“What about sleep?” Mrs. MacAleer asked.
“It’ll have to wait till we find another hiding-place,” Max said. “We’ll sleep during the day, travel at night.”
When everyone was set, Max opened the door and stepped out. The streetlights were on, though they blinked from time to time. Passing through the burned hollies, the glow from the lamps threw a skein of shadows across the front yard.
“Why do you think they’re keeping the lights on?” Jamie MacAleer asked behind Max.
“The better to see us with,” Max answered.
“I’m surprised the power’s on at all,” Dennis said.
“Because of the fires?” Max asked as they went down the steps. “The lines here on the peninsula run underground. And most of the lamp poles are aluminum.”
Rounding the house, they headed south through the backyard. Climbing over the fence proved easy enough; crossing another yard, they found themselves at Hirsch St. There was no sign of danger, and they crossed, entering the wreckage on the far side.
But as they neared the next street, they heard an engine laboring, and took cover. Max peered through a broken window-pane. Belching blue smoke, a huge Cadillac hearse with mirrored windows rolled by, something dragging behind it. With a shock Max suddenly realized what the object roped to the bumper was: one of the large crucifixes from St. Paul’s, a dead German shepherd spread-eagled over the body of Christ. Max swore softly and crossed himself. He had always loved that crucifix, the most beautiful he’d ever seen in a parish church.
Once the hearse was out of sight, the group continued on its way, soon approaching Beichmann Avenue. Directly ahead, over hogbacks of dark debris, they could see the tall yellowish lights that surrounded a huge boardwalk parking lot, and could hear vehicles coughing and rattling off in that direction.
They moved closer and closer to the lot. Beyond the charred ridges, human screams tore the night; corpses shrieked in mocking answer.
“One party we want to pass up,” Max said, leading westward, thinking to round the parking-lot and cross Beichmann Avenue closer to the heart of town. But Dennis soon noticed five motionless sentries atop a mound of rubble a hundred yards or so distant, outlined against the glare of a battery of blue-white lights off by the train tracks.
“Think they’ve spotted us?” Dennis asked.
“Doubt it,” Max said.
“We could circle ‘em to the North.”
“Then we’d just have to cross Beichmann further west, right in the middle of town. Looks too damn well lit over that way. I think we’d better try to slip by the parking lot on the boardwalk side. The boardwalk lights were out.”
They headed east again through the desolation, back the way they’d come. Paralleling the parking lot two blocks north, they forged steadily toward the boardwalk.
The cough of engines had faded from the parking lot. The vehicles seemed to have moved west, back along Beichmann perhaps.
Yet now they came closer again. Headlights flashed over the ruins, shining on broken glass. Shadows from leaning spars swept crazily across the ashes.
Max could see a small fleet, cars and vans. He crouched, motioning the others down.
The vehicles juddered to a halt one street north, then vanished inside a drifting pall of smoke, headlights filling it with a cold amber glow. Doors thumped hollowly. When the smoke rolled past, fifteen or so silhouettes were moving inorganically over the no-man’s-land toward Max’s group.
Staying as low as possible, trying to keep as much wreckage between themselves and the corpses as they could, the fugitives hastened south, then east, coming very close to the fringe of the garishly lit parking lot.
Max glanced back. Even as he looked, he saw a flurry of shadowy motion in front of the corpses-it was hard to tell in the darkness, but it seemed as though two or three people had been flushed out, and the dead were running them swiftly to earth.
Suddenly the sounds of another pursuit broke out closer to hand; Max looked around to see several women, limned by the parking lot lights, dashing alongside a soot-splotched bungalow to the east. He and the others threw themselves flat in a small crater-like depression in a field of fallen bricks.
He raised his head slightly, just over the lip of the depression, watching as a group of corpses dashed after the women, caught two, and dragged them back toward the parking lot. The third woman vanished in darkness, three of the pursuers hard behind her.
Dennis crawled up beside him.
“What do you think?” Dennis whispered.
“That we should thank God for all those other survivors out there,” Max answered.
And ask His forgiveness for thanking him.
The group sat tight for some time.
“I’m going to take a look,” Max told Dennis.
“At what?”
“The lot.”
“Are you nuts?”
“I want to see how many of them are over there. We might have to circle back west after all. I won’t be long. Stay put here.”
Silently Max crawled out of the depression and across the bricks; snaking over frost-stiffened grass, he made his way slowly up onto the slope of scorched wood that blocked his view. Reaching the top, he peered out over the parking-lot. A low involuntary gasp passed his lips.
Except for lanes obviously intended for vehicles (there were several vans being unloaded even now), the lot was almost completely covered with bodies. Thousands of them. Every once in a while one would rise stiffly to its feet-whereupon several of the dozens of walking dead patrolling the lot would converge and escort it toward the band shell on the far side of the lot. From the arch of the band shell a dozen or more bodies swung head-down in the wind, lifeless and contorted.
Max scanned the stage with his binoculars. On it stood two corpses in state trooper uniforms. One was a squat simian figure, the other a giant, taller by at least a head. On either side of them stood inverted crosses.
The newly-risen dead were brought before the troopers, forced to kneel in front of the stage. Then they were beckoned onto the platform one at a time by the giant. There the summoned corpse would kneel once more; the giant would place its hand on the bowed head, as if in some sort of benediction; the kneeling corpse would go back down, another would be summoned. The corpses that had been blessed would then join a large group, some fifty or sixty strong, that had gathered at the western end of the lot.
Into the midst of this, two pickup-trucks drove, pulling up near the band shell. Gangs of corpses set immediately to unloading them. One truck was full of inanimate bodies, the other with live people, who were led onto the grass beside the stage and forced to the ground.
The troopers came down from the stage. The giant kneeled next to one of the living, plucked a gag from the man’s mouth. A wail of utter despair reached Max’s ears. The giant reached down into the earth, apparently grabbing a handful; then it silenced the man’s cry by thrusting the dirt into the gaping mouth. The man bucked and struggled, but the corpse holding him kept him pinned to the earth.
Max crept back to his companions.
“What are they doing over there?” Father Chuck whispered.
“Piling up bodies,” Max answered. “And delivering prisoners. I think I’ve seen their leader, too. He’s wearing a state trooper’s outfit. Must be six foot ten.” He paused. “Those women we saw must’ve made a break from the lot-”
Sounds of movement came from the rubble off to the east and Max and Dennis looked over the rim of the depression. Three corpses had the woman who’d evaded capture. Max thought he could hear her whimpering
