.

“Sure, if you say.”

But Breeson was feeling it, too. He didn’t know if it was this black, wet night in the cemetery or that hound acting all jittery, but he was feeling very tense all of sudden. The flesh at his belly just crawling in waves. He kept looking around like he was expecting to see something horrible come slinking out between the graves, something with yellow eyes and big teeth. He thought if someone would have sneaked up behind him and tapped his shoulder, he would have jumped a foot. The graves. The rain. That clinging mist. Man, it made the cemetery look like a set from an old horror movie. Now and again, he caught sight of one of the other squads, their flashlight beams scanning around, their muffled voices carried by the wind.

Kleets got the hound moving, but the dog fought him all the way.

“See the way he’s acting?” Soper said. “Dogs can sense things we can’t. I had a dog once that”

“Shut up,” Kerr told him again.

And they were all feeling it, Breeson knew, same thing the hound had been picking up on for some time now. The sense that something was very wrong here. That if the graveyard was a puzzle, that suddenly the pieces were not fitting together so good anymore. The atmosphere seemed swollen with dread.

They moved on, the hound shaking now. The ground was just soft muck and their boots sank right into it. All you could hear was the water dripping and the dog growling and boots being drawn from the mud.

The hound stopped before a flooded grave that sat in a little low dip. The water had spread out and consumed three or four other graves. Looked like a little fish pond, dead leaves floating on its surface. The hound was smelling something there. He sniffed the water and then jumped back like something had nipped at him. He froze up in a straight line, one forepaw extended like a pointer and his tail straight as a poker. A low whining came from his throat. Kleets yanked him away and the dog took off fast, leading them on a merry chase through a series of graves. Then he started to snarl and fight, snapping at the leash, his own tail, and even Kleets. There was a row of hedges before them. High enough so that you could not see over them.

“Hell is wrong with that mutt?” Rhymes wanted to know.

They stood around again, sensing something but not knowing what. Rhymes got on his walkie-talkie and his voice was practically a whisper. Everyone played their lights around. Nothing to see but those high hedges sparkling with raindrops, tombstones and gnarled looking trees.

“We just gonna stand here”

“Shut the hell up,” Breeson told Soper this time.

They were all listening and listening hard. They were hearing something, but they did not know what: a sodden, slippery sort of sound like wet snakes coiling around each other in a ball. Slithering, undulant. And something beneath it like a muted hissing, the sort of sound a radiator makes as it cools in the summertime.

The dog took off and Kleets with it.

Around the hedgerow they went and so fast that Kleets could barely stay on his feet. Rhymes and the others followed suit, running through that muck and the pools of standing water. Through patches of mist, around burial vaults plastered with wet leaves and…and that was as far as they got.

“Jesus Christ,” Soper said.

They were all seeing it and to a man, they weren’t sure what it was. Not really. For the cemetery before them and as far as their lights could reach was alive. It was growing and pulsing and blooming. Snotty strands of some white morbid fungi were growing right up from the saturated ground in a great webby growth of pale tissue that was moving and coiling, shining like oil. The gravestones and markers and obelisks were consumed by a pulsating, slithering plexus of living material that reached from the ground and right up into the trees. It was threaded from branches to monuments in sheer plaits and heaving tarps. All of it viscidly alive and smelling of putrescence.

The hound took off running in the opposite direction and Kleets did not try to stop him.

“People,” Soper said. “Growing…like people.”

And that’s what it looked like. For sprouting like buds from that network of fungi were dozens and dozens of faces…men, women, children, terribly white and distorted, unformed like the faces of fetuses. Embryonic. Not only that, but winding loops of tissue and things that were trying to become limbs. Breeson saw hands erupting from a womb of fungi. You could see the impressions of fingers pressing against the membranous material and then the skin ruptured like a hymen, the hands bursting free like they had just been born. And not just one hand, but ten and then twenty, many of them blossoming from the same bulb. Hands growing upon hands growing upon hands.

“What…what kind of fucking freakshow is this?” Rhymes wanted to know, his voice filled with desperation and disgust.

The others said nothing. What could be said?

Arms were snaking free, chalky and mottled. Long exaggerated fingers splaying out, webbed together, but wriggling and alive. Solid masses that might have been bodies eventually…some even had the mounds of female breasts. And heads, of course. More all the time. Sometimes singly, but often three or more heads joined together or a single head with more than one face. And in one particularly gruesome instance, there was a rising, knobby pillar set with dozens of screaming faces piled one atop another like carvings on a totem pole, individual faces and faces melting into other faces.

And what was the very worst thing was that this was not some mindless, freakish growth.

For that entire network was getting excited at the arrival of the cops. It was undulating and creeping, spreading out, multiplying. More faces bursting free. More clutching, deformed hands. Things twitching and writhing and emerging. Yes, it was all reacting to their arrival and the faces, though they lacked eyes and had only hollows where eyes might be placed, were looking at them, heads craning on rubbery necks to get a look at them. Faces pushing out of gelatinous masses with horrible juicy sounds, mouths opening and closing like they were trying to breathe.

Soper ran off and Kleets did, too. They all heard them splashing away and who could really blame them? Because this, this was an atrocity. Whatever that oozing, shifting cobweb of flesh really was, there was no getting around what it was trying to be. It must have started germinating far below in those buried coffins, perhaps, filling them with degenerate life, feeding on the raw materials of the bodies down there, absorbing them like colonies of pale toadstools. Then bursting free from those boxes and growing through the soil in a fleshy white mass like some hungry cancer, an intricate system of rootlets, becoming an immense fruiting body that drained the charnel earth of grim nourishment before erupting from the waterlogged ground as a whole and giving flower. And now it was above ground, covering the earth and stones and bushes and crawling right up the trees in an unbroken circuitry of excrescence. Imitating what had given it life, crudely replicating what it found in those caskets far below.

Yes, Breeson knew, that was exactly what had happened. What was bringing the dead back in this city had now resurrected an entire cemetery. The knowledge of this made him want to drop to his knees and cry.

Everything out there was moving and worming, boiling with pestilent life, limbs reaching and hands fluttering and faces opening like crypt orchids. Mouths were opening and shutting, things like colorless tongues licking spongy lips.

“Get out of here!” Rhymes suddenly said, shocking them all out of it. “Now! Get the hell out of here!”

The web of flesh was agitated now, everything squirming and stretching, faces popping from central masses like bubbles. There were hissing sounds and slithering noises, the sound of that fungi in motion as it began to really move, spreading out in the direction of the men themselves. Contorted mouths opened and screamed with agonized voices. The voices of men and women and children, but shrill and piercing, or low and clotted. A wall of noise that masked the movement of the fungi itself.

