Caleb screamed as they descended on him. Teeth snapping at his clothes, throat, and stomach.
He tried to back crawl, but they held him down. He bellowed as an old man's jagged handful of teeth snapped into his arm.
A woman's head struck at the soft part of his stomach, ripped through his shirt, and tore his flesh—deep. An intestine jumped out of the wound in a short gray coil, and then it was in the woman's teeth, and she rose, stretching it, trying to rip it free. Another woman dove at the extended gut, and it snapped in half—the two of them tumbling over the desk in their frenzy to pull it from one another—like two ravenous blue jays squawking over a large, juicy worm.
Hands dipped into the wound, more guts were uncoiled, faces met Caleb's face, and chunks came out of his face and neck. After a moment, bathed in gore, his innards stretched all over the sheriffs office, Caleb finally ceased to scream.
Frozen with fear, Matt had backed into the cell and pulled the door shut. The Indian tied the strand with the ears on it around his neck, walked over, and put his face against the bars.
Matt let go with both barrels of the shotgun. The Indian's head jerked back a foot, then returned to stare through the bars. The shotgun pellets hit him just beneath the nose and down his chest. The little balls of lead dripped out of his flesh and rang on the floor. The Indian's laugh wasn't quite as loud as the slurping and sucking and chewing that was going on behind him.
The Indian took hold of the bars, and slowly, with a smile on his face, he began to bend the bars apart. He put his head through the space he had made and grinned at Matt.
Matt dropped the shotgun, pulled his revolver, and put the gun to his own head. He cocked back the hammer. Closed his eyes. And hesitated.
But just for a moment, then he pulled the trigger.
Matt's hand was snatched away, and the bullet slammed harmlessly into the back wall of the cell, and Matt, his eyes wide open, saw that the Indian was in the cell—holding the revolver's barrel—smiling at him.
The Indian snatched the revolver away. It clattered across the floor. The Indian opened his mouth. His teeth winked silver-white in the dim light made by the moon's beams struggling against the clouds and the rain, and the flickering lamp light.
The Indian's jaws opened wider, and wider. There was a snapping sound as they came unhinged like a snake's. A loud hissing sound came up from the Indian's throat, and the head snapped forward, engulfing Matt from chin to nose.
Matt screamed, and inside the great mouth it made the faintest of echoes as it rushed down the Indian's throat. There was a nauseating crunch as gouts of blood sprayed from either side of Matt's face.
The Indian, who had been leaning slightly forward, straightened his head, and as he did, he lifted Matt— kicking—off the floor. The Indian shook his head like a dog worrying a bone, and Matt flopped like a wet rag.
A last shake of the Indian's head, and Matt's face came off, and Matt splattered to the floor and slid until his head hit the far wall He was lying face up, and there was no face.
His forehead had collapsed, and his ears seemed perched on the edge of a precarious cliff, like inept climbers about to tumble in.
A ragged hunk of flesh poked out from beneath the Indian's big, sharp teeth, and with a quick gulping motion, it disappeared into the maw that was the man-thing's mouth. An instant later the Indian spat out a stream of Matt's teeth, like a sick man disgorging too many after-dinner mints.
The Indian turned his bloody face toward his followers and smiled to see that Caleb was standing up, guts dripping from his belly, the wound showing backbone in its wet depths as well as a gnawed rib.
Lifting his head to the ceiling, the Indian let forth a demonic howl that sent bloody spittle clear to the ceiling.
The defenders inside the church heard the howl, and for a brief time they stopped ripping up the pews, hammering them over the windows and doors, and listened.
Outside the zombies turned their heads in the direction of the howl as if it were a symphony, and this was the tune that they most wanted to hear.
The howl went on for a long time, and it seemed to the Reverend (paused with hammer in hand, a nail between his teeth, the other hand holding a fragment of pew bottom over a barred window) that it was both a cry of mourning and triumph.
This is how the defenders in the church prepared for the siege to come: They moved shotguns, rifles, and revolvers from the storage room, loaded them all, armed themselves with some, and placed the others down the pew rows, leaning them against or on the seats, ready to be grabbed up and used in an instant. The trick was to hold ground as long as possible, and if you had to back, you backed down that long aisle toward the storage room —the last stand—and there were weapons on either side of you as you went.
Breaking up the first few rows of pews, they used hammers and nails in a woodpecker frenzy to barricade the door and the windows, and as the zombies had not made another move toward the church, it had given them a good length of time to prepare properly.
Calhoun held a revolver in his hand. 'I've never used a gun in my life—I can't abide them.'
'Now's the time to learn,' the Reverend said. 'And learn to like them. They will be your most important companion shortly, I'm sure.'
The zombies stood near the windows, looking through the cracks in the slats nailed over them.
'What are they waiting for?' Calhoun asked no one in particular.
'Their master,' Doc said. 'His word.'
'Doc,' the Reverend said, 'if there's anything you can tell us that might help, now is the time.'
Doc found a pew to lean against. 'All right,' he said. 'I'm going to cut the details and tell this quick. I can't explain it, I'm just telling it. The Indian is a shaman, a magician. He put a curse on this town and accepted a demon into his body so that he might live after death and have revenge. The demon gives the Indian powers. This church will hold the zombies for a while, but not if he pushes them. And he will. The power of this church is uncomfortable to him, and he will send them to do his bidding. If they can't, then he himself will come. And the closer it gets to morning, the more likely he is to try himself.
When daylight comes, his powers wane. We can find him then and kill him, and there won't be much he can do against us. Sunlight is like poison to him.
'The zombies are like bees and he's like the queen of the hive. They are of one mind. HIS.
They can be stopped by destroying their brains. The Indian's magic only works on corpses in which the brain survives. I don't know how or why. No more than I know why some potions might call for a toad's eye or a black moth's wing. But that's the way it is. Shoot them in the head. Crack their skulls good. That's the way to stop them.'
'And the Indian?' David asked.
'Not the same. The demon controls his body and keeps him alive, no matter how worse for wear he becomes. The only way to stop him is with sunlight, or holy objects. But the person behind those objects must believe in them. If his faith falters, they'll fail.'
The Reverend put his arm around Abby's shoulders, 'You're sure about all this, Doc?'
'Hell no,' Doc said. 'You think I fight ghouls every day of the week? I read it in a goddamned book.' He paused. 'One other thing. This walking dead business—it's like a disease. One bites you, it's like being bit by a mad dog. Only worse—you become just like them. If you should get bit—I advise you to use the gun on yourself.'
II
The town was dead.
And the dead walked.
The Reverend, looking out through a crack in the wooden slats watched them. Once, in San Francisco, he had seen at least fifty rats leave a docked ship by a docking rope, and this reminded him of that time. Red, hungry eyes and all. The zombie that in life had been Millie Johnson appeared at a slit in the window and looked in at the Reverend. She licked her lips with a thick tongue. A stream of stringy snot dangled from her left nostril falling nearly to her left cheek. She moaned gently, as if the Reverend were a prize steak she coveted. Finally, she moved away to prowl about outside the church in search of a better way in, and when she moved, the Reverend saw the Indian.
