to fight his way through the flood. His drenched fists hammered uselessly against the door as the water rose and rose. Finally, he got it open enough to squeeze through. A tide of water came with him.
“Back to square one,” he said.
Dripping wet, the mire sluicing around him, Heller said, “What the hell happened?”
“How should I know?” Miggs said. “Maybe we opened that door and it created a vacuum or something. Must have been a lot of water caught behind that other door. Who knows?”
“Miggs,” Heller said. “Miggs.”
“What?”
“There’s…there’s someone over there.”
Miggs turned around, put his light where Heller was pointing. And, yes, there was someone over there near the telephone pole. A kid up to their chest in the water.
“Hey!” Miggs said. “C’mere! You can’t be out in this!”
But the kid-a little girl, Heller saw-was not moving. She just stood there and so very stiffly he thought she might be just another corpse. But then she moved. Did something.
Miggs went over to her.
“No,” Heller told him, tensing suddenly, “don’t.”
But Miggs went anyway, grumbling something under his breath.
Heller wasn’t sure at first what was bothering him about the kid, but now that he squinted his eyes in the rain and got his light full upon her, he saw all right. Just a little thing, a little girl with fine blonde hair…only there were great empty patches on her scalp and her face looked like wax melting off a skull. Just distorted and hideous, punched with two black holes for eyes.
But Miggs did not see that with the rain in his face.
“Gimme your hand,” he said, reaching out to her.
“I’m cold, mister,” the little girl said and her voice was congested like her lungs were full of leaves.
“Miggs!” Heller cried.
But it was too late. Miggs took hold of her hand and you could see that as he did so, his entire body tensed. Maybe he felt the coldness of her flesh or maybe he saw her face. But what was for certain was that when he took her outstretched hand in his own, gripping it, it was like pulp. It came apart in his fist, black juice squeezing out between his fingers.
He let out a scream and Heller fell back and over at the sound of it. When he came back up, there was nothing but Miggs’ flashlight being carried away down the street. Nothing else. No Miggs. No little girl.
“MIGGS!” Heller shouted. “MIGGS! MIGGS! MIGGS!”
But there was nothing but his own voice echoing out, empty and morose.
Oh Jesus, Oh Jesus Christ.
That wasn’t a little girl, a voice shrieked in his head. That was a dead thing, a living corpse…
Heller’s mind just went blank and he stumbled through the flooded streets, splashing and falling, his eyes drawn into narrow slits against the rain which hit him in sheets of needles. He kept moving, things bumping into him, his throat constricted down to a pinhole so that he could not even cry out. Then there was a building in front of him. A tall building that had been a hotel. He pulled himself up the steps and through the door and it was just black inside, black but dry.
Breathing hard, he pressed himself against the wall, trying to get his bearings.
Okay, okay, he had to find a door, find a room to hide in. It was the best he could hope for.
He still had his flashlight and that was something. He held it in his hand, ready to thumb the button…but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t dare. But then he knew. The light. Part of him was afraid that the light would be seen. And not just by that awful little girl, but others like her.
For there was no getting around one thing: the dead were in the streets of Witcham now. And some of them weren’t lying still.
Heller stood there, soaking wet and shivering. He had the flashlight in one hand and his 9mm Beretta in the other. He knew he had to find a place, a place he could hide. Though his mind was certainly not firing on all cylinders, his instinct was nearly electric. It told him that he must find a little hidey-hole, a corner he could push himself in. One that was defensible. There he would wait until first light. For surely the living dead had to crawl back in their graves when the sun came up.
Christ, the hotel was so unbearably dark.
It was like being shut in a closet. He had to take a chance. He thumbed the switch on his flashlight. He saw a few doors set in a corridor winding off to his left. Okay. That was a start. He clicked the light back off. He moved down there, opened the first door. Inside, mops and pails, boxes and shelves of cleaner. No, that wouldn’t do. Barely enough room to stand. He tried the next door. Shoving his 9mm into its holster, he gripped the knob and opened it. He put his thumb on the flashlight switch…and paused.
He heard a sound in the lobby. The sound of someone…or something…brushing against the walls blindly as if they were looking for him.
No time.
He stepped inside the room and-
The floor fell away beneath him and he was tumbling, slamming into steps and cracking his elbow and then his head, galaxies born in his brain in great nebular explosions. And then water. Sinking into it, plunging down into midnight depths, his face brushing a muddy bottom.
He came up like a rocket, gasping and clawing and sending waves rolling in every direction.
Stupid goddamn idiot…you’re down in the cellar.
It was so incredibly dark. Just one rolling shadow and you couldn’t see where the water stopped and the air began. Just that darkness that was thick and creamy and oddly suffocating. The water was up to his chest, his nostrils filled with its rank odor. Trying to make sense of it all, Heller made for the wall, figuring he could guide himself back to the stairs, extricate himself from this nightmare.
He had his gun, but the flashlight was gone.
This was not good. He’d made a lot of racket in his descent. Whoever had been in the lobby must have heard him. Knowing this, Heller just froze up and listened. He could hear nothing up there. Nothing at all. But behind him, there was a splashing sound. He wheeled around with his gun. God, the darkness. Like trying to see through a tarp. Another splash off to his left. He absolutely panicked this time, smelling dead things around him. He jerked the trigger on the 9mm, shooting blindly. In the muzzle flash, he saw that the stairs were quite a distance away.
Okay, make for them.
Heller moved through the water, pushing aside a couple floating boxes. No more splashing save his own, just that cutting silence. The noise he made struggling through the water was like thunder. It unnerved him so much that he stopped. And the splashing stopped just after he did. And that meant, that meant…
Somebody was following him.
Somebody was standing right behind him, dogging him in the water. He swung around, bringing his gun up and an odor like spoiled meat blew into his face, warm and sickening. Hands touched his face, his gunhand…hands that were soft and terribly moist.
He pulled the trigger, catching some hulking thing standing there in the muzzle flashes. Something reaching out with gnarled hands, ribbons of flesh hanging from them. He screamed and lost the gun and those hands were on him. Half out of his mind, Heller fought back. Clawing with his fingers, going almost instinctively for their eyes. His fingers hooked into empty eye sockets that slopped with something like mud and tore into mucid flesh that had the consistency of raw pork fat.
Then he was in the water, half-swimming and half-stumbling. Something bumped into him and he realized it was his flashlight. He came up with it, clicking it on and the light showed him a man standing a few feet away. His eyeless, ruined face was grayish-white, swollen, set with numerous holes from which water trickled. A couple black beetles emerged from his eye sockets and ran down his face. He grinned at Heller with blackened teeth.
And it wasn’t just him.
A dozen other heads came up out of the water now, strands of hair hanging in cadaverous faces. Grinning faces.
“Jesus Christ,” Heller heard his own voice say.
Then a woman vaulted up out of the water right in front of him, spraying him with stagnant slime. She was
