of the flashlights taped to their rifle barrels. Other than that, you couldn’t say much. It was pasty and flaking, looked like it had been slapped together out of papier-mache and poorly at that, its face pulpy and distorted, a gray jelly hanging from its mouth.
“Shit,” Neiderhauser said.
“Listen, Mr. Zombie,” Oates said, “why don’t you just go on back to whatever you were doing and we’ll kindly pretend we didn’t see your ugly ass. Hmm? What say?”
The dead guy said something, but with all that jelly bubbling from his mouth, it was really hard to say what. He held his hands out to them like he was in search of a dance partner, but you wouldn’t have wanted to hold those hands…they were white and puffy like they were made of bread dough, squishy and boneless.
“Neiderhumper,” Oates said, “I’m guessing this civilian is definitely unfriendly. Do you copy that?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Feel free to terminate his ass. You hear that, Mr. Zombie? Consider yourself terminated.”
The dead guy understood that much.
He made a growling sound in his throat and stepped forward, ready to give or to take. He opened his mouth with a wet, sticky sound and his lips parted, but were still connected by strings of flesh. His teeth were bared and ready to bite.
Neiderhauser opened up on him.
The first rounds chewed into him with little effect except to spray a lot of tissue against the wall. Then Neiderhauser compensated and brought his M-16 up, blasting that face right off the bone beneath, including the thing’s eyes. Mutilated and blind, it flayed out with its hands. Oates stepped out of its way and watched as it drunkenly passed him and found the stairs, tumbling right down them with a squishing sound. Below, you could hear it slamming into the walls looking for something to kill.
Oates was far enough gone by this point that he started chuckling. “Well, wasn’t that a trip?” he said.
Neiderhauser giggled.
Oates was losing it and he knew it and maybe he had lost it completely after his brush with the little dead girl downstairs. But he wasn’t so far gone that he wasn’t noticing a few things. That little girl had been possessed by something, was the very incarnation of evil, in his humble opinion, but Mr. Zombie just seemed to be some crazy, violent shithead. No cunning, no tricks up his sleeve, just something that walked that shouldn’t that was probably just as confused as they were as to why he was walking around at all. And this gave Oates some pause, made him think that some of these things were just crazy and others were very smart.
And was that good or bad?
What do you make of that, Angela? These dead ones are just like their living counterparts. Some of ‘em are just violent kill-happy freakos and others are cunning. What do you make of that, Angela dear-heart?
He followed Neiderhauser down the corridor, both tense as they passed too many closed doors, any one of which might contain the sort of surprise that would turn your hair white. Then, through an open doorway, they saw a dead woman lying on a mattress.
“Dead,” was Neiderhauser’s assessment.
“You sure, son? I’m thinking mouth-to-mouth might revive her.”
Neidehauser giggled again.
Because it was funny, see? All this was so goddamned roaring funny that if you started laughing, you just might never stop. The woman in question was sprawled on a ratty mattress, bloated up with gas, her skin gone a spotty grayish-green, her eyes little more than black holes sunk in her face. There were flies all over her, buzzing away happily.
“Hey, Elvira,” Oates said. “Any chance you might want to pull the train with me and my stupid friend here?”
She just lay there, decomposing, wearing veils of flies that buzzed so loudly you could barely hear yourself think. The very fact that Oates and Neiderhauser could stand there like that, with that repulsive, hot stink and the feasting corpse-flies, was a good indication that their minds had now slid somewhere south of the valley of shadow of death and they were fearing no evil.
“Hey, Sarge,” Neiderhauser said. “Lookit, will ya? She’s fucking naked, man! Fucking naked! There’s flies crawling out of her cootch! Ha, ha, you see that! Fucking flies, man!”
Oates thought that was pretty amusing, too. “Hey, Mrs. Brown,” he sang, “you’ve got a fucking ugly daughter.”
They both broke up over that one. Oates was wracking his brain, trying to remember who sang that song. Was that Herman’s Hermits or Paul Revere and the Raiders? Jesus, Oates just couldn’t remember. But he knew he had owned the 45 back in the days of his carefree youth. Back before he’d become a soldier and then a National Guard den mother.
“Neiderhauser, I’m thinking our girl here is having one of those not-so fresh days, you copy on that?”
“I copy. I’ve smelled some gnarly pussy in my time, Sarge, but this bitch needs to Fabreeze her gee-gee or soak it in Palmolive or something.”
Oates laughed, realizing that was exactly the sort of thing he might say. So he liked it. He liked this “new” Neiderhauser. This boy was a man now. He’d popped his cherry and dipped his wick and he was going to be okay.
Oates kicked the mattress and the dead woman jiggled like about a hundred-and-fifty pounds of green Jello that just hadn’t set right. A mist of flies rose from her. “Ooo-la-la,” he said, “wake up, Little Susie…”
Which wasn’t the sort of thing you really wanted to be saying to dead people in Witcham these days. You were just asking for trouble. And Oates learned that quick enough when a wave of motion passed through the dead woman and she opened her bleary, yellow eyes.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” she said with a voice that was watery and thick like oatmeal dumped into a bowl. “Lookee, lookee, lookee! Well, it’s your lucky day, boys, because Long Tall Sally is open for business and I do mean open!”
Neiderhauser wasn’t a tough guy soldier any more. No, he was a little boy in a dark bed cowering from the shadow of a tree limb the moon had thrown against his wall. He took two stumbling steps back and fell on his ass, a choking sound coming from his throat.
Oates for once found himself without a comment.
The dead woman sat up with a tearing, moist sound like moldering, wet laundry peeled from a basement floor. Most of the skin of her back remained stuck to the mattress, ropes of tissue connecting her to it as she sat up. She grinned at Oates and Neiderhauser and it was a hideous sight. Not a smile so much, but more like her face had suddenly sheared open. Something dropped off her left cheek and a yellow mucus oozed from her eyes. She belched out a cloud of flies.
“What’s a matter, fellas? You afraid of a real woman? Oh, take those cocks out for me so I can suck ‘em. Mmmm. You’re seeing a girl what likes a good piece of meat. One I can suck and chew and bite off at the root…”
She stood up with a slushy sound, those ropes of tissue snapping like elastic cords. She licked the puckered hole of her mouth with a black tongue and spat out a couple of teeth, shaking herself like a wet dog, rank fluids running from her vagina and ass. The flies lifted from her and then settled back down, nearly covering her in a droning, crawling mass.
“C’mon, boys,” she said, swiveling those swollen, spongy thighs that were a disgusting purple-black from blood lividity. “Don’t you boys want a blowjob? I’ll suck your cocks so hard yer fucking toes won’t straighten out for a week! I’ll suck your balls right out the ends! See if I don’t? See if I don’t! C’mere, soldier-boy, suckee-fuckee you little faggots! Me so horny! Me so horny!”
Oates almost fell over Neiderhauser getting out of that room as that horror shambled in their direction, shaking her rancid tits at them. She squeezed one bulbous, discolored breast at Neiderhauser and a stream of yellow goo squirted past his face and struck the wall with a stench like the drainage from an infected wound.
Oates shoved him. “Move! Move! Move!” he shouted.
He could hear that thing slopping along behind them with a juicy sound and a rising noise of buzzing flies. Oates heard something snap inside his head. It seemed like everything got really tight behind his eyes, his brain encased in crushing bands, then something just gave up there and part of him, maybe, suddenly ceased to exist.