The ground began to tremble.

Trees began to shake and stones began to tumble over. Men cried out and the cemetery earth rumbled like an empty belly. Great rents opened everywhere, headstones falling into the earth, trees falling over and the ground itself vibrating like an earth tremor was sweeping through it. Limbs fell from the oaks overhead. Mausoleums shook and swayed, many of them crumbling into heaps of shattered concrete. The men tried to find their feet, but were thrown to the ground, into each other, tossed over the heaving earth. That fungi was whipped into a wild agitation, creeping in every direction, it seemed, multiplying itself. Something white and lashing like a tentacle yanked Rhymes screaming into the night. Chasms were opening everywhere as the skin of the graveyard simply sheared open in dozens of places.

And it was surely not from any seismic activity.

Breeson, stumbling along, avoiding falling trees and tipping monuments, saw clearly what it was all about. That horrible fungi was the cause. For it was like an iceberg in its own way: what you saw above the surface was just a fraction of its total volume. And now the rest of it was coming up, unearthing itself, tearing itself up by flaccid white roots. It vomited from the split earth like some seething, steaming infection in mounds and pustules. A heaving mass of noxious gray-white jelly that was veined purple and red and blue, faces and forms and limbs swimming up out of the tissue, hundreds of bulging pink eyes opening.

Breeson saw Kerr fall into a pit of that rising flesh, heard the mucky, slopping sounds as he sank into it.

All across the cemetery, men were screaming and crying out for help and begging for mercy. Five or six cops came running in his direction and were literally swallowed alive by what oozed from the ground.

In the end, it was only Breeson who made it to the front gates, the graveyard alive and roiling and consuming behind him. And by then, of course, he was completely out of his mind, happily so.

 

19

“At first, it’s only a sliding and a dragging…a creeping noise coming out of the woods at you,” Cal Woltrip said to the children gathered in the shadowy bus. “But you can feel it getting closer, making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. And by then, heh, heh, it’s too late, far too late. For the thing has found you, the thing is coming closer and closer”

“Just stop it,” Tara Boyle said.

“and you can’t run, you can’t hide. You can only scream as it drops down out of the dark and winds around your throat, squeezing and sucking your brain out.”

His brother Kyle giggled. “Yeah, you can hear it sucking your brains out.”

“What is it?” Alicia Kroll wanted to know. “What does it look like?”

Cal laughed like a horror movie host: “Heh, heh, heh.” He was holding one of the flashlights under his chin so that his face was mired in shifting shadow. “It looks like a brain…a living, crawling brain with a spinal cord that’s like a tail. That’s what it wraps around your neck…that’s what holds you while it sucks the brain out of your skull…”

“Oh, gross,” Lacee Hendersen said.

“That’s stupid,” Chuck Bittner said, which was pretty much what he said about anything unless he came up with it.

Kyle looked at him. “You’re a fag just like your dad.”

“Shut up!”

“Homo.”

Bobby Luce held up his hands. “Okay, okay, everybody stop it!”

Kayla Summers began to whimper.

“Oh, boy,” Alicia Kroll said, “here we go again.”

Bobby Luce sighed. How was he supposed to reign in this bunch? True, Mr. Reed had placed him in charge of them while he went to look for help, but that didn’t exactly mean he wanted to be in charge. Mr. Reed had been gone for like two hours now and the natives were getting restless. Half of them wanted to leave the bus and find their own help and the other half wanted to stay. If it wasn’t Kyle and Cal Woltrip telling stories about psychopaths with chainsaws and brain-sucking monstrosities, then it was Chuck Bittner threatening them all with his father or Kayla Summers bursting into tears and Tara Boyle whining about everything. The others weren’t so bad, but they were all getting nervous and agitated and maybe more than a little scared.

And it was scary.

Bobby Luce, despite his eleven years, had inherited the practicality and rock-solid nerve of his parents. He did not scare easily. Even if something in a horror movie or horror comic occasionally freaked him out, he understood very well the dividing line between fantasy and reality. That line was very hard-etched in his mind. But even with his adult logic and common sense, this entire situation of being trapped in a bus in the pitch black in a flooded section of town…well, it was more than a little overwhelming.

The power had gone out now and Bethany was dark as a midnight cellar, that rain falling and falling. Sometimes light, sometimes very heavy, but always there. And like the others, all of it was getting on his nerves.

But what can I do? he wondered. I have to keep everyone here. Mr. Reed put me in charge and that means I’m responsible. I can’t let anyone leave and if they stay, I can’t let them claw each other’s eyes out.

It was a hell of a situation.

Sure, they were supposed to be a team, they were supposed to work together. Fairstreet Flyers, one for all and all for one. But that barely held water on the field during a game, let alone in the real world. Bobby wished Coach Costigan were there. She always seemed to have a pep talk for every eventuality and when that didn’t work, well, she had one hell of a temper, too.

Sighing, he shut off his flashlight.

They only had the two and they wouldn’t last forever. There were fifteen of them waiting in that bus and most were just sulking now, not saying a thing and Bobby wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. God, what was taking Mr. Reed so damn long?

“Cal,” Bobby said. “Turn that flashlight off. No sense wasting those batteries.”

“Okay, Chief.”

The light went off without an argument. Bobby was suspicious right away. Cal and Kyle weren’t as bad as some of the others, but they could be trouble. And Bobby was suspecting trouble when Cal didn’t even argue with him about the light.

“Probably a good idea,” Cal said. “You never know who might be out there.”

Oh, boy.

Kyle giggled as he always did. “Sure, out in the storm…you don’t know what’s out there. Some lunatic might see our lights and come to investigate.”

“He might have a knife,” Cal said.

“Or an axe,” his brother speculated.

“And he might be hungry. He might want something to eat,” Cal said, his voice dropping a few octaves into its horror host tone again. “I wonder who he is?”

“Some guy that escaped from a mental hospital,” Kyle decided. “Sure, he’s wandering out in the storm. He can probably smell us. And when he smells us, he’s gonna get hungry.”

Cal nodded. “And when he gets hungry, he’s gonna remember that butcher knife in his pocket.”

“Or that bloody axe in his hand.”

“Yeah, and he’s gonna want some meat. Some meat to chop up, red and bloody meat that he can stuff in his mouth. He likes the taste of it. It reminds him of all those kids he ate before they put him away.”

Bobby said, “C’mon already, will you two quit it?”

“And when he’s done eating us, he’s gonna want some souvenirs. Maybe a heart or a skull or something he can stuff in his pocket and chew on”

“Stop it,” Bobby told the both of them.

