human features. Primed and painted, features stamped into the cold clay of those formless faces.
Mitch and Tommy moved their lights around, panning through all those crowded dummies, the sudden intrusion of illumination made them seem to move, to lean out and pull back, huddle together. They were unformed like things waiting to be born, nothing but plastic and wax and who knows what waiting for an imitation of life, waiting for a lacquer of pink to give them a semblance of flesh and blood.
Tommy was nervous.
Mitch was feeling it, too.
This place was dull and harmless by day, but at night with no lights to be had? Unsettling. Rows and rows of mannequins, like corpses whose features had been scraped off with razor blades.
“I think I’d rather work in the prison mortuary,” Harry said, his voice echoing out into that cavernous room. “These things are creepy, you know? They’re like dolls waiting to be born or something. They almost look like they could move.”
They were about half way down the aisle now, three grown men bunched together like kids moving up the corridor of a carnival spookhouse, just waiting for something to jump out at them. And the beams of their flashlights weren’t helping matters much, because the shadows kept crawling and shifting and they all could have swore those things were moving around them. Mitch tried not to spend too much time looking at those closely-pressed rows of figures. There was something about those dead faces that really got your imagination rolling. You began to wonder what it might be like to be pressed in there with them, feel their cold skins against your own as the lights went out. And what might happen when you were alone with them and they began to move against you, touching you and whispering into your face with a warm, plastic breath.
This was your idea, he reminded himself. You can get out any time. It’s up to you.
And maybe it was his imagination again, but he was thinking that maybe it was too late. A place like this should have felt lifeless and inanimate, but it did not feel that way at all. It felt tenanted, occupied, like maybe there were others there, others holding their breath and waiting until you got close enough and then, and then?
Part of what was bothering Mitch most was that he was smelling something that didn’t belong. Sure, you expected it to smell kind of dank in there with all the water pooling and leaking in, but there was another odor that he simply did not like. It was sharp and acidic like vinegar gone bad, that and a moist corruption that seemed to be building around them, thickening and misting.
Tommy stopped dead, shining his light around.
“What?” Mitch said, gooseflesh broken out on his arms and spine.
“Listen,” Tommy said and there was dread import beneath his words.
Mitch listened. He heard the water dripping into puddles, the rain on the outside walls, the creak of the roof in the wind. And then something more. Something that set his heart to pounding. For somewhere in the rank darkness around them, there was a barely audible sound like a breeze blowing through a pipe nearly clogged with dirt. The sound of low respiration. The sound of breathing. Air was drawn in and exhaled.
“Shit,” Harry said.
“There’s someone here,” Mitch said, glad for the Remington in his hand.
He swung his light down the rows and caught sight of an amorphous shadow pulling back into those neat rows. It wasn’t his imagination. For something down there behind them had moved. He could feel the others tensing around him, feel their backs pressing up against his own. If the dead had to come at them, then this was about the worst possible place for it.
“We better get out of here,” he heard himself say.
But even then he knew it would not be that easy. They had been drawn into a trap and that trap was about to be sprung. And whoever or whatever had set it, had gone to too much trouble to have their prey turn and walk out on it all.
There was more movement around them…behind them, in front of them, to either side. Always gone whenever they put their lights on it, but there, definitely there. The breathing was coming from all over now. You could hear wet cloth rustling, wet feet slapping, lips parting. Somewhere, there was a high, childish giggling.
Mitch swung around with his light and, Jesus, they weren’t hiding now, no more games. He saw them. Pressed in-between the dummies at irregular intervals, those pallid dead faces, wet hair hanging over black and soulless eyes, graying lips pulling away from teeth.
As they cast the lights around, they could see dozens of faces…men, women, children. The jumping shadows and flickering light and ever-present mannequin faces were disorienting. Sometimes there were three dead girls with black pools for eyes, then one, then none. A man and a woman, a couple teenagers, then just formless plastic faces and mulling shadows.
But there was no way you could mark it down to simple imagination.
They were there, the dead of Witcham, and you could feel them and smell their decaying, soft hides. See the lights glint off their rain-soaked heads and eyes of pitch and barred teeth. Mitch and the others began backing down the aisle, suppressing the desire to just run. They made it maybe ten or fifteen feet like that and then the first zombie moved. It was the cadaver of a little girl, maybe five or six but no more when she died. She moved under the bars of the rack with a fluid, flowing motion that was serpentine, almost liquid. Her body was a white blur capped by a head of tangled dark hair. She looked angular and warped like a reflection from a funhouse mirror, pouring forward.
And maybe that was a cue, for the others started moving, too, slipping under and over the bars with that same boneless, almost hallucinatory motion. Hands like withered orchids and limp white spiders reaching to clutch and tear and hold. Faces that were dripping and bubbly like melted tallow, milky-colored and fungous, set off by huge, glaring eyes that were sometimes silvery and sometimes a glistening black jelly. As they came forward, they joined together, compressed, became a single crowd of watery, inhuman things pressing forward, an army of the dead.
Harry shouted something.
Mitch and Tommy just started shooting, blowing holes in that advancing gray wall, spraying white tissue and gray gut in every which direction, gouts of that vile black blood splattering to the floor.
But still the dead pressed forward relentlessly, eyes fixed and teeth chattering, fingers hooked and reaching.
Harry cried out because behind them two men stepped from the shadows, eyeless and horribly sutured as if they had been in deadly industrial accidents. Their faces were tombstone gray and blotched with mold, black water running from their mouths and the hollows of their eyes. While Mitch pumped off a few more rounds at the converging crowd, Tommy turned and fired at the man on the left point-blank. He exploded into a spray of filthy and mud and flesh, collapsing into a shivering pile of bones and mucilage.
The other dead man vaulted forward.
He almost got Harry, but Harry swung his length of rebar with everything he had, splitting that soft head wide open. There was no solidity to it like a normal human head and Harry knew what that felt like because he’d piped a few guys out in the yard at Slayhoke. This was not like that. More like swinging a baseball bat into a rotting gourd? the guy’s head collapsed in a slushy spray of grainy black liquid and he went to his knees, not dead, but obviously wounded.
“Go! Go! Go!” Mitch yelled out and they ran past that crawling thing, moving through the factory and warehouse and wing of offices up front.
The three of them splashed through the parking lot, two or three of the dead standing in the falling rain and watching them. They made it down the street and into Tommy’s truck, throwing themselves inside and panting.
“Oh, shit,” Harry said.
There was a dead one standing outside Mitch’s door. A young guy with a white, oozing face. Even through the rain-washed window, you could see he wasn’t much in the looks department. He slammed his hands against the window and the flesh of them seemed to splash like the yolks of eggs, bits of meat running down the windows.
Then Tommy had the truck moving, knocking aside two or three others and they were racing down the street, casting a wave behind them.
“They’re everywhere,” Harry said. “Those fucking things, they’re everywhere. The city is full of the walking dead.”
