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

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

Hot Tamale took a step forward, very round and very excited. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Mouth. All the fucking people in the world and we got to hook up with a weasel like you.”

Tommy laughed. “Oh, I get it, Hubb. You got this pig with to use as bait. You draw in those zombies and throw her at ‘em, take off running. The meat on her, she’d keep a dozen busy for at least an hour.”

Mitch sighed. “Tommy…”

“You’ll wanna watch that mouth of yours, you skinny-assed little piece of shit,” Hot Tamale said, ready to swing. “Else I’ll shut it for you. How’s that sound? Because if I can’t, Herb here sure as shit can.”

Herb just stood there looking dazed under the brim of his cowboy hat. “Huh?” he said.

“Oh, shut the hell up, you mother-rapers,” Hubb told them. “Mitch, Jesus, what in the fuck are you doing out here?”

So Mitch told him. It was Chrissy. Chrissy had brought them here. They thought she was being held in the orphanage. Hubb said he’d rallied his own troops after the “big flood” as he called it for an assault on that old spook house because the way he was seeing it, it had to be the epicenter of the whole mess.

“You cut off a snake’s head,” Hardy said, “and the body dies soon enough.”

They were much better provisioned than Mitch’s crew. They were all carrying 12-gauge pump shotguns and wore duck hunting vests equipped with ammo pouches. Clipped on the vests were flashlights and road flares. Hot Tamale and Herb carried duffels of gas bombs made from beer bottles with tampons shoved down the throats.

“Gonna have ourselves a wienie roast,” Herb told them.

Knucker held up her shotgun. “Rock salt. We emptied the pellets from our shells and loaded ‘em with rock salt. Them things don’t like salt. It eats ‘em right up. One good round usually does it.”

Another fully-loaded 12 gauge was slung over her back and she handed it to Tommy.

“Let’s do this,” he said.

“All right,” Hubb said, “enough of this cocksucking hen party, lets go do what we came to get done.”

They formed a skirmish line, stopping now and again so Hubb could take a pull off the little oxygen bottle he carried. Side by side, the eight of them moved slowly up the winding road to the old gates of the Sisters of the Bleeding Heart. The gates had long ago fallen down and were knotted in grasses and creepers. The orphanage rose up before them, crumbling and rotting like some medieval castle. Nobody hesitated. They slipped through the gates and re-formed their line. Mitch and Tommy were at one end with Deke, Hubb and the others spreading out in the other direction.

“We got company,” Hot Tamale said.

In the driving rain, they hadn’t seen what was in a little dip just before them. Not until they were almost on top of it. Six of the ghouls were on their hands and knees, feeding on the remains of a couple corpses sprawled before them. The bodies were so mutilated, gutted and gnawed and stripped, you could not tell if they had been men or women. The zombies just kept on feeding, tearing off bits of meat and chewing on bones. It was revolting.

“Holy oh cow,” Herb said.

The zombies looked up now, seeing they had an audience. Two of them were little girls with filthy school uniforms on and plaid skirts. Catholic schoolgirls from hell. They were white-faced and black-eyed, gore dripping from their mouths. The others were adults…or had been. The one that stood up first to challenge the intruders had been a young woman. At least, she looked like a young woman. She was naked, just as cold and white as cemetery marble. Her face was like some bubbly clot of mortician’s wax, set with holes and bulging growths. The lot of it looking like it had melted and ran…tendrils and ropes of it hanging like the strings of a dirty mop, growing right into her chest. She said something that was utterly unintelligible.

The girls kept gnawing on bones, sitting Indian-style on the muddy ground, watching what was about to take place with their huge, glistening black eyes. Transfixed like children watching a scary movie and munching popcorn.

The others stood up with the woman and started forward.

“All right,” Hubb said, “pay attention, you boys, this is how it’s done.”

He stepped forward with Hardy and Knucker. Hot Tamale and Herb stayed back.

As the dead came up out of that dip, Hubb gave the signal and the three of them opened up. They spent two shells each and the effect was devastating. The 12 gauge rounds hit their marks easily at such close range. One of the adults actually exploded in a spray of gray flesh and rubbery bones, lots of that black fluid. The others did not come apart. Pieces of them were blown off, but they still stood. At least, for about a second or two and then the rock salt did its business. What happened then was like some crafty, visceral piece of Hollywood special effects magic. The zombies moaned and cried out and literally folded right up, smoking and steaming and melting. Flopping about on the ground in the rain, their skins bursting open and letting forth a tide of black goo and worms. And that was about it.

“Shit,” Deke said, turning away.

The smell that came from them was hot and nauseating, like thousands of boiling dead fish.

“Works even better than table salt,” Tommy said.

 

28

Chrissy had thought that one thing was coming after Alona and her, but now she just wasn’t so sure about that. Whatever was down the hallway, it sounded as if there were more than one. She could hear the slap of bare feet, many feet, and now they had just stopped down there. Somewhere.

The waiting began.

Chrissy and Alona huddled in the dimness of that room Alona had shuttled them quickly into. It was a big room they were in. With what light came in through the rotting planks nailed over the broken windows at the far end, Chrissy could see that it must have been some sort of dormitory at one time. She could just imagine rows of metal-framed beds lined up against the peeling, mustard-colored walls. But now, it was just a long and dusty closet with cobwebs draped overhead and dust on the floors that had to be an inch deep. It was just filthy in there. The remains of broken beer bottles on the floor, cast-off cigarette butts, old leaves, rat droppings in the corners. A great hole was eaten through one of the walls. It was so big you could look into the room next door. The ceiling was drooping from water damage, many of the tiles having dropped to the floor. The air was thick and damp, stinking of plaster rot and something like old urine.

Chrissy and Alona squatted against one wall, holding onto each other. They were both sweating and shivering, tense and waiting. They were in a hell of a fix and they both knew it. Other than the crowbar Alona had, they were pretty much defenseless. The only thing in the room that could be used as a weapon were those shattered beer bottles.

But they were over near the door and Chrissy did not want to go over there.

And that was another problem: the door would not close.

Its frame was so swollen from damp rot that it simply would not shut. You could only get it partially closed before it wedged tight and even then it was still open an inch.

They were coming.

Whatever was out there, was coming. Perhaps they’d been standing around in indecision for a time, but now they were coming. Chrissy heard them with a sinking feeling in her chest. They were coming and there was no way to stop them. And, of course, she was not so naïve as to believe that what was coming up that shadowy hallway were people. No, of course not. These were dead things and she could smell the earthen boxes and narrow ditches they’d crawled out from. They came on with a stink of wet soil and green mildew and decayed shrouds. Any second now they would spy the partially open door and come right in in a mist of flies and grave stench.

Alona had the crowbar in her hands. She was holding it like a batter, breathing very fast.

Out in the hallway, they could hear the sound of nails being dragged along the walls and then something very peculiar: a slapping, thumping sound as if whatever was out there were guiding themselves along like blind men…by feel. The stink grew stronger. There had to be at least four or five of them judging by the shuffle of bare feet. They were nearing the door, patting the walls as they came.

It made no sense.

Surely they could see the door cracked open.

More thumping, bumping sounds. They passed by the door and the sound of flies buzzing passed with them. Their footfalls were mucky and moist. Down the hallway they went, slapping the walls, dripping and rotten and infested with vermin.

Chrissy and Alona looked at each other.

Alona shook her head.

Was there room for a glimmer of hope here? Chrissy wasn’t going to let herself believe that. There’s no way in hell those dead things weren’t going to find them. Just no way.

The footsteps were returning now, slow and inexorable. Those things were not slapping the walls now, but just running their hands along them. The noise it made was like wet dishrags dragged over concrete. She could hear them breathing with a sound as if their lungs were filled with sludge.

“Chrissy,” one of them said, a boy apparently, with a hissing sound like air leaking from a tire. “We know you’re here. We can smell you.”

Chrissy felt nettles in her stomach, piercing and sharp. They knew she was hiding. Not that someone was hiding in general but her specifically. What did that mean? Jesus, what did that mean?

“Chrissy, Chrissy, Chrissy, come out and play,” the voice said.

It was joined by another that came from a mouth filled with vomit: “Chrissy, Chrissy, Chrissy. We can feel you…we can smell you. Are you playing hide-and-seek? Do you like games?”

Still more voices, all of them thick and oozing and awful, in unison now: “Chrisssssseeeee…Chrisssssseeeee…Chrisssssseeeee…”

All of them were the voices of boys, wet and slopping, but boys all the same. What did that mean?

The terror that swept through her and settled into her was solid, physical, palpable. Her heart was hammering and her breath was coming in short, sharp bursts. Her skin felt so tight, she thought she would literally burst open. And inside, it felt like her stomach was pulling up into her chest, making her feel woozy and nauseous like she had when she was little and got car sick. Alona held onto her tightly. She would not let her go. And that was a good thing, because if she had Chrissy would have bolted right out the door and right into the waiting arms of those…monstrosities.

One of them was paused right outside the door, the one with the hissing voice that seemed barely audible above the buzzing of the flies. “Chrissy pissy, you better come out. Grimshanks wants to play with you. He said we have to find you. We’re having a party for you. He wants to do to you what he did to us. Chrissy, tell me where you are.”

Then the vomit-voiced one: “Chrissy, Chrissy, Chrissy…where is sweet little Chrissy? I can hear your heart beating.”

And then the others in unison again: “Chrissseee…Chrisseee…CHRISSSSSEEEEE…CHRISSSSSEEEEE…”

She couldn’t take it anymore.

She simply could not.

She’d been through a lot and seen things she even now could not honestly believe, but this was beyond even the horror of that fucking clown. This was beyond anything her mind could contain and accept. Those hideous voices, wavering and eldritch and hissing…it was tearing her apart on the inside. Getting into her head and filling her brain with a suffocating, blind madness. She had to run. She had to do something. Even diving out that window and breaking bones below was better than listening to this insanity.

The door slammed open and hit the wall, chunks of plaster and chips of paint raining to the floor. Chrissy gasped. She could not help herself. She gasped and what was standing in the doorway heard her.

But what was it exactly?

A boy, yes, what had once been a boy. Twelve or thirteen, no more than that at the time of his death. He was naked, his torso dark with filth and dirt, caked leaves and fuzzy growths of some morbid fungi that seemed to flutter as he breathed. His hair was blonde and ratty, hanging over his face in greasy coils. You could not see more than that, because it was covered in hundreds of fat bluebottle flies crowding in to feed on what was beneath. He held his hands out like somebody playing blind man’s bluff, feeling in the air, looking for something to touch.

“I can smell you, Chrissy,” he said in his hissing, windy voice. “Grimshanks says we have to bring you back. Bring you back to play. You’ve been bad and he wants to play with you. It won’t be nice, Chrissy.” He took a few steps into the room, searching with his hands. “It won’t be very nice at all. But you won’t be alone. We’ll be with you. I’ll hold your hand, Chrissy, while he does those terrible things to you. I’ll hold it tight so you won’t be alone. Alone the way we were when he brought us into that cellar and did those awful things to us day after day before he slit our throats and buried us in the dirt.”

Chrissy made another sound and his head craned in her general direction. This was not a gasp, but a whining sound in her throat as she tried to suppress the scream that scratched to get out. But Chrissy knew now. She knew why they were all boys. Why they were naked. Grimshanks’ victims. Yes, these were the boys he had kidnapped and taken down into his basement to torture and violate as he himself was once tortured and violated.

Another boy stepped into the room, equally as filthy and rotting and flyblown. But his lower torso was clean and white. You could plainly see the black and jagged ruts from a knife where he had been disemboweled by the clown. And lower down…nothing. Grimshanks had emasculated him completely.

And now she knew why they weren’t zeroing in on them: they were blind.

All of them were blind as maybe she had suspected all along.

Both of them in the room had no eyes and the other three waiting outside the door had none either. Just black, mutilated pits where their eyes had been. They had not been removed carefully either, but gouged out savagely with something like a butcher knife that opened the sockets in hacked star-like shapes.

This was the one with the voice of vomit: “Chrissy? Quit playing games! You’ll only make him angry!” He sniffed the air with the maggoty channel where his nose had once been. “She’s here…she’s close…I can smell her hot little cunt…”

“Find her…feel her out…she’s here…she’s here…”

The others outside the door were fly-covered, too, just buzzing husks, oozing with slime. They stood out there like Yuletide carolers, their ruined mouths whispering her name again and again: “Chrissseee…Chrissseee…Chrissseee…”

They were all in the room now, moving about with outstretched hands. Flies lit off them and crawled up the walls, buzzed over Chrissy and Alona’s heads. They crawled over their arms and hands. One of them settled onto the tip of Chrissy’s nose, rubbing its forelegs together, seeming to be looking right into her eyes. The tickling of it was maddening.

