seemed to be melting like wax figurines, ropes and runnels and threads of white and gray flesh hanging from their faces and hands and fingers. Red looping worms slid from eye sockets and hung from mouths and slithered from honeycombed breasts and swollen throats. That black juice ran from nostrils and lips and holes bored into puffy faces. Fat green leeches hung from the undersides of arms, pulsing and flaccid. Faces were furry with grave mold and spongy with decomposition. Every last bit of those creatures was infested and wriggling and moving.
“Give ‘em hell!” Hubb shouted and that’s how it began.
Mitch felt utterly useless with his Remington, being that he had no rock salt shells like the others. But he brought it up and worked the pump, punching holes through that advancing swarm of carrion. When his shells ran out, he started throwing salt and that did wonders.
But not like the rock salt shells.
Nothing could match the destruction those wrought. The impact of the salt was devastating. When it hit one of them, hundreds of salt pellets would drill right through those moist fungal hides and the zombies would let out a wailing, inhuman screech as they literally boiled and burned up from the inside out. And this within what seemed seconds. It was like an incendiary grenade had been detonated inside them.
The zombies poured forward and the defenders just kept shooting and shooting. The first wave fell into a writhing mass of putrescence, smoking and steaming and popping. But the others just came right over the top of them and with that many, there was just no way they could be held back. As the melting, hissing corpses on the floor piled up into a hip-deep charnel stew of worms and shuddering flesh and that repulsive stench of mass graves, the others clawed and leaped and crept forward and in such sheer numbers it quickly became pandemonium.
The defenders had to fall back and there was nothing to fall back to but into that stew of corpses and more vicious zombies. They needed time to reload, time to organize an effective front…but there was no such time. They had to retreat right through the dead and their lines were severed. But they were not beaten, because out came the road flares and the zombies did not like them.
Mitch had used up his bag of salt and had lost his rifle after successfully using it as a club to bash zombie heads. Now all he had was a flare. He shoved into the face of a dead thing, kicked another out of his way, effectively punching a hole through the zombie army and making it to the other side. Hubb Sadler was with him and Knucker. The flares were what got them through and kept the dead at arm’s length. They managed to get into one of the corridors where the fighting would be easier. Hardy James almost made it, but a throng of the dead engulfed him and he drowned beneath their numbers.
And Knucker, who was, in Hubb’s own words, “the toughest piece of ass-kicking broad this side of Annie fucking Oakley,” actually cried out and burst into tears as the sight of Hardy being buried alive in that carrion. She went down on one knee as the dead surged after them, reloading her 12 gauge with a sort of calm and care that was surprising. She might have been out in the woods come bird season. For she was no less careless, no more rushed, no less relaxed.
But she was not calm and she was not relaxed. Tears running from her eyes at the sight of her old friend and verbal combatant dying in such a horrible way, she was filled with zeal and rage and the need for payback.
And what she did next was suicidal.
“Knucker!” Hubb called out. “Get your fucking ass back here! Get back here!”
But she was beyond listening to him. Beyond listening to anyone but her own twisted rage. Hardy had been her friend. She had known him since he was a kid. And she did not take that sort of longevity and loyalty lightly. As Hubb and Mitch pulled back, she came forward to meet the grave herds. She started shooting, dropping them one by one, pushing them back until she reached the remains of her friend and by then she’d used every last round. She popped a road flare and jammed it into faces and throats and got a hand on Hardy’s ankle and dragged him back a good ten feet with two ghouls hanging off him before one of the dead, one of the Catholic school girls, leaped on her and vomited a gout of that black juice in her face that instantly blinded her, burning her and bringing her to her knees.
Mitch rushed in with Hubb’s shotgun and blasted five of them out of the way, ducking beneath sprays of that acidic black slime. He pulled Knucker away from the zombies and Hubb limped in to help, a road flare in each fist. They got Knucker away, even brought her shotgun back with them, but that was about all they could do for her because she was already dead. Mitch stripped her vest off her as the dead came for another assault.
Tommy and Deke were separated from the others. Deke threw salt until there was none left and Tommy pumped off round after round. The dead pushed them towards the stairs and by then, they had no idea if the others were even alive. The only thing that saved their bacon was that Hot Tamale was tossing a few of her gas bombs. They exploded against the walls and floors, spraying fire in every direction. This is what drove the dead back and allowed Tommy and Deke to make a not so orderly retreat up the stairs.
Yes, sheer pandemonium.
All over the orphanage, windows were breaking and doors being torn off hinges. Rain and wind blew in along with a foul stink of poisoned tidal pools and things rotting in gutters. Footsteps were heard. Dragging sounds. A raving and a shrieking and a whispering. Peals of disjointed laughter. The walls shook and mirrors shattered. The dead poured in from outside, from closets and cellars and hiding places in a shadowy throng bent on destruction and violence and murder. They were insane, all of them, driven into some wild feeding frenzy.
Mitch steered Hubb into a classroom and tried to hold the door as the dead battered against the other side, screaming and hissing and pounding their fists. They got it closed and locked, but how long it might hold, they did not know.
The crazy thing was, Hardy James was not dead. He’d been bitten and beaten, clawed and stomped, but not devoured. It was Knucker’s brave counterattack that had saved his life. As firebombs exploded and the dead circled around in confusion, he crawled away into one of the offices.
He even managed to get the door shut.
At least for a few minutes.
Then it blew right open, slamming him up against the wall. He tried to force it back shut, but those wormy hands found him, a dozen of them, yanking him in opposite directions. They pulled him by the hair and the arms, the body and the legs. More hands pressed in, hooked like talons, peeling the skin from his face and the meat from his throat. He felt one of his arms get ripped free, one of his knees snap. His left eye was thumbed from its socket, his nose broken, his cheek torn from the skull beneath. They mauled him and crushed him and bit into him. And he went down as they towered over him, greedy and ravenous. All those faces pushed in, looking like watercolor paintings that had run…color and flesh and features oozing from the bone in a seething mass alive with worms.
He died most horribly.
Herb was separated from Hot Tamale.
He made it into the industrial-sized kitchen back beyond the chapel and a swarm of the dead crushed into him, slamming him to linoleum floor. There were dozens of them, pale and blubbery and reaching. He saw one with too many eyes in its face and another whose flesh draped around it like a winding sheet. A dead woman carried a dead baby and a dead man carried a legless woman. He saw a mutated thing which seemed to be composed mostly of open sores and another with a row of fetal hands running down its belly. He saw a woman that was so unbearably white she was nearly phosphorescent and a little girl with too many rubbery limbs scamper right up the wall. He saw the dead and the decomposed, things with too many arms or heads or simply not enough. Some that looked like two or three people melted into a whole, slithering and hopping, unwinding as they came forward. Things wriggled and wormed, flew and stumbled. Things that should have walked, crawled. And others that should have crawled, walked.
An obscene freakshow of putrefaction and something far worse.
But then a woman took hold of his head and vomited a stream of black mud into his face and he, thankfully, saw no more. He could only hear the screamings and whispering and laughter, the wet ripping sounds as they tore out handfuls of their own furrowed and soggy meat and shoved it into his mouth, made him eat and swallow of their abundant spoilage, but by then his mind was long gone.
Mitch made a mistake and almost died because of it.
There were not one, but two doors leading into that cavernous classroom.
Hubb saw the other one starting to open at the other end. “Mitch!” he shouted. “Jesus whore-fucking Christ! Mitch!”
Mitch raced down there, leaping over a heap of lumber, jumping up just as that door came open and throwing
