Dead Stop (4 page)

“Miss? I need
you to think? I need to know if you’re…you’re…” he held up his hands and shook
his head helplessly, trying to figure out how to finish the sentence.

The dead girl
started then stopped once more, obviously trying to reorient to the new
location of his voice. This time she only made a half hearted reach in his
direction before letting her arm fall limp at her side.

The gesture
contained a certain sense of defeat, as if she understood its futility.

“I want to help
you,” he swallowed, and moved sideways again as he spoke. “But I need some sign
you’re…you.”

She just stood
there, blindly turning to track his voice. No expression crossed her masklike
features, and he wondered if it were even possible for her face to show any
emotion she might have..

“Miss?”

He frowned as
the girl slowly started to shake her head.

“Miss? What are
you trying to do?”

He stopped
moving, trying to understand this new development. What was she doing? Could
she understand him after all?

The dead young
woman continued to shake her head in what appeared to be some form of denial.
Her hands flexed, curling and uncurling with small, sickening crackles of
disused joints. Strands of hair started to drift from her scalp as the shaking
began to increase in tempo.

“Miss?” he
stared in both dismay and concern. Was this emotion? Could she actually be
aware of her state, and suffering from the horror even worse than him?

She now shook
her head violently, her hair whipping about in a shedding black cloud that
settled about her. The force of the motion caused the bones in her neck to pop
and snap even louder, and the effort even threatened to upset her precarious
balance. The effect was somewhere between hysterical negation and an animal
shaking its head in distress.

Then she stopped
and buried her face into her hands.

“Aw hell,” Amos
groaned, both moved and repulsed by the obviously grief stricken figure.

This was
completely insane. Over the years, and even serving in two wars, Amos thought
he had seen the worst the world had to offer. But this was sick beyond belief.
He was as scared of death as any man, yet he could only wonder what kind of
loving God would ever allow something like this to happen to a human being?
Especially a young woman!

A second later,
he got his answer.

The dead girl’s
fingers tightened into bony claws and with one deliberate, downward motion, she
ripped her own face off.

The cracked,
grey skin tore with a gristly rip and slid off in a single rotten sheet,
revealing the stained skull underneath. Withered and blackened muscles twitched
like oily worms across the thing’s ghastly visage. Many no longer had a purpose
and writhed uselessly, the features they were intended to manipulate having
been removed. On the other hand, the jaw muscles were still attached and now
could move freely, causing the exposed mandible to work in a disturbingly
experimental chewing motion.

But even worse
were the eyes.

Shrunken lumps
set deep in black sockets, they now fixed on the old man with insane intensity.
Nothing even remotely human showed in those glaring orbs, and Amos came to the
sudden realization God had nothing to do with this. Not one little bit.

Its jaw gaped
open and the monstrosity lurched for him. Both of its claw-like hands now
extended towards him with ferocious intent. Amos stumbled backwards, caught off
guard by the sudden transformation, and the thing closed the space between them
in three swift, awkward steps. One of those raptor-like talons closed on his
bicep as he turned to run. Its grip was painful with surprising force.

Amos had just
enough time to realize he had been drastically wrong about this creature.

It wasn’t slow.

It wasn’t weak…

…and it was
hungry.

He screamed and
tried to flee as the dead woman pulled herself up on his back and sank her
teeth in the place where his neck joined his shoulder. Her weight on his back
overbalanced him, interfering with his ability to run, and the intense flare of
pain in his shoulder disoriented him. He could feel the yellowed teeth slice
into muscle. Its legs wrapped around him and its other arm now embraced him
from behind. The stricken man spun in desperate gyrations, attempting to throw
the stinking horror off him while it tried at the same time to shift its grip
from his arm to his head.

The two engaged
in a frenetic dance any antelope and leopard down through the ages would have
recognized.

In an adrenaline
laced burst, he rammed into a tree at an angle calculated to drag her off. The
impact was painful and jarring, but it nearly succeeded. The grasping hand fell
away, and white hot agony erupted as the monsters teeth tore free of his
shoulder…along with a mouthful of red dripping flesh. Amos cried out and spun
again in an effort to twist free of the remaining arm and make a run for the
tractor.

He almost made
it.

The dead woman’s
embrace started to slip, and he surged forward in the direction of the
gates…when another powerful grip closed around his ankle. The wounded man fell,
thrashing wildly to the ground.

He twisted and
looked down at his foot to discover it in the grasp of another corpse. This
one, for some unknown reason, was dragging itself along the ground. But it had
already solved its blindness problem as well, for another skeletal visage
grinned back up at him.  It’s freshly exposed skull leered at the man for
a horror prolonged second before turning and closing its jaws around his ankle.

Amos shrieked
anew as he felt bone splinter and snap under the pressure.

He tried to kick
free, but the pain and blood loss were starting to take their toll. A second
later the dead woman fell back upon him, hands clawing like iron talons. That’s
when Amos Godfrey finally understood he was going to die. But even worse, right
before her form blotted out the world he saw more forms lurching in his
direction from the shadows, some still dripping dirt from the graves they had
just vacated.

Other hands
grabbed his twisting body, and he gave one last wailing scream as more rotten
toothed mouths closed on various parts of his anatomy.

Then the woman’s
jaws found his throat and his pain came to a quick and merciful end.

Chapter
Two: Twilight

As the sun set,
now unseen behind the encroaching clouds, twilight fell over the Mazon County
Cemetery like a blanket.

A swift drop in
temperature heralded the leading edge of the storm as it moved in. The first
stirrings of wind began to whisper through the dry stalks of corn in the
surrounding fields. Along with it came the smell of rain.

Darkness formed
in pools beneath the trees at the rear of the graveyard, masking the carnage
from the attack of an hour earlier.

