corridor.
They slipped single-file down a set of iron steps and came into another corridor which split off ahead to the right and left. They could hear the other TAC units crying out, opening up with their weapons, calling out for back- up…but Green Team did not rush to their aid. They had orders to proceed with extreme caution and they followed them.
They came to the T in the corridor and Rice spotted a form shambling in their direction. At first he thought the guy was drunk, but as he closed in, Rice saw he was dead. His face had been blasted down to meat and bone like it had been used for target practice and he was carrying what looked to be coils of linked sausages.
“His fucking intestines,” Johnson said.
The man kept coming despite being told to get on the floor and Oliverez said, almost too calmly, “Rice? Put that peckerwood down.”
Rice closed the gap between them, got a real good look at the man’s face…what there was of it. He had no eyes, no nose to speak of, his face hanging from the bone beneath in bloody tethers.
“Hey,” the mutilated man said in congested voice like his throat was full of wet leaves. “My sister’s going to love your ass…you see if she don’t…”
Rice said, “Sonofabitch,” and gave him a load of buckshot at point blank range.
The impact knocked the zombie over, nearly split him in half. But instead of lying down and waiting for a box and grave, he sat back up. His ragged shirt was smoking from contact burns, flames climbing up his collar. His guts were gone now, as was one of his hands. There was a gaping black hole in his abdomen and you could see right through it. Plumes of smoke were wafting from it.
The air was redolent with a stink of incinerated meat.
Rice made a funny, strangled sound and blew the dead man’s head to shards of bone that tinkled down the hallway like broken crockery. He fell over, his face missing from the nasal cavity on up. His jaws were still there, though, and they were snapping open and shut in rapid succession like a set of wind-up chattery teeth.
“Move out,” Oliverez said, not wanting the men to pause long enough to let any of this insanity sink in. Because if it did, they were done.
He led on to the left-the gunshots echoing louder from that direction-and the others fell in behind him. They came to an open door and saw candlelight flickering in there, throwing weird hopping shadows and bathing everything in a dirty orange light.
He came low through the doorway and saw a woman sitting cross-legged on a bed in there, the candle next to her on a little nightstand. She was humming. Utterly naked, she rocked back and forth, back and forth.
“Lady…” Oliverez managed.
She looked up at him, fixing him with a malignant leer…with her right eye, that was, because the left was just a blackened socket from which fed a moist pelt of yellow-green fungus that covered the left side of her face like a caul. She kept humming and rocking, flaking lips pulling back from narrow discolored teeth.
And it was bad, certainly.
But it wasn’t what made Oliverez’s stomach clamp tight like a vise.
What did that was what the woman was holding…an infant. It was gray and bloated and putrefied, like something pulled from a lake. It was sucking on her left breast with a sloshing, repulsive sound. The woman’s other breast was also moving, but that was because of the pockets of larva feasting within.
Then the infant pulled away from that gray nipple, looked over at the TAC unit and made a gurgling sound. Maggots were wriggling free of the woman’s tit and this is what the baby had been feeding on. Its face was distorted…bulging and sunken and eyeless, great holes torn in it and through them you could see the worms boiling within.
Oliverez never gave the order.
But everyone opened up.
Submachine guns and carbines and Rice’s assault shotgun were pumping lead in a lethal volley. They kept shooting until they’d emptied their magazines and the obscenity on the bed…and its offspring…were reduced to clots of glistening flesh. Bits of the dead woman and her child were plastered against the wall, dripping from the headboard, pooling in the sheets and the stink was revolting.
Oliverez ordered his men out of there.
“What…what… what in the fuck is this?” Johnson demanded.
“We ain’t here to figure that out,” Oliverez snapped at him. “Now lock and load, we’re moving out.”
They all had questions, yes, but they did not ask them. Maybe they didn’t dare to. Ten minutes into the compound and they’d already seen enough to give them cold sweats and nightmares for a lifetime.
And it didn’t get any better.
Two more zombies came out of a room to meet them. They were both large men with black boots and camouflage pants on. Shirtless, their bodies were of an almost phosphorescent whiteness and neither of them had a head, just frayed stumps. The one on the left was carrying the head of a woman by the hair. A living head. Her face was fissured and livid with purple blotches.
“There,” she said with a grating, airless squeak of a voice. “These are the ones, right ahead now…that’s it, straight on…bring me to them, bring me to them…yesssss…”
The TAC unit started shooting again, getting a little smarter this time around. They took the two men down at the knees, blowing their kneecaps to fragments. The woman’s head was dropped, rolling across the floor, hair whipping and voice grunting.
The headless men began crawling forward, dragging their shredded legs like bleeding confetti, but on they came. The TAC unit opened up with everything they had as the woman’s head shrieked and cackled and snapped its teeth.
Rice stuck the barrel of his shotgun in her mouth and she clamped down on it, biting and biting, trying to sink her teeth through the metal. He pulled the trigger and blew that hideous thing to slush. But still they could hear her voice…maybe in front of them or behind or maybe just echoing through the drums of their skulls…taunting them and telling them how they were going to die.
But there was no time to consider the madness of that or the two men who had been blasted to creeping slats of bone and tissue, for another zombie came down the corridor at them. It was a boy carrying a shoulder sack. He was giggling, digging into that sack and throwing things before him, like a girl tossing flower petals at a wedding. The TAC unit first thought they were spiders he was throwing…crawling albino spiders.
But then they saw they were human hands.
Living human hands severed at the wrists.
By the time they put the boy down, there were dozens of hands hopping and skittering and jumping. And pretty soon they were on the TAC unit and men were screaming, trying to pull iron fingers from their legs and ankles.
Johnson lost his mind as one of them ran up the leg of his coveralls. Followed by third and fourth and a fifth that found his crotch and gripped it with a crushing strength. Another got up his pant leg and others under his Kevlar vest. He jumped up and down, spun around in circles, slammed himself into walls like a man covered in nipping ants, anything to pull those grasping hands off him.
The TAC unit was shooting as they backed away, just white with a rolling terror now.
And though they beat off the zombies, the hands were something else entirely.
Johnson choked to death on one as it got in his screaming mouth and lodged itself in his throat, curling up there in a fleshy ball.
And the other TAC unit troopers let him die as the hands came on and flashlight beams cast dizzying flashes and weapons were discharged. And through it all, Oliverez forgot about the crawling heaps of bones. Until he fell down and they swarmed over him, that was.
*
Hell in a handbasket.
AD Silva had heard the expression, but until that fateful night at the compound he had no idea of the reality of it. His TAC units had been deployed and what he was hearing over the radio just could not be.
The living dead?
Zombies for the life of Christ?
It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t be. He could not accept the idea that his men were being attacked by hordes of
