crossed himself and a few others began to pray under their breath.
Pearle said, “Seems we have an enemy here that don’t care much for dying.”
More of the walking dead were pouring out of the gates now, all moving with the same leisurely pace. They were in no hurry. They came forward, the rain falling around them, many of them moaning like B-movie ghosts. And every man poised at the sandbag perimeter just watched as the dead came forward, getting a good look at those pale swinging arms and ruined faces that looked like birds had been pecking at them.
Outside the south wall where there really was no wall but a high reinforced chainlink fence topped by razor wire, the soldiers were able to see exactly what was happening inside the prison. They saw the prison mortuary building and the muddy, submerged graveyard. The dead that had risen that afternoon and assaulted the prison had, for reasons unknown, returned to their watery graves and now they were rising again. They came up out of that dirty, standing water, slicked with mud and clay, their skins barely concealing the bones beneath. They came up out of the ground like worms. Hundreds of them. An army of the flyblown dead that pressed themselves up against the fence, water running from the numerous holes in their hides.
And it was this more than anything, that made the soldiers panic.
These were hard-chargers. These were sky soldiers, troopers of the 1^st Air Cavalry Division, a unit that had killed more men than heart disease…or nearly. They had put the hurt to the Viet Cong and the NVA, Serbian guerrillas and Iraq’s Republican Guard. One thing you could certainly say about the 1^st Air Cav: they came, they saw, they kicked ass with extreme prejudice. And now they were beyond themselves. Men were screaming and folding up. Men were discharging weapons without authorization. Men were throwing their weapons and deserting. The skein that held together this tough, proud unit was unraveling on a large scale.
And there wasn’t shit the NCO’s or officers could do about it.
Back where Pearle was, just opposite of the main gate, he watched the dead swarm out like flies.
“Gas masks!” one of the NCO’s called out. “Gas masks! Gas masks!”
The men put on their masks, Pearle included, and the first volleys of tear gas canisters burst amongst the dead in hissing eruptions of white smog. More volleys followed. Thump! Thump! Thump! The smoke spread out in patches of fog and twisting plumes. It glowed in the lights trained on it. And the dead walked right through it, the smoke funneling out behind them like they were on fire.
Another test and this one a failure, too.
If Pearle did not believe what he was told at the briefing, he believed now. No men could walk through a wall of gas like that without so much as a shudder or a cough. The rain began to dissipate the clouds of gas and now there were easily forty or fifty walking cadavers emerging from the gates and spreading out in something like a rudimentary siege line.
They know we’re here, by Christ, Pearle thought, truly afraid of an advancing enemy for the first time in his hard-bitten life. We ain’t gonna stop ‘em with guns and gas. They know we’re here and their coming to chew on our livers and eat our stomachs out.
“FIRE!” he shouted. “FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!”
Nobody needed much prompting on that score. The fifty calibers opened up with steady roar, cutting the dead in half and making others literally vaporize. The light machine guns and automatic rifles followed. Tracer rounds lit like fireflies. Mortar teams shelled inside the compound with high-explosive and white-phosphorus rounds. Grenade launchers landed ordinance outside the wall. The dead were pulverized, bullet-ridden, blown to fragments. But they did not die. Body parts writhed on the ground. Hands dragged themselves forwards. Heads screamed obscenities into the night. The no-man’s land on the other side of the ditch became a blazing graveyard of dismembered corpses that could not know death.
The soldiers were losing it now, shouting and crying and many breaking and running, knocking sergeants flat as they tried to stop them. This was the meat of the matter and it was too much for some. Men suffered nervous breakdowns and some just went crazy with terror and pulled into themselves. And others leaped over the sandbags and charged the dead with fixed bayonets. Officers and noncom’s screamed at them, threatened them, physically and verbally abused them, but it did no good. For hell was offering up its own and it was simply too much.
More walkers poured forward, some of them little more than skeletons. Some with creeping funguses where their faces should have been. Many were half-eaten and many more bloated and spongy things that called out to the soldiers, telling them exactly what they would do to them when they finally reached them.
The firing continued and the dead were pierced by shrapnel and bullets, but they did not stop coming. Here were throngs of skeletal things and things like wraiths that had pulled themselves up out of the prison boneyard. Here were hundreds of convicts that had been very much alive that morning marching alongside guards. Punched with bullet holes, they still came on, black blood spurting from their wounds. Some were blown to fragments by tripping landmines, but most came forward with a deadly fixity of purpose. Nothing was going to stop them. They were coming to feed. There was a feast in the offering and they planned on getting their fill.
Pearle was just beside himself.
He ran up and down the top of the sandbags, shouting and screeching out orders to troops that were simply too mad or too frightened to obey. He kicked men that were in shock and slapped those that were not putting out a steady volume of fire.
“THIS IS NOT S.O.P.! THIS IS NOT S.O.P.!” he screamed. “YOU CANNOT
DESERT ME! YOU CANNOT ROLL OVER AND PLAY DEAD! YOU CANNOT LOCK UP ON
But in the light of what else was happening, the once high and mighty and somewhat dangerous Colonel Pearle seemed completely trivial. Men actually laughed him. Some of them were completely mad. Soldiers had contorted faces and chattering teeth and tearing eyes, they laughed at everything and anyone and particularly the walking dead. They were not to blame for thinking Pearle was a buffoon placed before them for their mutual amusement.
But mad or not, Pearle was not about to put up with it. Just to show them how totally humorless he was, he pulled his sidearm?a silver-plated Browning Hi-Power?and shot a young rifleman right through the left eye.
The dead were closing in on the trench now.
White phosphorus shells erupted around them, lighting many on fire. Yet, they came on, the phosphorus blazing on them, leaving trails of white smoke in their wakes. Some of those in better shape began moving quite quickly at the trench. They were not slow in mind nor in action. They knew, perhaps, that if they got across that trench and rushed the perimeter, they would simply overwhelm what soldiers remained. A great number of them came forward, burning from sprays of phosphorus and from contact burns. Their flesh sizzled and popped. Some of them fought madly to put the flames out, but others didn’t seem to care.
It was at this moment in the 4/1’s turkey-shoot that they noticed something else: the dead seemed riddled with worms. Not just your average maggots, though those were certainly in attendance too, but long, red, elastic- looking worms that filled empty eye sockets and draped from mouths, moved beneath those ashen mottled skins and coiled from wounds. These were the same type of worms that Harry Teal and the others from the prison mortuary crew had discovered feeding on the corpses in the potter’s field graveyard earlier that day.
But whereas those worms were simply parasitic?one of Mother Nature’s little helpers that sped along the process of decay?and essentially harmless to living things, these worms were different. They had changed. Mutated. They had been like living red licorice whips before, now they were thicker, bloated almost. Oily red things looking for flesh to despoil. It was almost like the dead were hosts for them. And some of the walkers…they were infested. Literally infested. Their bodies were set with dozens and dozens of holes and bullets had had nothing to do with it. These were not bullet holes, but worm holes. Tunnels the worms had created as they fed on the corpses.
