In the bright lights and spotter scopes, they were plainly visible sliding in and out of the corpses.
And then they saw something that was perhaps worse. If anything can truly be worse than the living dead infested with looping red worms. The ground beyond the trench was not only scattered with the still-moving litter of the dead, arms and legs and fingers and heads, but with free-moving worms. Many were sliding free of the shattered anatomies they had once fed upon, but many, many more seemed to be independent.
Pearle saw them.
Dozens of his men saw them.
What was at first dozens of those wriggling worms moving at the trench became hundreds, then thousands and finally a boiling red nest of them. They were interlocked and coiled together in a great rolling peristaltic wave that must have contained millions. That squirming wave poured forward and there was no doubt what the end result of that would be. If it reached the perimeter…good God, the men would be hip-deep in a ravenous, invasive sea of carrion worms.
If the walkers hadn’t been enough, this certainly was. Men bolted in numbers now and more than one overzealous NCO pulled his M-16 and shot his own deserting men.
It really was a miracle that the gas-filled trench had not went up by this point. Pearle, confused and disoriented, ordered one of the men with flamethrowers to ignite the trench. He did so just as the worms were but inches away. The gasoline erupted in a fuming cloud of fire and black smoke, the flames racing along the trench and encircling the prison in a blazing ring.
It worked wonders on the advancing worms. The majority of them near to the trench were cremated instantly and the others went back the way they came.
But the dead?
That was a different matter.
They did not hesitate. They did not like the fire, but it did not stop them.
Pearle went out of his mind at it. “NOT THE TRENCH! THEY CANNOT
BREACH THE TRENCH!”
But they did.
They waded right into the burning trench, dozens and dozens of them. Some were immediately overwhelmed by the flames and sank into the flaming gasoline. But others made it through, human torches that charged the perimeter only to be met by gouts of fire from the flamethrowers. But the burning gasoline only had a limited lifespan. The rain was diluting it steadily. Already the flames were dying down and in some places, so many walkers were trapped in the inferno that they suffocated it. And the others used their writhing remains as bridges.
The dead poured forth again as the rain fell in gray sheets.
They were met by clattering machine guns and the popping of small arms fire, walls of fire spewed from the flamethrowers. Still they came. In whole and in part. The air was thick with the smoke of rifles and burnt ordinance, the stink of phosphorus and cordite and incinerated flesh. But the most prevalent smell behind the sandbagged perimeter was the stench of vomit and feces from the men fouling themselves.
And the dead surged forward, as tenacious as any enemy the 4/1 could conceive of.
They could smell the fear on the soldiers and they charged forward, broaching the sandbags and the soldiers met them with bayonets and knifes, shooting until they ran out of bullets and then swinging their rifles like clubs. But the dead were overwhelming. They refused to die. They fell on the men in hordes, dismembering the defenders, tearing out throats and vomiting sprays of black acidic juice into their eyes. Pearle saw Waterman get disemboweled and then saw no less than six of the dead claw and snarl amongst each other as they fought over the steaming viscera that fell from his opened belly.
It was insane.
Close-in fighting against the legions of the dead.
A battle amongst the dead and dying and undead in a rain-swamped position.
They lurched and hopped forward, white-faced things set with holes. Eyeless things. Things like mummies and wax dummies and scarecrows with their stuffing hanging out. Distorted faces and leaping shadows and shrieking nightmares. Things whose faces were creeping white tissue or glistening with hundreds of undulating, feeding red worms. Water ran from them and that black, viscous blood…if that’s really what it was. You could shoot them and stab them and slash their limbs free, but they did not die. Hands still clutched and legs still kicked. Torsos inched along the ground like slugs and heads shrieked into the night.
Surprisingly, through it all, very few men deserted. The ones that had maintained their posts fought on, most of them wounded and hysterical and blood-thirsty. They wanted to kill. They needed to kill. Flamethrowers hissed and the dead…and the living…went up. Grenades exploded. Weapons discharged. Smoke rose into the night in great seething clouds. Fire blazed everywhere. The dead fought with the living and scattered at their feet, the wreckage of war: limbs and bodies and scraps of pustulant white flesh that refused to know death.
In the end, the walkers dragged off the corpses of soldiers, those dead and those near-death. The 4/1 held and Pearle was still alive, damn them all. The walkers had gotten what they’d come for. When it was over, fires were still burning and the air was a repellent brew of smoke and steam from burning bodies and the dank smell of falling rain, the smell of rotting meat and spilled blood. Bodies were strewn everywhere. Parts of bodies. Limbs and trunks. Mostly from the soldiers themselves. Pieces of the walkers were scattered from inside the sandbagged perimeter right to the prison gates, slithering and worming bits of non-life.
Pearle rallied his forces.
Using entrenching tools, they shoveled the dead into the ditch until their area was clear. Then they lit it all up with the flamethrowers. When it was all burning high and bright, Pearle looked please.
“God bless America!” he called out.
And the rain fell and the perimeter flooded and the mud sluiced in rivers. And behind the prison wall, there was the sound of feeding. Of chewing and tearing, licking and sucking.
It went on all night.
14
“Arrogant, I was, Mitch Barron,” Wanda Sepperly said with some pain knitted beneath her words. “Old age has not only made me soft in the head, made me lapse into dream and lost memory at the goddamnedest times, it has brought me conceit and confidence that I should have no truck with. Do you see what I’m saying to you, son? Is that light bulb popping over your head like in the funnies when I was a girl? I’m saying to you that not only am I often right, but oftener wrong.”
Mitch and Tommy sat at Wanda’s kitchen table while she examined the carcass of a chicken, sprinkling spices and powders into pans of water she had set out. There was weird smell in the air like cinnamon and sage and dried flowers that came from the burning incense pots in the living room. It was so strong in there, it practically made you want to gag. When they came in, Wanda Sepperly told them that they’d have to learn to live with and like that smell, for it was a smell that those outside could not stand. They would stay away, she said, for her medicine was stronger.
Mitch came because he had to find Chrissy.
Maybe Lily was gone, but something told him that Chrissy was not. That she was alive. Wanda had told them earlier that Chrissy would come to him in her own time, but Mitch wasn’t so sure about that. Maybe he wasn’t a seer or a gypsy fortune teller or the neighborhood witch, but he had a real ugly feeling in his guts and he could not seem to shake it. When they got to Wanda’s, she was still awake despite the late hour, candles burning and incense stinking. The Zirblanski twins were sleeping in a back bedroom. “Don’t you worry about waking me, Mitch Barron,” she had said. “The old sleep poorly and such is a fact of life.”
Thing was, once again, she knew why they had come.
“Yer thinking that your young miss is in danger, eh? That crazy old Mother Sepperly is a few plates short of a
