“Who’s down there?” it said, bubbling and mucky-sounding. “Who’s that? Who has come into my house uninvited?”
“Shit,” Tommy said.
It was Miriam’s voice, all right. The way she would have sounded if her lungs were full of gray water and sediment and rot.
“Is that you, Mitch Barron? You get out of my house or I’ll come down and you won’t like that, Mr. Union Man, you won’t like that at all.”
“Come down,” Mitch told her, his voice full of steel.
There was a slurping sound that he knew was her drawing in a breath. “Here I come.”
There was a squishing sound of her walking down the hallway accompanied by that clotted breathing and then she was coming. They thought she would amble down the stairs like one of the dead, but she did not amble. She drifted. Wearing an old ratty dressing gown, she floated slowly down the stairs like some ghoulish hot air balloon. She was white and swollen and mottled, lots of bumps and humps on her face where none had been before. She floated on down with arms out to either side like she was crucified, her head slumped to one shoulder like her neck was broken. There was black goo all over her mouth. A great oily quantity of it was washed down the front of her gown, globby and sticky looking like she’d thrown it all up.
Tommy and Mitch had their rifles on her, but she didn’t seem to care. She floated near the top, just hovering there like some great predatory insect, making a low hissing sound in her throat.
“Don’t you move,” Tommy told her, ready to pull the trigger.
She grinned at him with yellow teeth, making a snarling noise. Her eyes were black and greasy, like fat skimmed over a pot of brine. They shone darkly. So very black and deep they were like windows looking into some fathomless, haunted dead-end of space.
“Come into my house, have you? Trespassing like hobos and bums and hippies crawling with disease! Come to visit old Miriam Blake, eh, Mitch Barron? Well, well, well. Are you happy with what you’ve found?” she said, her voice now high-pitched and wavering like it was coming from a great distance over a weak radio signal. You could almost hear the static crackling under her words. “You’ve brought your friend with you. Tommy Kastle. He would be the one that has deceived you, Mitch. All the while you thought he was your good friend, he was fucking your wife. What a fine state of affairs! Do what’s right, Mitch, turn that gun on him and kill him! Kill him for what he’s done to you! Do you hear me? Kill him!”
Tommy was taken off guard just as he was. He kept shaking his head side to side. “Mitch…Jesus Christ, no, I wouldn’t do that…I’d never do that…”
Mitch felt her getting into his head, spreading filth through his thoughts, gumming up everything in there and he just wasn’t sure, he wasn’t sure of anything.
Miriam floated up there, malevolent and dripping with evil. As she spoke more of that black juice ran from her mouth. Her robe was open now showing not just the gray marble of her flesh and her drooping, blue-veined breasts, but something much worse. Worms. Hundreds of red worms were coming out of her belly and chest, wiggling in the air from their holes, making her look like some kind of repulsive sea anemone bursting with red tentacles.
“Kill him, Mitch! Do you hear me, you little gutless shit! Kill him! Kill him! Kill him! KILL THE MOTHERFUCKER! KILL HIM THAT HAS BEEN
FUCKING YOUR WIFE! FUCKING HER! FUCKING HER! FUCKING HER!”
And for one insane moment there, Mitch almost did. God help him, but he almost put the gun on his best friend and murdered him. A man he would never have raised a hand against in a sane moment. But he knew better. For light broke through the darkness that webbed his thoughts. Broke through with a stunning clarity and he saw Miriam for what she was…a thing, a wraith, a corruption that lived on filth and lies and hatred.
“Fuck…you,” he said and pulled the trigger of the Remington.
Twenty-gauge buckshot hit her and a split second later, Tommy fired. Then they were both shooting, buckshot biting into Miriam, knocking her back and forth, smashing her into the walls as she tried to launch herself down at them. She rose and descended like a diving bell, spraying fluid and tissue, screaming in a dozen waterlogged voices. And then, as if the helium had been bled from her, she came down. And came down hard, thudding into the steps. Then she was tumbling down and they could hear her fragile bones snapping and snapping. She landed at their feet in a fleshy, broken heap, bones thrusting out from her, worms coming out her throat and scalp like the snakes of Medusa.
They jumped back.
“Dead,” Tommy said, like he didn’t believe it.
She lay there a moment, bleeding that black goo and slithering with worms. Then her head craned up at them and she was grinning, more worms in her mouth. Black juice ran from her lips, looking like dirty transmission fluid. “Think you’ve won a great battle, do you? Think you effing sonsofbitches have put old Miriam Blake down and there’ll she’ll stay! Wrong! You’ve not won nor stilled me! You can stop me, but you won’t stop the other! The other that has come through to eat the guts out of this fucking city bite by bite!”
They kept backing away and Miriam started coming after them.
It was revolting to see. She was broken-up, shattered, infested by those looping red worms, but she was coming. Maybe her spine had broken because she could not stand. Instead, she wriggled, she crept. Like a slug she came forward with a lurching motion, raising up her ass like an angleworm and lowering it, pushing herself forward, making moist popping sounds. Her jaws opened and closed like they wanted to bite something. She left a slimy, bloody trail in her wake.
They both opened up on her again until what was left was ripped and torn and perforated, her neck broken and head twisted off to the side.
“Salt her,” Mitch said.
Tommy took out the bag and threw handful after handful at her.
It worked right away. Miriam thumped on the floor, screaming and screaming. Steam and moisture boiled out of her. She vomited a gout of that black blood onto the stairs. Her flesh yellowed, threaded out with fingers of dry rot, went brown and flaking. Her eyes filmed over and sank into her skull. She hissed and steamed and shuddered and then went still. All those worms twisting and writhing, trying to get free, then blackening and sinking into the desiccated, smoking mass that looked like a winter-dead tree.
That was it.
Mitch took Tommy by the arm and they staggered out of the door together into the rain. They both went down on their knees in the wet grass, water puddling around them.
After a time, Tommy found his voice. “They ain’t just zombies, Mitch. I been thinking on this awhile. They got power or something. They get in your head and hypnotize you or something. Like they know what scares you.”
“You saying she wasn’t floating down the stairs in there?”
Tommy shook his head. “She was. Oh, shit yes, she sure was.” He swallowed. “But in general, I mean. They can play head games with you, you know? Get in your mind and make you feel things and think things that aren’t true.”
Mitch looked at him. “I didn’t believe it, Tommy. I knew she was just lying the way those things do. I knew you and Lily would never…well, you know. Get together.”
“No way.” Tommy breathed in and out real slow. “She was in your head, though, wasn’t she? Miriam? For a minute there you almost believed her. I saw it in your eyes. They were just mad, crazy.”
“Yeah. She got in my head. But she wasn’t strong enough to make me believe crap like that. I know…knew my wife. And I know you, pal. You’re a complete asshole, but you’re loyal and trustworthy.”
“Hey, thanks, Mitch. That was real nice. It touches me, you know?”
Mitch smiled thinly. “Let’s go out to that base and see what the hell this is all about.”
12