“Chrissy, we can’t see you,” hissing-voice said. “Grimshanks cut out our eyes so we couldn’t watch what he did to us. He does not like to be watched. But he’ll let you watch when he starts cutting between your legs…”

 

29

This was the house of the dead.

That’s what the orphanage was.

As soon as Mitch and the others got through the front door and into the lobby, the dead came swarming out to meet them in numbers. The sun was poised to set and this is what brought them out, perhaps.

“Holy cock-knocking Christ,” Hubb said and it began.

The zombies were not stupid. They seemed to understand tactics of a sort. They could have leaped on Mitch and the others when they came through the front door, just took them violently there by surprise. But they did not. They waited until Mitch’s crew got into the lobby and then they came out, catching that little group in a pincer encirclement like soldiers surrounding and containing an enemy unit. They sealed the gaps. Mitch’s crew was right in the middle of a pack of them. They poured out of corridors and rooms, surrounded them, got behind them, too, so there was no escape out the door.

This is how it ended.

At least, the zombies thought so.

They came no closer, but held their ranks, ready to push in and crush the intruders. And what a motley crew they were. Yes, bloated and white and dripping, corpses from rivers and quarry deeps and bogs. Their faces were oozing and soft and pulpy, riven with worms and cloaked in flies. Some had eyes. Some barely had faces. They all seemed to be melting like wax figurines, ropes and runnels and threads of white and gray flesh hanging from their faces and hands and fingers. Red looping worms slid from eye sockets and hung from mouths and slithered from honeycombed breasts and swollen throats. That black juice ran from nostrils and lips and holes bored into puffy faces. Fat green leeches hung from the undersides of arms, pulsing and flaccid. Faces were furry with grave mold and spongy with decomposition. Every last bit of those creatures was infested and wriggling and moving.

“Give ‘em hell!” Hubb shouted and that’s how it began.

Mitch felt utterly useless with his Remington, being that he had no rock salt shells like the others. But he brought it up and worked the pump, punching holes through that advancing swarm of carrion. When his shells ran out, he started throwing salt and that did wonders.

But not like the rock salt shells.

Nothing could match the destruction those wrought. The impact of the salt was devastating. When it hit one of them, hundreds of salt pellets would drill right through those moist fungal hides and the zombies would let out a wailing, inhuman screech as they literally boiled and burned up from the inside out. And this within what seemed seconds. It was like an incendiary grenade had been detonated inside them.

The zombies poured forward and the defenders just kept shooting and shooting. The first wave fell into a writhing mass of putrescence, smoking and steaming and popping. But the others just came right over the top of them and with that many, there was just no way they could be held back. As the melting, hissing corpses on the floor piled up into a hip-deep charnel stew of worms and shuddering flesh and that repulsive stench of mass graves, the others clawed and leaped and crept forward and in such sheer numbers it quickly became pandemonium.

The defenders had to fall back and there was nothing to fall back to but into that stew of corpses and more vicious zombies. They needed time to reload, time to organize an effective front…but there was no such time. They had to retreat right through the dead and their lines were severed. But they were not beaten, because out came the road flares and the zombies did not like them.

Mitch had used up his bag of salt and had lost his rifle after successfully using it as a club to bash zombie heads. Now all he had was a flare. He shoved into the face of a dead thing, kicked another out of his way, effectively punching a hole through the zombie army and making it to the other side. Hubb Sadler was with him and Knucker. The flares were what got them through and kept the dead at arm’s length. They managed to get into one of the corridors where the fighting would be easier. Hardy James almost made it, but a throng of the dead engulfed him and he drowned beneath their numbers.

And Knucker, who was, in Hubb’s own words, “the toughest piece of ass-kicking broad this side of Annie fucking Oakley,” actually cried out and burst into tears as the sight of Hardy being buried alive in that carrion. She went down on one knee as the dead surged after them, reloading her 12 gauge with a sort of calm and care that was surprising. She might have been out in the woods come bird season. For she was no less careless, no more rushed, no less relaxed.

But she was not calm and she was not relaxed. Tears running from her eyes at the sight of her old friend and verbal combatant dying in such a horrible way, she was filled with zeal and rage and the need for payback.

And what she did next was suicidal.

“Knucker!” Hubb called out. “Get your fucking ass back here! Get back here!”

But she was beyond listening to him. Beyond listening to anyone but her own twisted rage. Hardy had been her friend. She had known him since he was a kid. And she did not take that sort of longevity and loyalty lightly. As Hubb and Mitch pulled back, she came forward to meet the grave herds. She started shooting, dropping them one by one, pushing them back until she reached the remains of her friend and by then she’d used every last round. She popped a road flare and jammed it into faces and throats and got a hand on Hardy’s ankle and dragged him back a good ten feet with two ghouls hanging off him before one of the dead, one of the Catholic school girls, leaped on her and vomited a gout of that black juice in her face that instantly blinded her, burning her and bringing her to her knees.

Mitch rushed in with Hubb’s shotgun and blasted five of them out of the way, ducking beneath sprays of that acidic black slime. He pulled Knucker away from the zombies and Hubb limped in to help, a road flare in each fist. They got Knucker away, even brought her shotgun back with them, but that was about all they could do for her because she was already dead. Mitch stripped her vest off her as the dead came for another assault.

Tommy and Deke were separated from the others. Deke threw salt until there was none left and Tommy pumped off round after round. The dead pushed them towards the stairs and by then, they had no idea if the others were even alive. The only thing that saved their bacon was that Hot Tamale was tossing a few of her gas bombs. They exploded against the walls and floors, spraying fire in every direction. This is what drove the dead back and allowed Tommy and Deke to make a not so orderly retreat up the stairs.

Yes, sheer pandemonium.

All over the orphanage, windows were breaking and doors being torn off hinges. Rain and wind blew in along with a foul stink of poisoned tidal pools and things rotting in gutters. Footsteps were heard. Dragging sounds. A raving and a shrieking and a whispering. Peals of disjointed laughter. The walls shook and mirrors shattered. The dead poured in from outside, from closets and cellars and hiding places in a shadowy throng bent on destruction and violence and murder. They were insane, all of them, driven into some wild feeding frenzy.

Mitch steered Hubb into a classroom and tried to hold the door as the dead battered against the other side, screaming and hissing and pounding their fists. They got it closed and locked, but how long it might hold, they did not know.

The crazy thing was, Hardy James was not dead. He’d been bitten and beaten, clawed and stomped, but not devoured. It was Knucker’s brave counterattack that had saved his life. As firebombs exploded and the dead circled around in confusion, he crawled away into one of the offices.

He even managed to get the door shut.

At least for a few minutes.

Then it blew right open, slamming him up against the wall. He tried to force it back shut, but those wormy hands found him, a dozen of them, yanking him in opposite directions. They pulled him by the hair and the arms, the body and the legs. More hands pressed in, hooked like talons, peeling the skin from his face and the meat from his throat. He felt one of his arms get ripped free, one of his knees snap. His left eye was thumbed from its socket, his nose broken, his cheek torn from the skull beneath. They mauled him and crushed him and bit into him. And he went down as they towered over him, greedy and ravenous. All those faces pushed in, looking like watercolor paintings that had run…color and flesh and features oozing from the bone in a seething mass alive with worms.

He died most horribly.

Herb was separated from Hot Tamale.

He made it into the industrial-sized kitchen back beyond the chapel and a swarm of the dead crushed into him, slamming him to linoleum floor. There were dozens of them, pale and blubbery and reaching. He saw one with too many eyes in its face and another whose flesh draped around it like a winding sheet. A dead woman carried a dead baby and a dead man carried a legless woman. He saw a mutated thing which seemed to be composed mostly of open sores and another with a row of fetal hands running down its belly. He saw a woman that was so unbearably white she was nearly phosphorescent and a little girl with too many rubbery limbs scamper right up the wall. He saw the dead and the decomposed, things with too many arms or heads or simply not enough. Some that looked like two or three people melted into a whole, slithering and hopping, unwinding as they came forward. Things wriggled and wormed, flew and stumbled. Things that should have walked, crawled. And others that should have crawled, walked.

An obscene freakshow of putrefaction and something far worse.

But then a woman took hold of his head and vomited a stream of black mud into his face and he, thankfully, saw no more. He could only hear the screamings and whispering and laughter, the wet ripping sounds as they tore out handfuls of their own furrowed and soggy meat and shoved it into his mouth, made him eat and swallow of their abundant spoilage, but by then his mind was long gone.

Mitch raced down there, leaping over a heap of lumber, jumping up just as that door came open and throwing his weight against it, slamming it shut. One of the thing’s hands was caught between the door and the jamb. Those wriggling fingers were severed. They fell to the floor and undulated like fat, deathless worms.

“Now what in the fuck?” Hubb said, panting and pulling off his oxygen mask. “Now what, Mitch?”

Listening to the carnage outside, Mitch had no idea.

 

30

“Don’t do anything foolish, boy,” Wanda Sepperley told Chuck Bittner on the rooftop as darkness began to descend over the town in folds of the blackest midnight satin. “Don’t be throwing that salt until you got something to throw it at.”

“Just take it easy,” Harry said.

But it was no easy bit, trying to take it easy. For as the shadows lengthened, the dead had begun to come out like worms after a good rain. They were gathering out there in that dirty, polluted water in numbers. They waited just beneath the surface and you could see their faces, white and phosphorescent.

“When are those helicopters coming?” Rhonda Zirblanski said.

“Soon, honey, soon.” She held the girls to either side of her and would not let them go. The cat waited with them.

“There’s got to be a hundred out there,” Chuck said, just sick about it.

Harry was watching them, too. “They want us to use up our salt. They want us to throw it into the water at them. If we do that, then they’ll come up after us.”

“That’s right, son. They’re baiting you.”

And they were.

Now and again, one of them would raise a rotting face above the water and call out to those on the rooftop by name. They called out in the voices of friends and loved ones and that was the hardest thing to tolerate. Chuck could barely stand it. The sound of his father’s voice coming from one of those crumbling mouths was bad enough, but it was the voice of his mother lilting into the dusk that truly shook him. Whatever demonic minds fueled the dead, they were not stupid. They knew very well how to torment and exactly what to say.

“You shouldn’t have let me die alone, Chuck,” that voice would say, echoing and echoing across the water. “How could you let me die alone, alone, alone, alone…”

“Don’t listen, son,” Wanda kept telling him. “That’s not your mother. That’s nobody’s mother.”

“How can they do that?” Rita asked. “How can they know those voices?”

Wanda patted her. “They know many things on both sides of the grave, child. They’re not people. They have no soul. Just awful crawling things that were never supposed to have been born. They live on fear and hate and death. They’re weak if you don’t give them power. So don’t listen and don’t ever believe. All they do is lie. They know nothing else.”

Harry lit the lantern to drive away the shadows. “Those choppers will be here soon,” he said and hoped it was true.

Out in that stinking bog of corruption, the undead waited.

 

31

In the Procton house, down the way from Mitch Barron’s, Russel Boyne and his mother, Margaret, were still alive. The house was the tallest on Kneale Street and they were in an upstairs bedroom on the third floor. They had a battery lantern and a few improvised weapons, nothing more. The house had held when the dam broke, but they were trapped. The water was nearly to the top of the stairs and if it rose much farther…

Russel sat there on the bed with a sharpened stake in his hands. “I don’t get any of this,” he said, pouting like the little boy he in fact was. “This never happened in any of them zombie pictures. Weren’t ever no flood like this.”

“Oh, shut up,” Margaret told him, finally tired of his role-playing. “This isn’t a movie, Russel. This is real.”

“But it’s like a movie.”

“Just be quiet,” she told him.

He had only one eye, the other just a black, mud-filled pit drilled into the tombstone gray of his face. His flesh was puckered and pitted with tiny holes, his nose fallen with rot into one central cavity. His lips hung in shreds, his blackened gums pierced with crumbling teeth.

It had come no closer. It just stood its ground, raining water and filth and madness. The lantern flickered wildly, casting lurching shadows over its pocketed skull-face.

Russel came forward with his stake. “Get back! Get back!”