Kayla Summers was crying again and a few other kids were fighting back sobs.

“Why don’t you two grow up already?” Lacee Henderson said, getting a little tired of talking Kayla down every time the Woltrip brothers got her all worked up again.

“He’s not coming back,” Tara Boyle said. “Mr. Reed.”

“Sure he is,” Bobby told her.

“But he’s not. If he was, then he would have been back by now.”

“That’s right,” Chuck Bittner said. “I think we should just walk out of here. It’s stupid to wait like this.”

And pretty soon they were all voicing their opinions and what was Bobby to do? He was bigger than the others, so he could probably physically stop a few of them, but not all of them. It just wasn’t possible.

As the other kids argued back and forth, Lacee and Alicia and Kayla were the only ones for staying put. Bobby squeezed his eyes shut and listened to the rain and felt the darkness closing in around them, imagining it to be some malefic fist that would crush the bus to a pulp. It was crazy thinking and not the sort that Bobby indulged in much, but the image presented itself and some morbid streak in his mind liked it, decided it was the perfect thing to torment him with. He tried to shake it out of his head, but it clung there as the worst things always seemed to. Maybe it was this waiting and maybe it was the Woltrip brothers with those terrible stories, but Bobby was frightened. He wasn’t sure of what exactly, but the fear was there: thick and unreasoning and complete.

C’mon, you idiot! You’re not afraid of the dark and the oogie-boogie man now are you?

But at that momentwhich, although he was not aware of it, was a defining moment in his young lifehe could not honestly say that he did not believe in spooks and spirits and creeping nightmares. God, it was so awfully dark in that bus, your mind just got carried away. Nothing but the sound of all those kids breathing or maybe not breathing at all, just holding their breath and waiting, waiting for something to happen…

And suddenly, with that in mind, Bobby became aware of the fact that nobody was talking.

It was dead silent in the bus.

The Woltrip brothers were not trying to scare the pants off anyone. Chuck Bittner was not bragging about his old man’s money. Tara Boyle was not whining. And, above all, Kayla Summers was not even crying.

There was a tenseness in the bus, an almost electric sense of foreboding like everyone was trying to keep quiet so that maybe if there was someone or something out there, they would not hear them, would not be able to zero in on them. Bobby swallowed. Then swallowed again. It wasn’t just him now. They were all feeling it. Like maybe they were not alone after all. That maybe something really was out there, something hungry and patient and incalculably evil.

Stop it! he told himself.

But he couldn’t.

His guts were tangled in knots and there was sweat beading his brow. Something was happening or about to and he could feel it. Really feel it. A palpable sense of dread, of doom. Though the rain was coming down at a steady rate, he thought he could hear splashing sounds outside. He looked to the windows, but they were speckled with raindrops and beyond them, God, it was miserably dark, unfathomably dark like the inside of a buried coffin.

“I’m scared,” Tara Boyle said.

“Shut up,” Lacee told her. “Be quiet.”

Bobby was thinking weapons now. If there was someone or some thing out there, then how would they defend themselves? For he could feel it right from his balls up to his throat, that inexplicable sense of danger. And more than that, the unshakable feeling that there was someone out there, people maybe, gathering around the bus like jagged-toothed sharks gathering around a sinking ship or buzzards circling a dying man.

There was a sudden thudding sound against the side of the bus and somebody let go with a strangled little cry.

“Who did that?” Bobby said.

But there were no answers. Just those faces barely visible in the gloom.

“Kyle? Cal?”

“No,” Cal said. “It wasn’t us. It came…it came from outside.”

And Bobby believed him, even though he wished it weren’t true. Maybe at any other time he would have been thinking that it was just Mr. Reed coming back with help, but he knew better. This was no help arriving, it was something else entirely.

There was another thud.

Bobby felt Lacee grab his arm and Alicia grab the other one. Something was rattling fiercely in his chest and it took him a moment to realize that it was his own heart. The girls’ hands on him were gripping him so tightly he thought they would snap his arms.

And then outside…a sliding, dragging sound like somebody was pulling themselves along the length of the bus. And on the other side, another thud…then a screeching sound like nails were being dragged along the outside panels.

Kayla Summers said, “It’s…it’s those brain-eating things.”

“Shut up,” Kyle told her. “That was just a movie…”

The tenseness held, was welded into place much as the bodies it came from. Finally, the Fairstreet Flyers were a team…one mind and one body. They were locked together, holding onto one another for dear life. They didn’t know why exactly, but they understood the sudden necessity of it.

Bobby wrenched himself free of the hands on him, knowing that somebody had to do something, somebody had to break this spell before everyone just lost it and started screaming. It was like being in a darkened movie theater, knowing something horrible was about to happen up on the screen. Or being in one of those carnival Halloween spookhouses, walking down a dim corridor and knowing that someone was about to reach out and grab you…

Bobby took hold of the flashlight, his hand shaking. He brought it up and turned it on. The beam of light was absolutely blinding and the moment his eyes adjusted to it, Bobby wished he’d left it off.

Maybe the dark was better.

Because in the dark you could not see those pallid faces peering in through the windows. Those starkly white faces set off by huge, glistening black eyes that were simply empty and dead.

Somebody screamed.

Bobby turned the light off.

There was a sudden knocking at the bifold door. At first just a gentle rapping, then a pounding and finally a hammering.

Whoever those people were, they wanted in.

Suddenly, a million hands were thudding against the outside of the bus, others beating against the door. Fingers scraping against the glass and faces pressed against those windows, hollow-eyed and pulpy.

The kids were crying out, screaming. Some were praying.

But Bobby heard none of it.

Because he was looking at the windshield up in the cab. There was something crawling up it he first took to be a giant, leggy spider. But as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could see what it was quite plainly.

A disembodied hand.

It was pale and bloated, the fingers pulling it up the windshield, leaving a slimy trail behind it.

Bobby didn’t hold off any longer: he screamed.

 

20

A few minutes after they entered the cemetery, Henry T. Oates came to the shocking realization that not only were they fucked here, but that in this particular violation, there would certainly be no flowers or soft kisses in the dark. Not so much as a heart-shaped box of candy. No, this definitely was of the grab-your-ankles-and- grit-your-teeth variety.

Neiderhauser, God bless him, was still whining. “Sarge…I’m serious here…this is crazy. To hell with Hopper and Torrio. Piss on ‘em, we need back up.”

“I’ll let you know when you need back up, sunshine,” Oates told him.

