She took the lantern and followed her son down the hallway towards the back of the house where the sounds of breaking glass had come from. It was a bedroom and the dead were trying to get in. An easy dozen of those white, puckered hands were tearing at the curtains and sash and anything they could get their rotting fingers on. Russel knew instantly what to do. It was just like that movie. He went over there and started hammering those hands with his rifle butt and there were so many, it was like trying to squash dozens of wriggling albino spiders at the same time.
“Be careful!” Margaret told him. “Watch it now!”
Darin was scared. He’d have been the first to admit that, yet the absolute absurdity of the situation?and the Boyne’s in general?seemed to cancel a lot of that out. They weren’t in touch with reality. Not in the least. Granted, reality in Witcham these days left something to be desired…but these two were something else again. They just didn’t seem to realize the danger those things outside presented. They were like a couple players in some European existentialist film. Too offbeat and exaggerated to be really taken seriously. They had spent a better part of their life watching low-budget horror films and now the veneer between reality and fantasy had been torn wide open, between the real and the blatantly cinematic, and they happily adapted to this. Life was a cheap zombie movie, pass the popcorn, mom.
Good God.
Russel kept at it, smashing at those hands and doing little more than mashing a few of those pulpy fingers in the process. The…crazies weren’t getting in, but then they weren’t retreating from the window either. Had the house sat lower and they didn’t have to reach up like they were, they would have come right in and used Russel as a floormat to wipe their feet off.
Finally, Russel backed away. “Too damn many,” he said. “Just too damn many.”
But not to be discouraged, now that he had his moment on the silver screen, he brought his rifle around and started popping rounds at the hands. He blew holes through moldering palms and blasted some fingers away in sprays of black juice. But, again, this did little to stop those outside.
Margaret, getting her cue from some unseen director, handed Darin the lantern and snatched a crucifix off the wall.
“Here,” she said, wading in, “have a taste of this!”
She thrust the cross into the flurry of hands. One of them grabbed it with no ill effect and almost yanked her right out the window with it. As it was, she fell over and several hands took hold of her. One had her around the throat. Another tore her hair out by the roots. And another…what seemed to be that of a woman, with a couple finely lacquered Lee Press-On Nails still on her fingers…scratched welts across her face and cheeks that looked oddly like racing stripes.
“Russel!” Margaret screamed. “Help me! Help me! They’ve got me! The dead have got me!”
Darin did his bit to save her. He walked over there with the lantern, seeing if light would drive them off. It didn’t. It just illuminated that closely-pressed ring of faces outside the window and forever erased any doubts he’d had that they were just crazies. He saw those faces and let out a low scream or something like a scream. Dear God. All of them rotting and dripping and oozing with slime. Eyes missing and skulls thrusting through faces. No, there could be no doubt now.
Russel charged in, shooting and hammering at them. Fighting for his mother’s life and managing to free her, along with a hand that was clutching her throat. And this was the ultimate denouement to this little episode of madness. Margaret hit the floor and that severed hand would not let go. It had hold of her throat and it planned on squeezing the life out of her. She turned about three shades of blue, went purple, and then Russel was on his hands and knees, trying to yank that hand off.
“Are you gonna help me?” he shouted at Darin.
But Darin primly shook his head. “No, I’m not.”
Russel freed the fingers one at a time, snapping them free until the severed hand had nothing left to grip with. It fell to the hardwood floor, thumping around for maybe two or three minutes before going still. The fingers following suit.
The zombies were gone from the window.
Russel dragged his mom into the hallway and let her catch her breath. The whole time, he just shook his head as he stared at Darin. Darin thought Russel was going to yell at him for not assisting, but that didn’t happen.
Sweaty and breathless and amazed, he said, “Man…what a rush.”
PESTILENCE
1
Even with the rising of the sun, darkness still held an awful sway over Witcham. For it was in every flooded cellar and musty-smelling closet and shadowed attic. You could not only see it, you could feel it. The city was a great, murky, misting graveyard washed by that slimy sea of death and putrescence. A disinterred coffin yanked from moldering earth, its dirt-clotted lid thrown open in brazen violation. Yes, the sun came up and showed you things you did not want to see. And chiefly, what it did was made all the dire imperfections of the city all that much more apparent as bright stage lights might make you see every childhood scar and blemish on an actor’s face. The daylight came, probing and digging and revealing, a bright and shining scalpel that cut through layers of dark and cancerous flesh, exposing the dank malignancies and pulsing anatomy beneath.
It was a long night.
A night that buried the city, that filled its hide with worms and the rising sun was the autopsy that showed you the depth of disease and putrefaction.
2
At Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus, Hubb Sadler and Knucker and Hardy, along with Hot Tamale and Herb, formed a war cabinet. This was their city. This was the city they had grown and lived in and like a loved one, they were not ready just yet to throw dirt in its face. So all through that bitter, sleepless night, they planned on re-taking it, wrenching it from the grip of unhallowed things that sought to turn it into a great morgue.
Hubb was loving it.
He hadn’t done a lot of smiling since his brother Chum’s ticker had exploded in a soup of blood fifteen years before and he’d hit the floor behind the counter, deader than a halibut in a dry bucket (on his way down, Chum, true to form, had said, “What in the dick-fucking Christ is this?”). Hubb had weathered that storm as he weathered them all?with a vile temperament and a variety of profane adjectives on his tongue. But he was liking this. Loving it, in fact. Wasn’t much old Hubb loved these days besides the sound of a cash register ringing and its drawer filling up with folding green stuff, but boy oh boy, now this rising dead business. Now that was putting the wind back into his sails. He’d buried his brother fifteen years back and his wife ten years ago and since that time, truth be told, Hubb hadn’t been doing much but hanging on. Just existing. Life and its assorted bullshit pretty much having squeezed the guts from him like a stepped upon cricket…but now he was getting some of that back. Really getting it back. He’d been hanging on and hanging on, too damn pissed-off and ornery to die, like maybe he’d been waiting around for something that would show him he was really a man again. And this was it. Sure, maybe he was overweight with a bad back and fallen arches and his left knee had been shot up by the gooks during the Korean War. Maybe he had a prostate the size of a honeydew melon that dribbled piss like a leaky garden hose. Maybe the Docs said his rheumatism and lumbago weren’t going to get better this side of the grave and that his cholesterol and high blood pressure were bad enough to kill five men half his age. And maybe his dick hadn’t done any dancing in years?even that sweet young college girl, Mindy, with the flowing raven hair and tits like cruise missiles hadn’t put any sauce back in his sausage, and you were talking about a girl that made boiled lasagna noodles stand up hard?but here he was, feeling like a man again. Maybe physically he was on the wrong side of seventy, but psychologically he was
