be a giant, leggy spider. But as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could see what it was quite plainly.
A disembodied hand.
It was pale and bloated, the fingers pulling it up the windshield, leaving a slimy trail behind it.
Bobby didn’t hold off any longer: he screamed.
20
A few minutes after they entered the cemetery, Henry T. Oates came to the shocking realization that not only were they fucked here, but that in this particular violation, there would certainly be no flowers or soft kisses in the dark. Not so much as a heart-shaped box of candy. No, this definitely was of the grab-your-ankles-and- grit- your-teeth variety.
Neiderhauser, God bless him, was still whining. “Sarge…I’m serious here…this is crazy. To hell with Hopper and Torrio. Piss on ‘em, we need back up.”
“I’ll let you know when you need back up, sunshine,” Oates told him.
They were drifting through the black water of a cemetery that Neiderhauser said had to be All Saints. Which was all and fine in Oates way of thinking. Not that that pearl did them much good. When you went to meet your maker, didn’t matter whether it was a bayonet or a Russian knife that sent you there; you were going all the same. And right then, Oates figured it didn’t much matter the name of this particular boneyard, because the shit was about to get deep.
Neiderhauser had killed the engine so Oates could get his senses stoked up and hot, maybe tell him just what was going on here. Just after they got into the cemetery, trying to catch up with Hopper’s boat, there’d been a booming sound like an impact somewhere out there, which made Oates think that Hopper and his band of merry men had smacked into something and flipped over. Course, over the sound of the Johnson pump jet engine at full rev, it was hard to say.
“Back there,” Neiderhauser said. “Those things in the water…they were?”
“Unfriendlies,” Oates said. “That’s what they were and that’s how we’ll log it.”
Nobody argued with him and that was a good thing, for he surely wasn’t in the mood for it. They’d lost the second boat back in the alley along with four boys. Now that wasn’t just bad, it flat out stank. And now maybe they’d lost Hopper and Torrio, too. Oates wasn’t liking this. This whole op wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be a fairly simple search-and-rescue, nothing more.
But now it had become anything but.
Oates had seen those things in the alley, too. He had seen what they looked like and it had scared him as bad as the others. Those…individuals, how could you classify them? Not as men and women surely. They looked like they’d crawled out of a mass grave, were in search of a few spare body bags.
You can try and be cute and sassy about those things all you want, Oates told himself, but they were all dead, the walking dead, goddamn?
“Zombies,” Neiderhauser said. “Zombies.”
“That’ll do,” Oates warned him, wiping a mist of rain from his face. “Keep your eyes peeled.”
Hinks hadn’t said a word since the incident in the alley. As if the very horror of all that had completely shut something down in him, had emptied him. He was just a shell with staring eyes. Maybe he was in shock and maybe he had lost his mind. Either way, Oates just didn’t have the time to babysit him. Not now.
Knowing procedure, Oates had radioed it all in. But the captain told him to stay and look for survivors and under no condition abandon his people out there. So that was that and now here they were.
But it was no easy bit.
Even without the fear that was worming up his asshole like an unfriendly finger, this was a mess. For maybe All Saints boneyard made some sort of sense when you were walking its roads and following its paths, but when there was a good six or seven feet of water covering it up, well it was a maze. All around them were trees?thick boles like pillars, branches spreading out above in a nearly unbroken weave and stout limbs rising from the soup. And in-between, the tips of tall monuments and the peaked roofs of burial vaults jutting up. Yeah, it was a maze, all right. The water was turgid and oily, a foul steam rising from it, lots of things bobbing and drifting just under the surface.
It was positively claustrophobic.
It reminded Oates of a mangrove swamp he’d spent two days in down in Brazil as part of a survival exercise years back. It was dark like that swamp, stank like that swamp, and gave him that same feeling of vulnerability… the sense that there were terrible things out there, watching him, things he would never see until they jumped out of the darkness at him.
Neiderhauser was terrified.
His constant bitching and complaining had an edge to it now that made you think he was teetering, that if he fell all the way, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men would never put him back together again. Sure, fear. Ugly, simmering fear. It was in all of them now.
And there was nothing Oates could say to change it.
What they had seen back in that alley, well, it was not the sort of thing you could just turn away from. It was the sort of thing that got down inside your mind, crouched in the darkness there.
“All right,” Oates said, “let’s get this done. Grab those oars, you poo-nanny sonosofbitches, and take us around that stand of trees.”
Again, they did not argue. Hinks and Neiderhauser sets their weapons aside and took hold of the oars, pushed them forward. The branches of the trees rose up jagged and skeletal, looked sharp enough to impale a man.
They came around, skirted the oval top of an obelisk, and thudded right into something. It was a box, long and narrow and covered with leaves.
“A coffin,” Neiderhauser said.
And it was. It bumped past them and they all fell as silent as Hinks. The wan moonlight reflected off its tarnished brass handles, falling rain speckled its surface. Oates knew that when a graveyard was inundated for days upon days, sometimes the soil just dissolved into a muddy silt and what was under it tended to rise to the surface.
“There’s another one,” Neiderhauser said.
Oates was on the spotlight and he picked out two or three others, one of them completely rotted. More a collection of sticks than anything else. Rotted cerements trailed out into the water like confetti.
He could almost feel that communal terror rising in his men again and maybe himself, too. The shadows and rain and stink…and now floating coffins. Jesus.
“Well, hang my cock from the sour apple tree,” Oates said. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
Hinks and Neiderhauser worked the oars again as Oates got on the bullhorn and called out for Hopper and Torrio. His voice echoed out through the flooded graveyard, coming back at him with a whispering sibilance as if a dozen voices out there were mocking him.
He kept working the spot, the beam of light glancing off floating coffins and the greasy surface of the water, picking out a few high headstones and imbuing them with a moonish phosphorescence. That awful, fetid fog rose from the water, the light barely cutting it. Weird shadows and half-glimpsed shapes darted through the gloom. Things splashed and the water rippled.
Oates panned the light around and picked out a lone figure standing atop the flat roof of a sepulcher.
“Shit,” Neiderhauser said.
Oates put the light on it and he thought it was a woman. At least…once she had been. The light glanced off her and she was a blackened, twisted thing, draped in trailing rags that might have been her burial robes or what remained of her flesh, but probably both. Oates pulled the light away from her, something clenching tight in his belly. The rain had subsided to a chill drizzle and the moon chose that moment to break briefly through, bathing that figure in a cold white light. Standing there, unmoving, framed in moonlight broken by the reaching tree limbs overhead, the fog rising up all around her, she looked like some cadaverous prophet touched by the light of heaven.
