16
As they cruised Upper Main, Tommy said, “I ever tell you about that cousin of mine that woke up in the morgue? Sure as shit. Stanny McCoy. Guy liked to drink. I mean he really liked to drink, Mitch. Been in and out of detox, couldn’t hold a job. He was one of those guys you see pedaling around town on an old bike with a basket full of cans he dug out of dumpsters and ditches. They’d throw his ass in detox over at St. Mary’s. A month later, they’d spring him and he’d be back on his favorite barstool, pissed to the gourd. Well, one day he passes out over in Chatterly Park, middle of a January night. Ten below or some shit. Some Public Works guy plowing snow the next morning sees Stanny leaning up against a tree, frozen right to it. Well, cops and ambulance guys declare him dead. They had to use a salamander heater to peel him off that tree because he was iced right to it. Anyway, they find Stanny a drawer all his own over to the county meat locker. Fifteen hours later, he comes around. Scared the shit right out of the guy pulling the graveyard shift, Stanny moaning and scraping around in the icebox.”
“He live?” Mitch asked.
“Sure as shit. Spent like two weeks in St. Mary’s, recovering. Lost a couple toes, nothing else. They said it was the booze that kept him alive. The booze and the cold lowered his body temperature, made him sort of hibernate. Then he thawed and woke up. You know what my mom said to him?”
“What?”
“She said, ‘Well, Stanny, I hope you see the evils of liquor now, I hope this changes things for you.’ And Stanny says, ‘Oh yuh, oh yuh, that’s for sure. From now on, I only drink inside.’ And that’s the God’s honest truth, Mitch.”
Mitch stared out the windshield, seeing too many shadows prancing about out there. “And is there a point to that story, Tommy? A…whaddyacallit…moral?”
“Sure,” Tommy said. “Stanny was right. Fuck this noise, let’s go get drunk.”
“I wish I could.”
“You got a plan, Mitch? Any kind of plan?” Tommy asked him. “I mean, even if you don’t have a clue, you could pretend otherwise…just for my sake.”
A plan.
Yes, what exactly was the plan?
Mitch didn’t know. This was probably some wild goose chase perpetuated by the visions of some crazy old lady that saw prophecy in egg yolks and chicken guts. But it was all he had and a starving man will gladly eat crumbs. He looked at the dash and the glowing green display of the digital clock told him it was almost three a.m. That meant roughly another four hours of darkness this time of year. And with the rain and mist and gloom, probably more like five. For even today at noon, it was so gray out it had looked like twilight.
Lots of darkness and then only scant light.
He didn’t know what to do. He could only follow Wanda Sepperly’s vague directions as to where Chrissy might be. Thing was, Upper Main was nearly two miles long and with two feet of water in the streets that was steadily rising, it seemed like forever. Main was dead. Being that the University was just off of it, Main was thronged with bars and clubs and what have you. It was busy day and night with student trade and traffic. But tonight it was pretty much deserted. They’d seen a few cars, some people on the streets from time to time, but they hadn’t slowed down enough to stop and chat. The way they were moving…or not moving, just sort of shambling around or standing dead still made Mitch pretty sure that they probably weren’t people at all.
He loved Chrissy.
God knew he loved her.
But it was all eating at him and he began to feel claustrophobic and the need to flee Witcham became very strong. It wouldn’t be too difficult, he figured, to talk Tommy into driving them out of town and to the National Guard camp everyone had been talking about. If the highway was still passable, they could have been out of the Black River Valley in an hour.
But it wasn’t going to happen.
He’d sooner have stuck a gun in his mouth and jerked the trigger. Because that would have been far less painful than leaving his daughter, his daughter, to the horrors of Witcham and hoping she would make it out on her own.
But how long could they keep looking?
How long before the stress and bullshit, the horror and madness and, yes, lack of sleep, would nail shut the coffins of their brains? Because it was coming and he knew it. His limbs felt heavy and his eyes gritty. Sometimes it was hard to concentrate and when he did, his mind was filled with reaching shadows.
He wondered how long before he gave in. How long would he stay in Witcham? Until it was so utterly swamped that he would have to climb up on the roof? And if he stayed, did not give up?and he knew he would never do that?what then? What would the future hold? The storm system would pass, probably within a few days or a week at the outside. Would Tommy finally abandon him and would he be alone and insane, just waiting and waiting for a knock at the door that would never, ever come?
Don’t you dare give in, he told himself. You can’t afford to. You have to find her and there really is no other choice. You lost Lily…but you won’t lose Chrissy. You will NOT lose Chrissy.
And if he waited long enough, maybe that knock would come. Tomorrow night or the night after, only it wouldn’t be Chrissy, but maybe Lily. Lily dripping wet and bloodless, eyes sunken in, a cadaverous grin on her features. Stinking not of that lilac body scrub she used, but of damp graves and damp earth.
And what would that be like?
Dear God above, what would that be like?
I left her alone and went over to see Wanda, he thought. I left her alone even though I knew she wasn’t right in the head, that something had gone bad in her, something had poisoned her right to the core. I left her alone and maybe I knew it deep down that it was wrong, that I was inviting disaster.
But I did it anyway.
Right away, though, a voice said in his mind, Don’t be too hard on yourself, Mitch. That’s just grief and guilt talking and you can’t afford those things right now. Yeah, maybe in retrospect leaving Lily alone was not such a hot idea. But even had you been there, you could have only watched her so much. Sooner or later you would have dozed or went to use the head and she would have slipped away because what’s happening in this town is far beyond you. Whatever it is, it brought about the terror and death and grief it feeds on. A self-perpetuating atrocity. Maybe Wanda’s right just like those others have been saying and it all started out at Fort Providence. That was the seed, but it’s gone far beyond that now and it isn’t something as simple as dead people rising. They’re rising because the Army maybe stupidly kicked open some door to hell that should have forever remained shut, but now whatever has come through is holding that door wide and it’s just beyond the Army and the President of the United States to slam it shut. Maybe there’s a logic here, a rationale, and maybe this whole thing is part of some goddamned cycle and if so, it’ll play itself out.
And, boy, Mitch was liking that, if not necessarily believing it.
Tensing inside, energy long absent filling him, he said, “We’re going to find Chrissy.”
“Of course we are,” Tommy said.
“I mean it. We’re gonna find her.”
“What’s our plan?”
“Just drive,” Mitch told him. “I don’t know how and I sure as hell don’t know why, but when we get close I’ll know it.”
“We’ll just keep driving then,” Tommy said.
17
Shortly after Oates and Neiderhauser made the second floor, one of the dead ones walked out of a doorway like maybe it had been waiting for them all along. It had been a man once, you could see that in the jumping beams
