knocking?
Mitch sighed, thinking about all those stiffs that had been washed out of Hillside Cemetery. River Town was full of them. And what if not just a few came back from the dead…but all of them? Good God. “Gimme one of those cigarettes,” he said.
“No, Mitch. I don’t believe in corrupting the nation’s youth with the evil weed.”
“Gimme one, you knothead.”
Tommy did and Mitch stared at it before he put it in his lips. He’d quit four times now. This last time had been for almost three years and here he was, ready to hand himself over to the monkey again. “Fuck it,” he said and put in his lips. He fired it up and almost coughed out half a lung on the first pull. Two drags later, he was fine. His body had accepted the filth he was sucking into his lungs again. That easily.
“You’re nothing but an addict,” Tommy told him. “They ought to lock up freaks like you.”
Mitch pulled off the cigarette, studying the gray world of Witcham and looking for something unusual, something out of the ordinary, anything that would tell him he hadn’t hallucinated this afternoon. But he saw nothing. Lots of water, lots of dripping trees, lots of saturated lawns bordering wet houses, but nothing else. Nothing truly peculiar.
Tommy had not mentioned any of it beyond that weird rain and Mitch knew he was having trouble with it. No surprise there. The flooding and now the walking dead. Jesus, like starring in The Night of the Living Dead as directed by Irwin Allen.
“Hell’s going on over there?” Tommy said all of a sudden, slowing the truck.
A sheriff’s cruiser was parked at the edge of the road. A culvert emptied into a drainage ditch which wandered through a high-grassed field and down towards River Town and the river itself. Two deputies in rain slickers were down the embankment working at something with long metal poles. They didn’t look happy about it.
“Let’s see if they need a hand,” Tommy said.
And Mitch was going to tell him that he had to get home to Lily, but suddenly he was feeling in no hurry. Over on The Strip it had been a nightmare and five blocks away, just a rainy day. Nothing more.
They got out and some kid was standing up on the road chewing a mouthful of bubble gum and watching the proceedings below.
“Got a body down there,” he said like it was no big deal. “And it’s moving.”
Mitch tensed inside. It was what the kid had said. Got a body down there…and it’s moving. Not that there was somebody injured down there, but a body and it was moving.
Mitch led the way down the muddy embankment, trying not to slide on the wet grass. He knew this drainage ditch, it was one of many hooked to the rainwater sewers under the city. It was about three feet deep and maybe four wide. In the summer there was maybe a foot of water in there coursing amongst the rotting foliage and cattails, crickets chirping and frogs chortling. A dark and boggy place. Even in the spring it was never more than three feet deep. But now it had burst its banks and then burst them again, had to be an easy six feet deep. As they got nearer, Mitch could smell a dank sewer smell and then something far worse…the stink of a dead dog that had burst open with gassy decay and maggots.
It’s another one, isn’t? he started thinking. Another dead thing that ain’t exactly dead?
“You need a hand?” Tommy called out.
One of the cops turned and looked at them. His eyes were wide and his lips were trembling. He looked angry, sickened. “No, what we need is a fucking psychiatrist.”
There was a body lodged in the ribbed mouth of the culvert and they were pulling it out. As Mitch and Tommy looked on, they brought it to the bank with those long hooked poles, managed to pull it up into the grass like an especially large and especially loathsome dead catfish.
“Oh my Christ,” one the deputies said, turning away.
Mitch felt his guts trying to sneak their way up his throat in a tide of bile.
“Sonofabitch,” the other deputy said, wiping rain out of his face. “It ain’t got no legs. It’s dead…gotta be dead…but it’s moving.”
“Won’t be the first one today,” the other said and his partner shot him a look.
“What’s that?” Tommy asked him.
He shook his head. “I didn’t say anything.”
Like hell you didn’t, Mitch thought.
The body was bloated and bleached fish belly white, the remains of a camouflage fatigue shirt hanging over its mottled torso in rags. There was nothing but dirty, fleshy ribbons beneath its waist and where the skin wasn’t white, it was black and singed as if it had crawled bodily from a blast furnace. There were burnt blotches all over its chest and it had been slit open from belly to sternum. Inside that gaping wound, you could see its organs and the jutting staves of ribs. And what was most shocking of all was that it appeared to be female. It had breasts…or at least one of them which looked like a ghostly white mound with a gray nipple. The other was squashed just as flat as a flower in a book.
“Fuck is going here?” Tommy asked them.
But they had no answers. No more than they knew what they were going to do now that they had landed their trophy fish here.
She should have been dead.
Should have been dead about five times over, but she was not. Her chest was rising and falling with a bubbly, syrupy sound like Jello forced through bellows. Her right arm was intact, the hand flexing, the fingers scratching in the grass like white pencils. Her left arm, however, had been cremated down to a gnarled stick that was flaking away. A down of filthy black hair trailed down the right side of her head, but was completely burned away from the other side, the crown crushed and laid open with a gash so wide you could have put your fist in there. Inside, you could plainly see her brain, all those gray-white and bloodless convolutions nested together like pale worms.
But Mitch wasn’t looking at any of that.
He was looking at her face. The meat had been peeled or burnt from her eye sockets on down, a flap of white flesh that should have covered one cheek was tossed to the side, hanging there by threads of gristle. She looked like some hideous anatomy specimen, her face just a sculpture of red meat and pink muscle, teeth jutting from puckered gums. And her eyes…dear God…like twin black mirrors, shining and wet.
“Push her back in,” Tommy said, not trying to be funny, just absolutely offended by her…or it.
And it almost looked like the deputies were considering it.
She was looking up at Mitch with those terrible eyes, her lower jaw pulling to the side in what might have been a grin had she any skin or lips around her mouth. He felt his stomach flip over as something like an oily black teardrop rolled from one of her eyes. Rain streaked down her face. Look at the way she’s dressed, he thought, the remains of that shirt. Camouflage. Sure, could be just a fashion statement, but I’m thinking this lady was a soldier. Just what exactly happened out at Fort Providence? What exploded out there and what were they working on to create a monstrosity like this? He was not a man given over to fainting spells or dizziness, but right then he felt as if he might swoon, go right down to his knees and then face first into the grass. Rainwater had gathered in the troughs under his eyes and he wiped it away with trembling fingers.
The woman…whatever she was…opened her mouth, or at least her jaws pulled apart with a wet and sticky sound, more of that black juice running out. She was making sounds, trying to form words really, but what came out was more of a low choked growling than anything else.
And maybe Mitch was losing his mind-he was pretty sure he was-but a wild and irrational horror rolled right through him because he was almost certain that as she stared at him, she was trying to speak his name. Trying to tell him something and he had a pretty good idea that whatever it was would send him right over the edge.
“Mrrrrsshhh,” she intoned with a sound like tearing, moist cloth. “Mrrrrsshhh.”
“She’s…she trying to talk,” one of the deputies said, a crooked smile passing over his lips as if the absurdity of that had finally hit him.
And Mitch thought: Yes, I think you’re right. And she’s trying to speak my name.
She could have been trying to say a lot of things or nothing at all. There was no way to know, yet Mitch was certain she was trying to say his name. And that was the true horror of it, wasn’t it? The fact that she stared only at him and knew his name. As maybe the dead knew the names of all the living on sight, knew their secrets and pains, all those things denied them in life. Just as this woman did. And Mitch had a disturbing idea that she not only
