calling out to the men above. Caricatures of what must have been Weerden’s head, fleshed in running wax. It was completely noxious and revolting. And what was maybe worse were those dozens of pink, slimy eyes the size of softballs.
Eyes that were staring right at him.
Harry grabbed Osbourne by the collar of his coat and lifted him right off the ground. “I should throw you into that motherfucker!” he shouted. “I should feed you to it! How would you like that, you crazy sonofabitch?”
Tommy and Mitch pulled him away.
They made towards the elevator.
“Here me good, you prick,” Mitch told him. “My wife is gone because of your fucking pets and my daughter is missing. If she doesn’t turn up, I’m coming back for you. I swear to God I’m coming back for you and I’m going to toss your ass down there. You hear me?”
Osbourne heard him, all right.
16
Imagine: the city haunted.
Haunted by vermin.
For Witcham was nothing but a flooded graveyard, a slaughterhouse, an inundated mortuary. A slopping, stinking gray cesspool of filth and decay and boiling miasma where thousands of ripe corpses had been washed from graves and thousands more were exhumed by the rising polluted waters every morning, creating a virulent black sea of dank rot and sewage and pestilence.
And this brought the vermin in hordes.
Immense buzzing clouds of meatflies and corpseflies that took to the air in droning, verminous clouds, darkening the sky as they settled over the streets, drawn and made hungry by the carrion that bobbed and drifted through the gutted carcass of the city. The flies feasted on the cadavers that clogged the streets in a gruesome logjam of bloated white flesh. They fed and mated and laid their eggs in the bellies of corpses, in the soft and spongy tissues of eyes and mouths and genitalia, seeding a fertile and noxious garden of putrescence. And within what seemed hours, those eggs gave flower: millions of writhing maggots and corpse-larva that themselves began to spread their wings, feeding and mating and laying millions of more eggs. The flies became storms that whirred through the city, feeding and fucking and breeding, spreading disease and filth.
The rot and waterlogged dead brought not just flies, but slinking red graveworms and beetles and crawling things. Thousands of ravenous rats were forced up from the sewers and cellars and drainage ditches by the rising water. Armies of them…fat and greasy and gray that filled buildings and overran houses. At night, they glutted themselves on corpse-flesh and made warm, putrid nests in the bellies of the moist, unburied dead.
By day, there were the birds.
Gulls and ravens, crows and buzzards. You would see them lighting off a floating cadaver, perching there happily on islands of drifting carrion, stretching their wings and cawing, picking out strips of raw red flesh and pecking flyblown faces down to the bone beneath. They feasted on maggots and insects and fought over the juiciest, greenest cuts of meat.
That was Witcham.
A putrid sea of decomposition haunted by vermin, a misting and rain-washed organic soup of decay that was charged with a hybrid flux of regeneration proteins vomited out of the secret catacombs of Fort Providence. And as such, it was not just a sea of death, but a great amniotic bath of degenerate and mutant life, resurrection, and unspeakable re-genesis.
17
On their way back through the city, they could plainly see the inexorable, almost ghastly change that had taken place in the past twenty-four hours. There was more water in the streets, of course, and it was still coming down. In buckets. There were more stranded cars and certain intersections were getting to the point where they were nearly impassable to anything that did not have a high profile like Tommy’s Dodge Ram. Many of these were blocked off and the public works had arranged detours. The National Guard was out in force, of course, as were the police and emergency services. Lots of people were on their way out of town.
But all that was to be expected.
What Mitch noticed was that much of Witcham seemed deserted now. And not just the heavily-flooded areas, but almost the whole town. Upper and Lower Main Street were nearly empty, most everything closed. Even the college looked empty. Yesterday, there had still been people in the streets shopping and going about their business, but today was a different story. What people they saw looked to be in a great hurry and those that weren’t looked simply confused, standing around on street corners and surveying the damage. It was hard not to view the city as a great waterlogged corpse in search of a grave and those few people standing about as mourners.
It was bad and this was just in the more passable areas of the city. Places like River Town and Bethany were pretty much underwater now and, if what people were saying could be believed, there were bodies everywhere.
“I think our hometown is on its last legs,” Tommy said.
There was no arguing that. There was a steady stream of traffic heading out to Highway 6 which led out of the city and out of the Black River Valley.
“They’re running,” Harry said, “and you can’t blame ‘em, can you? Not with what’s going on. I think the flooding is one thing, but dead things walking around is another. Lot of people, you know, they saw things last night and they don’t want to go through that again.”
Mitch knew that to be true. A lot of people died last night and a lot of them wouldn’t stay dead. That was the scary part. Tonight, the city would be an absolute graveyard. The water would rise and more of the zombies would reach areas they had been denied up to now. Witcham would be a house of horrors tonight.
Tommy brought them over to East Genesee without asking. Lisa Bell’s house was still empty as far as they could tell. No signs of occupancy, anyway. Heather Sale’s VW bug was not around. Over in Elmwood Hills, at the Sale house, the bug was not to be seen either. And what was worse, the front door was open and no one was around.
Harry did not ask what they were doing. Not until they reached the Sale house and Mitch told him flatly that they were looking for his daughter. He volunteered nothing else.
Tommy drove back towards Crandon, taking it slow, the water near the top of his wheels in places. Everywhere they went, desertion. Mass desertion. If it hadn’t been for the water everywhere, it would have looked like one of those cities in a movie that had been evacuated for an A-bomb attack.
“You can almost feel it, can’t you?” Mitch said.
Tommy nodded. “Yeah, it’s different. It’s bad. A real ugly kind of feel. City’s gone bad right to its roots.”
Mitch just grunted because that’s pretty much what he’d been feeling. It smelled like an open, rainy grave and now it felt like one, too. Just low and dank and mean like a subterranean tomb.
“I’m thinking about what that Osbourne guy said at the base,” Harry said. “That stuff that raises the dead and mutates things…it’s in this rain. And it keeps falling. I mean, shit, we’ve all been soaked in the stuff by now. Who knows what might happen to us.”
“You look okay,” Mitch told him. “I don’t see you growing any extra arms.”
Tommy laughed at that. “Relax, Harry. Way I see it is that this stuff that got pissed up into the air is gonna rain itself out. Maybe it already has. Maybe it’s just in the water itself now. It’ll run its course.”
Harry shrugged. “You’re probably right. But how much damage will be done by then? And how many of those things will be in the streets?”
Tommy kept driving until they hit The Strip in Crandon. Just about everything was closed there, too, though more than a few bars were open and doing pretty good business by the looks of things. They passed an intersection
