Then I was running dead out, stumbling, trying to get away…but every direction I started in the dead were coming, massing in ranks, swarming through the grass like locusts. I remembered when we’d gotten the note from Dragna, how I suggested we fight and Doc said it would be a massacre. Oh, how right he’d been. You can’t possibly imagine what thousands of zombies look like until they’re pressing in on you and your stomach pulls up into your chest, already feeling the blackened teeth that will bite into it.
Good God.
In the moonlight…out across the fields and hills…it looked like an outdoor festival in Hell…as far as I could see, nothing but Wormboys and Wormgirls and Wormkids. This was the tide of the undead that Dragna kept at bay via six sacrifices.
They moved in for the kill slowly because they had all the time in the world and knew it. They carried machetes and pipes, axes and bones and hammers and knives. Their faces were carved fright masks like the Wormboys the night before, but more elaborately decorated. They had pounded nails into their skulls in intricate patterns, replaced their fingernails with shards of glass, their teeth with surgical needles, slid shiny silver pins through their lips and braided fine chains and filigrees of copper electrical wire through them. Moonlight found all that metal and glass, made it blaze with a cold reflective fire.
I fired every round in my shotgun and roasted dozens with the flamethrower, but still they kept coming. Sylvia was at my side shooting, as was Hill…at least until they took him down. I saw what they did to him in the glow cast from burning corpses. He screamed and then as I turned, a scarlet mist of blood broke against my face and I had to blink it away. Six or seven Wormboys and one solitary Wormkid were on him, biting into him, killing him slowly and making it last and milking every last drop of agony from the poor guy. Sylvia and I shot through them, but it did little good by that point there were so many.
Hill looked like he had been fed into a wood chipper.
The zombies went after him in a frantic, starving feeding frenzy like piranhas in a meat tank, reducing him to a grisly gore storm: Gouts of blood fountaining in the air as arteries were laid open, bones sucked dry like candy straws and mashed to a fine meal, tissue and gut and organ reduced to a fragmented flying spew of human debris. He was opened, emptied, gnawed down to his basal anatomy then bisected, trisected, halved and quartered and ultimately ground down to a great, globby, wet stain on the earth as the Wormboys and Wormgirls and hollow- cheeked Wormkid waifs fought over the scraps, the stronger ones engaging in darkly comic tugs-of-war with the cherry-red hoses of his entrails.
I burned them.
I burned them all down.
I saw what they did to Hill and I fucking torched them. About thirty of them, I’m figuring. I lit them up like Fourth of July sparklers and Guy Fawkes dummies and true to the latter, they stumbled about blazing like hay- stuffed scarecrows, burning pieces and sections falling off them. One by one, they hit the yellow, straw-arid grass and lit it up and before long that whole goddamn summer-dry field was burning. Dozens of them were caught out in it as the flames came at them from every direction, encircling them, then claiming them and roasting them down to blackened, twitching, crumbling things.
But by then we were on the run, Sylvia and I.
My empty shotgun had been used to split the skull of an inquisitive Wormboy. Sylvia had a few rounds left in her. 9mm. Mine was gone. We had fire…we had the will to survive…we had hot terror leaping in our bellies…but that’s all we had. The dead kept coming like we were some wondrous new tourist attraction they had heard of and they just had to get a peek…or a stray nibble.
I cooked about a dozen more of them, trying to cut us a path to the front door but it was no go. Maybe the walking dead will never understand quantum physics or write a truly great sonnet, but they are not entirely stupid. They knew we’d be making for that door and there had to be hundreds crowded in the parking lot waiting for us.
It was hopeless.
Taking Sylvia by the hand, we circled around back, clinging to the shadows thrown by the outbuildings, the generating station, and the water tanks. The action was lighter back there. We found a shadowy crevice between a couple tanks and we waited.
“ There’s too many of them,” Sylvia whispered in my ear. “We can’t make it.”
“ You got a better idea?”
But she didn’t.
I had this crazy idea that if we could wait until daylight, we might have a chance. The Wormboys were more sluggish in direct sunlight.
That was my plan, anyway.
13
I don’t know if they could see in the dark or just smell prey, but about five of them showed within minutes and they knew right where we were like they were being guided by some unseen intelligence. I had no choice but to toast them. And in the light of those shambling human corpse-fat candles, I saw there were at least a dozen others closing the gap. I saw a face that was infested with crawling red beetles. They skittered out of holes and tunnels in the cheeks and forehead, nipping and chewing, carrying bits of tissue back into their nests in the skull like cartoon ants stealing away with picnic goodies.
More faces came into the field of light.
Many of them were clustered with feeding insects, but many others had no eyes. They’d been sewn shut and these ones were hunting by sound alone. Sylvia pressed her. 9mm into my hand without me asking for it. It was so greasy from her sweaty palm that I nearly dropped it.
The lead Wormboy-I don’t know what else to call him-was this massive naked man who’d apparently lost his own skin at some point because he was wearing what at first looked like a rippling pale poncho but soon revealed itself to be a patchwork of human skins sewed into a single garment and then tacked to the muscle and tissue beneath. It fluttered in the wind. I saw a section that was tattooed joined to another with a single flaccid breast which itself was stitched to another with a puckering navel. His face was a creeping mass of fungal rot, green and dripping, moving with slow, greasy undulations over the jutting skull beneath.
I shot him point blank in the face and then put another through the side of his head and he crashed drunkenly to the ground, his hastily-sewn garment/pelt/skin bursting open. The others fell on him right away, stripping him like carrion birds. He was torn open, his wormy guts ripped free, rib bones snapped off and gnawed, skull crushed and the gray slime within sucked up by anxious mouths.
Then I saw something that turned even my stomach.
By that point, I assumed it impossible to be sickened.
But I was wrong. The zombies that were busy feeding on him suddenly reared away, stumbling, crawling, tearing at their throats and making hissing/gobbling sounds and then I watched as they began to regurgitate what they had just eaten in clotty globs of worms, inky fluid, and rancid meat.
Maybe there was something after all they couldn’t abide.
Sylvia and I ran. I don’t know where we thought we were going, but we were determined to get there. Then something smashed into us…a couple big Wormboys and I heard Sylvia scream as she was pulled away into the night. A Wormgirl came at me and I forgot the gun tucked in my pants and went at her with absolute rage. I don’t think she was prepared for it. I launched myself at her, breaking her face open with my fists, then clawing her skull clean of flesh until she fell to her knees and I cleaved her head open with one good punt.
I was alone.
But they were coming for me. ill
14
