Tommy grabbed another board that was sharp as a stake and ran the thing through as it lunged at him. It vomited out black bile and shook like a fish out of water. Its flesh was bloodless and pulsing. Letting out a shrill, piping cry, it did not try and pull itself free from Tommy’s sharpened board…it did just the opposite. Possessed by a stupid, maniacal hate, it began to push itself up the shaft of the board, impaling itself further, but only concerned with getting at the man that had speared it.
Tommy tossed the board with a cry and the thing tried to move still.
More freak babies were coming through the windows, some of them attached together like paper dolls. Others crawled up the walls and some just wriggled about like squids or worms.
Tommy kicked at one that made for his legs, felt another creep up his back. He tossed it to the floor and it actually splattered into a convulsive stew of flesh and black fluid.
And then one grabbed his arms with wiry white fingers. Its bloated, waxy face grinned up at him and then its black teeth sank right into his forearm. He let out a cry and tried to grab the top of its head to toss it free. Its skull was not bone, but some rubbery and gelid material that came apart in his hand. His fingers plunged right through the crown of its skull and pierced the wormy gray matter within.
It let out a wild, whooping cry and fell off him.
And as if answering some unknown call, the freak babies retreated.
41
Hubb kept firing and reloading, firing and reloading.
He made a pretty good show of himself for a man who’d already suffered two minor heart attacks and was on the verge of a third. His left arm was burning, his chest tight and corded. Sweat ran down his face and he could not seem to breathe. But true to form, he wailed out a string of profanities and fired his last rounds until a burst of pain in his chest made him nearly black out.
He dropped his gun.
His eyes fluttered closed and when he opened them, there was a little girl standing there with a hatchet in her hands. Her hair was black and lustrous, stuck to her white face with blood and snot.
“I brought you something, mister,” she said.
Hubb just shook his head.
The hatchet came down again and again and Hubb was beyond defending himself. It split his head open, severed his left hand at the wrist, dug into his throat, chopping and cutting and slicing until he fell over dead.
The zombie girl kept hacking at him until she was splashed red with his blood. Then giggling, she picked up his hand and went back out into the night.
42
Chrissy and Deke worked in unison with road flares in each hand, jabbing them into faces and clawing hands, driving the dead away. But for everyone that fell back, three more took their place.
A dozen of them surrounded the couple, then at some unspoken moment, lunged. The first few got flares jammed into their faces, but the others got what they wanted. Two of them dragged Deke to the ground and he fought like a wild cat, punching and kicking and slashing until he worked himself free.
Several others took Chrissy and tried to drag her to the windows. She fought in their grip. Her nails dug into eyeballs and her fingers slid into pulpy faces. Others joined in, fighting for possession of her. One of them had a face of trailing flesh that looked like a squashed jellyfish, another had a tiny set of mutant arms coming out of its chest. She screamed and fought and then Mitch was there.
He put his last two round into the lot of them.
Several died, smoking and shuddering. Two others made for the window.
What was left behind was a woman who was hideous beyond words. She looked like the others, save that she had been pregnant. Instead of being born, the child had simply been absorbed by its mother’s flesh. It had now erupted from her belly, a thing with flesh like grease, heads thrashing and limbs rising out of the mass like it was trying to escape the bondage of its mother.
Tommy came up and tossed a flare into her lap and she crept away, burning and making a snorting, guttural sound like a suckling pig.
And that’s when they all noticed one thing.
The dead had now retreated.
They were outside the windows, hundreds of them, but they were not coming in.
43
And then it started raining again.
Raining damn hard.
But this was not water falling from the sky. It was something solid. Something that came down in a violent, lashing crimson torrent. Mitch and the others stood there, not knowing what to think or what to make of it. This was a red rain. It struck the walls of the orphanage with thudding, splatting sounds that were disgusting and meaty. Then that red, liquid rain poured right through the windows.
It was filled with falling, ropy shapes.
Not rain.
But worms.
A rain of red worms.
The first deluge of them were squashed by the fall, breaking open on impact. But they kept coming and coming and coming until the floor near the windows was a foot deep in thousands of looping and twining red worms. They were tangled together in a single mass of brilliant red undulant motion that began to break apart.
The worms were coming for Mitch and the others.
They uncoiled themselves from that squirming mass and began dropping to the floor. The first few just laid there, almost sluggishly like grass snakes waking up after a long winter’s hibernation. Almost like they were dazed. But others followed and they were very active. Some of them were easily a foot in length, segmented and violently red, obscenely thick and excreting a transparent jelly. A few of them rose up and tasted the air with tiny puckering mouths.
There was no getting beyond the absolute revulsion they inspired.
Mitch and Tommy, Deke and Chrissy…they were all feeling it. Some macabre and self-destructive part of their brains wondering bleakly what it might feel like to have one of those things slide up your pant leg or get under your shirt. Maybe slide across your belly or put that puckering mouth against your lips. You could not look at things like that without being offended almost atavistically. The human mind recoiled at the idea of worms in general and when they were profuse like this, it was appalled to great depths. For mankind had a long association with squirming, serpentine shapes and hated them on sight. For Mitch and the others, they were seized by a primal instinct which told them to stomp those things, to crush them under their boots. To exterminate them. Because if you didn’t, they’d breed and infest and you just couldn’t have that, now could you?
Mitch didn’t know about the others, but to him worms were just worms. Until they gathered in numbers like this. And especially since he had seen these very same worms slithering in and out of the walking dead, infesting and feeding upon them. And now they had come down in a rain. An actual rain.
Not good.
Not good at all.