And slowly, slowly it slid back beneath the water with a steaming sound, mist burning from its hide.

There were others coming from the water now. The one she had seen before was bad enough, a ripped and decayed zombie, running corruption for a face, but these…much worse.

They were faceless, dripping things, their skins and ragged clothing gone an oily black with mud and sediment from the river bottom, gray filthy blankets of fungus where their faces should have been.

With a cry of terror, Margaret hauled her son backwards just as they reached for him. Turning she took hold of the door and slammed it, one of the things' fingers caught between the door and the jamb. The wriggling fingers were severed and came free, landing on the carpeting where they squirmed.

She threw the deadbolt on the door and kicked the fingers into the corner.

And outside the door, they began pounding. The dead. Not just a pounding, but a hammering and a battering and a ramming. The door shook, trembled, cracks running through it. It was just a cheap hollow panel job, not meant to really hold back anything, let alone what was out there now.

Russel stood there with his stake, Margaret behind him with a kitchen knife.

The door came right off its hinges and the dead swarmed in.

Russel fought but they overwhelmed him instantly. Margaret sank her knife into one bloated belly and then hands had her, tossing her back into the water. The dead moved around her, diving and swimming, but they did not take her down with them.

She came up and the lantern was out.

Just darkness.

Russel was maybe in the bedroom or had been pulled down into the deeps. But he was gone, gone, gone and she began to weep, still in the water, clinging to the steps.

If only she could see something.

The water was chill and slimy, things bobbing in it, others things sunken around her. She tried to climb up, fell and went under. She came up, gasping for air, shocked and terrified.

She hung there, with her head and shoulders out of the mire, shivering and mad, thinking things and feeling things and maybe even believing that they wouldn’t come for her. After a time, she moved back towards the stairs, clung to them, waiting for what she did not know.

A drop of water struck her face. Then another.

In the heavy, moist stillness, she could hear someone breathing. Someone was standing over her on the stairs, dripping on her.

“Take my hand,” a voice said, gurgling and waterlogged.

“Oh, please…”

“Take my hand.”

The voice was not necessarily evil or threatening, just morbidly awful like its owner’s throat was packed with wet leaves. She reached out to take the hand offered because there really was no other way. She found the hand and gripped it as it gripped her. It was clammy and spongy, juice squirted from between her fingers. She let out a subtle cry of horror and she was pulled out of the water and pushed against a pulpy, crawling mass. Then a cold and rubbery mouth was pressed against her own and black water was vomited down her throat, filling her.

All things considered, it was not the worst possible death.

32

Don’t breathe.

Don’t move.

Don’t even make a sound.

The dead boys were searching the room now, moving along and patting the walls, pausing to sniff the air like dogs casting for a scent. Chrissy was not only wet with rain, she was wet with hot salty sweat that ran down her face in rivulets. She could taste it on her lips, feeling it pooling beneath her eyes and filling them, making them sting. It was agonizing. She needed to rub them. She had to. She couldn’t sit here like this, terrified and sweating and cramped. She would go mad.

Alona held her tighter than ever, in a grip like a vice. She would allow no movement, no sound.

But sooner or later, those things would find them.

Quiet.

Don’t stir.

Don’t make a sound.

But how long could she possibly do that? How long? You want to move and you know it. Sooner or later you’re going to, Chrissy. And it probably won’t even be voluntary, just a tendon popping or a muscle jerking and making your arm move. Maybe you should just get it over with.

No!

Good God, no. The idea of those things touching her was madness itself. And if that didn’t turn her mind to slush, then what about the party Grimshanks had planned? Oh, now that was really going to be something. He would have hurt and demeaned her in the most unspeakable ways before, but that was before they had injured him, beaten and broken him. Now he would do things she could not possibly imagine. Things beyond mere horror and agony, fresh and untapped realms of psychotic and lewd violation.

The one with the blond greasy hair was stopped right in front of them now. He cocked his head to the side like a puppy, but it was hardly cute. Flies covered his face and exited his mouth when he spoke.

“Chrissy? Is that you? Reach out and take my hand…I’ll see that he makes it quick, then we can be together. Death won’t last. He’ll call you up just like he called us up…”

Chrissy’s breath was coming very fast now and she could do nothing to muffle its sound. He was hearing it and knowing she was near. This was it. This was really it.

Alona sensed the endgame coming, but she wasn’t about to be scared into doing something foolish. At least, not yet. She slid her hand off Chrissy’s arm with nary a sound and picked up a shard of glass from the floor. Counting under her breath, she flung it across the room where it landed near the windows. The dead things began to congregate in that direction, outstretched hands searching the air, fingers wiggling, voices whispering excitedly.

The blonde-haired one had not moved.

He chuckled low in his throat and something like an engorged black beetle crawled out of his mouth. “Neat trick, lady, neat trick. But you’re not fooling me.”

He turned in their direction, looking just above their heads, his hands coming up to seek them out. He moved his head from side to side as if he were trying to form a mental picture of where they were. He turned it this way, then that. Held it there. And they were able to see what they hadn’t been able to before: the other side of his head. It was a great gaping cavity filled with buzzing life. But not flies. These were gray, oily beetles, segmented and winged, looking much like cockroaches. There were dozens and dozens of them in that cavity, crawling about, infesting, brooding over a mass of squirming larva that must have been their young.

“Here,” said the blonde-haired one. “Right here.”

The others were coming now, rushing forward with seeking hands. The blonde-haired one reached out for Chrissy and Alona as they stood up. Alona stepped out to meet him with the crowbar.

“Since you know where we are, dipshit,” she said. “Let me introduce myself.”

As he came forward, she swung the crowbar with everything she had, which was considerable. The bar hit him right between the eyes…or where they would have been…and split his face right down to his jaw with a pulpy cracking. He howled and backed away and Alona hit him two more times, collapsing his skull and letting forth a swarm of those roaches that sought her out, buzzing and nipping, getting in her hair and seeking her eyes. She swung the crowbar again and it struck the boy’s arm and snapped it off beneath the elbow. He hit the floor, his face a discharge of black gummy blood, and his arm hit the wall, dropping to the floor and squirming with life.

Chrissy swatted roaches away from her.

But it was too late for Alona. The others had charged in and buried her in their bodies.

“Run!” she said. “For the love of God, Chrissy! Run!”

Chrissy did as they began to pull her apart and open her up, bathing in her blood. She made it to the door and bolted right out into the hallway, just running with no set destination.

Behind her, she heard Alona give out one last reedy scream.

 

33

Hot Tamale was alone.

She did not know where Herb was or any of the others. And right then, she would have been glad to see even Tommy Kastle and his big goddamned mouth. Because she was in a real fix now. During the attack, after Herb had been separated from her, she’d run blindly, trying to escape and had ended up here, down in the cellar. She’d found a room. A small room that seemed defensible...and then the floor had given out, plunging her into the blackness below.

She had lost her shotgun.

Had nothing but some roadflares now in their waterproof containers.

She was in the cellar, she supposed, the water right up to her waist. The room was long and narrow and the only door she’d found was wedged tight, swollen in its frame, no doubt. So she waited there in the flooded darkness with a flare in her hands, the sputtering flame throwing jumping, greasy shadows in every direction.

Yes, just her.

And the beetles.

She could feel them in the water. Nipping, scratching, cold and oily. They were whipping through the air like flying gravel, seeking soft flesh and warm blood to torment. They got into her hair and worried at her throat. Only the flare drove them off.

The beetles made another run at her, buzzing and whirring. She ducked her head under, kept only the flare above the water.

She surfaced then, drenched and shivering and filthy with mud. The storm of beetles was gone. She pulled a few stragglers off her arm, searching frantically around for shelter, for an oasis, but there was none to be had. She had to get out of here. Somewhere out of the reach of the water and the beetles.

Something bumped into her and she screamed.

The drifting corpse of child.

It was dead, thankfully. She shoved it away and splashed in the other direction, not liking the idea of it being near her.

She waited then, peeling beetles off herself like ticks. They were not so offensive or aggressive when they were not swarming. It was something. She kept wondering what would happen when she used her last flare up.

Don’t think about it.

Steeling herself, she moved further into the room. More corpses. Just floating and lifeless, but offensive all the same. That’s what this room was, a river of floating debris and beetle-covered corpses now.

She felt something brush by her in the water, something undulating and smooth. She let out a cry, stumbled to the side, thinking there was a big snake in the water. And although Hot Tamale was not afraid of many things, snakes were one of them. She caught a glimpse of something that roiled the surface, something squirming and whipping. It rose up, dusky and shiny and serpentine, like the tentacle of some abyssal squid, then simply slipped back into the drink.

Hot Tamale could feel her heart in her throat, thudding like a tom tom.

Noise.

She whirled around, looking and searching and wishing to God she still had her shotgun. There was a rippling not fifteen feet behind her. The flickering yellow light from the flare reflected off the surface of the water which was black as gushing oil. The rippling became a whirlpool that grew and grew and then more of those snake-like tentacles rose up, whipping and slinking in a pulsing, busy net. They broke the surface like swamp roots. And then, from the center of that twisting helix, the form of a man rose up and up and up. He was dark and slimy like he’d been rubbed down with fat, his face utterly gray just as his eyes were utterly yellow.

Hot Tamale screamed, diving and fighting away. She found herself beneath the hole that she’d fallen through. There was no way she could get back up there. Just no way. She looked around frantically. She could hear water running, see it flowing down the walls like a waterfall. Everything as ebon and still and lifeless as some waterlogged tomb.

Jesus, what was that, what sort of thing was that?

Think, she told herself, just think now. No time for anything else.

She moved through the darkness slowly, carefully like some miner in a flooded cavern. It was so dark she couldn’t see her own hands, let alone anything else. Bobbing things, biting things, refuse and just about anything that wouldn’t sink. She located the wall, planned on following it back to the door. She had to get it to open, she just had to. She guided herself forward, things crawling across her fingers, water dripping from above and running down her face like sweat.

Something brushed her leg and she screamed again, falling into the water, the flare going out. She came up, pulling another one from her vest and lighting it by twisting the cap.

There. Light.

She moved forward with a half-swimming, half-falling sort of motion, the splashing water echoing like she was trapped in the bowels of a well. She found the wall again, sweaty flagstone, brushed against crates and barrels and shovels hanging from hooks. She kept going and going, moving in circles, but afraid to stand still.

Her throat felt tight and scratchy and she began to sweat. It almost seemed that the darkness was pushing in closer around her and she told herself it was the stirrings of claustrophobia and nothing more—

Then light.

It exploded in the depths of the cellar and Hot Tamale had to put a hand up over her eyes it was so bright. But then she could see that she was at the far wall, nowhere near the doorway. The light was coming from a gas lantern hanging on a peg near where she’d fallen through. It flickered with a jumping amber light.

But somebody had lit it, somebody had…

She didn’t see anyone, though. Just that filthy water sliding around her like those tar pits that drowned animals and a few ripples. Ripples that were building, surging, rolling into swells and tides and breakers. Before her, a man rose up out of the murk and she screamed because she knew it was the one that was part squid and part man and altogether something inhuman.

He stood there, that dark man, dressed in something like tanned, oily hides, dark as snakeskin, that seemed to quiver and convulse like they were connected to some arcane musculature. He wore a shroud beneath. His eyes were yellow coins, his face gray and seamed and skullish. The skin was beaded and shiny like a lizard pelt.

“Who…who the hell are you?” she managed. “What do you want?”

The dark man just stood there, the water around him busy and rippling and roiling. All those tentacles were working and bunching. He glided forward as if something below was towing him and Hot Tamale let out a cry, trying to dash away, but something tripped her up and when she fought out of the water she was less than two feet from him, those eyes burning into her head like embers as something coiled around her legs like heavy cables. The dark man towered over her, staring and staring until her bladder let go with a hot rush and her teeth chattered and something in her belly went loose like an uncoiled spring.

She dropped the flare.

The dark man’s face was covered in beetles as were his hands, they came out of his leathers and nostrils and mouth and then fell away one by one and there was a sudden spray of grume and mucus and vile blood and that face split asunder. In fact, it opened like a flower unfurling its petals so that the buds and blossoms could be marveled over. Hot Tamale saw something like a profusion of tendrils nested together and then they, too, stretched and writhed and opened and there were tentacles…three tentacles, smooth and scummed with jelly and just a bright, vibrant red like fresh spilled blood.

