But she was no prophet and there was certainly nothing heavenly about her.
She was a dead thing, ragged and rotten and emaciated, her face white as a gravestone, punched through with the black holes of her eyes and a crooked, grinning mouth. A dark sap ran like blood from her lips, moonlight reflected off the rungs of her exposed ribs.
Hinks made a gagging sound.
“Well, fuck this,” Oates said, bringing up his M-16 and opening up on that spectral figure on full auto. He hit her dead on, nary a stray bullet buzzing off into the night. The effect was instantaneous. As the rounds chewed into her, she jerked and shuddered, but did not go down. Then she simply exploded, burst open like a jellyfish, spraying black filth over the top of the roof. Whatever that stuff was, it glistened and oozed like marsh slime.
The sudden, invasive stench of putrefaction was nauseating.
Neiderhauser vomited. Right down the front of his rainslicker.
And then the water began to stir, slopping and splashing with unseen motion from beneath. Bubbles began to break the surface all around them, thick and gelatinous things. The water roiled and agitated, rolling with tumid waves that slapped up against the boat. There was an eruption of wet leaves and stinking water and a coffin broke the surface a few feet away. Then another and another. One struck the boat from below almost spilling them all into the drink. It scraped along the bottom with a muted squeaking sound and then worked its way free, jumping from the water and standing straight up before falling back over.
Hinks cried out and took up his M-16.
He began firing into the water, drilling rounds into that slop and into caskets. Just beneath the surface there were faces, white and eyeless things, slowly rising like bubbles. One after the other they came up, silt running from their eye sockets and black bile from their mouths. Some were recent interments, fleshy and puckered; others were wraiths and scarecrows, Halloween skeletons trimmed out in tattered hides, their faces leathery and seamed.
Neiderhauser started shooting, too.
Oates didn’t.
Not right away. The absurdity and hopelessness of waltzing into this horror story just sapped the strength from him. He had seen his share of scary flicks, but never once had he seen a character just lose it and burst out into hysterical laughter…right then, though, that’s exactly what he felt like doing.
But then as spidery arms clawed over the lip of the boat, the humor dried up in him and he started shooting. Not that it seemed to do much good. Some of them exploded like the woman and some of them were just shattered apart by the bullets. Two of them came up into the boat, grasping Hinks by the ankles and he emptied his magazine right into them, popping quite a few air chambers in the process.
And then he screamed.
Sure, he’d been silent and devastated for awhile, but now it was all coming out. Boiling out like poison. A ripping, reeling, wailing scream like his mind had decided to purge itself in one fell swoop. It was high and insane. More pale arms looped up into the boat, clutching hands grabbing him and he fell to his knees, shaking and screaming.
Neiderhauser fell away from him, blocking Oates’ line of fire. Oates tried to shove him away, but Neiderhauser had just simply snapped. He clung to Oates, sobbing and whimpering, and would not let go regardless of what Oates did.
There had to be twenty or thirty living corpses in the water now, most of them surrounding the front of the boat, crawling right over the top of one another as they tried to get at Hinks. With all those reaching arms and clawing fingers it was as if a forest of deadwood was growing up over the bow of the boat. Hinks was almost lost beneath those white limbs and tearing hands.
Oates tossed Neiderhauser off him with a shove and opened up on the dead. He punched a lot of not-so pretty holes through them, scattered a lot of grave waste over the surface of the water, but that was about it.
Finally, he crawled over Neiderhauser and got the engine going.
As he did so, a teenage girl wormed up over the other dead ones and pulled Hinks to her like a lover. You could no longer hear his frantic screams over the hissing and howling of the undead. Her face was gray and fringed with mildew, her eyes black and shining and starkly translucent. She gripped his head with two pulpy hands, black juice running from her nostrils. Her stare was vacant and remorseless. Then her mouth expanded like the blowhole of a whale and she vomited a stream of black mucus right into his face. It was thick and viscous, hanging from his cheeks like snot.
And that was about all Oates saw.
He jerked the throttle and reversed the boat backwards, Hinks and his dead friends falling off the bow. They he worked the stick and brought the boat surging forward, bouncing off coffins and the tips of monuments and rotting faces. And then he had the engine at full boar and there wasn’t anything that could stop them. They crashed through the branches of trees and slammed against the roofs of vaults, knocked caskets out of the way and he could see the spiked tops of the gates. A single coffin floated past them, the lid opening and a thin, withered arm snaking out.
Neiderhauser was still screaming himself hoarse as they passed out of the cemetery.
And Oates, about to lose his mind, reached over and slapped him across the face.
“Don’t you fold on me,” he told him. “Don’t you dare fucking fold on me.”
21
It took what seemed hours to go just a few blocks.
When they said Witcham was flooding, they weren’t kidding. As Deke Ericksen moved through the inundated streets, he decided that “flooding” didn’t really cut it here, because Witcham wasn’t just flooding, it was goddamn sinking.
And somewhere out there, Chrissy Barron was maybe lost or worse.
Now he did not know that to be true, but somewhere in his guts he was convinced of it. He’d been over to her house twice now and she still hadn’t made it home. There was only her mother there, talking about dead people in drains and that was really something wasn’t it? Chrissy had been telling him that her mother had lost it ever since her twin sister Marlene killed herself and now Deke believed it completely.
The first time he’d gone over there, she’d freaked him out with all that talk and made him think of his dead kid brother Nicky. Something he did not want to be thinking about anymore than he already did. Especially with what had happened over at Hillside. He’d left there that afternoon, something black and disgusting bubbling up the bathroom drain upstairs and Lily downstairs talking to someone in the other bathroom.
Just bullshit, man, he told himself. You didn’t hear what you thought you heard. You couldn’t have. It was just Lily mimicking another voice.
But, despite the absurdity of dead people speaking through drains, he could not convince himself that Lily had faked it. Sure, she was off the deep end…but that voice, gurgling and wet, it had not sounded like Lily at all.
Deke pushed it from his mind.
He’d gone over there again before sundown and Chrissy was still gone, Mitch still out looking for her, and Lily had been…what? Too lucid, too calm for somebody that imagined dead people talking to her from drains. Deke hadn’t hung around. Something about Lily was eating a hole through him and he left right away.
He’d been canvassing the streets ever since.
It was a bad night. The rain still falling and the water still rising and now and again he’d hear a National Guard chopper overhead, but that was about it. The city not only sounded dead, it felt dead.
But maybe that was his imagination.
God knew, he was plenty keyed-up.
In some of the lower-lying areas of Crandon, the water had come right up to his chest and now with the power out and no lights to be had…well, it was just bad. Real bad. Deke kept feeling things bump into him and he could not see what they were. Could have been floating tires or bodies for all he knew.
He was wasting his time and he knew it.
The chances of finding Chrissy on foot were astronomical. She was probably holed up with Heather Sale or Lisa Bell. And if the phones had been working, it would have been easy enough to check.
