Chrissy swallowed. “He…he was in the chapel.”
“Oh boy,” Tommy said. “You recognize that ugly face, Mitch?”
Mitch did and he didn’t. Who the hell was this? A tall man, almost regal in some way, dressed in a long black coat that might have been hide with a graying shroud beneath, soiled and dirty and set with spreading stains. His face was a leathery skull, the eyes huge, a brilliant yellow like alien moons. That face…yes, Mitch had seen it somewhere. Despite the apparent mummification, he had seen it somewhere before.
Yes, Fort Providence.
In that pit of slithering matter that Osbourne had shown them that had been grown from the finger bone of that German warlock. All those heads and faces rising from it and all of them looking exactly the same.
“Alardus Weerden,” he said.
“Who’s that?” Deke wanted to know.
But there was no time to explain any of it.
Weerden had something in his hand. A mask. He pulled it over his face. Yes, a death mask, stripped from a corpse. The scalp still intact with flowing black hair. Weerden did not move. He stayed put as the dead thronged forward like soldier ants, massing and malefic and creeping. Tommy ordered everyone away from those windows.
But Mitch did not move.
He was transfixed by what he was seeing. The dead. The walking dead of Witcham, grotesquely bloodless and rotting and infested by vermin. His eyes saw them, took them in, looking over that advancing charnel wall of death. Yes, inside he recoiled, but he was no less fascinated by what he was seeing. Skull faces and waxen faces and oozing faces and faces that moved on the bones beneath. Fishlike, blubbery mouths sucking in air and exhaling corpse gas. Fungous things and leprous things, mottled and perforated and leaking a black silt. They came forward with hands raised and fingers hooked. This was it. A human wave attack of the inhuman.
He pulled away just as the siege began.
They hit the outside of the orphanage with a great thud as if they thought they could walk right through walls. They were hissing and gibbering and making slobbering, wet sounds.
“Here we go,” Tommy said.
Hands came through the windows, shattering what glass was left in them. Fingers snaked around boards, pulling and pulling. Fists hammered and voices screeched and shadows wavered. There were raving, insane shrieks, the sound of fingers and teeth tearing at the planks. There were five windows lining the outside wall of the classroom and they were alive, alive with pale hands wrenching and twisting and clawing. Skeletal hands and gray hands and white hands set with numerous dripping black sores. Some fingers were webbed together and some had flesh hanging from them in ribbons and others were throbbing with the motion of the worms that burrowed beneath their skins.
So many white and wriggling fingers that it looked like a nest of slinking maggots in busy, industrious action.
Boards broke, others were yanked free of the nails that held them.
Eyeless faces swam in, faces that were made of dozens of converging white sacs like the floats of jellyfish. Faces that were melted wax and writhing carpets of flesh. A white face that was speckled with mold leered at Mitch with oyster-gray eyes, gouts of black blood hanging from its mouth. Another pushed in next to it, this one like a watercolor painting that had run…everything oozing from the bone beneath in a fungoid mass threaded with red worms.
Mitch and others had fallen back, but now they came forward, not with their guns, but with roadflares. They popped the caps and brought the flames to bear on the evil dead. The flames ate into hands and blackened fingers and vaporized eyes, the room filling with a thick and oily smoke of cremated flesh.
But there were always more faces and more hands.
The dead were pressing in in vast numbers and the boards were all snapping, breaking free. Bloated and fleshy hands looked for something to grab. Scabrous faces screamed and howled. More and more faces all the time, most of them ruined and puffy from immersion in the water.
The flares were just not enough.
The shotguns came out now and the night turned into a thunderstorm of shrieking voices and booming guns. Triggers were jerked and pumps worked, the muzzle flashes blinding and the chamber explosions deafening in the confines of the classroom. It was a blazing, hammering, flashing storm of pyrotechnics.
And the dead felt the sting of the rock salt.
They began to dissolve and steam and sizzle, faces sliding from skulls and hands withering. They fell into slops of mucus and flesh and jittering bones. But more came and more after that and soon enough, they had made it into the classroom over the remains of the others.
It was war to the knife now.
39
Mitch dropped three zombies and battered at the face of a fourth. He saw one fall apart at his feet and keep moving, a creeping plexus of meat that dragged its bones behind it like it was trying to free itself of them. He hopped away from it and right into the arms of three others. They threw him down and he brought his shotgun up, blasting two of them away that almost comically smashed into each other as they began to burn, melting into one another and fusing together, falling in a skittering, slimy heap. Smoking and steaming, they tried to pull away from each other but were tangled in each other’s anatomies.
The third zombie reached down for him and he gave it a round dead in the face that pulverized its head in splatter of tissue. It waltzed around, blind and thrashing and fell into a couple others.
And then he noticed something incredible.
Some of the dead had grown together. Two and three of them were sometimes stuck together in a central mass. At least, that’s what it looked like. But he soon saw that was not entirely the case. They were dividing. A huge and fleshy mass was actually dividing and becoming two or three separate entities.
He reloaded and kept shooting.
There was nothing else to do.
40
Tommy fired his last rounds and then grabbed a board and started swinging with everything he had, smashing heads that sometimes just collapsed and others that exploded in sprays of meat and tissue and black blood. Blood that was acidic and stinging when it struck him.
He saw more things come through the windows, but these were not men or women or children exactly, but something else. They looked like infants or fetuses, crawling things with too many coiling white limbs and huge bulbous heads. Some were conjoined like Siamese twins. Connected at the head or neck or waist. One of them had a face on both sides of its head and another had three faces stacked up on top of each other. Some were eyeless and some had but a single black, serous eye. Others had just too many. They hopped and skittered and slithered. One of them with no less than two heads and what might have been a dormant third, dragged itself in his direction. It had the requisite number of limbs. Though while those on the left side of its body were withered sticks, those on the right were massive and muscular, the globular white flesh set with thick purple veins.
When it got close, it tried to leap at him, but he swung his board and smashed one of the heads open. Worms and filth bubbled out. He smashed the second head the same way and that morbid thing still lived, hopping about in a crazy circle and spewing black fluid from its wounds.
Another of the freak babies came at him.
Its head was huge and misshapen, eyes the size of golf balls, a yawning mouth filled with overlapping serrated teeth that were blackened and rotting.
