pale toadstools. Then bursting free from those boxes and growing through the soil in a fleshy white mass like some hungry cancer, an intricate system of rootlets, becoming an immense fruiting body that drained the charnel earth of grim nourishment before erupting from the waterlogged ground as a whole and giving flower. And now it was above ground, covering the earth and stones and bushes and crawling right up the trees in an unbroken circuitry of excrescence. Imitating what had given it life, crudely replicating what it found in those caskets far below.
Yes, Breeson knew, that was exactly what had happened. What was bringing the dead back in this city had now resurrected an entire cemetery. The knowledge of this made him want to drop to his knees and cry.
Everything out there was moving and worming, boiling with pestilent life, limbs reaching and hands fluttering and faces opening like crypt orchids. Mouths were opening and shutting, things like colorless tongues licking spongy lips.
“Get out of here!” Rhymes suddenly said, shocking them all out of it. “Now! Get the hell out of here!”
The web of flesh was agitated now, everything squirming and stretching, faces popping from central masses like bubbles. There were hissing sounds and slithering noises, the sound of that fungi in motion as it began to really move, spreading out in the direction of the men themselves. Contorted mouths opened and screamed with agonized voices. The voices of men and women and children, but shrill and piercing, or low and clotted. A wall of noise that masked the movement of the fungi itself.
The ground began to tremble.
Trees began to shake and stones began to tumble over. Men cried out and the cemetery earth rumbled like an empty belly. Great rents opened everywhere, headstones falling into the earth, trees falling over and the ground itself vibrating like an earth tremor was sweeping through it. Limbs fell from the oaks overhead. Mausoleums shook and swayed, many of them crumbling into heaps of shattered concrete. The men tried to find their feet, but were thrown to the ground, into each other, tossed over the heaving earth. That fungi was whipped into a wild agitation, creeping in every direction, it seemed, multiplying itself. Something white and lashing like a tentacle yanked Rhymes screaming into the night. Chasms were opening everywhere as the skin of the graveyard simply sheared open in dozens of places.
And it was surely not from any seismic activity.
Breeson, stumbling along, avoiding falling trees and tipping monuments, saw clearly what it was all about. That horrible fungi was the cause. For it was like an iceberg in its own way: what you saw above the surface was just a fraction of its total volume. And now the rest of it was coming up, unearthing itself, tearing itself up by flaccid white roots. It vomited from the split earth like some seething, steaming infection in mounds and pustules. A heaving mass of noxious gray-white jelly that was veined purple and red and blue, faces and forms and limbs swimming up out of the tissue, hundreds of bulging pink eyes opening.
Breeson saw Kerr fall into a pit of that rising flesh, heard the mucky, slopping sounds as he sank into it.
All across the cemetery, men were screaming and crying out for help and begging for mercy. Five or six cops came running in his direction and were literally swallowed alive by what oozed from the ground.
In the end, it was only Breeson who made it to the front gates, the graveyard alive and roiling and consuming behind him. And by then, of course, he was completely out of his mind, happily so.
19
“At first, it’s only a sliding and a dragging…a creeping noise coming out of the woods at you,” Cal Woltrip said to the children gathered in the shadowy bus. “But you can feel it getting closer, making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. And by then, heh, heh, it’s too late, far too late. For the thing has found you, the thing is coming closer and closer?”
“Just stop it,” Tara Boyle said.
“?and you can’t run, you can’t hide. You can only scream as it drops down out of the dark and winds around your throat, squeezing and sucking your brain out.”
His brother Kyle giggled. “Yeah, you can hear it sucking your brains out.”
“What is it?” Alicia Kroll wanted to know. “What does it look like?”
Cal laughed like a horror movie host: “Heh, heh, heh.” He was holding one of the flashlights under his chin so that his face was mired in shifting shadow. “It looks like a brain…a living, crawling brain with a spinal cord that’s like a tail. That’s what it wraps around your neck…that’s what holds you while it sucks the brain out of your skull…”
“Oh, gross,” Lacee Hendersen said.
“That’s stupid,” Chuck Bittner said, which was pretty much what he said about anything unless he came up with it.
Kyle looked at him. “You’re a fag just like your dad.”
“Shut up!”
“Homo.”
Bobby Luce held up his hands. “Okay, okay, everybody stop it!”
Kayla Summers began to whimper.
“Oh, boy,” Alicia Kroll said, “here we go again.”
Bobby Luce sighed. How was he supposed to reign in this bunch? True, Mr. Reed had placed him in charge of them while he went to look for help, but that didn’t exactly mean he wanted to be in charge. Mr. Reed had been gone for like two hours now and the natives were getting restless. Half of them wanted to leave the bus and find their own help and the other half wanted to stay. If it wasn’t Kyle and Cal Woltrip telling stories about psychopaths with chainsaws and brain-sucking monstrosities, then it was Chuck Bittner threatening them all with his father or Kayla Summers bursting into tears and Tara Boyle whining about everything. The others weren’t so bad, but they were all getting nervous and agitated and maybe more than a little scared.
And it was scary.
Bobby Luce, despite his eleven years, had inherited the practicality and rock-solid nerve of his parents. He did not scare easily. Even if something in a horror movie or horror comic occasionally freaked him out, he understood very well the dividing line between fantasy and reality. That line was very hard-etched in his mind. But even with his adult logic and common sense, this entire situation of being trapped in a bus in the pitch black in a flooded section of town…well, it was more than a little overwhelming.
The power had gone out now and Bethany was dark as a midnight cellar, that rain falling and falling. Sometimes light, sometimes very heavy, but always there. And like the others, all of it was getting on his nerves.
But what can I do? he wondered. I have to keep everyone here. Mr. Reed put me in charge and that means I’m responsible. I can’t let anyone leave and if they stay, I can’t let them claw each other’s eyes out.
It was a hell of a situation.
Sure, they were supposed to be a team, they were supposed to work together. Fairstreet Flyers, one for all and all for one. But that barely held water on the field during a game, let alone in the real world. Bobby wished Coach Costigan were there. She always seemed to have a pep talk for every eventuality and when that didn’t work, well, she had one hell of a temper, too.
Sighing, he shut off his flashlight.
They only had the two and they wouldn’t last forever. There were fifteen of them waiting in that bus and most were just sulking now, not saying a thing and Bobby wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. God, what was taking Mr. Reed so damn long?
“Cal,” Bobby said. “Turn that flashlight off. No sense wasting those batteries.”
“Okay, Chief.”
The light went off without an argument. Bobby was suspicious right away. Cal and Kyle weren’t as bad as some of the others, but they could be trouble. And Bobby was suspecting trouble when Cal didn’t even argue with him about the light.
“Probably a good idea,” Cal said. “You never know who might be out there.”
Oh, boy.
Kyle giggled as he always did. “Sure, out in the storm…you don’t know what’s out there. Some lunatic might
