compound that was tacked to the wall. Problem was, the map was World War II vintage and there had been a lot of remodeling since. Stairways were gone. Hallways sealed up. Walls knocked down. So, yeah, Rice was trying to think his way out, but it didn’t look good.
He hadn’t heard any gunfire for awhile now, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. He could smell the death in the compound…like pressing your face into roadkill, filling your nostrils with that rank green smell and swallowing it down in reeking rivers. He could also smell the cordite and something like wood smoke, which told him the complex was burning.
But who lit it up?
The zombies? The FBI? Helicopters buzzed the roof from time to time and loudspeakers were broadcasting muffled appeals for Dade’s people to surrender.
And that was pretty funny when you thought about it.
Rice thought: They ain’t gonna surrender unless you bring a hearse.
He sat stiffly in the darkness. He had a small tactical flashlight and his Colt nine, that was about it. But maybe he could just wait this out, maybe Footsteps.
Something like them.
A lumbering, heavy sound. Like a bull was coming down the hallway, smashing into the walls, grunting and puffing. It passed by the door, then paused and Rice was certain it was sniffing, making a wet snorting sound.
The doorknob jiggled.
Jiggled again.
Whatever was out there stank like an open grave and it was strong, God, very strong, because it was yanking on the door now, rattling it on its frame. There was a groaning, crashing sound and the door was ripped from its hinges in a rain of wood splinters.
Rice made a choking sound in his throat and put the flashlight beam on it. But what was he seeing? A man… or something like one, immense and distended…white and black, swollen and mildewed and rancid. It was grotesquely bloated with gases, its eye sockets fluid with maggots and yellow bile.
Rice emptied the Colt into it and it took hold of him, dragged him down the hallway.
It opened an iron door and tossed him through, slamming it shut behind him.
Rice had the flashlight, but he didn’t dare turn it on.
Because he wasn’t alone in there. He could smell the others, hear them chewing and sucking and licking. Something damp brushed his arm, something like a tongue licked the back of his neck.
He turned on the light.
Yes, they were all around him, the zombies. Disfigured, grotesque, rotted to mush. Some were missing limbs and others looked like they’d been burned. One of them had a meat cleaver instead of a hand and another-a woman-was pregnant, or had been at the hour of her death. Her blue-black belly was voluminous and heaving, split wide open. There was something like a wormy fetus coming out, pulling itself out in a wash of noisome jelly, a crawling gray carrion.
It splashed to the floor, inching itself forward like a leech, leaving a trail of slime in its wake. The others dropped the limbs they’d been chewing on and watched what was about to happen. Grinned with disfigured faces like raw beef.
Long before that undulating, boneless thing touched him, Rice had gone raving mad.
*
Turner was the last TAC member alive.
He crawled through a slick of blood, his eyes wide and staring, his jaws clamped tight. He still had his Colt tactical carbine, but he was down to his last magazine. On hands and knees, he peered through a doorway, crab- crawled over there, breathing hard, his face beaded with sweat.
He was doing everything he could not to panic, but it was no easy bit.
With what he’d seen, experienced, even all that rigorous training wasn’t enough to keep his mind from melting into slush.
But he would stay alive. Somehow, some way.
Dear Christ, he would not be like them.
He would not allow himself to become something that fed on corpses and human flesh, something that should have been zipped in a bag or slid shut in a drawer. No, dammit, he would kill himself first.
He’d been pretty much on the dodge since Green Team was attacked by those hands. He saw it now in his brain, like some nightmare one-reel cartoon that played over and over until it all became almost laughable.
But it was not funny.
Johnson had gone down under those hands and Oliverez had been inundated by the crawling remains of the headless men. But you could give that old, leather-faced bastard credit, for even knitted with a blanket of surging carrion that tried to engulf him like a pustulant jellyfish, he fought on. As Rice and Turner evaded their asses out of there, Oliverez stumbled along, fighting the abominations which covered his head and upper body.
Somehow, he’d gotten loose, tossed his attackers.
Screaming and covered in an ooze of corruption, he ran right past Rice and Turner, vaulted through a doorway and disappeared before they could catch him.
They found him, though.
He’d gone through a doorway, trying to make his way down a flight of emergency steps…and that’s as far as he made it. Something captured him there. Something that sent Rice running and burned a scar across Turner’s mind.
Even now, stroking his carbine and remembering, Turner could not believe it, could not stomach that poison memory.
At first, they’d thought Oliverez had stumbled into a spider’s web.
The sort of thing some gigantic arachnid mutation might have spun in a cheap 1950’s B-movie. But it was no spider. What Rice and he saw was an intricate network of knotted bowels, strung together in an oily web at the bottom of the steps. Oliverez had wandered right into it, got tangled up in those rubbery strands. Might have fought his way free, if something like a skinless girl hadn’t come racing down that network and chewed his face from the skull beneath.
Because that’s what was happening when Rice and Turner showed.
That skinless girl…maybe twelve or thirteen…was eating Oliverez. His face was gone and her own was buried in the cavity of his belly, pulling out coils of viscera and chewing globs of yellow fat with teeth that were not teeth, but shards of glass hammered into her jaws.
Turner stared at her in the beam of his light. She had eyes, but they were dangling out of her sockets by bleeding optic nerves. Yet, they moved and saw. She looked upon him with such a ravening lunacy, it made his guts slink in cold waves.
Rice ran off.
Turner gave her a few rounds, had been hiding ever since.
And the fact that he wasn’t laughing at it just yet told him he was not crazy. Maybe tomorrow or next week, but not now. Horror and revulsion and hot-blooded anger that God would allow a travesty like this…these things kept him hanging on, kept his edge polished and sharp.
He could hear sounds coming down the corridor, echoes of voices, dragging sounds, scraping sounds. But in that maze of corridors, it could have been around the next bend or upstairs.
Thing was, Turner was lost.
Even when he came to a room with a window, it did him no good: they were all barred like prison cells. But he could see that everyone was still out there beyond the blockade-cops and medics, journalists and the curious kept at bay behind them.
Wishing he still had his headset, Turner kicked open a door and plunged in there, flashing his light around with the sweeping motion of the Colt’s barrel. Nothing, nothing, nothing. He was in a little apartment with a bathroom off to the side.
He came around through the archway, saw a toilet that was filthy and stained brown with ancient rust stains. The sink. A mirror with jagged cracks in it. And Someone was in the tub.
At first he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, only that they were entirely red from head to foot, red and glistening, like a stick man (or woman) dipped in blood and bowels and decomposition, splashed down with a
