He dashed out into the night, fading into the shadows while we all stood around gape-jawed and wide-eyed with our thumbs most surely shoved up our asses. I don’t know how far he got, but I heard a grunting sound out there and something splatter over the pavement and then the hysterical, screeching of the undead as they began to feed with sucking and chewing sounds.
“CLOSE THAT DOOR!” Doc cried out, stumbling up the corridor. “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD-”
You would have thought it would be our first reaction, but it wasn’t. We were still wired in place with shock and bewilderment and surprise. I was one of the first to even attempt it and as I moved towards that rectangle of darkness and those positively hideous sounds of slobbering mouths beyond, I caught sight of Maria’s face. It was twitching with horror.
I heard a sound like the buzzing of malarial larvae and felt a dank envelope of rot come blowing in from outside. When I turned, she was standing there; one of the Wormgirls was in the doorway bringing the cool, putrescent stink of the night in with her.
Somebody screamed.
Earl made a gurgling sound as his mouth filled with blood.
Just about everyone made a quick and hasty retreat but Maria, myself, Doc and Ape. And Earl, of course, because he wasn’t going anywhere that didn’t feature harps and pearly gates.
The Wormgirl took two lumbering steps in my direction and her feet made slow, oozing, squishing noises like sponges saturated with syrup. She was a large woman, distended with gas to the point that it looked like she was nine months along. Her face was crawling green pulp and there were so many flies on her you could see very little else beyond one glistening red suckered hole for an eye. I think what we all saw-and wished to God we hadn’t-was that her genitals were swollen blue with decay, the labia puffed out and drooping like the udders of a cow. She reached out a hand towards me. It wasn’t a violent seizing motion like most of them would do…it was almost gentle and caressing and maybe I might even have accepted it as such if her hand wasn’t a writhing larval mass, massive nodules and blisters popping with yellow gas.
I fell away from her and Maria pulled me back.
There was a moist smacking sound and a hole opened in her face that must have been a mouth, strings of tissue webbing the lips together. Her tongue was a bloated flap of maggots. When she spoke it sounded like her mouth was full of warm gruel. But as bad as that was, what she said was somehow worse: “Going…to the chapel…and I’m…going to get…marrrieeeeed.” And that barely even left her mouth in her slopping, regurgitive voice when Ape opened up on her with his twelve-gauge pump, firing not only out of fear but pure, unreasoning disgust.
He blew holes in her big enough to pass your arm through. Flesh that had the consistency of gelatin blew off her, revealing rungs of rib, a pelvic wing, a ladder of spinal vertebrae. He kept pumping and shooting and she made a sort of globby, mewling sound as she came apart in a cyclone of meat and black blood, gray ooze and suppurating tissue like rice pudding, leaking piss and shit and yolky egg-like masses of tangled red graveworms. Before she went down into a seething mass of carrion and plumes of corpse-gas, something fell from between her legs and splashed to the floor.
I saw it.
We all did.
A rubbery doll-like form…a cross between a human infant and a bloated white coffin-worm. It squirmed free of the slime and ichor. It looked up at me with a face like a glistening grub, reaching out with yellow-green gelid fingers.
That’s what I saw right before Ape blew it in half and then in thirds and then I could not be certain I wasn’t looking at a colony of undulant maggots.
The woman hit the floor in a splattering of meat and fluid and a flyblown, acrid stink that nearly reamed my nose out.
But we were hardly done.
The above nightmare probably only lasted a minute or two, but the entire time the door was open to the night and what waited out there. They were crowded outside the door by then: graying, gibbering ghost faces- dozens of them-that looked less like dead humans than the carven ritualistic masks of Chinese festival demons. Another sect of the undead with their own look: I saw bald, mottled heads, viscid yellow-silver eyes sitting in carved, up-tilted pits, noses fallen into skullish hollows, faces elaborately cut and scarified into braided, convoluting patterns, the corners of mouths slit up to cheekbones…all of it creating the gruesome effect of grinning death fetishes.
These were Wormgirl’s boyfriends, her suitors and lovers, maybe.
Then Ape kicked the door shut and without even thinking, I was throwing locks and muttering nonsensical prayers under my breath.
Then we stood around in the remains of Wormgirl and her progeny, seeped to the skin in a noisome membrane of rot. We had averted disaster…but just barely.
8
Once we had shoveled out the remains of our visitor and incinerated them, scrubbed down the entry with caustic antiseptics, and disposed of Earl’s corpse, we were faced with a new problem. Murph had been number six in the lottery and that meant we had to play again. We had to go through that insanity again scarcely a day later. Usually, there was a month and sometimes three, I was told, but here we were again, gearing up to play Doc’s sadistic little game and learn all about the creepy-crawly things that lived inside each other’s heads.
There was nothing quite like the lottery to bring them slithering out.
Maria and Shacks were probably the only two that were on my side, ready to mount an armed insurrection at my say so. But I wasn’t saying so. What I didn’t want here was some violent purge that would not only destroy Doc’s half-assed utopian society but leave a trail of bodies. These people had to simply refuse to play. I was pretty sure that Ape and Sonny and Conroy, Doc’s would-be goons, would stand with us if it came to that. They were not evil men any more than the rest of us. They were scared, is all. They were following Doc because Doc had a plan and they had spent their lives as good little soldiers doing what they were told. None of them were particularly well-practiced in the smarts department.
But like I said, I didn’t want bloodshed.
And if I swung them my way…what then? I had no plan other than a half-baked possibly suicidal idea of us loading up in the trucks and buses outside and making a run up for Canada. I had a feeling the Wormboys and Wormgirls and all the wriggling, drooling Wormkids wouldn’t do real well in sub-zero temperatures when their limbs started locking up.
I was your basic anarchist in that I wanted to destroy the government but once everything lay in ruin I had no idea what to do next.
So lacking a cohesive plan we went about business as usual.
We played the lottery.
9
Again, the same scene: a group of shifty-eyed, borderline neurotic people packed into the dining hall, whispering, praying, chain-smoking, or just staring into space with a steely silence that spoke volumes. You could smell the stale sweat, the feverish anxiety, a fear that was bright and hot coming off every one of them and I had to wonder if that’s what it smelled like in those packed cattle cars bound for places like Treblinka and Sobibor during World War II. There was very little talking. Now and then a peal of almost hysterical laughter that was sharp as a pin would break out amongst the condemned.
Because we were condemned, you know.
Each and every one of us who stayed and played that awful fucking game were most definitely condemned. It