She told herself she did not know his name, but she did. Just like she understood that what he was, what lived in his flesh was not the memory of a man, but something else.

“Say it,” the dark man demanded.

Hot Tamale gasped, images and ideas and arcane philosophies raging through her brain in hot bolts as her willpower and individuality went to a white, bubbling sauce.

“You…you are Weerden,” she said almost mechanically. “You are Alardus Weerden and you died in 1627.”

“Yes, until my grave was desecrated.”

One of those bloated ruby-red tentacles had her around the throat now and another kissed her eyes shut and the third forced itself down her throat, expanding like the stinging tendril of a jellyfish until she gagged and asphyxiated and went still, sliding limp and dead into the black waters.

The lantern on the peg went out with a hiss.

 

34

Something was going on.

Chrissy heard the sound of gunfire and voices and smelled fire. Flashes of light and booming sounds. A stench of death and burning flesh wafted up the stairs. It had been getting dark, but now there was light coming up from below.

She raced over to the stairs and almost made it made it.

Except that Grimshanks came drifting up the stairs to meet her, grinning with those gnarled yellow teeth that pushed past his blubbery lips. His face was white and oily, set with a multitude of tiny scars where he had knitted himself back together again. His eyes were huge, bulging from those black harlequin diamonds that contained them. They were glistening pale eggs set with a tracery of purple veins, eggs that were pulsing and ready to hatch. His orange-and-yellow checked suit was filthy with dried blood and black goo and streaks of grime, bits of things that might have been tissue. The bells twinkled on his cap and tiny red beetles swarmed out of his mouth and skittered over his bloated face.

He held his white puffy hands out to her. “Chrissy-pissy pudding pie! Where do you think you’re going? That’s not for you down there…not for you.”

Chrissy wanted to run, but the strength just bled from her. There was nothing left to run with or fight with. There was only a bitter acceptance of what the clown would do which would be horrible to the extreme. He stared at her with those awful veined, slimy eyes. Tiny pustules were set in them and they began to break open one by one, running with a foul-smelling pus. Yes, he looked at her and in her and she saw graveyards in her mind, gallows…the places Grimshanks knew and knew very well. More, she saw little boys screaming. Little boys chained to cobwebbed basement walls and hanging by hooks, cut and slit and worked by knives. Hanging from ropes and being shoveled into shallow graves.

Yes, those eyes had her and they would not let her go.

They were the eyes of wolves that waited for little girls in dark forests, hungry and malevolent and ruthlessly vulpine. The eyes of wolves that devoured grandmothers and waited in their beds with slavering jaws and perverse dark minds. The eyes of slimy, deranged little men that seduced little boys into fields and lonely thickets with the promise of sweets. And mostly, they were the eyes of something born in the depths of hell. The eyes of a dead and obscene thing that had been born in the drainage and corpse-slime of the grave.

Chrissy opened her mouth to protest, but nothing came out.

Grimshanks jetted forward with a blast of fetid, hot wind. He hit her and knocked her onto her back and then he fell on her, his jaws opening wider and wider until they were wide enough, it seemed, to swallow the world. They closed over her throat gently but firmly. Not with enough strength to even break the skin. He picked her up like a wolf picks up a pup and drifted off, bringing her into another dark room and dropping her on the floor.

“Chrissy-pissy, alone at last and with no interruptions,” he said and his breath in her face smelled like tombs.

Stretched out beneath him, her mind swam in and out of focus. She felt those bloated hands running up and down her, walking over her like spiders, pausing to squeeze her breasts and poke at her belly, stroke down between her legs. Several candles set in holders atop a table suddenly lit up, filling the room with a guttering yellow-orange glare. And this is what the clown wanted, not some fumbling violation in the dark, but an illuminated and precise defilement that she would have to look upon as her mind went to a soup of ruin.

He opened her shirt with his fingers and the feel of his flesh against hers is what jerked her fully awake. It was like cold, wet meat, a slime of jelly coming from his fingertips. His face was right above her own, huge and bulbous and grotesque like some fleshy Halloween pumpkin. Up close, she could see not just the pink threading of scars in that porous white flesh, but the numerous tiny holes made by parasites and worms. His entire face, up close like that, was covered in fine, minute webbing of silk like caterpillars or spiders had spun a fine cocoon over it. Things squirmed and wriggled just under the flesh. His tongue came out and it was black and horribly swollen, too fat, it seemed, for his mouth. Her drew it along her neck and its touch burned like lye.

She screamed.

Screamed with everything she had and all that did was made him grin. Make vile secretions run from his face and red beetles run out of his nostrils. Yes, and it made his cock thicken and lengthen under his suit, pressing against her belly.

“You will beg for death, you sweet little cunt,” Grimshanks whispered in her contorted face. “You will beg for old Grimshanks to slit your throat! But he won’t! Not until he’s done! Not until you’ve tasted his seed and felt him pushing inside your hot sweetness and filling your ass, splitting it wide and bloody! You will scream and scream, Chrissy-pissy, just as I screamed when the clowns took me in that cold, dripping cellar! You’ll know what I knew! You’ll know every awful, breathless minute of it! And how you’ll cry for your mommy and daddy, but they can’t help you! They’ll never hear you! Because your mine, every luscious inch of you is mine to toy with and soil and torment! Mine, mine, mine!”

She felt those hands on her, felt his cock against her, the stink and gelid feel of him, the absolute depravity and degeneration of his worm-holed mind, that seething pit of child bones and smoldering innocence where the boogeyman lived and where little boys and girls died a foul, perverted death.

Her shirt open, her breasts laid bare, Grimshanks planted a line of stinging kisses from her sternum to her belly. Each one was a separate agony. And she could just image what it would feel like to have that engorged and rancid penis inside her, how it would burn and tear.

“Now, Chrissy-pissy pudding pie, you’ll taste me before I taste you…”

He rose up before her and she knew he was going to expose himself. Make her touch it and feel it and put it in her mouth, cackling all the while with the sound of screaming children roasted on spits. Those very un-funny distended hands of his worked his cock through the suit and it rose up, filling and swelling, becoming much larger than any such organ had a right to be.

Now he would take it out.

Now he would make her do things.

Make her do things just as he’d made those boys do things.

No, no, it was too much. Simply too much. With every last bit of strength in her, Chrissy let out a piercing scream that could be heard throughout the orphanage.

Grimshanks boomed with fragmented laughter.

Maggots filled his mouth and emerged from holes in his tongue.

His eyes blazed with nefarious, carnal delight.

Here was the violation, the groping and pumping and penetration, the defilement of flesh and soul. The seeding that came before the cutting and the chewing and dismembering. He would make her suck on him and then he would take her sex in his mouth, piercing it with his yellow and decayed teeth, feeling that hot cunt virgin’s blood washing down his throat. And then he would slide into her, pushing deeper and deeper, shooting into her, filling her with acid and worms

“That’s a fucking clown,” a voice said and then. “It’s got Chrissy!”

Chrissy was certain that her mind had run now like maple sap. For she was hearing the voice of Deke and another voice which sounded suspiciously like that of Tommy Kastle, her stepdad’s old drinking and bowling partner. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.

But there they were.

Dressed in wet raincoats, looking haggard and tired and angry, very angry. They stormed into the room and Grimshanks shrank away, because he knew that what was in them was even worse than what had been in the mob that had beaten him earlier that day down into the grass.

Deke was on his knees, holding Chrissy against him.

Tommy stood there with a shotgun in his hands.

Grimshanks looked afraid, trapped, cornered, in dire straits.

“Hello, Pervo,” Tommy said and his voice was flat and deadly. “I heard all about you. Fruitpie the fucking Magician. I bet fruit pies aren’t the only thing that disappear when you’re around, are they? I bet a lot of kids go missing…don’t they, suck-nut?”

Grimshanks hunched over. His hands came up, his face contorted into a mask of raw animal rage, teeth sharp and bared, eyes fixed and hating. “I’ll tear your guts out, Tommy-boy, and I’ll make your friend eat them! Eat them! DO YOU HEAR ME YOU FUCKING COCKLESS GUTLESS SQUIRT OF SHIT? I’LL MAKE HIM EAT THEMMMMMM”

He charged at Tommy.

It was a good bluff and pretty damn frightening to see, but Tommy was not impressed. He cracked a little smile and pulled the trigger. Grimshanks took it right in the belly. He did not fold up or go down like the others, he went absolutely manic and demented. He leaped into the air, bounced off the walls. He flew up and attached himself to the ceiling like a spider. He slid down the walls and wormed over the floors, the whole time steam churning from that hole in his guts. He rushed at Tommy and Tommy fired again, this time catching him with a glancing shot that ripped most of the meat from his upper arm, the flesh there singing and blackening.

Finally, Grimshanks let out a freight train wail of noise, howling and shrieking and everyone had to cover their ears. The clown took advantage of that and hit the boards over the windows like a projectile from a cannon. Some of the boards snapped, but others held.

He hit them and went instantly liquid.

He became a blob that ran and gushed and forced its gelatinous mass between the boards and out into the night where he escaped into the wet darkness. But everyone in that room could hear him wailing and screeching. Because for the first time, Grimshanks was really hurt. He was damaged beyond repair and that screaming of his was part agony and part absolute fear.

Deke was rocking Chrissy back and forth in his arms. She was crying and so was he. Tommy brushed them both with his hands, making contact with them.

“Deke, you take care of her,” he said, heading for the door.

“Where you going?”

Tommy looked back at him, grabbing the lantern, and winked. “I’m going to kill me a motherfucking clown.”

 

35

There wasn’t much time.

It was full dark and the dead were coming.

Where before they had been content to wait just under the water, staring up with hollow eyes at the people on the rooftop, now their patience had worn thin. They were coming up out of the water. Coming in numbers. And by the looks of it, there would be no stopping them.

“Get ready,” Harry told Chuck. “Stand by with that salt.”

“Look how many there are!” Rita Zirblanski said.

Harry almost told her that he would not let them get her…but could he really promise that? Promise anything that seemed so utterly impossible under the circumstances? Wanda and the twins had the lantern up near the chimney. Harry moved around carefully on the wet shingles with their sole flashlight. Everywhere he played the light, nothing but dead and leering faces.

Jesus, they were everywhere.

To all sides of the house, the zombies were gathered. The water came almost up to the lip of the roof itself and it was thick with the living dead. They crowded up to the roof, five and six and sometimes seven deep, looking almost like concert-goers pressed up to the edge of a stage. White arms were resting on the shingles, faces that were distorted peering up at Harry and the others, those eyes filled with an infinite and unholy blackness. Black tears ran from huge, gelatinous eyes; black blood from the corners of grinning mouths. So many of them, so damn many. There wasn’t enough salt to turn back more than ten or fifteen at best and out there…good God, a seething, hungering graveyard of them.

Mr. Cheese, Chuck’s cat, was mewling wildly now.

“Listen!” Chuck said. “Listen!”

Harry was not listening, though. He was studying the living corpses down below, knowing that essentially only himself and a bag of salt stood in-between them and the people left in his charge. Sure, Chuck would fight hard, but he was just a boy. Just like the Zirblanksi’s were really just kids and Wanda was an old, old lady. No, he was their protector.

And he didn’t stand a chance.

You could have ran. You could have gotten away anytime.

True. True enough. And that was the really crazy, fucked-up part of it all. He, Harry Teal, felon and escaped convict and all-around bad guy, did not want to leave. He was a guy who’d ran with a pretty tough cut-throat crew in Milwaukee. He’d boosted cars to order. He made his living in the streets. He’d spent the past five years in a maximum security hellhole. In the streets, he’d beat guys bloody, he’d even shot a guy once. In Slayhoke, he’d busted metal pipes over men’s heads, he’d stabbed them and beaten them nearly to death when they got in his way or gave him trouble or just failed to show him respect. He had become an animal just like all the others animals out in the yard there. He wasn’t the sort of guy who gave a rat’s ass about anyone. With him it had always been one thing, same as any other criminal: greed. He wanted that folding green and God help you if you got in the way of him getting it.

And now? Now he was playing good Samaritan?

