“Let’s just ride this storm out for now,” I said.
I left them there hashing it out. I went over to the others. They were sitting on a low stone trough. Janie had broke out some MREs and Texas Slim was regaling them with a story of a tornado at his aunt’s farm in Oklahoma. This was his version of dinner theater. I wasn’t hungry, but I listened to Texas tell of cows getting sucked up into the funnel, their badly worn carcasses getting deposited in the parking lot of an all-you-can eat barbeque joint twenty miles away.
“So at least none of that beef went to waste,” he said.
I walked away, Morse snapping a few shots of me, and leaned against one of the stalls. The smell of hot food made my stomach flip and flop. I stayed there by myself, chain-smoking and wondering if I was leading those poor people to their deaths.
Lost in thought, I looked up and Janie was standing there.
“What’re you thinking about, Nash?” she asked me, though I could see by the set of her face that she had absolutely no interest. “Something important or just musing over Mickey’s tits?”
“I was musing over Mickey’s tits.”
Janie shook her head and turned away.
“It was a fucking joke,” I told her. “C’mon.”
She stayed though it was obvious that she no longer cared for my company and could you honestly blame her? All men lust in their hearts, don’t they? But only the stupid ones let it go any farther than that.
“I was thinking about these people, Janie.”
“What about them?”
I pulled off my smoke, wishing to God I could quit and knowing there wasn’t much point to it at that stage. “They’re following me because they have some kind of faith in me or they fear The Shape or they think it-or I-will keep them safe. For the most part, they don’t question; they accept. And that bothers me. The faith they have.”
“Well, faith of any sort would bother a guy like you,” she said and then noticing that I was oblivious to her barbs, said, “They need something to believe in, Nash. Everyone does. Especially now. And you have to admit, for the most part they’ve been lucky with you.”
“Specs and Sean weren’t so lucky.”
But she had no interest in discussing the dead. “And you’re bothered by this faith?”
“Yes, I am.” I ground out my cigarette. “We’re going to a place called Bitter Creek, Janie. All I know is that somewhere near there Price says there is a storage facility the Army kept its germ warfare agents at. That’s all I know. But I know it’s where I’m supposed to go. I know, somehow, that it all ends there. I have to go there…but I don’t know about the rest of you. I wonder if I shouldn’t tell you people to keep heading west and just drop me off. I don’t like the idea of the rest of you facing what I know I have to face.”
“Hmm. Suddenly you have some overwhelming desire to protect their lives?”
“Yes.”
“It’s too late, Nash. They’ll follow you and you can’t get rid of them.”
“What about you?”
She studied me with her cold blue eyes. “I have my own reasons for staying with you and, believe me, they have nothing to do with love for who or what you’ve become.”
“Why don’t you tell me what I’ve become?”
“What good would it do?”
She turned away and I grabbed her hand. She yanked it away like she’d just touched a rattlesnake. “Don’t touch me, Nash. You don’t have the right anymore. I’ll stay with you like the others. But only because I need to, not because I want to.”
2
“You smell that?” Carl said about ten minutes later.
I stopped brooding. The wind was coming from the other direction, through the half-open door at the far side, and I could smell death on it: hot, putrefying. It was a smell I knew well, the bouquet of every city in the country and the world for that matter. But in that barn you did not expect it. It was high, nauseating and it was getting stronger.
Carl, Texas, and I grabbed our guns.
We tracked the smell to the far end of the barn and each step I took on the way there made my heart sink a little lower. We didn’t need more trouble. We had to get to Bitter Creek. And with what might be waiting there, wasn’t that enough?
“Something around that stall,” Texas said, his Desert Eagle. 50 cal in his hands.
Carl moved forward with his AK. I followed.
Corpses.
There was some kind of trough cut into the floor and its purpose was unknown to me. There were five or six bodies in there. They were greening, going soft with rot. They were all bloated up, that stink so thick it was nearly palpable.
“Shit,” Carl said.
One of the bodies moved. Then another. It was incredible, but I saw it and despite all I knew about horror by that point-which was considerable, I might add-I found myself gripped with an unreasoning superstitious terror at the idea of a moving corpse.
But there was nothing supernatural about it.
The bodies were infested. That’s all it was. A corpse-worm that was perfectly white and perfectly smooth slid out of the eye socket of one of the bodies. It was slimy and steaming, about three feet of it wavering side-to-side in the air, that bulb-like head opening and closing like it was breathing.
Carl shot it, cut it in half before it could spit some of its digestive enzymes at us. The bullets shattered it into a fleshy sauce of black bile. The rest of it slid back into the eye socket.
“We should burn those bodies or something,” Carl said.
“Why?” Texas asked him. “Once those worms are done eating, they’ll just starve anyway with no more meat to be had.”
“True,” I said.
Texas and I turned away and walked towards the others. I called out to them that it was nothing but a worm and they relaxed. Carl was right behind us. He couldn’t help himself, he pointed his AK into the pit and gave the remains a couple of three-shot bursts.
And that’s when we all heard the screaming.
3
A man came charging out at us. He had a shovel in his hands and he planned on using it. I don’t know where he’d been hiding-maybe under the straw-but he charged right at Carl before any of us could intervene and before Carl could get his weapon up. He swung the shovel and Carl ducked out of the way. It barely missed his head. The shovel blade hit the concrete with such force it sparked.
Then Carl cracked the guy with the butt of his AK and down he went.
He was some raggedy old man with a white beard. He was on his knees, breathing hard, blood running down his temple.
Carl got his rifle on him.
“We won’t hurt you,” I told him and he just looked at me with wild, confused eyes. The eyes of an animal. He muttered something, but it made no sense. The others were circled around us by that time. He saw them, panicked, and crawled away on all fours towards the door.
