shovels paused in dirty, wet hands. All you could hear was the rain coming down.
“No, something’s really happening here,” Lauder said and there was a note of panic to his voice. “The lid…the lid popped back off…motherfucker, that body moved.”
“Full of worms,” one of the hacks said.
There was laughter from the cons…but strained and unpleasant sounding as if maybe they were beginning to sense something, too.
Lauders let out a small, economical scream that made everyone start paying attention. “No, no…this stiff moved…I saw the hand move,” he said, that panic really settling into his voice now. “Help me out of here! C’mon, help me the fuck out of here!”
He was trying to climb back out, but the sides of the grave were so sodden they just came apart in his hands and he kept sliding back down. “Get me out of here! Get me out of here! Goddammit, get me the fuck out of here! Get me out! GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
By then, half a dozen cons were over there, looking down into the grave. A dozen more pushing in for a look. The hacks kept telling them to break it up, but they weren’t listening. Harry and a couple others reached down and grasped Lauder’s flaying hands, started yanking him out of there as that grave just seemed to collapse in on itself. But his hands were slick with clay and they kept losing their grip and he kept sliding back down, just out of his head with fear. His eyes were bulging and mouth contorted in a silent scream.
And Harry could feel it spreading amongst them in a cold wave: fear. It jumped from man to man and you could see it in the widening of eyes and lips pressed tightly together, bodies scrambling to get away from that open grave.
Harry and another got a good hold on Lauders and pulled him up and out. He ran right over the top of them. Down in that hole, a form sheathed in a membrane of sucking gray mud was sitting up in its coffin.
And then…madness.
Later, Harry thought that you could actually feel something happening. Like standing beneath high tension lines and feeling all the power flowing and feeding and arcing. It was like that, except this energy was coming from the ground. The earth beneath their feet was thrumming, vibrating. And right then, white and scabrous hands began to emerge through the layer of mold like spidery orchids blooming. Not just blooms then, but white roots and limbs and gnarled shoots, trunks and boles and spreading branches until the entire graveyard was alive with the resurrection and a cadaver forest blossomed and thickened and covered the ground in a noxious, seeking growth. Pallid, mossy faces rose from the mud and skinless fingers stretched. Like worms drawn to the surface by rain, the dead were squirming up from their graves, more all the time.
The stacked caskets began to shift and move. Lids clattered open and skull-faces were washed by chill rain. Every casket was in motion, meatless fists beating against lids. And in the other truck, the tarp fell away as dozens and dozens of corpses rotted down to rawboned scarecrows came alive and began to slide free to the ground in a grim army, grinning and whispering and chattering blackened teeth.
The graveyard seemed to explode.
The dead slid from the earth and broke the surface of deep, muddy puddles, water running from empty eye sockets and numerous worm-holes. Markers tumbled and fell, shadows slinked forward, charnel voices screeched into the storm. The hacks started shooting with their riotguns and the sound was of thunderous death knells and funeral bells gonging.
Harry saw men being pulled screaming down into the mire of mud like jungle explorers sucked into quicksand, others simply dragged down into submerged graves by clutching hands.
But then he was running with Jacky Kripp and this was surely the point where reality ripped the seat out of its pants and showed him its scaly, dirty behind.
The rain continued to fall.
Men continued to scream.
By the time Harry and the others made it to the mortuary and slammed the great door shut against the world, there was only a silence in the cemetery. A silence punctuated by rain filling puddles and the shuffling of feet as the dead moved towards the prison itself with squishy, slopping sounds.
6
“Someone’s coming,” Miriam Blake said. “Be ready, girls.”
“I know him,” Rita Zirblanksi said as she saw Deke Ericksen walk up the sidewalk in front of the Blake house. “He used to deliver our papers, he-”
Miriam pulled her away from the curtain. “There you go again, dear, and luckily for you, hear I am to set you straight. You don’t know any of them. They may look like people you know or went to school with or who even delivered your paper, but believe me, they are not any longer who they were. Things are getting desperate and dangerous out there and anyone, anyone, would do the most awful things to you to get what you have. They’d slit your throat, they’d rape and rob you and that’s because order has broken down because of liberals empowering all the crawly things in our society. All the dregs and effing bottom-feeders that should have been content to live in the sidewalk cracks and dirty, low places just as God intended.”
Rita tried to swallow. “This is getting creepy.”
“Creepy, you think?” Miriam said, grinning like a cardboard Halloween witch taped to a window. “Do you think it’s creepy, child? Well, indeed it is, I suppose. But this is only the beginning! You wait, you just wait until nightfall, then you’ll see! When all the crazy ones are howling in the streets and those pale horrors begin slinking about knocking on doors and scratching at windows! Then you’ll see and you’ll be glad I’m here to protect you.”
Rhonda had tears in her eyes; she didn’t know what to think.
First, Mrs. Blake had invited them in, given them a lecture about fighting, and then filled their heads with lots of weird politics, and now…now this. Rhonda knew none of it was right. Rita was getting flushed and that meant her temper was rising. It was only a matter of time before she got out of hand and Rhonda figured on getting out of hand with her.
“We should go…go and see if our parents are home yet,” Rita said, fully expecting Miriam to come down on her.
She was not disappointed.
“Oh, no, no, no,” Miriam said. “I won’t hear of it. You’re safe here and I’m not about to let you go. It’s not safe. It’s simply not effing safe out there.”
Rhonda and Rita looked at each other. This was all getting to feel like they’d been kidnapped or something. Were being held against their will. Like they were Hansel and Grethel being held by the hag in a candycane cottage. And with the way Miriam’s eyes were lit up with some dirty, dim light, maybe that wasn’t too far off the mark.
Rhonda sighed. This was going to be up to her and she knew it. People were of the notion that both Zirblanski twins were hotheads and savages, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. They both had their moments, but more often than not Rita was the one who lost control first. It was boredom, maybe. Rita was very high strung and when she had no outlet for the energy that surged inside her, she had a nasty habit of striking out at whatever was near. More often than not, that happened to be Rhonda. Not that Rhonda was above giving it back in spades when that little witch started it, but she was the calmer of the two. The more reasonable. You pushed Rita into a corner, she’d scratch your eyes out; you pushed Rhonda into a corner, she’d warn you to back away before she scratched your eyes out.
Rita said, “What do you think is out in the rain? You sound like you think there’s monsters out there.”
“And maybe there is, Miss High and Mighty. Maybe there is at that.”
Rhonda swallowed. Could the monsters out there be worse than the one holding them hostage in here? Their parents had always told them to steer clear of the Blake house. You see a rattlesnake, dad had said, you don’t go into its den, you give it a wide berth. The general consensus in the neighborhood was that Miriam Blake was crazy and Rhonda was starting to think that was probably true. She was really starting to weird-out now. There were lots of magazines in the house, things like Guns amp; Ammo, Soldier of Fortune, and the National Revue. But there were also stacks of those nutty papers from the grocery store checkout. A lot of them were the Weekly World Examiner, had black and white photographs on the cover of the president shaking hands with space aliens or giant jellyfish