They were drifting through the black water of a cemetery that Neiderhauser said had to be All Saints. Which was all and fine in Oates way of thinking. Not that that pearl did them much good. When you went to meet your maker, didn’t matter whether it was a bayonet or a Russian knife that sent you there; you were going all the same. And right then, Oates figured it didn’t much matter the name of this particular boneyard, because the shit was about to get deep.

Neiderhauser had killed the engine so Oates could get his senses stoked up and hot, maybe tell him just what was going on here. Just after they got into the cemetery, trying to catch up with Hopper’s boat, there’d been a booming sound like an impact somewhere out there, which made Oates think that Hopper and his band of merry men had smacked into something and flipped over. Course, over the sound of the Johnson pump jet engine at full rev, it was hard to say.

“Back there,” Neiderhauser said. “Those things in the water…they were”

“Unfriendlies,” Oates said. “That’s what they were and that’s how we’ll log it.”

Nobody argued with him and that was a good thing, for he surely wasn’t in the mood for it. They’d lost the second boat back in the alley along with four boys. Now that wasn’t just bad, it flat out stank. And now maybe they’d lost Hopper and Torrio, too. Oates wasn’t liking this. This whole op wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be a fairly simple search-and-rescue, nothing more.

But now it had become anything but.

Oates had seen those things in the alley, too. He had seen what they looked like and it had scared him as bad as the others. Those…individuals, how could you classify them? Not as men and women surely. They looked like they’d crawled out of a mass grave, were in search of a few spare body bags.

You can try and be cute and sassy about those things all you want, Oates told himself, but they were all dead, the walking dead, goddamn

“Zombies,” Neiderhauser said. “Zombies.”

“That’ll do,” Oates warned him, wiping a mist of rain from his face. “Keep your eyes peeled.”

Hinks hadn’t said a word since the incident in the alley. As if the very horror of all that had completely shut something down in him, had emptied him. He was just a shell with staring eyes. Maybe he was in shock and maybe he had lost his mind. Either way, Oates just didn’t have the time to babysit him. Not now.

Knowing procedure, Oates had radioed it all in. But the captain told him to stay and look for survivors and under no condition abandon his people out there. So that was that and now here they were.

But it was no easy bit.

Even without the fear that was worming up his asshole like an unfriendly finger, this was a mess. For maybe All Saints boneyard made some sort of sense when you were walking its roads and following its paths, but when there was a good six or seven feet of water covering it up, well it was a maze. All around them were treesthick boles like pillars, branches spreading out above in a nearly unbroken weave and stout limbs rising from the soup. And in-between, the tips of tall monuments and the peaked roofs of burial vaults jutting up. Yeah, it was a maze, all right. The water was turgid and oily, a foul steam rising from it, lots of things bobbing and drifting just under the surface.

It was positively claustrophobic.

It reminded Oates of a mangrove swamp he’d spent two days in down in Brazil as part of a survival exercise years back. It was dark like that swamp, stank like that swamp, and gave him that same feeling of vulnerability…the sense that there were terrible things out there, watching him, things he would never see until they jumped out of the darkness at him.

Neiderhauser was terrified.

His constant bitching and complaining had an edge to it now that made you think he was teetering, that if he fell all the way, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men would never put him back together again. Sure, fear. Ugly, simmering fear. It was in all of them now.

And there was nothing Oates could say to change it.

What they had seen back in that alley, well, it was not the sort of thing you could just turn away from. It was the sort of thing that got down inside your mind, crouched in the darkness there.

“All right,” Oates said, “let’s get this done. Grab those oars, you poo-nanny sonosofbitches, and take us around that stand of trees.”

Again, they did not argue. Hinks and Neiderhauser sets their weapons aside and took hold of the oars, pushed them forward. The branches of the trees rose up jagged and skeletal, looked sharp enough to impale a man.

They came around, skirted the oval top of an obelisk, and thudded right into something. It was a box, long and narrow and covered with leaves.

“A coffin,” Neiderhauser said.

And it was. It bumped past them and they all fell as silent as Hinks. The wan moonlight reflected off its tarnished brass handles, falling rain speckled its surface. Oates knew that when a graveyard was inundated for days upon days, sometimes the soil just dissolved into a muddy silt and what was under it tended to rise to the surface.

“There’s another one,” Neiderhauser said.

Oates was on the spotlight and he picked out two or three others, one of them completely rotted. More a collection of sticks than anything else. Rotted cerements trailed out into the water like confetti.

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 there 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.

But that wasn’t possible…the power was off. It couldn’t be ringing. Feeling disoriented, he stumbled over to where the phone sat on a desk. It just kept ringing and he stared dumbly at it.

This is totally psycho, dude, the power is out.

But maybe power had been restored to a few houses and maybe phones worked some other way. If that was so, he could call Heather Sale’s or Lisa Bell’s and find out about Chrissy.

He snatched it up on the seventh ring.

Slowly, with trembling hands, he brought it to his ear. There was air in his throat and he could not speak. Water dripped from him. On the other end, he could hear something.

Something like wind howling through low places.

Then a voice, clotted and congested said, “I’m coming, big bwother…wait for me…I’m coming…”

Nicky.

With a rasping scream, Deke dropped the receiver and fell onto his ass in the drenched carpet.

And still he could hear his brother’s high, screeching voice.

Laughing.

And laughing and laughing.

And another voice in Deke’s head told him, they’re all down below in those secret tunnels waiting for us.

Out in the streets, the wind howled.

 

22

Thing was, Lily did not ask why Mitch and Tommy came home carrying bags of salt under their arms. She just looked at them, smiled and accepted. And that probably wasn’t a good thing. Again, Mitch was struck by that weird mood she was in. She was acting like a little girl with a secret. A big, wonderful secret kept locked behind pressed lips. And Mitch just couldn’t bring himself to ask what that secret might be. As it was, she was giddy and happy and excited like she was waiting for something momentous to happen.

Oh, something might happen tonight, he found himself thinking, but I don’t think you’re going to like it, Lil.

The Zirblanksi twins were staying with them being that they still couldn’t find their parents. Mitch and Tommy had been over to their house three times and they still weren’t home.

“I don’t want you girls to be worrying,” Mitch told them. “Your mom and dad are probably holed up somewhere waiting this out.”

He wasn’t sure whether the twins believed him or not, but they seemed comfortable with the idea of staying at his house. And he supposed after Miriam Blake, the Addam’s Family would have seemed acceptable. Mitch hadn’t known the girls very well before any of this started. They’d grown up a few houses down Kneale Street, but he didn’t think he’d ever said much more than a simple hello to them his entire life, stuffed some candy into their plastic pumpkins on Halloween night and waved to them on the street. Of course, the twins had a reputation as hellions, something he knew was pretty much true.

