bone. Some were zipped in bags and others…what there were of them…secreted in buckets.
As they went about their grim business, pawing through the remains, making one grisly discovery after another, the TAC unit found worse things. Not just cadavers, but parts of them…hands and heads and torsos.
This place, the entire place, not just a mortuary, but something worse. A dissection room. An anatomical theater…only Weston knew it was far worse than that. For there was a rhyme and reason to this carnage, a secret truth that he feared was so awful it would lick his sanity straight into the void if he had to look it in the face.
And he was not a man who frightened easily.
But something was happening here and it was leagues beyond dead cultists. For he could feel it building in the air around him like a scream, a heavy and electric sense of… activity. The air had gone thin as ether and the shadows were slithering around them like fat-bodied vipers coming out of a snake pit.
Gripping his weapon tightly, he said, “Stand ready…”
*
About the time Red Team announced they had found bodies, AD Silva was on the radio with Blue Team who’d come in the back way. Clark was in command of Blue.
“We got something here,” he was saying over his headset.
“What?” Silva wanted to know. “What’re you seeing in there?”
Clark was slow to respond.
Silva could hear him chatting with Platz, Tuchman, and Seaver. Their voices had an unpleasant, almost frantic edge to them.
“What the hell’s going on in there, mister?” Silva demanded.
Clark said, “We…we’re in a large room here, sir, looks…yeah, looks like some kind of old hospital ward or something…I’m not sure. Beds are lined up against either wall, bodies on most of ‘em, covered in sheets.”
Standing there in the command van, Silva felt his throat constrict tight like a snake. “Bodies?”
“Yeah,” Clark said, his voice oddly thick. “Yeah…gotta be thirty beds here…most of ‘em have bodies on ‘em. Men and women…some kids, too.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah…yes sir, AD, all dead.” He paused. “I got…shit…I’m seeing bullet wounds, entry wounds to the chest, the vitals. All their throats, they’ve been slit ear to ear. Mother of Christ. Some of them, they’ve been dead for weeks, maybe months I’m thinking. Damn, that stink…”
“Any sign of Dade?”
A long drawn-out silence. “Yeah, he’s here with the rest-”
*
And he was.
Clark was looking on that face that he’d poured over for hours and hours in photographs. It was pallid as flour, the eyes wide and staring, the mouth hooked in a contorted gruesome smile. Like maybe Dade knew the punch line to a real funny joke, but he wasn’t ready to share it, not just yet.
“We got a live one over here,” Platz announced, pulling off his helmet and going to a woman who was sitting up.
Clark saw her face in his flashlight beam, in the beams of the others…but she couldn’t be sitting up. Her throat was slit ear to ear. And maybe Platz didn’t seem to realize that or maybe he was realizing it now because she made a hissing sound and took hold of his arm in one gray claw, drawing him closer before he could do much more than scream. Before the others could stop her, she produced a jagged shard of glass and slid it into the side of Platz’s throat.
And then the shit truly hit the fan.
Platz was on the floor, making a bubbling sound as blood washed down his throat and he vomited red to the floor, slipping and sliding in it.
Tuchman opened up on the woman with his MP5, gave her two three-round bursts to the chest. The rounds ripped holes through her, spattered the walls with her meat, but she kept coming, a toothy, demented grin on her face. The TAC unit watched in abject, stunned horror as she fell on Platz. As she pressed her fissured mouth against his own and came away, chewing on a bloody strand of tissue that had once been his lips.
Platz never screamed; he was way beyond that.
And then flashlight beams were flickering and bobbing, men were shouting and swearing, weapons discharging.
Because they were all waking up.
Sheets were sliding from ravaged faces and licking black tongues. Bloated hands reached out, teeth gnashed together.
The TAC unit was shooting and screaming for back-up, but it was simply too late.
A door slammed open on the far side of the room.
Shapes, forms, figures…they came hobbling through the doorway with a putrescent grave stench. The strangers were rotting and crumbling, sporting beards of mold and cobwebbed faces. Some lacked limbs and others lacked faces, but they were united for a single purpose and as Clark and the others watched, it all became horribly clear what that was.
His people started screaming and shrieking, drawing guns and trying to run, shooting and shooting, and on came their killers. He saw Tuchman smash the butt of his machine pistol into one decayed face and put two rounds into another. But like swatted mosquitoes, the dead were instantly replaced by others. Tuchman fought and kept fighting until a fleshless face darted in and tore out the soft meat of his throat. And then they had him and he disappeared in a noisome sea of fungus-covered bone and chattering, ripping teeth.
Clark could hear Silva shouting, demanding to know what was happening.
But there was no time to tell him.
Clark emptied his Colt carbine into a wall of deadwood faces, then fished a 9mm Steyr auto from his vest and fired on a gray and withered stickwoman who literally disintegrated as if she were made of dehydrated clay. And then skeletal fingers were on him and he was thrown to the ground. He saw Seaver-his face a drooling, demented mask-start spraying down anything that moved with his submachine gun.
And on it went, bullets ripping through the air and mouths screaming and everywhere the stink of cordite and violated tombs. It became a nightmare shadow-show of darting figures and slashing teeth, muzzle flashes and clutching fungous fingers, atrocities captured in the strobing flashlights. Yellow-eyed faces with flesh hanging in loops and mouths vomiting froths of black putrescent slime.
Clark fought bravely through that barrage of gnarled hands and chomping teeth, saw his men go down in bloody seas, saw them unzipped and eviscerated and divided by thrashing fingers and tearing red mouths. The dead yanked out ribbons of greasy entrails and fought like starving dogs over them, biting and chewing and sucking and slurping.
And then something looped around Clark’s throat and snapped tight like a garrote, collapsing his windpipe as lewd mouths bit into his legs and crotch and belly. But all he was really aware of was his mind falling into a coveting blackness as that cord strangled him.
Finally, ultimately, he went down.
Not knowing that a woman dead some three weeks had strangled him with a loop of her own viscera.
*
As the zombie woman woke up and stabbed a shard of glass into Platz’s soft white throat, Green Team, waiting up on the roof, got the word. They crashed through the skylights, rappelling down on ropes into that claustrophobic blackness. They climbed out of their harnesses and regrouped, prepared to deploy.
Oliverez was in charge. He said, “All right, don’t bother with the NV goggles. We need all the lights we can get. Red Team and Blue Team have made contact with unfriendlies, but they’re not armed.”
“At least not yet,” Rice said.
Johnson and Turner slid tactical goggles over their eyes, checked their weapons quickly, flexed their hands in fingerless gloves. Oliverez was going on about what Silva had said, the chatter from Red and Blue that he’d monitored.
“I don’t know what kind of clusterfuck this is, but be ready.”
They moved out, Rice taking point, his big Remington 12-gauge police shotgun held out before him. The flashlight attached to the barrel cut through that roiling tenebrous darkness, showing everyone an empty
