It was the sort of thing that made you want to laugh until you cried and cry until you began laughing hysterically. But it was certainly a possibility, now wasn’t it?
35
“Are you up to this, Mitch?” Tommy said as he came to Coogan Avenue, the shattered barrier there, which certainly looked like something as big as a bus had smashed through those sawhorses.
“Yeah,” Mitch said, not believing it himself. “I’m up to it.”
They stepped out into the wet darkness, clicking on their flashlights. Tommy had his four-ten and Mitch had his twenty-gauge Remington autoloader. Neither of them believed that the guns would do them much good, but they were something. And both men had filled the waterproof pockets of their raincoats with salt. It was crazy, maybe, but they’d seen what salt could do to the newly-risen.
The Zirblanksi twins were with Mrs. Sepperley now. She was old and more than a little frail, but she knew things and Mitch was pretty sure the dead would not mess with her.
“This is better,” Mitch said. “It’s chilly and raining, but it clears my head. That van…it smells like Lily.”
Tommy understood.
They’d taken Lily’s van so they had enough room to pack the kids. It was all-wheel drive, rode up high, and handled the water pretty good.
Flashlight beams panning the murky night around them, Mitch and Tommy started down the hill towards the rising water. Near the bottom, the lake that had drowned Bethany was black and leaf-covered. Some crates and cardboard boxes bobbed in it, stray branches and a couple bald tires, some other things obscured by the leaves. You could smell the stink of the river, the backed-up sewers and the ever-present smell of rot which was even more pronounced down there.
“After you,” Mitch said.
Tommy wiped a sheen of rain from his face and stepped into the mire. Mitch followed him. He wished they’d had time to bring waders, because the water was chilly and slimy-feeling, filled with submerged things that bumped into his legs. Things he just didn’t want to know about. He could just imagine the diseases simmering in that noxious organic stew of standing water and putrescence. It felt thick and muddy, full of suspended sediment. A mist steamed from its surface.
“I’m thinking I ain’t gonna like this,” Tommy said.
And Mitch was pretty much thinking that neither of them would. There were guys, he knew, that got paid to wallow in festering muck like that, but Tommy and he weren’t those kind of guys. He just wondered what sort of germs and contamination he was breathing in.
Bethany was an old place any day or night. Filled with old houses and old, rotting buildings, some restored, but many just decaying like Witcham’s industrial past. The streets here were narrow and winding, cut by snaking alleys and countless archaic cul-de-sacs. But on a night like this…with the flooding and the rain and the lack of electric lights, well, it was simply black and haunted and menacing. The buildings and high houses around them were netted in shadow, leaning out over the streets like they wanted to fall. The flashlights only cut ten, maybe fifteen feet tops into the stagnant brew coming off the water. Droplets of rain lit in the beams like tiny insects, falling and streaking. Things rustled in the shadows, splashed and squished. You could hear water running from rainspouts, things creaking and rattling in the wind.
They moved on slowly, panning their lights about, hearing sounds but never seeing what made them. The weave of darkness was claustrophobic and crushing. They stepped down carefully, never knowing what lay beneath that soup or if they might step into an open manhole or if the street beneath them might have given away to subsidence.
Tommy said, “Remember when I told you how bad that mortuary I worked at was?”
Mitch nodded. “Yeah.”
“Well, this is worse.”
Mitch believed him. Because he didn’t think anything could be worse than this. Worse than the smell and the dark and the way it made him feel inside. For as impossible as it may have sounded, everything seemed miles away now. Not just people and life, but everything he had been through and even the dire knowledge that he would never see Lily again. All that had been swept away by the stark immensity of this particular, awful moment. It felt like the city was closing in around them, pressing down with a ghastly weight, rising up like a great hand that wanted to crush them. He could feel something like a thousand eyes watching him, studying him, making him feel his own impending death which would not be quick and silent, but brutal and dirty.
“What the hell’s that?” Tommy said, his voice sounding like it was coming from somewhere south of his throat.
Mitch put his light on an irregular series of humps covered in leaves. But not covered enough, because he soon made out a white arm and then an ashen face, a single leaf clinging to its forehead and accentuating its pallor. The eyes were sunken, the lips shriveled like an old lady without her teeth in. A beetle crawled out of the nostril and then crawled back in. The entire body was blown up with gas, immensely round and barrel-like.
They moved around it nervously, just waiting for it to move.
“I guess…I guess I can handle corpses now,” Tommy said. “Long as they don’t move.”
They passed another bobbing body floating facedown in the classic dead man’s float. Its back had been laid open right to the spinal vertebrae. Something had been at it. Something with teeth. The water went from around their waists to up above their bellies as they moved through a dip and then it sank back down a few inches.
If Mitch had closed his eyes, he would have thought he was crawling through a subterranean pipe. The falling rain, the steam, the echo of dripping water. God, he’d never felt so completely unclean like he’d been wading in a septic tank. He had a nasty desire to scratch his skin off.
They moved on, hoping beyond hope that Wanda Sepperley hadn’t led them on a wild and deadly goose chase. The stink was not only pervasive, but palpable. Growing stronger the further they went. It was a flyblown, squalid odor…excrement and piss, rot and wet decay, surely, but something else, too. A living smell like what you might smell at the bottom of a rotting pile of leaves or under a green, mossy log. There was a rich, almost heady vitality to that stink. The odor of something that wormed through the bowels of corpses or perhaps its breath, the breath of something low and vile that chewed on putrefying carcasses.
But really putting a name to it was impossible.
For this was the stench of the resurrected. Things rotting, yet animate.
“I’m not seeing any bus,” Tommy said, the fear so thick on his voice it dripped.
“A little farther,” Mitch said. “I think…I think the street turns just up ahead.”
He pushed on ahead of Tommy, like a knife cutting through spoiled loops of viscera. And as that smell worsened, became impossibly acrid and sweet, he waited for something misshapen with long yellow teeth and bleeding eyes to rise from the muck and take a bite out of him. Now and again, the chill water would become infused with a warm stream like somebody had just emptied their bladder into it. But then it would pass.
Mitch felt it before he saw it, as he’d been feeling it for some time now: the sense that they were not alone. He brought his shotgun up, gripped the stock with his hand.
“Oh, shit,” Tommy said.
Not even ten feet from them, a grotesque and angular form rose up, caked with leaves, its face hanging like gray ropy moss from the yellow bone beneath…if you could even describe it as a face, for it looked more like some morbid fungi that might web the corners of a sunken tomb. Mitch could see its white teeth and the black holes where its eyes should have been. It was holding out its hands as if it wanted something.
So Mitch, feeling all the badness and madness filling him, gave it something.
He gave it a round of birdshot at point-blank range, steadying the Remington with his flashlight hand. The boom sounded like a missile erupting from a silo. It echoed off the faces of houses and buildings, went rolling over the rooftops like distant thunder. The round blew a hole in its belly big enough to hide a cantaloupe in. But the thing did not fall. It jerked from the impact, made a screeching sound, and a great quantity of flesh and meat sprayed into the water behind it.
But that was it.
