“Yeah, but-”
“No, Tommy. Use your fucking head for once. Wormboys are everywhere. Anybody that goes out there is meat, nothing but meat.”
He was right, of course. I knew he was right but even at that point I simply was not as hard and cold as Sonny and the rest of them. God knows I should have been after some of the awful shit I had seen, but even through it all there was hope and humanity and pity still flowering in me like sweet green shoots rising from the cracked, blackened soil of a graveyard.
I ran downstairs and found Doc and Earl waiting for survivors to make the door, but none had. They just looked at me, said nothing. They knew what I was thinking and Earl had his shotgun up. If I tried to throw the deadbolts and locks he would have killed me without a second thought.
I knew it.
He knew it.
Doc knew it.
I looked out the gunport slit and I could see the action just fine. The Wormboys were coming from every direction, waxy faces like melting goat curds or rippling papier-mache. A hot steam of rot rose from them in a sickening, churning mist. Some of them were walking, but others had crawled from ditches and pockets of shadow and many of them were missing limbs. I saw headless trunks. Severed hands. What looked like a rolling head. A woman whose flesh looked like it had been boiled saw me watching her and turned, shambling over towards the door. Her eyes were slimy rotten eggs bulging from raw red sockets, her face a worm carnival. She thrust her backside at me and lifted the ragged remains of her dress. Something like a gushing stream of rice pissed out from between her legs.
I turned away, barely able to keep my stomach down.
“You don’t need to be here, Tommy,” Doc said. “Why don’t you go back to your room?”
“Those people need help.”
“Yes, they do. And if it’s at all possible, we’ll help them.”
“Mister Bleeding fucking Heart,” Earl said.
I ignored him. Out there the zombies were feeding on the injured, but one guy was still pretty spry. He must have slipped out of the van after the crash but ran off in the wrong direction. Now he was coming back. He came vaulting across the lot. Two Wormboys made a grab for him but they weren’t fast enough. He darted past another and jumped over a couple crawlers.
In my mind I was with him, pumped with excitement at the idea that he would make it. It was like the good old days, watching Earl Campbell charging into the flak, flattening defenders, jumping, spinning, ducking, whirling around, but never, ever losing his consistent forward momentum.
He was no more than twenty feet from the door when three Wormboys got in his way and he broke to the right, tripped over a crawling husk, and went down. They converged on him from every side, literally covering him in their numbers. I heard him scream with a brilliant, piercing cry of absolute defilement.
But it wasn’t him at all.
It was the woman. The Wormboys had her and they were killing her a bit at a time, tearing out handfuls of flesh, biting into her, nibbling and nipping. I saw her face before it sank away in that carrion ocean. The pain, the horror…it had driven her mad. She clawed her eyes out with bloody fingers.
I turned away and got up real close and personal with Doc. “We could have saved that guy. We could have charged out there and dropped some of them, cut him a path to the door.”
“Not without endangering our community,” Doc said.
I glared at him. “You’re a fucking asshole,” I said and then went back to my room, helpless, hopeless, desperate. I was filled with a black concrete weight that was sinking me day by day.
5
The lottery.
Doc gathered us up in the dining hall because it was the only place big enough to hold us all. Everyone was there, of course. All of us except the children. There were fourteen kids in the shelter ranging from teenagers to infants. But thank God Doc left them out of this sordid mess. This was a party for adults and you should have seen them-eyes staring, faces sweating, hands trembling. Some chain-smoking until the air fumed over in a blue haze and others mumbling prayers over and over again until you wanted to kick their teeth out. Jesus. What a scene.
Then Doc showed up, smiling that plastic smile of his that made me bleed inside. “This isn’t anything we enjoy,” he said. “But it’s something we have to do and I think we all know that.”
Nobody agreed or disagreed with that and I couldn’t even look at that prim, proper, fatherly butcher because the sight of him made my skin crawl. Maria and I sat side by side, holding hands. Shacks was with us. Sonny, too. Murph was there…only he was scared white and he couldn’t even muster a pale shiteating grin or a nasty remark.
Doc held out a cigar box. “There are twenty-three slips of paper in here, folded. One for each adult here in the shelter. Six of these papers have an ‘X’ on them and you all know what those mean. Now, one by one-”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Doc,” some guy named Corey said. “We know the drill. Just get to it already. I’m about to have fucking kittens here.”
A woman next to him who’d come in with Shipman made a sound that was somewhere between laughter and sobbing, a brittle sort of sound like something had just shattered in her throat.
“Well, then,” Doc said. “Well.”
Earl and two other guys-Jerome Conroy, an ex-cop, and Ape, an ex-biker-stood by the exit with shotguns. Both of them had seen their share of violence before the dead started rising and plenty since. But neither liked the job Doc had given them: security. It was human nature to bolt and run when you were handed a death sentence and they were there to see that no one did.
Doc, smiling like a tentshow preacher, all teeth and gums, walked around with his cigar box. He took out his slip of paper first. Then one by one we all dipped into that Pandora’s Box. The paper was heavy vellum and you couldn’t see through it. Couldn’t know until you unfolded it.
Corey was the first to say, “I’m staying! You hear that? I’m fucking staying!”
He was joined by three others, including Shacks, who could make the same boast. The woman who was sitting by Corey unfolded hers and stood straight up like something hot had just been jabbed up her ass. She held out her paper and there was an X on it. She was trembling so badly she nearly fell over.
She was chosen.
Corey and the others moved away from her like she had something catchy.
Only Doc went to her, put an arm around her, said, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Pearson.” She fell limp into his arms.
Then everybody was unfolding their papers and looking at them. Some, like Sonny, jumped up and danced for joy. “Knew it wouldn’t be me. Shit, yes.” Others cried out. One guy fainted dead away. And another guy shook his paper in the air, saying, “Praise the Lord, I have been chosen. Praise the lord.” Then he fell to his knees and began sobbing uncontrollably. It was a nightmare. People dancing. People hugging and kissing, others on the floor, moaning and whimpering. People came and went at the shelter and I did not know all of them that well. But I knew what all of them thought every day: if I can just get through the lottery one more time, I’ll make plans to get out. I won’t flirt with death twice. Yes, that’s what they told themselves because I told myself something very similar. If I can just get through it this one time, then I’ll get out. I won’t do it again. This was my first one. But many of them had played this sick game several times. People like Murph and Earl and Doc himself. And human optimism being as deluding as it is, they all told themselves that this would be their last time, that they would get through it and leave.
But very few of them did.
What took place in that room during the next fifteen minutes was more horrible than anything I had ever witnessed up to that point and I’d seen plenty. For the zombies are monsters, ghouls, predatory things like starving
