So when the knocking came at the door an hour before dawn, she just nodded. “Maybe it’s for the best.”
The others stared at her, thinking she was out of her mind.
“I think we’re the last ones,” she told her guests. “Those effing things have been knocking on doors all night, I’d reckon. Being invited in and breaking in when they weren’t. Now we’re all that’s left.”
“The last people?” Russel said.
“Yes, I’m afraid so, son.”
“That’s…that’s ridiculous,” Lou Darin said. “It can’t be. There are 80,000 people in this city. 80,000!”
“Were, I’m afraid. Were.”
The knocking sounded again. Not just the front door now, but the back door, too.
“Maybe…maybe it’s the National Guard,” Margaret said, though she did not seem to believe it.
“No, dear, no,” Miriam told her.
This knocking was slow and monotonous. It wasn’t at all the way someone would knock that needed help or wanted to give it. That would be more of an insistent, quick rapping. And if it were a mere social call?a laughable idea under the circumstances?then it would have carried some sort of rhythm. But this…no this knocking was all wrong. It was a mindless banging. The sort of cadence a machine would produce or something with a mind like one.
“Why don’t they just stop?” Lou said.
And then they did.
Silence.
For a moment, two and then three.
The doorknob was turned this way and that. It was rattled violently. The door shook against the plank Miriam had secured over it after she’d blown the lock off. Somebody wanted in and they intended on getting in.
Russel grabbed his mother’s arm in a death-grip. “Look,” he muttered. “Look…”
Behind the curtains they could make out the silhouettes of several people trying to peer through the window. They rubbed the rain-beaded panes with their hands and pressed their faces up against the glass.
“I guess they’ve found us,” Russel said, reaching for a rifle on the table, a Winchester. 30-30.
The door was struck by a flurry of pounding, shaking in its frame. The window took the same degree of force and shattered in its casement. With a sinking feeling, everyone in that room saw dozens of white hands tear through the curtains, lashing and clawing, dead faces peering in. And the hands?puffy and rotting?were thrashing around mindlessly, looking for something to grab. By the light of the candles, they all saw the zombies waiting out there, massing, preparing to come in. Many faces were distended with gas, others stripped nearly down to bone, and still others with strips of flesh hanging from their cheeks and chins.
Lou Darin screamed.
It was a high, broken, womanish sound. He was the Superintendent of Schools. He cracked the whip in Witcham’s educational circles. He was the terror of the PTO and the school board itself. He was a man of position and power and influence. But all that was gone in a single moment of hysteria. All of it. Now he was just a frightened child and the scream that came out was the only course of action left to him as his mind came apart.
“Come on, you effing sonsofbitches,” Miriam told them. “I’m here! I’ve been here all along! Come and get me!”
So they did.
As they pressed through the shattered window, Miriam kept pulling the trigger on her Remington 12-gauge until she was out of shells. She blew them into fragments and slime, but they kept coming. They were faceless and dripping things, white and bloated, streaked with sediment and river mud, their faces veiled with grave fungi.
Miriam found her feet and went right after the first one to violate her house. It stared at her with steely eyes set in a face of running corruption. It smiled at her and she swung the shotgun at it, splitting open the crown of its skull. Black water spilled down its face. Then it took hold of her and she fought with as much life as was left in that old body. Scraping at that hideous face with her nails, gouging out strips of mucid flesh and white pulp. But it had her, crushing her against it, squeezing the life out of her.
“Run!” she told the others. “For God’s sake, run!”
They needed no more prompting. Russel in the lead, they dashed back through the house, making for the back door. And when the front door came apart, they had already slipped out the back.
The thing holding Miriam tossed her aside and the others moved past her, making for the backdoor. She lay on the floor, breathless and aching, her left wrist numb. She waited for them to come back. Five minutes. Then ten. But they did not return.
Good God, was this a respite?
Had some power above granted her a stay of execution?
It seemed impossible under the circumstances. But she did not look a gift horse in the mouth. She pulled herself to her feet, sickened by the smells those things had dragged into her house. Quickly then, she found her Remington and loaded it. The window was broken, the front door hanging by one hinge. Whatever she was going to do, she knew she had to do it now.
Think, old woman! You need a plan like you’ve never needed one before!
The best course of action, she decided, would be to lock herself in one of the bedrooms upstairs. Take a few guns and a lot of ammo. Hold out until dawn like they always did in those westerns when the Indians were besieging the fort. That was the ticket.
Miriam.
At first she thought she’d heard it, then she realized she hadn’t heard it with her ears, but with her mind. Just that single word and so clear, so precise that there was no way that she could have merely thought it. No, this had been placed in her head.
She looked around the living room, the shotgun in her hands.
It came again, but this time it was spoken: “Miriam.”
The voice was soft and fluid and not at all unpleasant. A voice like that could weave your brain in a downy cocoon and tuck you off to dreamland. You could listen to it while you fell asleep.
“Miriam.”
Maybe she should have been afraid, but she wasn’t. Whether demon or angel or just one of those soulless monstrosities from the grave, this one was special. This one wasn’t bothering with any horror show theatrics. No scratching at windows and battering through doors. No vile, dripping voices describing the tortures of the damned or exposing the dirty little secrets of your life. The brain that directed this voice was above the fun and games. It was experienced and aged, smooth and effortless and somehow enchanting.
“Miriam,” it said through the open doorway. “I’ve come for you.”
Yes, there was an enchantment to it, something that made you dream of castles in the sky and fairy kingdoms and gentle afternoons spent at your mother’s knee as she read to you of lands far, far away in her voice which was always sunshine and honey, a voice you wanted to drink from and sleep on.
This voice was like that…almost. A man’s voice. A voice that was cool, almost chilly, maybe not friendly exactly, but soothing and inviting. How could you not listen to a voice like that? Maybe those other things were all rape and violation, but this one was pure red velvet seduction and black satin romance.
“Come in,” Miriam said.
She said it and was instantly filled with horror and longing, more of one than the other. And a voice, a very tiny voice, in the back of her brain said, Are you goddamned crazy, old woman? Do you realize what you’re doing? What you’ve invited into your effing house? But she just ignored that. Her time had come and she wanted to look the Grim Reaper himself dead in the face and say, ha, thought I’d quiver in my boots, did you? That you’d scare the beejesus out of Miriam Blake? Well, wrong you are, boyo…
There was a swishing as of sheets and a form stepped through the doorway.
Miriam looked and looked again.
It was a man, very tall and very unpleasant to look upon. He wore some long, oily looking coat that might have been leather. A graying, dirty shift beneath it that might have been a shroud. His face was pale, blotched with gray, seamed and withered, barely containing the skull beneath. Red worms were feasting upon it. Beetles crawled over it, scurrying madly. But what caught her were those almost luminous yellow eyes set with just a tiny black pinprick of pupil. Those eyes did not just look at you, they owned you. They were filled with toxic mists and
