The Dead

stomach.

She tried to get back up. He raked her across the legs.

“Out!” he bellowed. “Out!”

In the scramble for the back door, Father Chuck tripped over the lashing limbs of the corpse on the floor, dropping his pistol. He managed to disentangle himself, but not before a hand ripped deep into his calf. Max had to help him up the stairs, out into the back yard.

Sounds of pursuit from within; was Ginger crippled after all?

They staggered away among the bungalows to the north. Bringing up the rear, Gary noticed Father Chuck was leaving a bloodtrail. The priest’s black pantleg clung to his leg, plastered against the shredded drysuit, shiny and sodden.

They paused. Father Chuck leaned against the side of a canary-yellow bungalow as Max took off his own belt and wrapped it above the priest’s wound, tightening it fiercely to choke off the blood-flow.

Steve and Gary stood guard. Gary had scooped Father Chuck’s.45 off the floor on the way out.

“Sorry,” Steve panted. “I thought she would’ve escaped already. But I buried her in solid concrete, and she must not have had enough lever-”

“Why’d you do it?” Gary broke in.

“Kill her?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it to you?” Steve asked, apparently puzzled that he was being pressed about such trivia.

Gary was stunned by his manner. If anything, it seemed more shocking than Steve’s crime. It was a few moments before Gary could speak.

“I mean, was it an accident?” he asked. “Was she cheating on you? Or was it just cold-blooded murder?”

Steve flashed him a smile. “Hey, you know me. What do you think?”

“Tell me,” Gary said.

“It was because of Sally,” Steve replied, after a pause. “Ginger found out about us. She wanted to cut me out of her money.”

“So you just killed her?”

“It wasn’t just that,” Steve went on, as if he’d left out some genuinely mitigating circumstance. “She started screwing someone else. A little tit for tat. ‘Sauce for the gander,’ she said. She was going to dump me over for him. But nobody walks out on me, Gary.”

Gary stared at him, dumbstruck. Steve returned the stare, still smiling. There wasn’t the least hint of guilt in his expression, or even a trace of insanity. He looked as he always did, handsome, good-natured, intelligent.

“Just imagine,” he went on. “The nerve of the bitch.”

Chapter 24: Max and Legion

Max had barely finished with Father Chuck’s leg when the shrieking started; one corpse by the sound of it, off to the south.

“Ginger, I bet,” Steve said. “Fucking Ginger.”

They started moving again.

Other shrieks answered from the east-dozens, maybe scores of voices, over by the boardwalk. The group shifted course, working northwestward.

Quickly they came up against the Mobley Canal, a narrow inlet opening the Barragansett to the ocean, forming the border between Brittany and Mobley Beach. Mobley was another bungalow town, its only tall building a Catholic church called St. Bonaventure’s, whose steeples towered over the surrounding rooftops.

The group headed west, paralleling the channel but staying one row of houses back from it, to avoid being spotted from the north.

“Got to hide,” Gary said, even as a new pack began to bay, off to the south.

“Not yet,” Max answered. “Have to get on the other side of the canal, at least. They’ll be all over this area, and they’ll search every one of these cheesebox bungalows.”

“But…”

“There’s a real sewer system over in Mobley. Our only hope is to get underground.”

Howls resounded from behind. Gary looked back along the narrow lane. It extended straight to the beachfront, and he could see a mob pouring in off the boardwalk.

They did the only thing they could-wind a path south and west through the grid of houses, trying to screen their movements.

But the dead to the south soon spotted them. From that point on, with pursuit from two sides, there was no way to keep out of sight…

Pressing northwest again, they suddenly found themselves on Rt. 35, the peninsula’s main street. On the right was the canal drawbridge, its southern approach guarded by three cadavers. The span was raised behind them.

The group dashed to the far side of the highway. Two of the guards started after them.

Gary dropped back. Clapping both hands to his pistol, he kneecapped the corpses. They went down like they’d tripped over a wire, legs jerking out from under.

He rushed to rejoin the others.

The bungalows on the west side of 35 weren’t laid out in a grid, but more haphazardly, divided by curving gravel roads, with a paved street here and there. Once more it became possible for the fugitives to lose themselves, if only briefly. As short as their lead was, Gary nearly missed them.

But the advantage evaporated when the belt on Father Chuck’s leg worked loose. The blood started again, and there was no time to re-tie the tourniquet.

“I say leave him,” Steve snarled. “He’s going to lead them right to us.”

“No,” Max answered.

“Well, suppose I just shoot the fucker?”

“Suppose we just shoot you?” Linda panted.

“Why don’t you volunteer, Father?” Steve asked as he ran alongside the priest. “Sacrifice yourself. Save us all.”

Father Chuck shook his head, not even looking at him.

“Don’t have the faith, huh?” Steve sneered.

“Why don’t you take off?” Gary demanded.

“And leave all this firepower? Not on your life.”

A chain-link fence appeared. Beyond were the white tanks of the Mobley fuel company, which had supplied diesel and gas to nearby marinas.

Gary shot the lock off a gate. They dashed across a gravel strip and in among the tanks. Behind them, the maze of summer homes echoed with screams.

They came out in a parking lot bordered on the far side by a spur of the inlet; lined with pilings, the channel reached southwestward to the bay. A raised pipeline, surmounted by a narrow catwalk, spanned the channel; the pipeline serviced the pumps and tanks of the Harrison Bay Marina, which was just across the canal. A gasoline truck stood in the lot between the fuel company’s tanks and the pipeline.

“Go on to the catwalk,” Max told the others. “I’m going to try and light off the tanks. Wait for me.”

Gary set his arm beneath Father Chuck’s shoulder, and they took off across the lot.

Max looked back between the fuel-tanks. The dead surged up to the chain-link fence and poured through the open gate.

He unslung his pack and took out one of his black-powder bombs-the weapon, along with a butane lighter, was in a big Ziploc bag. Opening the bag, he jammed the bomb in between the tank on his left and a tangle of pipe, ignited the fuse, and raced away, pack over one arm.