But tonight, he was not seeing that.

Rita was very quiet for the most part, brooding sometimes, kept chewing her fingernails. Rhonda was the more outgoing of the two. She kept asking questions, wanting to help with things.

When Mitch and Tommy got back at sundown, or just after, Rhonda had said, “Why so much salt, Mr. Barron?”

Maybe Lily was too lost in her personal fog to care, but not Rhonda.

Mitch had to come up with a lie…and quick. “It’s for my ice cream maker,” he said, not entirely sure where that pearl of bullshit had come from. “You need lots of salt.”

That much was true. Mitch had gotten an ice cream maker for Christmas a few years before and it now sat on a high closet shelf gathering dust. But he’d read the instructions and you did need an awful lot of salt to make ice cream.

Rita brightened at the idea. “We’re going to make ice cream? Can we make strawberry?”

Mitch swallowed. “Um…well…”

Tommy knew he was lying, was enjoying how he squirmed. “Yeah, Mitch, I want some chocolate. Can we make rocky road, too?”

“I love rocky road,” Rhonda said.

Oh, Christ…now what?

The power was off and they were sitting around by candlelight and these kids wanted to make ice cream. You didn’t need electricity to make it, but you needed a freezer. Already, Rita and Rhonda had helped Lily move most of the perishables from the upstairs freezer to the floor freezer in the basement where it was cooler. They would last down there longer, but it probably wasn’t cold enough to store ice cream. But looking at those two girls with their big dark eyes and pretty faces, he could not tell them no. He supposed they could sacrifice one of the bags of salt. Tommy and he had brought home thirty pounds of the stuff and Lilybeing Lilyalready had a couple five pound bags in the pantry. Lily was like that…or had been…always stocking up when things went on sale. That’s why they had like twenty rolls of paper towels downstairs and enough toilet paper for ten years.

Lily said, “I think it would be fun to make ice cream, girls. When Chrissy gets home, she’ll want some.”

Mitch felt that like a knife in his chest. Still no Chrissy. He’d fed Lily some bullshit about her staying the night at the Sale’s house and Lily had accepted that. Maybe it was true. Maybe that’s where Chrissy indeed was. After all, Heather Sale’s dad said they had been there and would be back. Still, Mitch didn’t like not knowing where she was. Especially with the flooding…and other things.

In the kitchen, by the light of a Coleman lantern, Lily and the girls began assembling ingredients. At least it gave them something to do. And when she was busy, that funny light in Lily’s eyes didn’t burn so bright. Maybe this is what she needed: to keep busy. Maybe, maybe. But there was something there that Mitch did not like.

“I been thinking of all these lights we got going,” Tommy said after Mitch had delivered the ice cream maker to the girls. “You think…you think it’s a good idea to be burning them?”

Mitch didn’t know exactly.

In a way, he thought lights might bring in people that needed shelter and the more, the merrier tonight. But there was also the possibility that the lights might draw in those other…people out there. For surely, like it or not, they were out in the streets now. Mitch had been thinking about them a lot and not coming up with any good explanations for any of it. All the doors and windows were locked. They had Tommy’s four-ten and Mitch’s twenty-gauge Remington auto-loader that he used for hunting partridge in the fall, to go “a-grousing” as his old man had called it. Though it had been a few years since he’d been out bird hunting, he still had a full box of shells. So they had weapons, if it came down to it.

But would any of that be enough?

“I don’t know,” Mitch finally said, “but I figure we have to take a chance. It might be worse sitting in the dark with those kids.”

They had pulled Lily’s big conversion van out of the garage now and pulled in Tommy’s truck. He had a police scanner in there and that, at least, connected them with the world. The garage was attached, so they didn’t have to go outside.

While Tommy sat in the cab listening to the police chatter which was pretty hairy stufflost people and bodies, looting and shootings, accidents and people trapped in flooded buildingshe sat by the workbench and smoked, staring out the single rain-spattered window at the night beyond. He didn’t really know what any of this was about. He figured most didn’t, but there were a few out there who did. After seeing that living dead woman that the cops pulled from the drainage ditch, seeing that she wore the remains of military fatigues, Mitch had pretty much made up his mind that the explosion out at the Fort Providence base was all connected up with this. He didn’t know what they did out there, nobody really did, but they were involved. All this shit had come down after that explosion and although Mitch didn’t believe half the crazy stories circulating about that, there must have been a germ of truth in there somewhere.

The Army was saying it was fuel tank that exploded.

But Mitch was no longer buying that.

They had been working on something weird out there, must have been. The idea that the dead would start walking around on their own just didn’t wash. The Army were up to something fantastic out there and whatever that had been, it was out of control now. Maybe something in the rain. Mitch had spent four years in the Navy. That wasn’t exactly a career, but it was enough experience so that he knew the military were not exactly up front about their activities. And when they fucked-up, they rarely admitted such. No, Mitch was not much into conspiracies. He didn’t really think the military had captured flying saucers or anything, but they were no doubt involved in things equally as frightening.

This scenario pretty much proved that.

Mitch didn’t trust his own government any farther than he could throw them and he sure as hell did not trust the military. You put people in power and they invariably abused it. But even with that in mind, he doubted that any of this was meant to happen. No, it was an accident. Something went wrong, something got out of control.

But what exactly? What had they been doing at that base?

Tommy came over. “Mitch…it’s getting pretty wild out there.”

“No shit?”

“I’m serious here. There’s been some kind of riot out at Slayhoke, prisoners running wild. The National Guard are up there putting it down.”

“Jesus, just what we need right now.”

“And something else…there’s a bus load of kids missing,” Tommy said. “They were coming from a soccer match and now nobody can find that bus. But they figure it’s in town.”

“One tragedy after another.”

Tommy lit a cigarette. “You know what I was thinking?”

Mitch looked up at him.

“I was thinking about that witch, that old lady you took me to see.”

“Wanda Sepperly?”

Tommy nodded. “I don’t believe in any of that crap, but you got to admit that lady’s got something going on. She knows things. I bet she might know where that bus is and I bet she might know where Chrissy is.”

Mitch nodded, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it. “Maybe…maybe we should take a walk over there.”

“Maybe we should.”

Mitch nodded. “For a minute there, I thought you were going to tell me about some cousin of yours that was a witch.”

“What kind of family do you think we are?”

 

23

Next door to the Barron’s, as the idea of making ice cream was being tossed around, Arland Mattson came awake to the sound of invasion. He’d been snoozing in his recliner, feet atop a stool heaped with newspapers. He came awake slowly, dreaming about the sores on his chest and the pains he got down in his bowels sometimes. He opened his eyes, thinking he’d maybe heard a car backfire, but then right away he heard only the sound of the falling rain, the wind skirting the eaves.

