his weight against it, slamming it shut. One of the thing’s hands was caught between the door and the jamb. Those wriggling fingers were severed. They fell to the floor and undulated like fat, deathless worms.
“Now what in the fuck?” Hubb said, panting and pulling off his oxygen mask. “Now what, Mitch?”
Listening to the carnage outside, Mitch had no idea.
30
“Don’t do anything foolish, boy,” Wanda Sepperley told Chuck Bittner on the rooftop as darkness began to descend over the town in folds of the blackest midnight satin. “Don’t be throwing that salt until you got something to throw it at.”
“Just take it easy,” Harry said.
But it was no easy bit, trying to take it easy. For as the shadows lengthened, the dead had begun to come out like worms after a good rain. They were gathering out there in that dirty, polluted water in numbers. They waited just beneath the surface and you could see their faces, white and phosphorescent.
“When are those helicopters coming?” Rhonda Zirblanski said.
“Soon, honey, soon.” She held the girls to either side of her and would not let them go. The cat waited with them.
“There’s got to be a hundred out there,” Chuck said, just sick about it.
Harry was watching them, too. “They want us to use up our salt. They want us to throw it into the water at them. If we do that, then they’ll come up after us.”
“That’s right, son. They’re baiting you.”
And they were.
Now and again, one of them would raise a rotting face above the water and call out to those on the rooftop by name. They called out in the voices of friends and loved ones and that was the hardest thing to tolerate. Chuck could barely stand it. The sound of his father’s voice coming from one of those crumbling mouths was bad enough, but it was the voice of his mother lilting into the dusk that truly shook him. Whatever demonic minds fueled the dead, they were not stupid. They knew very well how to torment and exactly what to say.
“You shouldn’t have let me die alone, Chuck,” that voice would say, echoing and echoing across the water. “How could you let me die alone, alone, alone, alone…”
“Don’t listen, son,” Wanda kept telling him. “That’s not your mother. That’s nobody’s mother.”
“How can they do that?” Rita asked. “How can they know those voices?”
Wanda patted her. “They know many things on both sides of the grave, child. They’re not people. They have no soul. Just awful crawling things that were never supposed to have been born. They live on fear and hate and death. They’re weak if you don’t give them power. So don’t listen and don’t ever believe. All they do is lie. They know nothing else.”
Harry lit the lantern to drive away the shadows. “Those choppers will be here soon,” he said and hoped it was true.
Out in that stinking bog of corruption, the undead waited.
31
In the Procton house, down the way from Mitch Barron’s, Russel Boyne and his mother, Margaret, were still alive. The house was the tallest on Kneale Street and they were in an upstairs bedroom on the third floor. They had a battery lantern and a few improvised weapons, nothing more. The house had held when the dam broke, but they were trapped. The water was nearly to the top of the stairs and if it rose much farther…
Russel sat there on the bed with a sharpened stake in his hands. “I don’t get any of this,” he said, pouting like the little boy he in fact was. “This never happened in any of them zombie pictures. Weren’t ever no flood like this.”
“Oh, shut up,” Margaret told him, finally tired of his role-playing. “This isn’t a movie, Russel. This is real.”
“But it’s like a movie.”
“Just be quiet,” she told him.
She heard something in the water. Splashing. A suggestion of movement. She rose up slowly, steeling herself for whatever it might be. It was more than likely nothing, but she had to know.
“What’s that?” Russel said. “A zombie?”
“Shut up.”
At the top of the steps, she paused and listened.
The lantern was still burning brightly. It probably had an hour or more left before they were plunged into darkness. Occasionally it flickered, sending giant, eerie shadows dancing across the walls in a spook show. She peered down the stairwell. The water was rippling. A few bubbles broke the surface. Then more.
She could see something just beneath the surface, a dark, irregular shape that was rising, rising. Something cold broke open in her stomach as absolute dread settled into her.
The waters parted and a head appeared, then shoulders, the upper half of a torso. The head had been bowed, only a nest of filthy leave-caked hair visible, now it lifted and looked at her.
Her insides went to liquid.
Yes, a zombie.
He had only one eye, the other just a black, mud-filled pit drilled into the tombstone gray of his face. His flesh was puckered and pitted with tiny holes, his nose fallen with rot into one central cavity. His lips hung in shreds, his blackened gums pierced with crumbling teeth.
Margaret’s knees were rubber now, she tottered drunkenly, a cold and raw horror spreading through her and stealing the warmth and hope from her pounding heart.
The thing looked at her, fixing her with that one yellow, glistening eye. “The cemetery,” it croaked, dirty water running from its mouth. “The cemetery…yesssss…” From deep inside its congested lungs, a belching, bubbling sound arose and more water and clods of mud vomited from its ripped and hollow throat.
Margaret had gone down on one knee.
It had come no closer. It just stood its ground, raining water and filth and madness. The lantern flickered wildly, casting lurching shadows over its pocketed skull-face.
Russel came forward with his stake. “Get back! Get back!”
“Margaret,” the thing gurgled, “yaaaahhhhhhhhh…”
And slowly, slowly it slid back beneath the water with a steaming sound, mist burning from its hide.
Margaret screamed.
There were others coming from the water now. The one she had seen before was bad enough, a ripped and decayed zombie, running corruption for a face, but these…much worse.
They were faceless, dripping things, their skins and ragged clothing gone an oily black with mud and sediment from the river bottom, gray filthy blankets of fungus where their faces should have been.
With a cry of terror, Margaret hauled her son backwards just as they reached for him. Turning she took hold of the door and slammed it, one of the things' fingers caught between the door and the jamb. The wriggling fingers were severed and came free, landing on the carpeting where they squirmed.
She threw the deadbolt on the door and kicked the fingers into the corner.
And outside the door, they began pounding. The dead. Not just a pounding, but a hammering and a battering and a ramming. The door shook, trembled, cracks running through it. It was just a cheap hollow panel job, not meant to really hold back anything, let alone what was out there now.
Russel stood there with his stake, Margaret behind him with a kitchen knife.
The door came right off its hinges and the dead swarmed in.
Russel fought but they overwhelmed him instantly. Margaret sank her knife into one bloated belly and then