Yes. Yes, that was it exactly. He could have ran off anytime after they’d gotten out from behind those walls. He could have run off on Jacky Kripp. He could have run off after Jacky was killed. But he hadn’t. He’d hooked up with Tommy and Mitch and stayed…stayed when he knew things were bad. More than bad. Just plain awful. A flooding city. The living dead. He got through that gauntlet, the cops would either shoot him down on sight or throw him back in a cage. Regardless, he’d stayed and stayed because Tommy and Mitch had treated him okay. Not like a con, but like a man. Like a friend. They accepted him and gave him something he’d never had before: a good feeling inside. So he stayed to help, because he figured a guy like him was particularly suited to surviving in a clusterfuck like Witcham. Tommy and Mitch were good boys, but neither of them were like Harry. They were not natural-born predators.

And they needed somebody who was.

Somebody who would watch their back and bring hell down on anyone who gave them trouble. But it was more than that even. He liked Wanda. She was like the grandmother you never had. The Zirblanski twins were like your favorite nieces. And Chuck? Goddamn, he could have been Harry’s kid in a different world where he hadn’t come up hard in the wrong neighborhood.

In twenty-four hours, less than that, he felt like the bunch of them were family to him.

That’s some sweet shit you’re reeling off there, bro, Harry told himself. But look where it’s gotten you. You don’t have to worry about going back to Slayhoke, because it ends for you tonight on this fucking rooftop, this fucking oasis in this stinking, rancid sea of the hungry dead.

But it didn’t bother him, it really didn’t

“Harry!” Chuck said. “They’re coming! Listen, they’re coming!”

Listen?

Sure, sure, he was hearing it now. The thunk-thunk-thunk of helicopter rotors. It was getting louder. Louder by the moment. Excited, Harry panned his light over the dead. They were getting restless down there. There was no doubt of it. Something like an extended shiver was passing through them.

“Give me that salt, Chuck,” he said to the kid.

“I’ll fight them off with you, Harry.”

God, what a kid. Harry put an arm around him. “I got a better job for you, Chuck. A more important one. When that chopper gets here, I’ll need you to get the women aboard it. Okay? I need you to do that for me.”

Chuck sighed. “Okay. I guess.”

“Good man. Get up there by the chimney with them. Get ready.”

Chuck didn’t really like the idea, but he did it. That’s the kind of kid he was. And truth be told, Harry would not have recognized the old Chuck Bittner had he seen him. That selfish, arrogant little beast had died now and what rose from the ashes was about as fine of a boy as you could imagine.

“There!” Rhonda said. “Look! I can see it!”

So could Harry. “Thank God,” he said.

Coming through the mist and the falling rain it looked like some alien craft approaching, lit up, search lights scanning the waters, raindrops suspended in its sweeping beams.

“Get ready!” he shouted to the others.

“We’re ready and willing,” Wanda said.

The girls let out a cheer.

Harry waved the flashlight over his head.

The chopper was getting closer now. It had seen their lights and it was coming. It was on a direct route to them. Nothing could stay it now.

Below, the dead were moving.

“Shit,” Harry said under his breath.

He’d used up all the shells. All he had now was that bag of salt.

The dead were massing, crawling up out of the oily waters like fish. Not rising up on their hands and knees like men and women, but crawling on their bellies like mutant worms, slinking and slithering. From all sides of the roof, they were coming, pulling themselves from the water and wriggling their way up the wet shingles.

The helicopter had made Kneale Street now. It was very loud. Some guy on a loudspeaker was calling out to them.

“Harry…” Chuck said.

“I see them. Just get ready.”

The dead surged forth. So many in the lantern light that Harry knew that he and the others would not just be overwhelmed, they would literally be buried alive. His flashlight beam glimmered off their eyes which were glistening and gelid like the eggs of frogs. They looked like they would pop in a surge of filth if you poked them.

The helicopter was nearly to the roof now.

It was so loud that Harry could not hear what the others were saying. Not really. Though he could sense the panic in their voices. The chopper wouldn’t make it in time, not unless something happened.

And Harry was that something.

He started throwing the salt. Racing around the inclines of the roof, tossing salt. Much of it washed away in the rain, but enough found its intended targets that they pulled back, burning and steaming and crying out.

The helicopter was overhead.

The basket was coming down. Both of the Zirblanski twins were in it with the cat, crowding into it while Chuck held it steady in the rotor wash that was kicking up water and mist and a foul, moldering stink. Harry waved to the twins and they just looked back at him with horror in their eyes, knowing he was sacrificing himself so that they might escape.

The basket was coming back down now.

Chuck was shouting to Harry.

Harry waved him off and tossed what salt he had left at the advancing army of the dead. They were coming from all sides now, swarming like ants, hissing and scratching the shingles and gnashing their rotten teeth.

Wanda almost lost control of the basket.

She didn’t weigh much more than it did. Harry raced over there on his hands and knees, slipping once and sliding precious inches down towards those clutching white hands. He got up and got hold of the basket just as it would have tossed Wanda airborne.

“Harry!” Chuck shouted.

“Just get in for chrissake!”

He got Chuck in there and the basket started up and the dead were almost on them. Wanda would not make it either. But she didn’t seem to be too alarmed about that.

The dead were close now.

So many it was almost impossible to differentiate between them. Just a raging, compressed graveyard machine of skullish faces and bloated faces and wormy faces, scraping fingers and clutching fingers and fingers that were skeletal hooks. Moving, advancing, eyes like wet cinders and faces that were cold and white like new moons.

“Caught up with me at last, have you?” Wanda said, clinging to the chimney. “Crawled out of your slimy graves and dark pest-holes to put your teeth and claws to this old woman, eh? Well, you don’t frighten me! Not a one of you! Filth and disease and canker and pestilence! That’s all you are! Things to be salted and staked and burned out like infection!”

One of the dead came up over the apex of the roof, making for Wanda. She didn’t see it and she didn’t seem to care. Its face was little more than withered, flapping leather that looked stitched and pulled into the general appearance of a face, but missing the mark by miles. It had no eyes. And its flesh…it crawled over the bone, fluttering with a wriggling motion. Another came up behind it and its own face was nothing but a nest of creeping worms, burrowing in and out of the flesh.

Harry knocked two zombies away from him and made it to Wanda just as the dead things took hold of her. He hit old worm-face with a bunched fist and that face simply sprayed and fell apart. Wanda screamed once as the thing that had her broke her over its knee with a wet snapping. She died right then.

Harry went wild.

As they came at him, he punched and kicked and clawed, tearing faces from the skulls beneath and breaking off limbs and burying his fists into moist, swollen bellies.

The helicopter was still hovering up there, the basket swinging beneath it. The backwash of the rotors threw rain in Harry’s face, almost plucked him off the roof. A gunner up there was firing rounds into the dead, drilling holes through them, but it did little good.

Last stand.

This was it.

“Come on, you fuckers!” Harry shouted at them. “Come and get me!”

There was an old antenna pole bolted to the chimney. Harry yanked and pulled on it until it popped free. A weapon. He smashed heads and impaled bodies and made one hell of a show of himself, swinging and bashing and gutting his attackers. But by then there were hundreds closing on him, a flurry of reaching white hands and pallid faces crowding in on him.

They buried him alive.

But to his credit, he fought like a maniac right to his last breath.

 

36

“Hey, Pervo!” Tommy shouted up the narrow attic stairwell. “I’m coming to get your ass!”

Grimshanks was up there hiding and Tommy knew it. He’d hunted and tracked enough game in his time and followed enough blood trails to know that he was getting close. It was nothing you needed to be told. You could feel it. You could sense it with some primal mechanism of the hunt. And right then, Tommy was feeling it right up his spine. In his belly. In his balls.

I got that slimy fuck and he knows it.

Grimshanks must have come in another window after squeezing out the one on the second floor. Tommy had gone up to the third, moving on gut instinct and nothing more. It wasn’t long before he found that smear of black juice on the wall, the drops that led here to the attic stairs. The stench of Grimshanks’ burning flesh was acrid and pungent, nauseating. There was no mistaking the smell of a zombie that had tasted the salt.

Smiling, Tommy mounted the stairs, the shotgun in one hand, the lantern in the other.

“Hey, sucknut!” he called out. “What you gonna do when I come for you?”

Nothing but silence.

Tommy was not dismayed, only all the more vigilant. That goddamn clown was up here and the drops of black blood on the steps were evidence of that. Tommy followed them step by step, ready for action. Ready for old Fruitpie to come barreling down at him at any moment.

“Hey, Puddles? Come out and play…”

He made it to the top of the stairs, holding up the lantern, casting a wide swath of light in every direction. Hunched shadows slid around him. The attic was huge and dusty and mildewed-smelling. About what you’d expect. Ancient rafters overhead, shuttered gales on the sloping walls. Crates and boxes and old rolled-up rugs rotting away in the warm darkness. It stank musty up there. Cobwebs were draped above Tommy’s head, lots of rodent droppings everywhere.

A few stray rats skittered away at his approach.

“Hey, fuckface!” Tommy called out. “I’m gonna do to you what you do to kids: I’m gonna fuck you real bad! You hear me? Huh? You hear me, Giggles?”

There was a roaring like that of some primeval beast and something came rushing out of the darkness and hit Tommy. Hit him hard enough to knock him over and almost down the stairs. But he managed to hang onto the 12 gauge. The lantern went sailing. It thudded into a beam and crashed to the floor, shattering, all that lantern fuel spilling out. The fire tasted the old wood and a wall of flame lit up.

No problem seeing now.

Grimshanks was clinging to the rafters above like some grotesque albino spider. He was not even a clown now. He was a great white insect with a dozen legs and a dozen glittering eyes. Venom dripped from his mouth and had it not been for the lantern exploding, he would have dropped right on Tommy.

But he hesitated, not liking fire.

Tommy fired without even taking aim. That was the beauty of a shotgun. The round peppered the clown-thing with rock salt and Grimshanks screamed. Screamed the way he must have screamed when those two pervert clowns, Bobo and Ripples, had taken him in that dank cellar for the first time. For just as he had been violated then, he was violated now.

That scream was hysterical and bleating.

The rocksalt caught him across the chest and burned right into him, creating dozens of separate blackened caverns as it ate through him. He jerked and crisped and fell to the floor trailing plumes of smoke.

Quickly, making some nonsensical gurgling sound, he hobbled away, trying to get out of reach of the flames and Tommy’s gun.

Tommy came right after him, sensing victory.

“Be a good little clown, eh? Just lay there and fucking take it,” Tommy told him.

“Take it? Take it? TAKE IT?” Grimshanks howled. “FROM YOU? FROM YOU? YOU SILLY SCABBY LITTLE BOY THAT PISSED THE BED UNTIL HE WAS EIGHT FUCKING YEARS OLD! WHOSE MOTHER WAS NOTHING BUT A DRUNKEN USELESS WHORE CUNT COCKSUCKER”

Tommy shot again.

And again caught the retreating bulk of the clown.

More sputtering as of sizzling bacon fat, more boiling smoke, and more screeching from Grimshanks. But he was not beaten yet. Not just yet.

As Tommy moved in for the kill, a droning black cloud rose from the clown and came squalling in his direction like a typhoon. A black cloud of clicking, snapping, whirring noise. A tornado of flying insects that found and enveloped him, biting and tearing and stinging. In his hair and his face, down his shirt and up his pantlegs.

But Tommy stumbled forward and put another round into the clown.

Grimshanks screamed so loud that dust rained from the rafters overhead. The floor rumbled and the attic shook. A great wind surged, spreading the fire, letting it taste those old rugs and stirring it up into a conflagration.

Grimshanks was dying.

He rose up, burning and steaming, clots of flesh dropping off him, flames erupting from his guts. That last round had ripped the left side of his face away, leaving a smoldering skull in its wake. A single pale and luminous eye darted madly around and then popped like a ripe grape, spewing yellow fluid. Grimshanks was not screaming or threatening now. He was mewling like a cat. He climbed up the walls as the rock salt boiled him from the inside out. He was melting. Literally melting. His flesh oozed and liquefied like hot tallow, streamers and ropes of it hanging from him like wax bubbling from a burning candle. He tried to climb and slid down the wall, a writhing mass of worms and beetles and decay, sizzling and steaming and blackening.

What he had been all those years before, a nonentity named Edward Shears, had been pulled out in bleeding handfuls by those two deviant clowns that had forever blighted him, disemboweled his soul, and gutted his mind of all but an echo of who and what he was. But no matter. Anything that was left faded when he died. What was in him now, cremating and curling up like dead worms, were blasphemous and nameless things that had been waiting long and patient in ethereal mansions of cosmic depravity and anti-human degeneration. And at the moment of his death, Edward’s death, they had come out of crevices and dark spaces and shadowy graves of nonexistence, descending upon him, picking away at his carcass and filling themselves on all that he was and would never be again.