Nothing more.

Right away, he became suspicious.

Arland had not necessarily been of sound mind since his wife Camille had been taken by cancer ten years previously. What had been a somewhat alarming trend towards suspicion and distrust while she was alive, had bloomed into a fully developed persecution complex by the time of the flooding of Witcham. Arland was extremely paranoid, was certain that the government were watching him and had planted listening devices in the walls of his house. He also believed that the pancreatic tumor that had killed his wife was not merely a matter of heredity or chance, but the result of something slipped into her food that was intended for him. And he knew that there were parasites living inside him, tiny insectlike creatures that were eating away his stomach, even if the doctor told him that such a thing was impossible. Neighbors like Mitch Barron had gotten used to the threats of frivolous lawsuits and the rampant conspiracies that Arland saw in everything from sudden changes in the weather to the questions asked by census takers, but they only saw small bite-sized portions of his dementia.

Had they seen more, they would have had him committed.

So when Arland came awake, he knew that his house had been invaded. Possibly by the things the rain had brought and possibly by government agents that had come to steal his water samples that he had taken from the rain.

Arland sat there in his chair, listening, knowing something had come into his house and right about then he began to smell it. Whatever it was, it stank dirty and flyblown.

Houses are very personal things.

They are the webs of our daily lives just as we are the spiders that inhabit them. And, like spiders, when something settles into our webs, we can feel the minute tugging of strands, the vibrations, the weight and physical impression intruders make. And this is what Arland was feeling. Though he was past eighty, terribly thin, and his vision was not so good, he could feel that sense of invasion just fine. The minute threads of his web had been touched, broken, torn asunder. Some weighty bluebottle fly or yellowjacket had landed and become ensnared in those fine filaments and he could feel the oscillations of their distress…or perhaps it was his own.

Lightly, he got to his feet and grabbed a butcher knife off the coffee table. His battery lantern was still glowing and he took this, too.

Arland was afraid, but he had suspected this for some time. It was only a matter of time before they came to silence him; he knew too much. They had no doubt hoped to kill him in his sleep, but he had thwarted their plans, had he not?

He walked out of the living room and into the hall.

The front door was open a few inches and this more than anything made something solidify in his belly. He always kept the door locked. But now it was open and what could that mean? Well, yes, they had picked the lock, of course. They knew how to do things like that. There was a hidden key outside, secreted beneath a loose brick on the porch, but even they would not have known that.

Only Arland did.

And Camille, of course. But Camille had been dead well over five years now. She’d been cremated over to the Harvest Hill crematorium.

Maybe he’d forgotten to lock it.

And then, he was suddenly certain that he had. And now somebody had come into the house in the dead of night.

Arland stood there with the knife, wishing then he had a gun. But he’d never gotten one because they had to be registered and that was just another way the government tracked you and fattened the file they kept on everyone.

There were wet footprints leading from the doorway and down the hall to the door that led to the cellar. Of course, that’s where they would go. Arland kept much of his material concerning their activities down in the cellar. He only hoped they would not touch his mason jars of rainwater, he needed those for his class action suit against them.

Breathing hard, a tightness at his chest, Arland followed those prints to the cellar door. The lantern threw jumping shadows all around him.

And a voice in his head told him, This is a job for a young man, not an old one.

But Arland dismissed that. He was up to this. Certainly, he was.

And that’s when he heard something shatter in the cellar.

One of his mason jars.

The crash was followed by another and another and another. They were destroying his specimens, that’s what they were doing.

He threw open the cellar door, the light casting flickering illumination. He saw prints leading down the steps, prints that were black and muddy. As he started down, a papery rustle in his chest, more jars shattered and as he got to the bottom of the steps, one was tossed at him out of the darkness, exploding against the wall a few inches from his head.

Arland started and slashed out with his knife.

Shadows.

Shadows creeping and crawling and oozing around him. The stink was worse down here, a musty odor of rotting vegetables kept in moist closets. It was almost unbearable. Like something dead and fruiting with mushrooms had come into the house. It made his eyes water and his stomach heave.

Another jar shattered against the wall and another.

A pain needling dead-center of his chest, Arland struggled forward and for the first time he was wondering if he was truly up to this. If maybe coming down here had not been a terrible mistake.

He could hear that other person…they were somewhere down in the webby, mazelike confines of the cellar and they moved with a wet, squishing sound as if they did not have feet as such, but were stepping about on bloated toadstools. Shaking badly now, he came around the furnace room and into the washroom where the dryer and washer were. His light reflected off shards of glass in the stationary tub. Dozens of bottles had been broken in there.

But as he moved forward, something sinking inside him, he saw a mason jar on the floor. Its lid was missing, but it was about half full. But not with rainwater, but with something yellow and sharp-smelling: urine.

Arland gasped, barely able to catch his breath now.

He held up his lantern and there was another mason jar a few feet away and another beyond it. Both were about half-filled with urine. There was no mistaking that gagging, foul odor, the ammonia-like sharpness of it. Somebody…somebody had broken his jars and then emptied the others out, filling them with piss. Yes, there were more jars ahead, they led like a trail right up to the door of the rec room.

Arland was suddenly terrified.

Because unless there were dozens of people, no single person could have put out that much urine. Nobody had that much water in them. Yet, he was still hearing those squishing sounds and he knew there was only one individual down here.

Okay, you fool old man, now what? Do you try and run or do you face what’s been doing this?

But Arland knew there was really no choice.

For if he tried to make it up the steps, he would feel the motion behind him, then cold white fingers at the back of his throat. Because this was not some mere prank, this was all done for his benefit. Just like that trail of jars was meant to lure him into the rec room like a trail of candy leading to a witch’s cottage.

There were things in life you knew and those you could never know.

And what was waiting for him in the rec room was definitely of the latter variety. It had come slinking in here to torment him. Something hideous that had perhaps went door to door up Kneale Street trying locks until he or she or it had found one unlatched.

You might as well have invited it in, he told himself. Something that wanted to get out of the rain and wind, something lonely looking for warmth and…companionship.

And what could that be?

What exactly could that be?

Because he was pretty certain it was not the government.

It was something else.

Arland went to the rec room door and heard a muted giggling in there. The sound of someone laughing into their hands. His throat dry and his heart hammering painfully, he pushed open the door.

He saw the pool table right away. There were three more jars sitting on it, all half-filled by this thing with an inexhaustible bladder. Oh, its smell was nauseating and it reminded him of barns filled with rotting hay and boxes packed with wet, decaying leaves. Nothing alive could carry such an odor, only something dead and gassy and blackened.

