feeling thirty again, ready to knock cocks with the best of ’em just like he’d done in the old days. And how was that for coming back from the grave, ma and pa? Jesus Mary-humping Christ…how was that?
Old Hubb felt renewed and revitalized, ready to slap ass and slide meat, praise God in the highest. So he rallied his troops like a general, gathered weapons and mapped strategies. Their time was coming and when it did, they would not shrink from duty. They’d meet those zombies, dicks in hands, and give ‘em the randiest fucking this side of hell.
3
Outside the city, at the Fort Providence Military Reservation, there was a silence of cryptyards and grave hollows. A vile-stinking mist blew through the high security installation. Rain fell. Things rotted and other things moved. But nothing truly living or natural breathed there. The corridors were empty. The rooms untenanted. The pestilence that took the city, it would soon be known, was born here and what had crawled from that toxic womb, was hell itself.
4
And Mitch Barron and Tommy Kastle? They had slept. That was something. They had slept and that if nothing else kept them sane. Mitch could not remember ever having been so tired, so worn, so empty before. After the nightmare at the mannequin factory, they had gone back to Wanda Sepperly’s, Tommy and he and Harry, their new friend. Wanda let them in and Mitch had to wonder if she ever really slept at all. But then, he knew that the sleep of the old and the sleep of the young were entirely two different things. The Zirblanski twins were zonked out in one bedroom, so Mitch and the others took the one across the hall. He and Tommy both took a bed; Harry got the floor. Harry didn’t seem to mind. A sleeping bag on a carpeted floor beat the shit out of a state rack any day, he pointed out to them.
“Listen to me, Harry,” Tommy had told him. “You say you only stole cars. Okay and fine. Just don’t try any shit, okay? We got an old lady out there we’re real fond of and a couple girls sleeping across the hallway that Mitch and me cherish, so don’t do anything that’s gonna piss us off.”
You could see Harry didn’t like that much. Like any other group in society, criminals had their foodchain, they had their surface feeders and their bottom dwellers. Even an armed robber or a car thief could look down his nose at, say, a pedophile and feel good about himself. “See, that’s how it works when you’re inside. None of us think we’re fucking Boy Scouts,” he explained to them. “We know we’re bad boys and troublemakers. But there’s a pecking order, see? There’s rungs to the ladder. The more brains and balls it takes to pull your chosen crime, the more respect you get. A jewel thief or a bankrobber have guts and brains, so they get respect. They’re up on the top. But a rapist or a child molester are just gutless trash, so they take the abuse. Guys who torment helpless women and children don’t rank real high in our system. Inside, I have a bad day and I feel shitty about who and what I am, I go knock the teeth out of some baby-raper or serial killer and that makes me feel better about myself. Yeah, I know how that sounds. But life inside and life outside are two different things. I guess what I’m saying is, I’d slit my wrists before I’d stoop to hurting innocents.”
“Fair enough,” Tommy said. “Just remember, we’re letting you sleep here. We’re trusting you.”
“And you can. You saved my life.” He laughed then. “Even women don’t excite a guy like me the way a nice vehicle does. Like that truck of yours, Tommy. We were in Milwaukee? I’d jack that sonofabitch in about three minutes tops. Within an hour, she’s stripped.”
“You leave my truck alone.”
So, whether they wanted him or not, Harry was part of them. Mitch thought he seemed all right. He looked like he could be rough if you cornered him, but he seemed like a good guy, as good as a guy could be after living in a state cage for the past few years. Mitch had a funny feeling that Harry was now part of what they were, whatever that was. But he believed it. For some way, somehow he was going to be instrumental down the road. He needed them and they needed him.
Before they closed their eyes, Mitch pulled Tommy aside and laid it out for him: “Listen, buddy, we don’t find Chrissy by sundown, I want you to take Wanda, Deke, and the girls and get the hell out. Goddamn city is sinking. No, no, don’t give me any of that hero shit. I want you to get them out of here. You wanna come back, I’d appreciate your help. But they have to get out of here.”
And with that logic, even Tommy Kastle could not argue.
5
At Slayhoke Penitentiary, the dead outnumbered the living. The 1^st Air Cavalry, bolstered by National Guardsmen, spent the night throwing a serious volume of fire against anything that tried to leave the prison walls. During the process, many of them died and quite a few more had nervous breakdowns. By dawn, they huddled outside the wire in the mud, the rain falling and the mist rising, wide-eyed and trembling from the amphetamines that kept them going and the horrors they had seen and would never forget. They had surrounded the prison on all sides, established a No-Man’s-Land between themselves and the walls, gunning down anything that tried to cross it. Using grenades, anti-personnel mines, and flame throwers when bullets couldn’t do the job. And out there now, in that cratered, misty dead zone, there were the remains of dozens and dozens of bodies. Bullet-ridden, blown to fragments, incinerated…what was left, continued to move.
6
In the Procton House, Russel and Margaret Boyne and Lou Darin waited for the sun to come up. They did not sleep. They did not relax their vigil. They knew the dead were out there and they waited for them. They kept busy. Russel and his mother collected up knives and hammers and golf clubs, anything they thought could be used as a weapon. The entire time recounting the plots of dozens of low-budget horror films. Darin listened, but did not hear. They were mad. They were both mad. And he told them so quite often. Although Russel ignored him, Margaret argued their point continually.
“This is not about who’s crazy and who’s not, Mr. Darin. This is about the survival of the human race,” she told him. “This is a battle to save humanity.”
“And you’re going to wage it with kitchen knives and a couple nine irons?”
“We have to start somewhere.”
Towards dawn, Russel said, “I wonder what happens if one of us gets infected? Will we come back from the dead, too?”
7
All in all, it was a mad sort of night.
Which was to be expected now that Witcham had gone completely insane. Lots of things that had happened in the city were witnessed by many. Some people lost their minds at what they saw, screaming themselves into a happier, carefree world of lunacy. Others ran and still others just let themselves be taken by what knocked on their doors that long, listening night. Still others found neither of these paths acceptable. They refused to live in a world