Like emotions, they were hot and cold, passionate and disinterested, predatory and calculating…but one thing they were not was compassionate or remotely human. They took what Grimshanks had been and multiplied it geometrically.

And now, they too, were dying…if things like them could really know death.

Disembodied, noxious spirits that had been born in seething pits of black mud and the screaming wastes of hell. They came as one, they came as a thousand…they were legion. And that’s the same way they left. Vomiting out of the clown’s skull in a pillar of black waste that became decay and then ash and then nothing.

“Here’s what it feels like, you stinking rotten piece of shit!” Tommy said and worked the pump on the 12 gauge and put two more rounds of rock salt into the remains of Grimshanks.

All that was left was a writhing, wormy pool of liquid flesh that bubbled and blistered, tried to fashion itself into hands and faces and forms that quickly melted away and drained off the yellowed skeleton below. It squirmed and flowed and wriggled, then it went up in a blaze of twisting greasy smoke and became a heap of bones blown by charnel ashes.

And that was how Grimshanks died.

And how Eddie Shears was finally set free.

 

37

It had been silent for a time and Mitch was not liking that.

Then, again, he wasn’t liking any of this.

Oh, it had been a good plan they’d had, in theory. Come up here, rescue Chrissyif she was even aliveand get the hell out. And now that had all fallen apart. Chrissy was most likely dead and who knew about the rest? He’d heard some shooting earlier, so maybe Tommy was still alive, but then again, maybe not.

Now Mitch was trapped in this fucking classroom with Hubb Sadler who looked like he was just about down to his last breath. They had a couple shotguns, some road flares, about thirty rounds of rock salt and that was about it. Yes, there was reason to worry. And the greatest reason of all was the silence which was just overwhelming. It had stopped raining now. The wind wasn’t even blowing.

Nothing but that heavy, impossible silence.

Over in the corner, Hubb was breathing hard, his face lined and strained looking like maybe he’d already had a good heart attack and was expecting another. “Funny how life kicks you right in the nuts, eh, Mitch?” he said. “You ain’t got it tough enough, goddamn life kicks you right in the mother-humping rocks and says, how’s that feel you, you silly ass-fucking lump of goatshit? How you like them apples now that I’ve shoved ‘em up your ass?”

Mitch wasn’t even really paying attention. “Yeah,” was all he could manage.

He had his ear to the door, listening to the unnatural quiet out there. It was a smooth and almost liquid sort of silence that just did not sound right. But then…

“Wait,” he said. “Somebody’s coming.”

Hubb just grunted.

Footsteps. Several pairs of them were coming down the corridor. But they didn’t sound soggy and dragging like those of the dead things, they sounded oddly quick and light.

They paused outside the door.

Mitch barely breathed.

A fist pounded on the door and he brought up his shotgun.

Then a voice: “Mitch? Mitch, you in there?”

Tommy? Holy H. Jesus! Mitch pulled the lock open and as he did so, he was wondering if he’d just made a real big mistake. What if Tommy was one of them now? Wouldn’t that be a real ass-kicker? But the way Mitch was feeling, what did it matter? If Chrissy was dead and Tommy was one of the living dead, his world wasn’t worth a damn anyway.

Mitch pulled open the door and Tommy was standing there. His hat was gone. His raincoat missing. His shirt and pants were torn and filthy like he’d wiped out a barn with them. A real bad odor came off him. His face was peppered with red marks that might have been burns or bites. There had to be some kind of story there.

But at least he was still normal.

“C’mon already, get the hell outta the way so we can get in,” Tommy said.

We?

Oh yes, Tommy came in, smelling like he’d been dancing a jig at a morgue, and behind him…Deke and Chrissy.

Chrissy?

Oh yes, Chrissy.

Dumbfounded, surprised, floored with happiness, Mitch just stood there while she came to him, melted into his arms. She fit right in there, felt perfect as she’d always felt perfect ever since she’d been a child. She was sobbing, shaking, and Mitch was, too. He could barely catch his breath. It had started yesterday morning…or was it afternoon?…when he’d gone out to look for her. When Lily had started to worry. And now…Christ, he could not even wrap his brain around what was happening.

“Are you okay, baby?” he finally managed.

“I am now,” she said.

“Me, too.”

They just stood there looking at each other and finally Chrissy wiped her eyes, said, “What about Mom?”

Mitch shook his head. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry…”

 

38

An hour later, things were still silent in the orphanage. They could still smell the odor of smoke, so they figured parts of the building were still burning. And if that fanned itself into a three-alarm blaze, there was going to be trouble. Real trouble. Because maybe they did not know where the legions of the dead were, but they were not kidding themselves that they had simply gone away. They were out there, somewhere. But for now, there was nothing but the five of them to do but wait.

And wait.

After Chrissy got over the initial shock of her mother’s death, there was plenty to say. Plenty of stories to be swapped. And listening to them, they all sounded equally as insane. Mitch knew he had Tommy to thank for Chrissy’s life. God willing, there’d be time later to thank him properly.

He was over at the row of windows now. All of them were boarded, but you could see easily enough between them.

“You better get over here,” Tommy said.

Mitch did. He peered out there. The rain had not started again. There were stars out in the sky and a huge full moon had risen over Witcham, turning night to a surreal, almost luminous sort of day. Mitch could see the grass out there, the road coming in. The trees behind. But he wasn’t paying much attention to any of that.

“Shit,” he said.

The dead were out there. And not just twenty or thirty, but hundreds. An immense wall of them standing out there waiting at the edge of the orphanage grounds. Mitch could see that their numbers went on and on, as far as he could see. The road leading through the woods was thick with them. They were all congregating here. Perhaps every last one of them.

Everyone was at the boarded windows now.

“What do they want?” Chrissy said. “Why are they just standing there?”

“They know we got to come out sooner or later,” Hubb said. “You smell that smoke, honey? Goddamn place is burning. Sooner or later, that fire is going to force us out.”

Mitch did not say anything.

There was nothing to say. The dead had vacated the orphanage for reasons known only to themselves. Now they were gathered out there in an army along with what must have been hundreds if not thousands of others, just waiting for the right moment. And that bothered him. Were they this organized? Or were they of some weird communal mind like on a science fiction movie? Or, and worse, had somebody managed to gather them together like this? A leader or something.

“What do you think?” Mitch finally said.

“I’d say we better make ready…I think they’re coming,” Tommy told him.

They were.

They were marching at the orphanage, moving slowly, not breaking ranks. And as the first wave neared, wave after wave after wave pushed in to take their places. And out front, interestingly enough, a single form leading the way.

“Who the hell’s that?” Deke said.

He was moving faster than the others and it wasn’t long before everyone in the classroom could see him just fine. He came within twenty feet of the building and stopped. Stopped dead.

Chrissy swallowed. “He…he was in the chapel.”

“Oh boy,” Tommy said. “You recognize that ugly face, Mitch?”

Mitch did and he didn’t. Who the hell was this? A tall man, almost regal in some way, dressed in a long black coat that might have been hide with a graying shroud beneath, soiled and dirty and set with spreading stains. His face was a leathery skull, the eyes huge, a brilliant yellow like alien moons. That face…yes, Mitch had seen it somewhere. Despite the apparent mummification, he had seen it somewhere before.

Yes, Fort Providence.

In that pit of slithering matter that Osbourne had shown them that had been grown from the finger bone of that German warlock. All those heads and faces rising from it and all of them looking exactly the same.

“Alardus Weerden,” he said.

“Who’s that?” Deke wanted to know.

But there was no time to explain any of it.

Weerden had something in his hand. A mask. He pulled it over his face. Yes, a death mask, stripped from a corpse. The scalp still intact with flowing black hair. Weerden did not move. He stayed put as the dead thronged forward like soldier ants, massing and malefic and creeping. Tommy ordered everyone away from those windows.

But Mitch did not move.

He was transfixed by what he was seeing. The dead. The walking dead of Witcham, grotesquely bloodless and rotting and infested by vermin. His eyes saw them, took them in, looking over that advancing charnel wall of death. Yes, inside he recoiled, but he was no less fascinated by what he was seeing. Skull faces and waxen faces and oozing faces and faces that moved on the bones beneath. Fishlike, blubbery mouths sucking in air and exhaling corpse gas. Fungous things and leprous things, mottled and perforated and leaking a black silt. They came forward with hands raised and fingers hooked. This was it. A human wave attack of the inhuman.

He pulled away just as the siege began.

They hit the outside of the orphanage with a great thud as if they thought they could walk right through walls. They were hissing and gibbering and making slobbering, wet sounds.

“Here we go,” Tommy said.

Hands came through the windows, shattering what glass was left in them. Fingers snaked around boards, pulling and pulling. Fists hammered and voices screeched and shadows wavered. There were raving, insane shrieks, the sound of fingers and teeth tearing at the planks. There were five windows lining the outside wall of the classroom and they were alive, alive with pale hands wrenching and twisting and clawing. Skeletal hands and gray hands and white hands set with numerous dripping black sores. Some fingers were webbed together and some had flesh hanging from them in ribbons and others were throbbing with the motion of the worms that burrowed beneath their skins.

So many white and wriggling fingers that it looked like a nest of slinking maggots in busy, industrious action.

Boards broke, others were yanked free of the nails that held them.

Eyeless faces swam in, faces that were made of dozens of converging white sacs like the floats of jellyfish. Faces that were melted wax and writhing carpets of flesh. A white face that was speckled with mold leered at Mitch with oyster-gray eyes, gouts of black blood hanging from its mouth. Another pushed in next to it, this one like a watercolor painting that had run…everything oozing from the bone beneath in a fungoid mass threaded with red worms.

Mitch and others had fallen back, but now they came forward, not with their guns, but with roadflares. They popped the caps and brought the flames to bear on the evil dead. The flames ate into hands and blackened fingers and vaporized eyes, the room filling with a thick and oily smoke of cremated flesh.

But there were always more faces and more hands.

The dead were pressing in in vast numbers and the boards were all snapping, breaking free. Bloated and fleshy hands looked for something to grab. Scabrous faces screamed and howled. More and more faces all the time, most of them ruined and puffy from immersion in the water.

The flares were just not enough.

The shotguns came out now and the night turned into a thunderstorm of shrieking voices and booming guns. Triggers were jerked and pumps worked, the muzzle flashes blinding and the chamber explosions deafening in the confines of the classroom. It was a blazing, hammering, flashing storm of pyrotechnics.

And the dead felt the sting of the rock salt.

They began to dissolve and steam and sizzle, faces sliding from skulls and hands withering. They fell into slops of mucus and flesh and jittering bones. But more came and more after that and soon enough, they had made it into the classroom over the remains of the others.

It was war to the knife now.

 

39

Mitch dropped three zombies and battered at the face of a fourth. He saw one fall apart at his feet and keep moving, a creeping plexus of meat that dragged its bones behind it like it was trying to free itself of them. He hopped away from it and right into the arms of three others. They threw him down and he brought his shotgun up, blasting two of them away that almost comically smashed into each other as they began to burn, melting into one another and fusing together, falling in a skittering, slimy heap. Smoking and steaming, they tried to pull away from each other but were tangled in each other’s anatomies.

The third zombie reached down for him and he gave it a round dead in the face that pulverized its head in splatter of tissue. It waltzed around, blind and thrashing and fell into a couple others.

And then he noticed something incredible.

Some of the dead had grown together. Two and three of them were sometimes stuck together in a central mass. At least, that’s what it looked like. But he soon saw that was not entirely the case. They were dividing. A huge and fleshy mass was actually dividing and becoming two or three separate entities.

He reloaded and kept shooting.

There was nothing else to do.

 

40

Tommy fired his last rounds and then grabbed a board and started swinging with everything he had, smashing heads that sometimes just collapsed and others that exploded in sprays of meat and tissue and black blood. Blood that was acidic and stinging when it struck him.

He saw more things come through the windows, but these were not men or women or children exactly, but something else. They looked like infants or fetuses, crawling things with too many coiling white limbs and huge bulbous heads. Some were conjoined like Siamese twins. Connected at the head or neck or waist. One of them had a face on both sides of its head and another had three faces stacked up on top of each other. Some were eyeless and some had but a single black, serous eye. Others had just too many. They hopped and skittered and slithered. One of them with no less than two heads and what might have been a dormant third, dragged itself in his direction. It had the requisite number of limbs. Though while those on the left side of its body were withered sticks, those on the right were massive and muscular, the globular white flesh set with thick purple veins.