He heard that giggling again.

More pain threading through his chest, he brought the lantern around and the knife clattered from his hand. He could not say exactly what he saw, only that it was a great blubbery shape plastered with brown Autumn leaves. Its head was matted with strands of gray hair that fell over its distended face. Its flesh, what he could see of it through the leaves, was white and puckered, smeared with streaks of dark mud. And it was naked. The breasts were pendulous and thickly-veined with blue, the belly hanging in greasy rolls.

A woman…or something that had been one once.

She was squatting on the floor, giggling with a wet congested sound as she filled yet another mason jar with piss. All the while, making a droning sound that was oddly musical and maybe was supposed to be a happy humming.

Arland gasped.

The piss kept running.

The sound of that was awful, not just the sound of liquid squirting into that jar as from a spigot, but chunks and clots of something dropping in there as well as if the bladder itself was coming apart.

Oh, Christ, no, no…

Arland went down on his ass, pain exploding in his chest and his vision blurring. Darkness moved through his head in waves. But after a moment, his vision cleared.

He heard the woman get up, sounding like a bag of wet laundry shifting. She came over to him with those splatting footfalls and stood over him. She was swollen and ripe, water dripping from her. With one bloated hand, she held up the mason jar she had filled and dumped it over Arland’s head. The urine was cold and filled with bits of sediment and chunks of tissue. He vomited right away, trying to cry out the whole while.

The rancid thing stepped over him and he could see beneath that tangled hair and accumulation of leaves, that she had eyes…black, shining things, jellied and glistening like bubbles that wanted to pop. He saw a mouth, gray broken teeth licked by a black tongue.

She stood over him, filled with squirming things and larval activity, bits of her dropping away. Oily fluids and watery discharges ran from her and she kept smacking her lips.

When she spoke, it sounded like her mouth was filled with oatmeal. “Arland…let’s take some samples, eh? One more for our class action suit…that’s a boy…open your mouth…let me fill it for you…”

As Arland’s heart ruptured in his chest, he felt those flabby and greasy fingers yank his mouth open as she squatted over him, bringing the cancerous ruin of her green and undulant privates into his face. Humming happily, she drained her bladder into his mouth.

But by the time that gray, sludgy water overflowed his mouth, Arland was thankfully dead.

 

24

An hour after those things attacked the bus, Bobby Luce lost what control he’d had of the kids. Some wanted to leave and some wanted to stay and nothing he seemed to say could bring them together again. So much for team spirit. So much for the Fairstreet Flyers. Their camaraderie, if it had ever really existed, was now just dust in the wind and Bobby simply did not have enough hands to hold it together.

He was tired.

He was fed-up.

And, yes, he was scared.

Even now, a good hour after those things, those people, had tried to get into the bus, it was still on him as he imagined it was on the others: that deep-set, almost automatic fear that made him start whenever the wind picked up or something splashed. How could you put that business into context? How could you absorb that into your world-view and not come out of it with white streaks in your hair? Those people…there were other words for them he didn’t dare use…those people had not been normal. They had looked pale, waterlogged, like corpses pulled from rivers and lake bottoms. And yet, they had been alive…well, at least, they had moved. Because their eyes had not been what you might call alive…dead and shining and just empty, hollow.

And they had been deranged, psychotic, something.

They wanted in and Bobby refused to speculate as to why.

And then, of course, if all that wasn’t enough to kick your legs out from under you, there was always the hand. Because he’d seen it, that severed dead hand crawling up the windshield. And so had some of the others.

“They’re zombies,” Cal Woltrip said as if it was all too obvious. He had dropped the horror host voice now that the shit had been finally scared out of him and had adopted an almost clinical tone, like Van Helsing talking about vampires. “That’s what they are. They can’t be nothing else.”

Alicia Kroll just shook her. “Walking dead people? Oh, come on.”

“Yeah, as if,” Lacee Henderson said.

But if these two girls were the last bastions of reason, no one else dared to argue the point. They sat around in the darkness, sunk in their personal mires of terror, and just accepted.

“Zombies,” Kyle said. “Zombies.”

“You saw them,” his brother went on, “you saw what they looked like. You think normal people look like that? You think even crazy people have faces and eyes like that?”

Bobby opened his mouth to object, but what was the point?

“I’ve seen zombie movies,” Chuck Bittner said. “And they eat people. They come back to eat people.”

At which point, Kayla Summers started sobbing uncontrollably.

Bobby just sighed and buried his face in his hands, wondering if Kayla’s tear ducts ever ran dry.

“Oh, God, does she ever stop?” Tara Boyle said. “Wah, wah, wah, wah. I’m so sick of this bus and I’m so sick of that crying. God.”

“Shut up,” Alicia told her.

Lacee put her arm around Kayla. “Is this stupid crap necessary? Do we have to sit around and talk about zombies?”

“That’s what they are,” Cal pointed out.

“Lah-tee-dah,” Lacee said. “So what? What does it matter what they are? They’re creepy and flipped out and nutso. That’s all I need to know. And what makes you the authority, Mr. Know-It-All? Just because you’ve seen more dumb movies than anyone else?”

“They’re not dumb!” Kyle said, either defending his brother or zombies in general, it was hard to say.

Lacee laughed. “They are, too! I’ve seen those dumb movies, they’re totally lame! Zombies stumbling around like a bunch of retards! I’m so sure. Unless you’re really slow, stupid, or crippled, I think you could outrun them even if those morons in those movies can’t…”

Oh, dear Christ, she was insulting the Holy Grail here, pissing on the cross, taking a dump on the altar… to Kyle and Cal, zombie movies were everything. They were both zombie freaks, collected dvds and toys and comics and masks and you name it, had waded through the gory waters of Italian splatterfests, and could both openly quote from George Romero’s Dead Trilogy. It was a religion to them and you didn’t make fun of a man’s faith.

“You’re a dumb bitch!” Kyle told her. “Everybody knows you’re nothing but a dumb bitch! A slut! A sleezebag! A whore! A”

“All right,” Bobby said. “That’ll do.”

Kyle had a horrible temper, but Bobby was pretty certain that Cal wanted to say pretty much the same things to Lacee. Although she was none of those things, still being in the fifth grade, it didn’t slow Cal down.

Lacee thought it was funny. “Cal, can you please restrain that little disease? He’s so gay.”

Kyle fought to get free, but Cal would not let him. Bobby figured if Kyle got loose, he would probably start swinging on Lacee. But whether the Woltrip brothers liked what Lacee said or not, she did have a point. Those zombies in those movies were not exactly known for their speed or grace. They were slow, drunken, dim-witted. He didn’t think that these things were of that variety.

