“Is there any other way in here?” Jason Kramer asked.
Hubb told him there was not. Only the locked back door and the front door where the car now had inserted itself. No windows. No nothing.
Mitch tried to swallow, but there was no spit left in his mouth. He was feeling that cold rain blowing in around the car and shivering, thinking about Lily at home and what she would do if some of these things came knocking like trick-or-treaters.
Nobody had relaxed, it was too soon for that, and that was a good thing because the things out there were trying again. A single bare arm pushed aside the flap and began searching around like a blind man looking for his cane. That arm was dripping wet and just as white as tombstone marble, set with tiny round perforations like somebody had been pounding nails into it. As white as it was-and it was white, a bloodless white lacking any pigment-it was also mottled gray in spots with tiny bumps like clusters of minute toadstools and you could clearly see a dark purple vein tracery beneath the skin.
“Shit,” somebody said.
Another arm joined it and another and another, until there were no less than six of those anemic-looking limbs pushing aside the flap, white fingers searching around like albino spiders for something to fasten on to. Mitch could just imagine them pressed up together out there like a bunch of kids reaching through a hole in the fence, trying to find their ball on the other side. Now and again, he caught a glimpse of the bodies they were attached to, saw a distorted blur of a face or the whipping, wet hair of a woman.
A couple more hands joined in the fun now, only these hooked around the flap of sheet metal and began trying to widen the hole. The metal began to groan. If these individuals just stopped and used their beans for a moment, they would have quickly realized that you could have indeed gotten into the store one at a time and very easily. But the hole just wasn’t big enough for seven or eight bodies at once. But there was greed at work here like piglets all trying to squeeze in on the same nipples at the same time.
One of the arms was slit open by the jagged edge of the flap and Mitch saw that no blood came out, just a trickle of something black and watery that the rain instantly washed away.
It was enough, by Christ, it surely was.
Mitch and Tommy in the lead, everyone waded in. People were grunting and swearing and shouting, swinging axes and machetes and clubs at those snaking arms. They recoiled with the impact, but kept coming back, flaying and clawing and scratching. Tommy brought down his axe, caught one of those hands between the car door and his axe-blade and severed three fingers. The hand pulled away, stumps spitting that black goo. The fingers themselves landed on the hood where they wriggled like white worms. Mitch laid open an arm from wrist to elbow and nothing came out but that inky sludge. A spray of it struck Jason Kramer in the face and he screamed like he’d been scalded by acid. He tripped and fell, red welts rising on his cheeks where that liquid had struck him.
Most everyone fell away as more of that blood flew and one grasping hand darted in and grabbed Tommy by the wrist. And with enough force that his own hand flexed open and he dropped his axe.
He tried to pull away, an almost hysterical cry coming from his mouth: “Mitch! Mitch! Get that fucker off me!”
Mitch brought his axe down with an overhead swing as the arm tried to pull Tommy towards the opening. The blade caught the arm right at the bicep and cleanly severed it, the axe head traveling right through it and shattering the driver’s side window of the Intrepid. The arm let go and dropped to the floor and everyone jumped away from it because it was not at all dead.
Tommy fell back, rubbing his wrist and you could see the indentations of those fingermarks.
The arms retracted and then came in again. Mitch and Hubb kept pounding away at them and they were pulled away and then there was just silence out there. Mitch thought he heard those things running off through the puddles, but he could not be sure. The flap was bent wide open, though, and there was nothing out there but the falling rain.
Everyone was breathing hard and shaking their heads, but they did not speak.
Those fingers had finally stopped wriggling and just looked dead.
The arm was still thrashing, though, fingers waving and scraping, muscles and tendons standing taut beneath that horribly white flesh. It flopped and jumped in a pool of that black filth and then went still.
Hot Tamale looked about as pale as that arm and Gena Kramer looked ready to throw up. She held her husband as he held his face and then she turned and did throw up.
Hubb opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then just closed it again.
Everyone was pulling back into the store wordlessly, giving that arm a very wide berth. There was not a biologist among them, but they did not need any scientific training to tell them that a severed human limb could not live after being cut off. There might be few shudders as its nerve endings pissed the last of their electricity into the muscles, but that was about it. But this particular arm had been alive, very alive. Disconnected or not, if it had found a throat to strangle, it would have done just that.
Tommy lit a cigarette. “Think…think I saw that movie about the living arm,” he said in a dull monotone. “Except it was set in the Arctic.”
“And it was an alien arm,” Hot Tamale said.
“Got ripped off by dogs,” Herb added.
Mitch looked at them and burst out laughing. Not everyone joined him, but most were smiling at the very least. Hubb laughed so hard Mindy had to wheel his oxygen tank over so he could grab a few puffs.
But the good humor, which was really just some hysterical after-effect of the shock and horror, died out when Yellow Hat opened his yap and said, “What the hell is going on in this town?”
Which, Mitch thought, was the first intelligent thing he’d said.
Nobody answered him, so Hot Tamale took the bait. “Just like we saw out at our car,” she said. “All white and dead-looking…you know what that means, don’t you?”
“What?” Mitch said.
“Zombies. Those things are zombies.”
10
Mitch waited for Tommy to say something smartassed, but he didn’t.
Zombies, for chrissake. Of all things. Mitch wasn’t ready to swallow that one, but then on the other hand, he sure as hell did not have a better explanation. Zombies. Sure, he’d seen the movies. They dragged their dead asses around, munching on people. But they were slow, dull-witted, and almost comical. These things had not been slow nor comical. They had been fast and able to use rudimentary logic. In those movies you just shot them in the head and that was it. Mitch had an uneasy feeling that a bullet to the head would not be enough this time around.
Listen to yourself! You’re acting like those…those people were the walking dead! You can’t honestly believe something like…can you? Well,
But he wasn’t sure. Not sure of anything. He walked over to the severed arm, stared down at it. It looked just like a dead arm. It was almost phosphorescent it was so terribly, unnaturally white. He could see the fine black hairs curled on the forearm, the matting of lines on the palm. He kicked it and it flopped over with a slapping sound.
“Be careful,” Hot Tamale said. “It might be alive still.”
Mitch jabbed it with the handle of his axe. The flesh gave like normal flesh. He jabbed it a couple more times and it did not move. Then he prodded the palm and the entire arm flexed obscenely and the hand grabbed the axe handle. Not just grabbed, but held on tightly. He could see the tendons straining at the wrist. He was horrified, yet fascinated. It could not be alive, not really. This was some grotesque reflexive action and nothing more. He tried to shake it loose, but it held. At least for a moment or two, then it relaxed and thudded to the floor.
Mitch just stared at it.
Maybe he needed this, needed to see that this dead arm still had life in it when it couldn’t possibly. Maybe
