mouth.
“Sarge…” Neiderhauser said.
Oates ignored him. He didn’t know and couldn’t know. The girl started coming down the steps and her dress was pretty and bright. She smelled of peaches and warm August fields. Her hands came out and she wanted Oates to hold her and he wanted that, too. He was going to go to her. He wanted nothing more. And at the last possible moment, he saw she was drooling and that her teeth were gray and crumbling?
Then Neiderhauser grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back. He’d actually been up on the second step and he did not remember doing so. He missed the landing and fell on his ass.
“Why don’t you be nice?” the girl said. “Angela’s always nice. She’s very nice to other men when you’re gone. She likes them to shove their dicks in her. She likes it when she has one in her cunt and one in her ass and one in her?”
“Shut up!” Oates said. “You shut the hell up!”
And that little girl he’d almost touched started to laugh. As she did so, black water ran from her mouth. Ants crawled out of her hair and out of her nostrils and her laughter became booming and male in timber. “You stupid cockless little fuck,” that deep baritone said. “Don’t you think I know you? Don’t you think I know all about you?”
Oates was shaking his head violently side to side. “You don’t know me, you don’t know anything!”
That laughter again. The girl opened her mouth wide, wriggling things and black silt raining out. She put first her fingers and then her whole hand into her mouth, sliding it down into her throat. Then she withdrew it inch by inch and she had a crucifix in her fingers, a dirty chain coming out of her mouth link by link. “Your mother was buried with this!” the thing said to him. “I know all about you, Henry Oates! I know that your mother died giving birth to you and she was happy when death took her, because she was tired of that farm and tired of raising you little brats while your father beat on her! I know that your first handjob was from your older sister Lynn! But why not? For it ran in the family! Your grandfather got drunk every Thursday at the Legion Hall and when he got home, he raped your mother! He did it every week until she was fifteen! You didn’t know that? You didn’t know that she bore him two children that died at birth just as you should have? No, you didn’t know, just like you didn’t know that Angela is getting fucked right now! That she’s taking it up the ass and squealing and begging for more! Ask her about it! Ask her about the pictures of her and that other girl out on the internet! Ask her!”
Oates let out a scream, jumped to his feet and opened up on that little girl on full auto. The bullets punched into her and she exploded like a jellyfish in spray of slime and black blood and gray tissue. She burst and splashed them with her filth. Then there was nothing but bones on the stairs and a skull bouncing its way down.
Oates fell to the floor, his head filled with a screeching white noise.
And from somewhere very far away, he could hear Neiderhauser talking to him, yelling at him, trying to make contact. But there was no contact because the lines were down and what coherence was left in Oates by that point told him that those lines probably would never come up again. At least that’s what he thought, but he underestimated the resiliency of the human mind and its innate gift for reorienting itself to new circumstances. It got shaken for a time, but it overcame.
Neiderhauser was sitting on the floor with him, his eyes looking like holes somebody had drilled into his face. Oates had seen guys in the war aging rapidly because of what they saw, but he’d never seen a face like that before.
“What that thing said…did you hear what it said?” Oates mumbled.
“It said for you to be nice, that’s all it said.”
“Nothing else?”
Neiderhauser shook his head.
Jesus, it had all been in his mind then. But he didn’t believe for one minute he’d imagined any of it. That thing had told him those awful truths, it knew things it could not possibly know, only it hadn’t said them out loud. Just in his head. Or maybe he was just crazy.
But that was okay, because they were both crazy now. Crazies in a crazy city. It almost made sense.
Getting up, Oates said, “C’mon, let’s make that roof.”
8
Harry Teal kept hoping he was going to wake up and it would be like one of those movies where they say, oh, it was only a dream. That’s all it was. He was hoping he would wake up from some fever he’d picked up handling the stiffs out in the mortuary maybe. Wake up in his cell with the hacks banging on the bars with their sticks. But he knew it wasn’t going to happen; it was all true. He had been out in the prison cemetery with the others, digging up all those muddy graves, and he had seen the dead rise and he had hid in the mortuary with Jacky Kripp and the others. It was all true. Ugly and brutal and just impossible, but it was true, all right.
“I got plans, Harry,” Jacky Kripp said. “And I’m counting on you to be with me. Are you with me? Are you part of what I am?”
“Sure, sure.”
“No, I mean are you really with me?”
Harry told him that he’d been with him since his first week at Slayhoke and that hadn’t changed. Of course, it had changed, now that they were free, but that wasn’t something you told Jacky Kripp. He liked killing people too much.
It was just the two of them now.
When the dead assaulted the prison and utter pandemonium broke out, they’d waited it out in the mortuary. Then, on Jacky’s orders, they’d made a break for it, got a truck and drove right through the front gates. No problem. There was no one in the towers. All the guards were dead and being eaten. They lost Mo Borden, though. Big, ugly Mo. He’d held off the zombies while they got in the truck. Mo could have killed any man at Slayhoke, taken on two or three at a time, but he wasn’t up to the living dead. And when a dozen of them fell on him, he was buried alive. When they hit Witcham, Roland Smythe ran off and they never saw him again.
“Ain’t that just the way with guys like that?” Jacky Kripp said. “You do ‘em good, you hand feed those motherfuckers and take ‘em under your wing, soon as they learn to fly, they take off. It don’t surprise me none. Roland weren’t nothing but a fucking jig.”
“I thought he was your friend?”
“Yeah, so what? A jig’s a jig, right? Fuckers turn on you soon as they can. I run into that prick again, you know what I’m gonna do to him?”
Harry sighed. “Kill him?”
“Kill him?” Kripp thought that was funny. “You watch too much TV, Harry. You guys always think people like me go around killing. Not so. See, what I’d do is break that fucker’s kneecaps with a baseball bat and then I’d shove the big end up his ass, leave it there. Then that black prick would just wish he was dead.”
Good old Jacky. You could count on the guy to be a violent, intolerant sonofabitch. Stir, out of stir. On the streets, in a club. Even in a city that was sinking in a flood, same old Jacky, always ready to straighten some guy out that didn’t dance when he snapped his fingers.
Thing was, Harry didn’t blame Roland.
Roland had done the right thing. Jacky was bad enough behind the prison walls, but he was no better outside of them. He was an animal, a predator. He wanted something, you got in his way, you went down. You could smell the trouble and badness wafting off a guy like him. You hung with him, he’d involve you in shit that you didn’t want any part of.
When they hit the city?driving a Department of Corrections van, no less?both Roland and Harry had been pretty rattled with what they had seen. But not Jacky. He took it in stride. The dead were walking? Yeah, no shit? What’s that to me? That’s how it was for Jacky. He was crazy like that. You could have dumped a guy like him in the hottest stretch of hell and he would have immediately acclimated himself, been forming a tough crew and running rackets by the end of the week. Harry wished he could just shrug it all off. But as hard as he’d gotten in Slayhoke, the dead coming back to life just scared him white inside.
They ditched the van right away.
