We walked right into the horde.
Muddy looked terrified, his eyes bulging and in constant motion. His grin had been replaced by a pained grimace. Emmit could see his breaths puffing out rapidly, little clouds of vapor seeping between his bared teeth. He was terrified, but he was collected and holding his own. His deformed arm was tucked close to him and out of the way as he did exactly as Roy had instructed him to, using his skinny body to stabilize his spear as the Links began to approach him. They were in a semicircle, a mumbling, grasping C shape that began to close in around him. Muddy thrusted forward, driving the tip of his spear into the Link closest to him— it was the corpse of a young man, a teenaged boy most likely, dressed in the tatters of a NASCAR shirt that draped down over soiled blue jeans. The link had no eyes and no nose left. From its hair line to its sneering upper lip was nothing but exposed skull, ripped flesh and rubbery cartilage dangling from the savage wound like corn husks caught on a wire fence.
Muddy's spear lodged itself in the Link's neck, just below its motionless Adam's apple. The brittle skin around the tip sunk in, turning the flesh there into a bloodless, sucking mouth. There was an audibly soggy pop as the spearhead exited the back of the Link's neck, slimed with dark brown blood that looked more like congealed tobacco spit. The Link's head rolled back on its shoulders, that same fluid now dribbling out of its mouth and staining its pale chin.
"Gahhhhhhh," it gurgled, its smile never faltering. Being impaled seemed to be orgasmic for it, even as whatever sinister force that powered it began to fade and it dropped to its knees. Muddy twisted his body and the spear ripped free, leaving a tunnel of meat and gristle through the thing's throat.
Behind Emmit shambled out the remains of a priest, still dressed in its flowing black robes. The tarnished crucifix hanging around its neck bounced and swayed with each of its shaky, uncertain footsteps. It struggled in the deep snow, lifting its legs high in the air as it moved as if it were in a marching band. Even over the dissonance of the building battle he could hear the joints and tendons popping and snapping like the branches around them.
The priest's milky eyes were fixed on Emmit, unblinking and unwavering. The flesh of its cheeks bunched and cracked as it grinned, impossibly wide. Goosebumps rippled up and down Emmit's back, the thin hairs swaying like seaweed on a riverbed.
"Sinnerrrrr," it said, reaching to embrace him. "Gunman."
Emmit stared at the dead thing's hooked hands coming toward his face, his own hands beginning to ache and protest from the cold and the force of his grip on the wooden handle of his club. The priest had no fingernails left; only the blackened, sunken quicks remained. They looked like ten crusted ink wells.
Emmit screamed. Not in fear this time, but rage; it was hot and primal, surging up from deep inside him like a rush of lava erupting from the jagged throat of a volcano. He swung the club around behind his back, bringing it up and over his head like a woodcutter preparing to split a log. He felt every small muscle in his body, from his stiff neck to his scrawny legs, tensing and pulling. He was about to give this undead fuck everything he had.
Emmit's aim couldn't have been better, even if he had been carefully aiming. The weighty end of the club crashed down like a controlled demolition and connected solidly with the top of the priest's skull, making a sound like two heavy rocks knocking together. The priest's head was obliterated instantly.
The top of its skull flattened out like a spent bullet, the brain and everything under its scalp splitting apart and flowering open into a visceral plateau. Both of the thing's eyes were forced from their sockets, hanging from deformed holes and jostling against its crumpled wax-paper cheeks. They swung like pendulums by wet tangles of nerves. Brain matter burst from the priest's ears, spewing out like steam from an angry cartoon character's ears and nearly bringing Emmit to the point of hysterical laughter. The priest looked like it was laughing about it too. Even as its knees folded beneath it and it collapsed into the snowdrift it had struggled so hard to navigate, the ceaseless smile remained.
A pair of Links immediately took its place, stepping carelessly into the soup that drained from the cranium of their fallen comrade.
My son, Emmit thought darkly. These things want to keep me from my son.
"My son!" He bellowed mindlessly, insane with a potent cocktail of fear and adrenaline and rage. He swung the club like a baseball bat. One of the Links, a bearded corpse whose stiff muscles bulged under the garb of a construction worker, took the brunt of the impact on its left forearm. The bones splintered at the elbow, bending the arm the wrong way into a perfect 90° angle break. The force of the impact sent it corkscrewing back into the foliage, its dulled orange safety vest flapping behind it. Emmit heard a small, breathless chuckle as it began the arduous climb back to its feet.
The club kept moving like a battering ram, spinning Emmit on his heels. It finally stopped when it connected with the face of another Link, the corpse of a morbidly obese woman in a floral sundress that had rotted and frayed to the point that the semisolid cottage cheese of its body was barely contained. Its gut skin was splitting open in long, football
