It swayed back and forth, smoke rolling from the hole in its abdomen. There was a mucid, slushy sound that was infinitely repulsive, reminding Mitch of what a diseased placenta expelled from a womb might sound like. There was that sound and then the thing’s bowels fell out of its belly in a mutilated tangle, like snakes peeled raw, dropping into the water along with a gush of black slime.
Still, it did not fall.
It stood there, a watery sound coming from its mouth as if its throat were filled with soft, soggy things. It was trying to talk and God only knew what horrors it might tell them of were such a thing possible.
Tommy couldn’t stand it anymore.
He stuck his flashlight inside his jacket and brought out a fistful of salt. And without further ado, he took two, uneasy steps forward, said, “Here, have some seasoning, you ugly sonofabitch.”
He tossed the salt at it and right away the thing began to cook, to shrivel and smoke and sputter like bacon fat on a hot griddle. The thing coiled and clawed and made a sharp hissing sound that was probably not its voice at all, but the sound of that salt dehydrating it. Its flesh went soft and plastic, as did the tissues below, and then they literally melted from the skeleton beneath, pissing into the grimy waters. And the most ludicrous thing of all, was that skeleton, the framework still stood. It was a horrible thing ribboned in tendon and sinew and mats of bubbling flesh. But it stood, smoking and trembling, and then it simply collapsed into the water, steaming, sinking from view.
Tommy made a gagging sound.
Mitch was glad his belly was empty.
Trying to blink it away, he hooked an arm around Tommy’s elbow and dragged him on forward. They had to reach that bus and they had to goddamn well reach it now. There was no time to freak out, no time to puke or try to make sense of that which was utterly senseless.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
They splashed forward and Tommy seemed to understand that, suddenly, time was of the essence. They had to get it done and get it done now. Sure, they’d only encountered one zombie. And that was enough, thank you very much, but Mitch had this wild idea that they were like rats: when you saw one, the rest of the pack wasn’t very far behind. And maybe it was something more than that, like maybe these things were like wasps or bees. A hive mind. When you did something to one, they all knew it. When one was injured or killed, maybe the others knew it, too.
He was soaking wet and smelled like a rag used to wipe out a public toilet, but his throat was dry. Just as dry as he was inside, filled with dust and time and memory, maybe understanding that one invariably leads to the other. They came to the end of the street where the road split into a Y. They took the right fork and simply because Mitch was going purely on instinct here. Wanda Sepperley’s directions were fairly vague, only saying that the bus was down Coogan Avenue, at the bottom. And when it came to two diverging roads, Mitch had read somewhere that when lost, people almost always chose the right fork over the left.
They came around the corner and there was the bus. The front end had sunk down into the water right up to the hood, a flatbed truck right in front of it. Carefully, Mitch and Tommy moved along the side, hoping that those kids were still inside. Mitch thought he could hear a few muffled voices, but wasn’t sure. He came up to the bifold door and hammered on it with his flashlight.
“Hey, you kids! Open up!” he called out. “We’re here to get you out!”
“Anybody in there?” Tommy said.
A few faces appeared in the rain-specked windows and you could see by the way they did it?very cautiously? they were maybe afraid of what they might see. Tommy flashed his light at them and pretty soon they could hear feet thumping around in there. The door swung open and a flashlight caught Mitch directly in the face.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Sorry,” Bobby Luce said to them. “We thought you were normal, but…but we weren’t sure.”
“All right, c’mon,” Mitch told them. “We’re getting you out of here.”
The kids, seven or eight of them, came scrambling out, not minding the water, just glad to be out of that coffin, glad that the waiting was over. And Mitch could see it on their faces, that the waiting had been the very worst part. The water came up to their chests and he and Tommy led them away from the front of the bus to the rear where it dropped down towards their bellies. Quickly, Mitch formed them into a daisy chain, made them hold hands. Tommy led the way out and he himself watched the back door.
It was a scary, tense business wading through the soup, making for the hill and the van above. But they did it. They actually did it, ignoring the splashing secretive sounds all around them.
And when they reached the top of the hill and Tommy moved them into the back of the van, Mitch stood there with his shotgun and flashlight, guarding them. Before he got in, he looked down the hill to the rising, black water.
And they were down there.
Dozens of distorted forms had risen from the water and they just stood there like wax statues.
The walking dead.
DECAY
1
Sometimes it was the rain and sometimes it was the wind and sometimes it was just the night closing in on them. All Chuck Bittner knew for sure was that maybe, just maybe, he had made a mistake here. Maybe they all had. Maybe they should have waited with the others in the bus for rescue. Because, yeah, it had seemed like a good idea at the time, just up and walk out of there, but now he just wasn’t so sure.
He wasn’t so sure about a lot of things.
Because with the power out, things were very dark, pitch black almost. You could see the shapes of buildings and houses looming around you, but that’s all they were, just shapes. Even the flashlight did them little good with the rain pouring down and the night rising up and that wind howling through the empty places, because…well, because sometimes it almost sounded like human voices out there.
They’d been slogging through the waist-deep water for what seemed hours now, Cal and Kyle Woltrip in the lead, seeming to get a kick out of the whole thing. Tara Boyle was with them and Brian Summers, Jacob Key and Mark Tobin. That was their posse, the ones that had made the heroic breakout from the schoolbus. They had been turned around and turned around again and God only knew where they were now.
Chuck was numb from the waist down. He very much wanted to be out of this. Because he was starting to feel the need to do something he had not done publicly in years: cry.
From the moment they’d left the bus he’d felt oddly exhilarated, excited that they were doing the sensible thing and just helping themselves. Taking charge and not waiting in that damn bus like a bunch of old ladies. But no more than twenty minutes into it, following behind the Woltrip brothers who managed to get them more and more lost with each turn, he began to feel something more primal, something that cut from the inside: fear.
There was no denying it.
And it wasn’t just him.
For not only were they wet and shivering, they were all scared.
At times, the rain came down in a fall of needles, fierce and blinding, and there was nothing to do but cover your head and wait it out. At other times, it was more of a cold drizzle than anything else.
But it all sucked.
It all completely sucked.
They were paused at what might have been an intersection once. Overhead, in the beam of Cal’s flashlight, they could see the swinging mass of a dead traffic light. It swung on its wires, impossibly large and impossibly clumsy looking. If it fell, it would surely crush one of them. Cal put the light on the street signs. Westhaven and 15^th Avenue.
That didn’t tell Chuck much.
He was from Elmwood Hills like the rest of the kids. He didn’t know Bethany and this was Bethany. Maybe he