When it got close, it tried to leap at him, but he swung his board and smashed one of the heads open. Worms and filth bubbled out. He smashed the second head the same way and that morbid thing still lived, hopping about in a crazy circle and spewing black fluid from its wounds.

Another of the freak babies came at him.

Its head was huge and misshapen, eyes the size of golf balls, a yawning mouth filled with overlapping serrated teeth that were blackened and rotting.

Tommy grabbed another board that was sharp as a stake and ran the thing through as it lunged at him. It vomited out black bile and shook like a fish out of water. Its flesh was bloodless and pulsing. Letting out a shrill, piping cry, it did not try and pull itself free from Tommy’s sharpened board…it did just the opposite. Possessed by a stupid, maniacal hate, it began to push itself up the shaft of the board, impaling itself further, but only concerned with getting at the man that had speared it.

Tommy tossed the board with a cry and the thing tried to move still.

More freak babies were coming through the windows, some of them attached together like paper dolls. Others crawled up the walls and some just wriggled about like squids or worms.

Tommy kicked at one that made for his legs, felt another creep up his back. He tossed it to the floor and it actually splattered into a convulsive stew of flesh and black fluid.

And then one grabbed his arms with wiry white fingers. Its bloated, waxy face grinned up at him and then its black teeth sank right into his forearm. He let out a cry and tried to grab the top of its head to toss it free. Its skull was not bone, but some rubbery and gelid material that came apart in his hand. His fingers plunged right through the crown of its skull and pierced the wormy gray matter within.

It let out a wild, whooping cry and fell off him.

And as if answering some unknown call, the freak babies retreated.

 

41

Hubb kept firing and reloading, firing and reloading.

He made a pretty good show of himself for a man who’d already suffered two minor heart attacks and was on the verge of a third. His left arm was burning, his chest tight and corded. Sweat ran down his face and he could not seem to breathe. But true to form, he wailed out a string of profanities and fired his last rounds until a burst of pain in his chest made him nearly black out.

He dropped his gun.

His eyes fluttered closed and when he opened them, there was a little girl standing there with a hatchet in her hands. Her hair was black and lustrous, stuck to her white face with blood and snot.

“I brought you something, mister,” she said.

Hubb just shook his head.

The hatchet came down again and again and Hubb was beyond defending himself. It split his head open, severed his left hand at the wrist, dug into his throat, chopping and cutting and slicing until he fell over dead.

The zombie girl kept hacking at him until she was splashed red with his blood. Then giggling, she picked up his hand and went back out into the night.

 

42

Chrissy and Deke worked in unison with road flares in each hand, jabbing them into faces and clawing hands, driving the dead away. But for everyone that fell back, three more took their place.

A dozen of them surrounded the couple, then at some unspoken moment, lunged. The first few got flares jammed into their faces, but the others got what they wanted. Two of them dragged Deke to the ground and he fought like a wild cat, punching and kicking and slashing until he worked himself free.

Several others took Chrissy and tried to drag her to the windows. She fought in their grip. Her nails dug into eyeballs and her fingers slid into pulpy faces. Others joined in, fighting for possession of her. One of them had a face of trailing flesh that looked like a squashed jellyfish, another had a tiny set of mutant arms coming out of its chest. She screamed and fought and then Mitch was there.

He put his last two round into the lot of them.

Several died, smoking and shuddering. Two others made for the window.

What was left behind was a woman who was hideous beyond words. She looked like the others, save that she had been pregnant. Instead of being born, the child had simply been absorbed by its mother’s flesh. It had now erupted from her belly, a thing with flesh like grease, heads thrashing and limbs rising out of the mass like it was trying to escape the bondage of its mother.

Tommy came up and tossed a flare into her lap and she crept away, burning and making a snorting, guttural sound like a suckling pig.

And that’s when they all noticed one thing.

The dead had now retreated.

They were outside the windows, hundreds of them, but they were not coming in.

 

43

And then it started raining again.

Raining damn hard.

But this was not water falling from the sky. It was something solid. Something that came down in a violent, lashing crimson torrent. Mitch and the others stood there, not knowing what to think or what to make of it. This was a red rain. It struck the walls of the orphanage with thudding, splatting sounds that were disgusting and meaty. Then that red, liquid rain poured right through the windows.

It was filled with falling, ropy shapes.

Not rain.

But worms.

A rain of red worms.

The first deluge of them were squashed by the fall, breaking open on impact. But they kept coming and coming and coming until the floor near the windows was a foot deep in thousands of looping and twining red worms. They were tangled together in a single mass of brilliant red undulant motion that began to break apart.

The worms were coming for Mitch and the others.

They uncoiled themselves from that squirming mass and began dropping to the floor. The first few just laid there, almost sluggishly like grass snakes waking up after a long winter’s hibernation. Almost like they were dazed. But others followed and they were very active. Some of them were easily a foot in length, segmented and violently red, obscenely thick and excreting a transparent jelly. A few of them rose up and tasted the air with tiny puckering mouths.

There was no getting beyond the absolute revulsion they inspired.

Mitch and Tommy, Deke and Chrissy…they were all feeling it. Some macabre and self-destructive part of their brains wondering bleakly what it might feel like to have one of those things slide up your pant leg or get under your shirt. Maybe slide across your belly or put that puckering mouth against your lips. You could not look at things like that without being offended almost atavistically. The human mind recoiled at the idea of worms in general and when they were profuse like this, it was appalled to great depths. For mankind had a long association with squirming, serpentine shapes and hated them on sight. For Mitch and the others, they were seized by a primal instinct which told them to stomp those things, to crush them under their boots. To exterminate them. Because if you didn’t, they’d breed and infest and you just couldn’t have that, now could you?

Mitch didn’t know about the others, but to him worms were just worms. Until they gathered in numbers like this. And especially since he had seen these very same worms slithering in and out of the walking dead, infesting and feeding upon them. And now they had come down in a rain. An actual rain.

Not good.

Not good at all.

“They’re coming across the floor,” Chrissy said. She was a long-time detractor of anything crawly or slinking and these things filled her with horror.

More worms unknotted themselves from the central mass. No less than fifty or sixty of them were moving at Mitch’s group.

“What do they want? Why are they doing this?” Deke wanted to know. “They’re worms. Worms don’t hunt people.”

“It’s that fucking Weerden, Mitch,” Tommy said. “This is one of his little tricks, you know? A funny little game to him.”

“Grab the last of those flares,” Mitch said.

Chrissy refused to do anything but press herself up against the wall. She knew that fear of such things like these was a clichéd female thing, but she honestly did not care. Let the men handle it. She just didn’t do worms.

Tommy, Mitch, and Deke popped the flares and guttering red flames shot out, spraying sparks and lazy clouds of smoke.

“Come on, wormy. Got something for you,” Tommy said.

Maybe the worms were driven by Weerden, but they were still essentially worms, regardless of their apparent mutation. And worms did not understand fire. They did not understand what it was like to burn. Not until they got too close. Then they understood, all right.

Tommy gave them the first taste.

Not that Mitch was surprised. Even as a kid, Tommy had been practically fearless. The first kid to step on an especially large and ugly spider. The first guy to shoot some growling, strange dog with his slingshot. The first one to pick up a snake or swing a dead rat around by the tail. The first guy into a fistfight and the last one out. He was in his element here. Maybe it was not especially smart under the circumstances, but he figured that if clowns from hell didn’t scare him, worms weren’t about to.

Two or three got within range of his boot and he put the flame to them. The flare burned especially hot and it sliced them right in half. Their severed bodies writhed on the floor.

“Just fucking worms,” Tommy said.

Mitch and Deke were at it, too, by then. On their knees, they passed the flares before them in wide arcs and the heat drove most of the worms back. Those that didn’t retreat, were fried. Within five minutes, there had to be a hundred smoking, blazing worm carcasses.

“God, that stinks,” Chrissy said.

Mitch laughed almost automatically.

“This works good,” Deke said, seeming to enjoy himself.

“Sure, until you guys run out of flares.”

Then what? Then what happened? The worms kept coming and Mitch and his little crew tap-danced around, trying to squash as many as they could before the little buggers got up their pants and started biting, started tunneling like borer worms? Because if those things got them down, they’d be buried in their numbers.

“Hey!” Tommy called out into the night. “This ain’t working, Weerden, you fucking scab! Try something else!”

Mitch was going to tell him that you didn’t challenge something like Alardus Weerden, something dead yet alive, something that was practically immortal if you believed the regeneration stories they’d heard at the Army base. You didn’t go and piss off something like him that had been on both sides of the grave and many times. Jesus Christ, he was a warlock for chrissake. What if he could call up a storm or raise a demon or something like that?

But he didn’t do any of those things.

And maybe Weerden had nothing to do with what came next, but nobody believed that for a moment.

The dead were still out there, but there was something with them now. Some huge, amorphous shape that crept up to the windows like a spreading hood of shadow. Maybe crept wasn’t the right word, for this moved like a wave, a great dark wave heading ashore and when it hit the building, the classroom shook.

And Mitch thought: Oh good God, what is that coming at us? What is that?

His first sensation was the stink it brought with it: a high, almost yeasty smell of fermentation like apples that had gone bad, gone to a soft decaying pulp. That was the smell. Only amplified a thousand times into a low, black stench that got down in his belly and tried to yank his guts out. His second sensation was its size. How it seemed to literally absorb the dead that waited in its path. And his third was when it struck the building: everything shook like a train had just tried to bash through the wall.

Chrissy was actually pitched onto her ass.

“What is it? What is it? What is it?” she kept saying.

But they all saw soon enough. It was a great wave of gray-white jelly, an immense creeping mass that filled the windows, pulsating and oozing and horribly alive. It struck the building, great blobs of itself pressing through the windows like moist, greasy dough forced through holes with incredible pressure. It spilled into the room, fleshy and convulsing, its outer skin transparent so that you could see things like coiling roots and thick red and green arteries that throbbed beneath. Its surface was set with great pustules and trembling mounds, a ropy cobwebbing of white and undulant fibers growing over it like a net.

Somebody screamed and Mitch was pretty sure it was himself.

Though they couldn’t see outside because it blocked the windows, they did not doubt its colossal bulk. For the walls were creaking as was the entire orphanage. That thing could maybe have swallowed it alive.

“What the fuck?” Tommy said.

As it came into the room, it fell over the worms and vacuumed them right up into its mass. Whatever it was, it would absorb and assimilate anything that it came into contact with. Anything of flesh and blood.

“It looks…it looks like that thing in the pit,” Mitch said. “At the base.”

And it did. That quivering mass of shapeless flesh that Osbourne had shown them. That massive undulating horror that they had grown from Weerden’s tissue. Perhaps it was that very thing, Mitch thought. When the dam broke, it probably flattened Fort Providence like everything else. The base would have been right in its path. The research compound there was probably stripped away and this horror was set loose, to devour and consume and engorge itself. Maybe this wasn’t that thing, but it was something pretty damn close.

“A fucking blastema,” Tommy said.

It poured into the classroom, massing in front of the windows. It did not flood forward and overwhelm Mitch and the others. Instead, it began to grow, to divide, to do something. White pulsing tendrils emerged from the mass and began snaking over the floor, up the walls, spreading over the ceiling like albino rootlets as seen via time-lapse photography. Yes, the walls, the ceiling, the floor was thick with them. But before any of those seeking growths reached Mitch and the others, something else happened. It looked like the thing was germinating. All those great pustules and lumps and cancerous looking mounds began to split open and out came…people. Or parts of them. Perfectly white hands erupted and clutched at the empty air. Arms came out, fingers wiggling at their ends. And then faces. A hundred faces, a thousand faces. So many albino faces that they crowded in for space. All of them were a ghastly white like the walking dead themselves. All were hairless. Most were fetal and unformed. None had eyes, just contorted, gasping mouths. And everyone of those mouths began to scream with the high, agonized wailing of the damned.

More limbs sprouted.

Not just faces now, but entire heads.

And then entire bodies, marble-white mockeries of men, women, children, even infants. They began to emerge from the central crawling mass, screeching and moaning, trying to pull themselves free with their hands. They were not just white, but perforated with tiny holes and grotesque nodules that popped and spilled that black blood. Their skins were set with a pale green and blue vein tracery. More of them sprouted all the time. Some growing from the bellies of the previous or sheering others asunder as they flowered with a moist, ripping sound. Bodies divided into two and three and four, single heads split into twos and threes with sprays of gray slime. Faces were overrun by other faces. Embryonic things like mutant babies emerged. Multi-headed things. Things with dozens of limbs. All of them connected to the central mass.