A dry flash of
lightning revealed the ground to be carpeted with crows. They covered the area
of Amos Godfrey’s demise like a large black amoeba, strutting and crowding
against each other, while picking at the blood covered grass and shreds of
flesh left behind.   Others filled the tree limbs overhead, and all
the nearby tombstones were crowned with their black bodies.

There hadn’t
been much left to go around.

 What had
once been the old caretaker now consisted of a large blood soaked patch of
earth strewn with gnawed bones and ragged bits of cloth. Only his feet remained
intact, tossed aside as they were protected by boots with laces far beyond the
feasters ability to fathom and untie.

The same flash
of lightning also revealedthe crows were not alone. The blackness under the
trees concealed figures standing still and silent in the approaching night.

No speech,
groans, or any other form of utterance issued from the motionless shapes. A
slight breeze picked up and stirred wisps of hair and strips of clothing
hanging from their desiccated frames, but otherwise they may as well have been
the statues posted over some of the older graves.

Their blank,
skullish visages faced whichever direction they had been when the bloody feast
had come to an end. No hint of purpose, or even the former ghoulish life,
showed in their eyes.

Then, as
twilight deepened…something changed.

To the east, a
light flickered, then came to life against the darkening horizon. It shone
bright and steady, an almost actinic white, just barely visible over the tall
rows of corn.

The darkness
under the trees filled with the beating of wings as their owners took flight to
the branches above. A brief chorus of harsh caws filled the murk, then the
birds fell silent to monitor further developments. One of their deathly
companions had stirred, and caution dictated they remain a safe distance. Now
they waited to see if it would happen again.

They didn’t have
long to wait.

Withered necks
twisted with the creak of old leather as the distant beacon trickled into the
empty awareness of the lurkers. Some of the forms shifted to allow themselves
to look in the same direction as their companions, ignoring the consternation
their movement caused amongst the crows. In about thirty seconds, more than
four dozen sets of black sockets and grinning jaws faced east.

A man with sharp
eyes could have discerned the light was a tall, illuminated sign. If he had
binoculars, he would have been able to read the word “TEXTRO,” and “Food,
Diesel, Gas,” in smaller letters underneath. It glowed like a bright beacon
against the evening sky, a little over a mile away.

These onlookers
understood none of that.

The light simply
drew their gaze as a new stimulus after the past hour of inaction. Their
reduced eyesight could make out no details of this phenomenon, only that it was
new and it shined bright in the gathering darkness.

Ruined synaptic
pathways sputtered and flickered.

Recognition started
to filter into the collective awareness.

This was light.

They didn’t
recognize it by name, or even as much of a concept. They simply understood it
as a brightness against the otherwise darkening landscape. But as they remained
fixed on it, one pair of sunken eyes…and then more…started to come to life with
another recognition as well.

This was light…

…and light meant
life.

Need.

Once more unholy
vitality sprang to being in the eyes of all the watchers, and they moved in
unison towards the east.

Some lurched,
some stumbled, and some even crawled as their legs had decayed at a greater
rate due to the realities of the preservation process. Embalming fluid is
injected into the veins at the neck, and in some it hadn’t spread as far into
the legs as it should. Yet this wasn’t the slow shuffle of the movies of yore.
They moved at a steady, inexorable rate varying from individual to individual.

It didn’t take
very long for them to make their way through the tombstones and across the
small cemetery. And it was there they came to their first obstacle. A low
chain-link fence surrounded the graveyard and separated it from the corn field.

At first they
simply walked up against it and stopped, temporarily confused by this new
development. They lined along its length and in some places piled up against
it. Then old patterns emerged and the bodies remembered other movements.

Gray hands
closed on the waist high top rail, and spines crackled as the motions of
climbing were attempted. Some merely leaned over the rail, resulting in them
falling into the field on the other side. Others caused the wire fencing to
shake and rattle as they clambered over with awkward fervor. In one place the
small barrier bent and collapsed under the pressure where a group had piled up
against it.

It was
ungraceful and clumsy, but the obstacle was overcome with the same silent
intensity characteristic of their attack earlier. And with the barrier behind
them, the grisly mob surged onwards. Withered forms plunged into the tall corn;
the dry brown stalks and leaves rustling like rain as they pushed their way
through.

At no time did
they lose their fixation on the light in the distance. The beacon drew them
onwards, their feral eyes now shining with need. Leathery hands flexed and
skeletal jaws parted as their owners strode down the dark rows toward their
distant destination.

Death was coming
to the Textro for dinner.

###

Twilight -
Rachel

Never
forget…any time you poison an animal to the point of unconsciousness, you are
taking a risk.

Rachel threw her
lab coat against the wall of her back office and swore as the words of her old
anesthesiology professor rose in her mind.

“That’s a great
line, Prof,” she snarled at the tile ceiling, “A real pithy truism! But it
doesn’t help me explain to kindly old Miss Tatum why her precious Prissy is
dead when all she came in for was to have her goddamned teeth cleaned!”

Realizing those
last few words had come out uncomfortably close to a screech, the young
veterinarian slumped into the padded chair, buried her face into her palm and
rubbed her temples with thumb and fingers.

She knew any
procedure involving anesthesia ran the risk, no matter how small, of this
happening. Sometimes the animal just doesn’t wake up. It could be because of an
unknown heart problem or a number of other hidden conditions making an
otherwise healthy appearing animal susceptible to death by anesthesia.

And sometimes
the cause is never known.

She had sent her
tech/receptionist, Arlene, home for the evening after all attempts to resuscitate
the cat had failed
.
Then Rachel had steeled
herself and dialed Miss Tatum’s number to deliver the bad news. She only got
the answering machine. Miss Tatum had probably gone to the same Knights of
Columbus dinner the Hollises had attended.