They had powerful halogen flashlights taped to the barrels of their M-16s and they turned them on, heading down that winding street. With all the water, there was just no way to be quiet about it. They splashed along, all that racket echoing off the faces of the buildings, announcing their presence to anyone that might be listening.
Nothing but black water everywhere, rain falling into it and stirring up a mist that blew lazily over the surface. The lights created too many shadows and sometimes it was hard to tell if they were just shadows or something else entirely.
Oates heard a splashing just ahead.
“Oh, boy,” he said.
They came around a truck and three forms were standing there…a man, a woman, and a child. They were holding hands like they were waiting for the bus. But there was no way in hell they were normal, for they were pale and stinking, their eyes glittering like wet stones.
“Shit,” Neiderhauser said.
The little family let go of each other’s hands and started moving in Oates’ direction. There was something impossibly blank about those faces in the beams of the flashlights. Yes, they were decaying and bleached white, but they had a stupid, idiotic look about them as if they were doing things without knowing why, driven on by forces they could not comprehend.
“Take a walk,” Oates told them. “I hear there’s a Halloween party downtown.”
They did not even acknowledge that he had spoken or seem to understand. They just plodded forward, not stiff and shambling, but almost gracefully as if they had lived in deep water all their lives.
Oates sighted in on the child, a little boy. Swallowing, he gave the kid a three-round burst to the head. It blasted away lots of meat and skull, but that was about it. The kid kept coming. Neiderhauser opened up on the adults. The rounds chewed into them, but they kept coming, smoke boiling from the holes in them.
Oates and Neiderhauser backed-up.
The zombies kept coming.
And then behind them, a half a dozen others came out of the shadows, ruined faces appraising the men with guns and seeing absolutely no reason not to lunch on them. One of them, a woman in a bathrobe, pointed at them and hissed, black syrup running from her mouth.
“Retreat,” Oates heard himself say.
Neiderhauser and he struggled through the water to the buildings. Behind them, the zombies came forward, moving slowly like they had all the time in the world and they probably did. When it came to eating people, you had to savor the anticipation and the hunt. They just came on, pale and grinning, eyes black and wet. A few of them made hissing sounds and one of them might have been humming. It was hard to say. They came after Oates and Neiderhauser like a spider came after the prey caught in its web…no malice or hatred, just mindless instinctual imperatives guiding them.
There was a narrow three-story flophouse hotel wedged in-between a take-out rib counter and a dry cleaning outfit. Neiderhauser went up the steps and out of the water. The door was open. Oates followed him inside and they threw the deadbolt on the door.
“Christ, what now?” Neiderhauser said.
Outside, they could hear the splashing sounds as the dead moved out of the water and up the steps. They stood outside the door bringing their smell with them?flat and toxic like stagnant ponds that had been poisoned out. Hands began to slap and knock at the door. Some of those hands made sounds like wet sponges.
“That’ll hold ‘em for awhile,” Oates said, trying to catch his breath.
It wasn’t the exertion, he knew that much. He stayed in shape and could outrun guys half his age. No, this was something else. Something that was taking him inch by inch and making him want to fold up. He was figuring it was fear, it was terror, and probably something beyond that, maybe hysteria wanting to set in. The dead walking. The dead walking. Oh my Christ, what the hell was this all about?
“Sarge?” Neiderhauser said.
Oates snapped out of it. No, he could not unravel. Not now. Not just yet. Maybe when he was safe in bed with Angela he could have a breakdown, but that was later. Much later. Now he had to get his feet under him. He had to think of Neiderhauser who would die quickly and horribly without him.
“I’m okay,” Oates said. “Just fucking age sneaking up on me.”
They panned their lights around, saw a sofa and a couple chairs, a TV set. A desk with keys hanging behind it. The place smelled old and mildewed. Much of that was the water, of course, but Oates was thinking this place hadn’t smelled real good to begin with. It was just a shitty little hole-in-the-wall hotel where they rented rooms by the hour, no doubt. The sort of place you took your secretary on your lunch hour to screw her or the neighbor’s wife, some eighteen-year old hooker you picked up. The place was dirty and smarmy and you could come here with your girl and violently fuck, do all those things you didn’t dare ask your wife to do.
“We should make for the roof,” Oates said. “It’s our best chance. We see a chopper come by, we can signal it with our lights.”
They moved past the desk, their lights bobbing, and to a little staircase around the corner. And that’s about as far as they got.
A girl was standing up on the fifth step.
Just a little ragged thing maybe six- or seven-years old with pigtails, dressed in the tattered remains of what almost looked like a party dress. But if it had been pink with a bow and sequins, now it was just drab and dirty. A shroud. Her face was swollen and gray, threaded with what might have been bits of lichen or fungi. Her eyes were colorless and gelid-looking, like they might pop if you poked them with a pin. She smiled down at them and black water ran from the corners of her mouth.
Neiderhauser made a gagging sound. The stink coming off of her was appalling, like dank river bottoms and rotting weeds.
“You better get the fuck out of my way,” Oates heard himself say, his voice sounding distant as if it belonged to someone else.
The girl’s smile deepened and she opened her mouth, dark clods of something like graveyard soil falling out and dropping to her feet. There was a black line of suturing at her throat and Oates figured she must have died violently, the coroner or undertaker having to sew her head back on. There was something in her hair, something busy and crawling. Ants. Large black ants were nesting in her hair and maybe in the skull beneath. They began to crawl down her face, eight or ten of them. A few more came up her neck out of her dress. She did not seem to notice.
Neiderhauser brought up his weapon, then brought it back down again. “I…I can’t do this shit, Sarge.” He turned away, sobbing. “I can’t do this.”
“Well, you better learn to.”
There was a pool of black water settling onto the fifth step where she stood, a little stream of it running like spilled ink down to the fourth and third. Though she was dead, she was breathing, her chest rising and falling, a clogged sound coming from her throat as if her lungs were full of fluid. And they probably were.
“Hey, mister,” she said in a bubbling, thick voice. “Have you seen my mommy? I’ve been looking for her, but she’s not anywhere.”
Oates felt the need to giggle neurotically. What the hell was this all about? Where the hell was it going to end? “Your mother’s dead, honey. Just like you. She’s dead.”
The smile faded some and was replaced by an almost confused look. That grayish pallor whitened, those eyes filled with a blackness. “That’s not very nice. Why don’t you be nice? Don’t you want to be nice?”
Oates was just staring at her, thinking that this little thing had died young and would never really, truly age another day. There was something infinitely horrifying about that. She would always be like this until the meat dropped from her bones. A little corpse-white thing filled with ants forever looking for her mother.
“You should be nice,” the girl said. “Angela is always nice.”
Oates felt something shatter inside him. He wanted to scream and rage or maybe just cry, drop to his knees and bawl like he hadn’t since he was twelve and found his dog crushed on the road, panting out its last pathetic breaths. He stared at that little girl and she stared back and it was funny…funny but she didn’t smell like a waterlogged corpse now and her skin was pink and her eyes clear and green. There was no morbid growth on her face. She was eight-years old. Just eight-years old. And that was disturbing because Angela had had a miscarriage eight years before and this could have been his daughter. She even looked like Angela around the jawline and
