"Links are close. Real close. I think it's time we shut the fuck up, kids," Poke whispered. He flipped something small and round into the air, where it turned end over end like a coin. Emmit reached out to catch it on impulse and immediately regretted it.
What slapped into his palm was a severed human ear, trailing stringy tendrils of purple tissue. The ear had begun to fold in on itself like a dried flower petal, and if he held it up to his eye, Emmit could look all the way through the hole that someone had once used to hear.
"Want some jerky?" Poke said, grinning his black grin as Emmit made a disgusted grunting noise and threw the ear into the snow.
"That's why they're called Links," Muddy said joyously, barely containing his laughter. "Their skin looks like beef jerky, and Roy—"
Two arms were suddenly around Emmit's midsection, wrapping tightly and digging all ten fingers into his clothes like an eagle's talons digging into a juicy fish. He didn't have time to scream. The grip was vice-like, unbelievably strong. It became hard to breath in seconds, and in the haze of his panic the club slipped out of his fingers and thudded into the snow. He felt himself being pulled backward.
"Thieeeeeef," came a sandpaper rasp, inches from his ear. Every strand of his body hair stood on end, his skin erupting in goose flesh the way it had always done when things were still good with Kelly, when she would whisper things into his ear with her lips barely, just barely, touching his flesh.
"Don't touch it!" Muddy and Poke shrieked at the same time. Emmit paid them no mind; he had no control over himself anyway. The panic reaction was on autopilot. He looked down at the stiffened arms that held him, the flesh free of clothing and rotting even as it froze—
—Christ it does look like jerky I'll never eat jerky again I swear to baby Jesus I'll never eat it again—
—and although he knew better, although he could remember the searing pain of touching one of the monsters, he grabbed at one of the bony arms with both hands and began yanking on it, twisting it, trying to break it. The adrenaline gave him superpowers; he felt no pain, not at first. He was somehow watching all his fingers at the same time, biting into the dead flesh, feeling the rigidity of the cold and leathery skin. There was a dry shredding sound like old fabric being ripped apart, and a hunk of meat the size of a New York strip steak came off in his hands. He watched the rubbery flesh stretch and snap like taffy. The maroon sinew and tendons, the ones left intact and still loosely attached to the bones beneath, flexed and pulled as the Link continued to clench him.
Abruptly, Emmit felt like he had actually grabbed a New York strip steak— right from an open flame. The black, hateful bite was boiling into his palms.
"Fuck, shit!" He screamed, launching the hunk of meat through the air like a grotesque football. He was still being dragged, but he spared a moment to glance down at his seared hands. He had to; it was like when you got a deep cut, a real good one that wouldn’t stop bleeding. It almost didn't feel real unless you kept staring at it.
Sure enough, both of his hands were now blackened to match his arm.
Even with the Link muttering drunkenly in his ear he heard a swift whistling sound, like a gust of wind shrilling through a drafty door frame. Something long and dark rocketed past his face, sickeningly close, close enough to nudge the frames of his glasses up and lightly kiss the corner of his eye.
There was a wet slicing noise as Poke withdrew the spear, and the Link that had been gripping Emmit became dead weight. Emmit heard the slack body thud into the snow with a sound like a sack of rotten potatoes falling from a kitchen table. Poke was shouting, pointing at Emmit's feet as his rotting mouth morphed and formed the different shapes of words. The tip of his spear was adorned with a purple-gray clot of hair and fluffy jelly that looked a little like old lasagna. Everything moved in slow, silent motion.
Shock, snap out of it, shock, snap out of it—
"They're everywhere Papa, we gotta move!" Poke bellowed directly into his face, loud enough to hurt and force his ear canals to contract. The sound of his voice and the stench of his breath was a merciless assault, but effective, nonetheless. Emmit felt his club slam against his stomach, and he fumbled to clutch it with his newly tattooed hands.
It sounded like they were surrounded by cicadas. The frozen landscape around them was suddenly buzzing and humming with sleepy, grating voices. Hundreds. Thousands. To Emmit it resembled the crowd at one of his beloved wrestling shows, the noise of everyone filing in and finding their seats. No cheering or booing yet; just quiet conversations and movement, multiplied by tens of thousands. Silently deafening.
The cluster of trees ahead of them began to spasm and twitch as if caught in the throes of an earthquake, and then he saw the first wave of them. Horrible, disheveled figures, slouching and stumbling, clutching and raking at the air in front of them with gnarled hands and fingers that were little more than tight skin and bone. They were shoulder to shoulder, every visible inch of open space suddenly filled with walking corpses. They writhed against each other as they slowly advanced, the swarm of bodies and limbs pulsating like a patch of oversized maggots.
