In twenty-four hours, less than that, he felt like the bunch of them were family to him.
That’s some sweet shit you’re reeling off there, bro, Harry told himself. But look where it’s gotten you. You don’t have to worry about going back to Slayhoke, because it ends for you tonight on this fucking rooftop, this fucking oasis in this stinking, rancid sea of the hungry dead.
But it didn’t bother him, it really didn’t?
“Harry!” Chuck said. “They’re coming! Listen, they’re coming!”
Listen?
Sure, sure, he was hearing it now. The thunk-thunk-thunk of helicopter rotors. It was getting louder. Louder by the moment. Excited, Harry panned his light over the dead. They were getting restless down there. There was no doubt of it. Something like an extended shiver was passing through them.
“Give me that salt, Chuck,” he said to the kid.
“I’ll fight them off with you, Harry.”
God, what a kid. Harry put an arm around him. “I got a better job for you, Chuck. A more important one. When that chopper gets here, I’ll need you to get the women aboard it. Okay? I need you to do that for me.”
Chuck sighed. “Okay. I guess.”
“Good man. Get up there by the chimney with them. Get ready.”
Chuck didn’t really like the idea, but he did it. That’s the kind of kid he was. And truth be told, Harry would not have recognized the old Chuck Bittner had he seen him. That selfish, arrogant little beast had died now and what rose from the ashes was about as fine of a boy as you could imagine.
“There!” Rhonda said. “Look! I can see it!”
So could Harry. “Thank God,” he said.
Coming through the mist and the falling rain it looked like some alien craft approaching, lit up, search lights scanning the waters, raindrops suspended in its sweeping beams.
“Get ready!” he shouted to the others.
“We’re ready and willing,” Wanda said.
The girls let out a cheer.
Harry waved the flashlight over his head.
The chopper was getting closer now. It had seen their lights and it was coming. It was on a direct route to them. Nothing could stay it now.
Below, the dead were moving.
“Shit,” Harry said under his breath.
He’d used up all the shells. All he had now was that bag of salt.
The dead were massing, crawling up out of the oily waters like fish. Not rising up on their hands and knees like men and women, but crawling on their bellies like mutant worms, slinking and slithering. From all sides of the roof, they were coming, pulling themselves from the water and wriggling their way up the wet shingles.
The helicopter had made Kneale Street now. It was very loud. Some guy on a loudspeaker was calling out to them.
“Harry…” Chuck said.
“I see them. Just get ready.”
The dead surged forth. So many in the lantern light that Harry knew that he and the others would not just be overwhelmed, they would literally be buried alive. His flashlight beam glimmered off their eyes which were glistening and gelid like the eggs of frogs. They looked like they would pop in a surge of filth if you poked them.
The helicopter was nearly to the roof now.
It was so loud that Harry could not hear what the others were saying. Not really. Though he could sense the panic in their voices. The chopper wouldn’t make it in time, not unless something happened.
And Harry was that something.
He started throwing the salt. Racing around the inclines of the roof, tossing salt. Much of it washed away in the rain, but enough found its intended targets that they pulled back, burning and steaming and crying out.
The helicopter was overhead.
The basket was coming down. Both of the Zirblanski twins were in it with the cat, crowding into it while Chuck held it steady in the rotor wash that was kicking up water and mist and a foul, moldering stink. Harry waved to the twins and they just looked back at him with horror in their eyes, knowing he was sacrificing himself so that they might escape.
The basket was coming back down now.
Chuck was shouting to Harry.
Harry waved him off and tossed what salt he had left at the advancing army of the dead. They were coming from all sides now, swarming like ants, hissing and scratching the shingles and gnashing their rotten teeth.
Wanda almost lost control of the basket.
She didn’t weigh much more than it did. Harry raced over there on his hands and knees, slipping once and sliding precious inches down towards those clutching white hands. He got up and got hold of the basket just as it would have tossed Wanda airborne.
“Harry!” Chuck shouted.
“Just get in for chrissake!”
He got Chuck in there and the basket started up and the dead were almost on them. Wanda would not make it either. But she didn’t seem to be too alarmed about that.
The dead were close now.
So many it was almost impossible to differentiate between them. Just a raging, compressed graveyard machine of skullish faces and bloated faces and wormy faces, scraping fingers and clutching fingers and fingers that were skeletal hooks. Moving, advancing, eyes like wet cinders and faces that were cold and white like new moons.
“Caught up with me at last, have you?” Wanda said, clinging to the chimney. “Crawled out of your slimy graves and dark pest-holes to put your teeth and claws to this old woman, eh? Well, you don’t frighten me! Not a one of you! Filth and disease and canker and pestilence! That’s all you are! Things to be salted and staked and burned out like infection!”
One of the dead came up over the apex of the roof, making for Wanda. She didn’t see it and she didn’t seem to care. Its face was little more than withered, flapping leather that looked stitched and pulled into the general appearance of a face, but missing the mark by miles. It had no eyes. And its flesh…it crawled over the bone, fluttering with a wriggling motion. Another came up behind it and its own face was nothing but a nest of creeping worms, burrowing in and out of the flesh.
Harry knocked two zombies away from him and made it to Wanda just as the dead things took hold of her. He hit old worm-face with a bunched fist and that face simply sprayed and fell apart. Wanda screamed once as the thing that had her broke her over its knee with a wet snapping. She died right then.
Harry went wild.
As they came at him, he punched and kicked and clawed, tearing faces from the skulls beneath and breaking off limbs and burying his fists into moist, swollen bellies.
The helicopter was still hovering up there, the basket swinging beneath it. The backwash of the rotors threw rain in Harry’s face, almost plucked him off the roof. A gunner up there was firing rounds into the dead, drilling holes through them, but it did little good.
Last stand.
This was it.
“Come on, you fuckers!” Harry shouted at them. “Come and get me!”
There was an old antenna pole bolted to the chimney. Harry yanked and pulled on it until it popped free. A weapon. He smashed heads and impaled bodies and made one hell of a show of himself, swinging and bashing and gutting his attackers. But by then there were hundreds closing on him, a flurry of reaching white hands and pallid faces crowding in on him.
They buried him alive.
But to his credit, he fought like a maniac right to his last breath.
