dead-end cellar of nonexistence and non-entity. Several of them pointed at the men in the boat, hissing and screaming, vomiting out clods of river mud. Gray water ran from their puckered, fish-like mouths and sunken nostrils.
What came next was almost obscene.
Using their host corpses like inflatable floats in a swimming pool, they began kicking their way at the boat, circling in like sharks looking for fresh meat. Tommy hit one square in the face with an oar, a little girl with swelling nodules on her face that bled a discolored slime. He hit her with his board and her head imploded like a water balloon stuffed with gray meat and black filth.
Deke let out a cry and followed suit.
A little boy reached up at the boat and he swung his board, those outstretched fingers exploding in a spray of bile and tissue.
And by then, Mitch was at it.
He didn’t even bother with the gun. He grabbed his bag of salt and let fly with what was inside, digging out handfuls and scattering them at those loathsome children like he was salting the icy steps in mid-winter. The first one that tasted the salt screamed in rage and possibly pain. Her filmed eyeballs rolled back in her head and she twisted and turned in the water, black ooze pouring out of her. The others didn’t like it much better. The salt ate right into them, making them steam and sputter and shrivel. Their skins yellowed and tightened and they squirmed like snakes, looping and wriggling, mouths pulled back from the slats of their teeth. Eyes popped like dirty soap bubbles and faces went spongy like rotting humus.
And they sank from view, plumes of smoke rising from the water, bits of flesh and fat sizzling on the surface. Then there was just a greasy wake and nothing else.
“Row,” Mitch said.
They did. They dug their oars into that slopping water and propelled the boat away from the floating corpses with renewed zeal. After about ten minutes of that, their arms aching, they stopped.
“Look,” Deke said.
At first, Mitch just saw that fog rising from the water, the mist of rain falling, rows of houses that had been smashed into one another by the tidal wave. But then he saw it.
Coming out of the murky distance.
The orphanage.
24
The breakout.
Albert had both boards off now. A light that was grainy and filled with suspended motes of dust was coming in, illuminating the pit and those that languished in it. They were a ragged bunch. Most were injured and some injured so badly they were in shock or feverish and half out of their heads. The others were just terrified into silence. Chrissy had tried to bring a lot of them out of it ever since she woke up down there, but they weren’t having it. Albert had told her it was a waste of time and Alona agreed.
But then, with the light coming in, it was like they all woke up.
Or those that could. The ones in bad shape didn’t seem to notice and others, like Ed Watts, for example, were dead. No, Alona hadn’t meant to kill him. She admitted that much and Chrissy believed her. All that pent-up rage…when Watts tried to call out to the clown, well, he brought it on himself.
“I never killed anyone before,” Alona admitted. “But one of these other SOB’s tries something, I’ll do it again.”
Desperate times called for desperate measures, as they said.
Now it wasn’t just Albert and Chrissy and Alona over near the window, it was ten other people who wanted out. They hadn’t had the balls to help, but they weren’t too ashamed to reap the benefits.
Alona said, “We’re going to do this orderly, people. You and you and you,” she said, picking out three people at random. “Get over to that door. If you hear Pervo the Clown coming back, give us a holler.”
They did what she said. Maybe it was that she was hot-headed and dangerous with a board in her hands or maybe it was just that somebody had to take charge and there was a sort of military efficiency to the woman.
“I’ll go first,” Albert said to Chrissy. “If something’s waiting out there, better me than you, kid.”
Alona and another man gave him a boost and he put his head through into the gray daylight. He looked both ways and saw nothing that concerned him. He pulled himself out and dragged himself through the grass. He saw where they were, just like he could see what had had happened to Witcham through the drizzle and mist. The sight of the destruction made him swallow and then swallow again.
“Christ,” he said.
“What?” Chrissy asked. “What do you see?”
“Nothing…it’s nothing.”
He reached a hand down and she took it and he pulled her up with amazing strength. She barked her back on the top of the window and then she, too, was up. She crawled through the wet grass, shielding her eyes. After being in that damn pit so long, even the dirty overcast afternoon seemed bright. But then her eyes adjusted and through the trees that dotted Crooked Hill, she saw the devastation of her home town, how high the water had risen. She just stood there in awe, a sinking feeling in her belly. Down there, somewhere, were her mother, Mitch, Deke…oh dear God.
She stumbled back, knowing where she was, knowing that she was on top of Crooked Hill, the highest point in the city, but a sudden wave of unreality passed through her. Her head spun with vertigo and her breath didn’t want to come. She went down on her ass and then found herself looking up at the Bleeding Heart Orphanage rising above her. It was tall and sagging, shuttered and weathered gray. Windows were broken and siding hanging loose. A rain gutter creaked high above and the bricks were crumbling away up near the roof.
More people were coming out now.
While Chrissy was taking it all in, Albert was pulling them out. Three women, two men, another guy wiggling his way out. Albert pulled him up and the guy?a middle-aged man in dirty suit?started crying and actually kissed the grass, not caring that wet leaves got stuck to his face.
A woman named Gail had her arm around Chrissy. She was crying, trying to tell her something that made absolutely no sense.
Alona came next, having to do a bit of wiggling to get through, but she made it, all right. “Praise the goddamn Lord,” she said.
And a voice in Chrissy’s head chose that moment to say: This is all going a little too smoothly, don’t you think? Grimshanks might be a lot of things in this world and mostly out of it, but he’s not stupid. Whatever crawling pestilence has invaded his corpse, it’s surely not stupid?
“Come on,” Albert called through the window.
There were still a few left that could make it under their own power, but they weren’t coming.
“Screw ‘em,” Alona said.
But that wasn’t Albert’s way. “Come on in there, you people.”
But nobody was coming. From where Chrissy was standing, she could not see anything. Just that square of blackness and nothing else. Not so much as a face. Chrissy felt herself tensing inside. This was not good, this was not good at all.
Then a voice, weak and rasping said, “Gimme a hand, will ya?”
And Chrissy almost told Albert not to, because there was something wrong with that voice and everybody suddenly seemed to sense that. They all took a few steps back from the window. One woman let out a muffled cry and ran off. But Albert, good old Albert, he stuck his hand down there and then jerked as it was seized. He tried to pull it back, but it would not let go.
Chrissy saw an oversized white hand gripping his wrist.
“Well, well, well,” Grimshanks said, “when the cat’s away, my how the mice will play.”
Then she caught a glimpse of his face down there…white and swollen and undulant on the bone beneath, a series of pink scars spreading out across his nose in a fine threading like that face had shattered and been stitched
