were more like writhing tentacles than anything else.
But what Hopper saw that disturbed him more than anything else, was that quite a few were joined together at the head and the hip or shoulder like Siamese twins. And some had more than one head, sometimes just a bulb growing from a shoulder like something that wanted to be a head.
No, they were not human. But jellyfish and embryonic squids that were pretending to be human.
“God, hurry,” Torrio said. “Hurry.”
Together, they stumbled down the hall, hearing the slushy, wet sounds of those things climbing the stairs.
27
“That thing was eating Liss,” Torrio said.
He hadn’t said a word in some time and this is how he broached the silence. Hopper didn’t bother commenting on it. They were safe for the moment. The things had been climbing the stairs for some time, but now it was quiet out there so they must have retreated.
“It was eating him,” Torrio said.
“Yeah, no shit.”
They were sitting in a room, the door locked to what might lay in wait outside. It was the bedroom of some boy, probably, who had seriously been into airplanes and space exploration. Plastic fighters and spacecraft hung from the ceiling on threads. There were posters of the moon and Mars on the walls. Even the bedspread featured rockets and stars and satellites whizzing about. Torrio was laying on it, his equipment tossed to the floor.
Hopper sat on the edge of the bed. “What the fuck is going on in this city?” he said. “What the hell is this all about?”
“The dead are rising, man, just like in those movies.”
“And those things downstairs?”
Torrio took his time in answering that one. Finally, he said, “Freak babies.”
“Freak babies?”
“Yeah, man, sure. You’ve seen ‘em. They used to have ‘em at sideshows and shit. Dead babies in jars. Things that died at birth. You know, things with two heads or too many eyes, three arms. You know.”
Hopper was going to tell him that was ridiculous. What possible chain of events could have put freak babies from sideshow jars into the water out there? And, better, what made them alive? What turned something that was essentially pitiable into a monster?
“Listen,” Torrio said.
There was movement out in the hallway.
A dragging noise.
Then a dripping sound like water was running from something.
Neither of them dared to even breathe.
More sounds now, gathering outside the door. Hopper heard a drawn-out phlegmy sound that might have been breathing. Something sniffed along the bottom of the door and then there was the sound of dozens of fingers scraping.
“They won’t get in,” Torrio said, breathing heavily.
But Hopper was not so sure. The door was only a cheap panel job. It couldn’t take too much. And those fetal nightmares out there were throwing everything they had at it. Pounding and scratching and tearing at it. The door was rattling uneasily in its frame. If it came open…
Well, Hopper did not want to think what it might be like to be buried in a sea of those things, drowning beneath those scraping fingers and sucking mouths.
No, no, no.
He went over to the window. The garage roof was just below them. They could drop onto it and get back into the water, try another house maybe. He undid the latch and was surprised when it slid up as if greased.
“Come on,” he said.
Torrio didn’t argue.
Hopper went first, leaping onto the roof seven feet below. He hit hard, but the roof was flat so he didn’t roll off. Torrio followed.
“Now what?”
Hopper scanned the water. It looked okay. “Back in,” he said.
They lowered themselves into the drink and felt that chill water consume them again. The pervasive stench of it was sickening. Just rot and things they didn’t want to know about. They started moving down an alley, their hearts in their throats, shining their lights about. The rain had slowed to a trickle. The clouds thinned enough so that moonlight actually made it through, illuminating the sunken, surreal world around them.
“Wait,” Torrio said.
Somebody was standing at the end of the alley where it opened into the street.
Just a figure that looked to be cut from the darkest vellum, almost like a cardboard cut-out. Had they seen it in a yard, they might have thought it was a statue. Except this statue had two eyes that shined yellow in the wan moonlight.
“Fuck this,” Torrio said.
He took aim on it and fired a couple three-round bursts at it from his M-16. The bullets kicked up the water around it and made it jerk with the impact of the ones that hit, but nothing more.
It just stood there, watching them.
Hopper felt something coming from this one that was beyond anything they’d felt before: just an absolute, seething evil that sucked his breath away. He grabbed Torrio by the arm and led him away between two houses. Whatever it was, he did not want to come face to face with it.
He found another open door and they went in, crouching in the knee-deep water, just breathing and waiting and hoping to dear God that the creature did not follow them. Outside, it was dead quiet. Nothing but the rain, an occasional breeze along the roof. There was a narrow stairway on the other side of the room. There must have been a window at the top for it was lit by yellow moonlight.
“Should we go up?” Torrio whispered.
Hopper didn’t answer.
Something moved up there. There was a rustling, dragging sound as something came towards the top of the stairs. They had their flashlights off. The moonlight was enough. Whatever was up there must have known they were there, because it kept coming and finally, they could see it.
Not it exactly, but the shadow it threw against the stairway wall.
Something hunched-over and inhuman, a single arm extended before it, the hand more like a tree branch than a hand. Enlarged and deformed, the fingers splayed out like crooked twigs, impossibly long and wiry.
Hopper thought: Good God…what’s that coming down the stairs?
But he didn’t want to find out what could throw a shadow like that, what could move with that undulant, worming motion. Torrio and he splashed back out into the streets and behind them, a dry and crumbling voice called out to them. What it was saying, they did not know.
Out in the water.
Hopper was out of his mind. He didn’t know where to go, where to hide. Another house? Take their chances out in the open? The two of them just stood there in the flooded street and waited and waited.
“Hopper?”
There was a splash and Torrio was gone. Nothing but ripples where he had been standing. He did not come back up. Hopper could barely catch his breath. He stood there, turning around in circles, filled with white fear. Hot urine coursed down his leg.
“Desecrator,” a voice said.
Hopper turned and looked at the form standing behind him. A tall, dark man with eyes that burned like yellow lamps. He was dressed in a flowing leathery shift like a shroud. His face was an atrocity. He looked like a mummy