“This is all dumb,” Chuck said. “You’re all dumb. And especially you, Kyle. You and your stupid, stupid, stupid zombies! I’m sick of it! I’m sick of all you assholes!”

Kyle started laughing, then singing: “Chuck is a friend of mine, he will blow me any time. For a nickel or a dime, fifty cents for overtime. If you have a credit card, he will blow you extra hard”

Chuck dove at him and Kyle met him, the two of them swinging and kicking. Cal and Bobby broke them up. Both were panting and bleeding and just wild. It took about five minutes before they both quit swearing and calling each other names.

Finally, Tara said, “Let’s just go.”

Bobby said, “It’s not safe out there.”

“Well, it’s not safe in here, that’s for sure,” she pointed out.

And that’s how the team finally, ultimately broke up. Tara and Chuck, the Woltrip brothers, and six or seven others just got to their feet and made for the door. Bobby let them take one of the flashlights, but that was about it.

“And you guys are just going to stay?” Cal said.

Alicia nodded. “That’s right.”

“You’re all nuts,” Kyle said.

“Maybe,” Bobby told him, “but we’re not going to die out there like you guys.”

“No, you’re going to die in here.”

Bobby watched them go, knowing he couldn’t stop them. He took hold of the lever and opened the doors. And it was at that particular moment, in the light of Cal’s flashlight, that Bobby saw indecision on their faces, as if maybe they weren’t real sure this was the best idea after all.

“Cmon,” Cal said, stepping down into the water and the others followed one by one, complaining about how cold it was.

The water up to their chests, they all looked back up at Bobby. “Last chance,” he said.

They turned and waded off, Cal in the lead.

Bobby shut the door.

He never saw any of them again.

 

25

Well, contrary to popular beliefor that of one Sergeant OatesHopper, Liss, and Torrio were certainly not dead. Maybe what they were going through was not exactly balloons and funny hats, but they were certainly not dead. They’d passed right through All Saints Cemetery in their boat and had not collided with a thing. Not until Hopper brought them back around into the city proper and they’d hit a partially-submerged car. And that had sent all three of them ass over teakettle into the drink, left them scrambling in that dirty water with nothing but their rifles and the gear they carried on their backs: a few packs of MRE’s, some emergency flares, a couple extra magazines for their M-16s.

But that was about it.

Their boat flipped over, dumped them, and then magically righted itself as boats sometimes will do. Last they’d seen of it, it was making headway out into the darkness without them. And if that hadn’t been so unbelievably tragic, it might have actually been funny.

On foot, in the flooded byways of River Town. If there was humor in that, you’d have to dig pretty deep to find it. The only good thing was that they were unhurt and far enough into River Town so that the water was only about waist-deep…unless you happened to step in a pothole.

But what did any of it mean, really?

It meant that Hopper, being a corporal, was in charge of Torrio and Liss, both privates. It meant that he was responsible for them and that if anything untoward happened to their shiny white asses, the captain would eat him alive over it. Not to mention what that professional ballbuster, Sergeant Henry T. Oates, would do to him. Hopper wanted command like he wanted a third tit or a removable skull-cap. Maybe not even that much. Because with command came responsibility and he was not very good with that. At 21 years of age, Hopper had lost no less than three jobs in the last year and a half because he’d forgot to set his alarm. His mother still had to remind him to wear clean socks and if it hadn’t been for his sometimes girlfriend, Cathy Jo, he would no doubt never clean his apartment or even remember to get some food in his belly on a regular basis. He would have happily zoned out playing Cellcom or Grand Theft Auto on his X-Box, screw reality.

But now he was in charge.

And he wanted it even less than he’d ever suspected. Because there was shit coming down in this city that he did not like. There were dead people in the water, only they were moving and seriously pissed at the living. Yeah, it almost sounded like a video game, when you thought about it. And Hopper loved video games almost as much as he loved Cathy Jo giving him a blowjob…but he sure as hell did not want to live in one.

As they trudged through the flooded streets, rifles in hand, the stink of the water up their noses, he kept telling himself that they were alive and they were armed and that was the important thing. He was glad for that. Or almost. He honestly wouldn’t have minded if Liss had bought it when the boat flipped, because he was just psycho and things were bad enough without a guy like that around.

Right then, Liss was saying, “I should call my mom, you guys. She gets really mad when I’m late. I don’t want to get grounded again. God, last time I couldn’t even watch TV. She had me doing laundry. You believe that? I had to do laundry. Your moms ever make you do laundry?”

“Can’t you shut him up?” Torrio said.

“No, I can’t,” Hopper said.

Jesus, he felt sorry for the guy. Almost. Maybe a combination of pity and contempt, you came right down to it. Liss had been funny ever since he’d opened fire in that ballpark, said he’d seen someone, and Oates had jumped up and down on his ass like it was a trampoline. He’d snapped or something. Had some kind of breakdown. Ever since then he’d just been out of it. Hopper kind of felt sorry for him. At any other time he would have really felt sorry for him. But they were in a bind here. They were in a potentially dangerous situation and the last thing he needed on his first run with command was guy who’d lost it.

Liss kept talking about shit that made no sense and Torrio kept bitching about it and there was Hopper, right in the middle, trying to keep things level. Was this why Oates was so belligerent all the time? Because he was playing babysitter for a bunch of wanna-be soldiers and the irony of the situation made him run down himself, them, and the Army in general?

And all this time I thought he was just an asshole, Hopper thought.

The rain picked up a bit, stippling the stagnant water around them, beading their faces. Hopper was miserable and he figured that went for the other two as well…Torrio anyway, Liss probably thought he was at a Cub Scout meeting or something.

“So what’s our plan here?” Torrio said.

Hopper scanned the silent, sunken streets with his flashlight. Nothing but rain falling and debris floating, empty buildings to either side flowing with shadow. There were things in the water and they could have been just about anywhere. Waiting in the flooded darkness, ready to leap out at them with gnarled white fingers. Christ, it was ugly, it was tense. He figured maybe this is what it felt like being in a real war, people out there wanting to kill you. Or maybe being the survivor of a shipwreck and waiting for the sharks to show. He supposed the latter was more applicable.

“I said, what’s our plan here?” Torrio said again, raising his voice. It echoed off the silent buildings around them and that was more than a little disturbing.

Hopper sighed. Goddamn Torrio asked the same question every ten minutes or so. “Our plan is the same as it’s been since we went overboard, dumbass. We keep moving. We keep moving until we get to some dry ground. Until the water goes down.”