And all along the flowing, rippling mass of tissue, more things were born and more and more and more. A forest of reaching hands and thrashing limbs and sightless screaming faces.

It surged forward and Mitch pushed the others toward the doorway.

Better to face off against the dead than be absorbed by this hideous mutation, to be pulled in by those hands and feel those puckered mouths on your own. Tommy threw open the door, the sound of those screaming mouths just absolutely deafening. Mitch knew they would not escape. There was just no way. And out in the corridor, more of that surging tissue was rolling in their direction with a million faces.

Not worms and not water, but something else. A violent lashing storm as if the heavens had been split open and the orphanage and everything for miles around it was deluged in its blood. It poured and poured, hammering down so loudly that Mitch could not hear what Tommy was saying.

But then he didn’t have to.

He could smell what it was: the yellow rain. The same sharp, acrid stink that Tommy and he had smelled when the rain killed those cops outside the Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus.

Tommy jumped up and down. “VVK!” he shouted. “IT’S THE VVK!”

Deke and Chrissy had no idea what the hell he was talking about. They were dumbfounded and confused. Was this a good development or a bad one? Yes, they were stunned and horrified and just beside themselves, but mostly they were dumfounded. The smell was so bad, the air so thick with the pungent odor of that toxic chemical rain, that the lot of then could barely breathe. Their eyes watered and their stomachs heaved. Holding onto one another, they staggered away down the corridor.

But they could all see the effect the yellow rain had: the fleshy mass was retreating. It was pulling itself back outside and that was the very worst thing it could have done. It thrashed and pounded and rolled and surged, those voices screeching and then it was gone. Out into the rain.

Through the open front door of the orphanage, Mitch and Tommy and Deke and Chrissy saw it happen.

Saw the reign of the mutant dead come to a crashing end.

They couldn’t see what happened to the mass of tissue, but what happened to the dead was all too apparent. There were hundreds of them out there, from the bottom of the orphanage porch out into the courtyard and to the woods themselves, all lit in that phantasmal yellow illumination of the rain itself. They were all twisting and screaming and falling, contorting madly on the ground. Their skins scorched and blistered, ran like superheated wax, popping and sizzling, running from the polished white bone beneath. Eyes bleached and fell in. Flesh bubbled. Limbs curled up. An oily brown smoke rose into the night. And out there, for a few impossible moments like something from a Halloween cartoon, there were hundreds of skeletons dancing a grisly jig out in the rain, then they simply collapsed into a sea of bones and carrion.

And then nothing moved.

Nothing at all.

The rain faded to a drizzle and then ended.

One of the undead made it up the steps and fell to the cracked tiled floor. But only one. Weerden. He was blackened and blistered, squirming in his death throes like a dying, blackened worm. His hands clawed out, his mouth roared. Things like great whipping red tentacles rose from his remains and snapped at the air and then crumbled away. And then there was an eruption of that viscous black blood that pooled around him. Worms boiled out of his skeleton. Then a buzzing, whirling tornado of flies and beetles and roaches, thousands of them spinning in a frenzied cyclonic storm…and then they too fell into the smoking, steaming mass of corruption. Weerden’s flesh clung to his jerking skeleton and his skull rose up, screaming and then fell into the liquitious, bubbling stew of charnel waste.

He was dead.

They were all dead.

And outside, the sky was clear and the stars were out.

Everyone was speechless. Everyone but Tommy. He just whistled low in his throat and said, “Mother…fucker.”

 

44

Dawn.

They didn’t dare go out until the sun came up and it was the finest, most perfect sunrise any of them had ever seen. It lit the world with golden light and they felt the warmth on their faces for the first time in God knows how long.

Deke kissed Chrissy.

Tommy kissed Chrissy.

Mitch kissed Chrissy.

Then Tommy grabbed him and planted a wet one on his cheek. “I love you, man,” he said.

“Knock it off,” Mitch said, giggling happily like a child.

Together they stepped out onto the porch.

Dear God.

For as far as the eye could see, the world was a great noxious ooze of putrescence and carrion and bones. A steam of gassy decomposition rising up from it. A livid carpet of rotting flesh. And birds. Hundreds and hundreds of birds. Gulls and vultures and buzzards and ravens. And flies, of course. All of Mother Nature’s carrion eaters had assembled and were hard at work.

“Do we have to walk through that?” Chrissy said.

“Yeah, Mitch, she’s got her new shoes on,” Tommy said.

Everyone laughed.

But they didn’t have to walk because they could hear the helicopters coming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RESURRECTION

 

 

 

1

Witcham was a disaster area.

Even the governor declared it so.

And there was no doubt of that. It was a sea of mud and silt and bodies. Entire neighborhoods were gone. Buildings and homes washed away. Hillsides were missing. Structures that had stood a hundred and fifty years were pulverized. It took weeks and weeks for the water to drain away into the swollen Black River which spilled into the Great Lakes themselves. And when the water was finally gone, wreckage. A rawboned cadaver of a town washed by a few feeble streams of contaminated water and smeared with silt and run-off and tons of debris and refuse. The black mud that had been deposited over the city was five feet deep in places. Areas of the city were absolute bogs that would never dry up on their own. Homes that still stood were filled with mud and sewage and all manners of rotting garbage and detritus.

And above all, there were corpses.

Thousands and thousands of them in every possible state of decay. The media was all over that, but not CNN or ABC or NBC or even the underground press itself ever, ever mentioned that many of the bodies had been walking around as zombies. That was left out of every report and the people of Witcham, those glassy-eyed survivors whose heads were supplied with a lifetime of nightmares, never mentioned what they saw. As far as the world at large was concerned, Witcham had flooded through torrential rains and then the Black Lake Reservoir had burst its dam and devastated the city.

That was it.

D-Mort was brought in. D-Mort, the Disaster Mortuary Response Team. A branch of the federal government, they were responsible for cataloging the dead following airplane crashes and mass disasters of any kind. They came in force with a team of pathologists and coroners, forensic anthropologists and undertakers. It was nearly impossible, under the circumstances, to identify the cadavers and parts thereof they found. But they did their job and it took months. D-Mort are notoriously close-mouthed about what they have seen and what it is they do, and they were no less secretive about Witcham. They gathered up the dead and placed them in huge makeshift morgues and began the gruesome business of setting things to right. Many were reburied, but many were not. And whatever they learned and whatever they decided was unfit for traditional burial and what it was they shoveled into the mouths of incinerators, they never spoke of.

Many who’d lived through the horror of Witcham and many who returned, denied the lurid tales that made the rounds. Just as the traditional press did. Of all those who had survived the death of the city, none of them wished to discuss more than what was reported in the press.

But what they said in private was a different matter.

Lou Darin returned to the city and spent his years denying that anything other than an ordinary flood had taken the town. He was not alone. Many refused to believe what they had seen and what they had lived through. It was simply beyond belief.

Some had no choice but to believe.

Chuck Bittner was one of these.

It took him weeks and weeks to track down the apartment building where Mrs. Crowley had lived. The building was empty, of course. It was marked for demolition and had been for months before the flooding. He had to sneak inside. He had to see that flat where the old witch had lived. He had to prove to himself that such a place existed.

It did.

What he found were empty, dusty rooms that had not been lived in for years. But the layout was familiar, too familiar. Maybe the furniture was gone. All the cozy accoutrements that had baited in he and the other kids that night they’d escaped from that clown were missing, but there was no doubt in Chuck’s mind that he stood in the house of the child-eating witch.

And that was proved positive when he saw something scratched into the wall there. Names. The names of the children:

Brian Summers.

Tara Boyle.

Mark Tobin.

And beneath that, in the same gouged and spidery hand:

September 27

On this date I did et three children and found them pleasing

Chuck ran out of there then. It was just too much. All of it came rushing back into his head and as he ran from the building, he thought he heard the shrill cackling of the old witch following behind him.

 

2

For Mitch and Tommy and Deke and Chrissy, there were a lot of long nights trying to pull their lives together. Nothing would be the same again. But they accepted that. Tommy had had no family but his sister Bonnie and she had been out of town when the disaster struck. Mitch had lost his wife and Chrissy had lost her mother and all of her closest friends. Deke had lost his parents. No one who survived the blackness Witcham had been plunged into came out of it without loss, without scars and wounds and suffering. It was the nature of the beast. But for all of it, there was a beauty and a serenity to surviving. To being able to see the sun and smell clean air again. And mostly, to be dry and know that the dead were once again, just the dead.

Deke moved in with his aunt who lived ten miles away.

Mitch and Chrissy moved in with Tommy out at his cabin on Pullman Lake, which was situated outside of the Black River Valley and suffered no damage. Mitch and Chrissy had a lot of good cries, did a lot of bonding. But they came through it. And Tommy was always there with a smart remark or to say the worst possible thing at the worst possible time.

But they went on.

They lived off of Mitch and Tommy’s savings, neither of them were quite ready to go back into the blue collar world even six weeks later. But that would come. In time.

One afternoon as Mitch laid on Tommy’s couch, he said, “You know, it’s just damn funny that there’s no mention of the walking dead, no mention of the shit that caused it: that goddamn army base and their experiments.”

“Perception management,” Tommy told him, pulling off a cigarette. “They got spin doctors at work out there, Mitch, that could make you believe you’re my maiden aunt.”

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

Chrissy who had been sitting there with them, threw back her long lustrous dark hair and just laughed. “Oh, there’s been mention of it, guys.”

They both looked at her.

On the coffee table were some of Tommy’s favorite periodicals, the kind that specialized in bigfoot rape stories and UFO abductions. There were three copies of the Weekly World Examiner sitting there, well-thumbed. On their covers were photos that might have been taken in Witcham or maybe on a soundstage for that matter. One showed a rain-swept, flooded street and blurry, out-of-focus people rising from the murk. Another showed a shadowy figure standing amongst some graves. And still another showed hands rising from the water. Hands that looked a little familiar for Mitch to simply shrug off. Too white, too bloated, too set with sores. WISCONSIN CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD, one headline proclaimed. THE WITCH-AM HORROR, said another. THE RISING DEAD OF WISCONSIN, said yet another. Inside, were more blurry photos. Some which had actually been taken in Witcham. The stories were lurid to the extreme and that was pretty fitting, because what had happened in Witcham was certainly lurid. And certainly extreme by all standards of normalcy.

Mitch just sighed, forcing memories from his head. “I guess…I guess it makes you wonder how much of that stuff is true, you know?”

Tommy and Chrissy looked at each other, laughed.

“Yeah, here’s one that’s got me thinking,” Tommy said. “’Face of Jesus seen on Mars.’ I mean, that’s food for thought.”

“How about this one,” Chrissy said. “’Rabid Grandmother feeds grandchildren to giant Rats.’ I don’t think I’ll sleep again.”

“All right, all right.” Mitch just shook his head. “And where are you off to?”

Chrissy shrugged. “Deke’s picking me up.”

“Well, tell him he better come in this time,” Tommy said. “No daughter of mine is dating some hoodlum who pulls up in the yard and revs his engine. I won’t have it. Me or your father.”

Chrissy ignored him, came over to Mitch and gave him a kiss. “Love you, dad.”

“Love you, kid. Be careful, will ya?”

“Always.”

Tommy put his hands on his hips. “Where’s mine? Didn’t I raise you better than that?”

Chrissy pecked him on the cheek.

Mitch watched her go to the door and wait. He found that he could spend hours just staring at her. She was her own person, tough and individualistic, but now and again, he could see Lily in her eyes or hear her in Chrissy’s staccato laugh.

“See you, boys,” she said when Deke pulled up.

“What should we do tonight, father?” Tommy said.

Mitch sighed. “Would you knock it off.”

“We could watch TV or play cards…unless you feel like fooling around a little.”

Mitch sighed. “You are an asshole, Tommy Kastle.”

“You know what my mom said. Go with your strengths.”

Mitch shut his eyes. He missed Lily, but they had a life again, Chrissy and he. And in the greater scheme of things, that would have to be enough. The sky was still blue. And the sun still rose. The birds still sang and Tommy was still a dick.

There was peace in that, now wasn’t there?

 

--The End--