Night of the Living Dead (30 page)

For unlike Harry, Helen did not find her sick little girl passed out under her borrowed sheets. She found Karen up and about, kneeling before the body of her father ...

... and eating his arm.

"Karen?" she whispered.

Karen’s eyes rolled toward her mother, and the hunk of meat from her father’s shoulder fell to the floor. She moved around on her knees and, with some tottering, climbed to her feet.

"Karen ..." Helen said again, her voice taking on a pleading tone. She moved to the side, desperate to unsee what she was seeing.

Karen moved toward her, her arms outstretched as if seeking a hug. But the hunger in her young eyes and the gore covering her mouth told another story.

"Poor baby," Helen choked, tears filling her eyes ... but she still backed away.

Karen advanced, showing no emotion beyond that need, that monstrous
hunger
.

"Baby ..." she said again. Then her foot caught against something, and she stumbled and fell.

As soon as she hit the floor, striking her head on the corner of something wooden and unyielding, Helen’s confusion sharpened into focus. What she was seeing was terrible, but she was no longer in denial of it.

As if to illustrate that point, Karen reached out and grabbed a dirty old trowel from the wall. Whatever had taken those things upstairs so long to figure out tools, Karen was apparently not experiencing the same delay — she grasped the little shovel’s handle in both hands and raised it high above her head, ready to strike, as she again advanced upon her mother.

Helen wanted to get up, to run away, but her body was in revolt. Instead she cowered, unable even to form words to beg for mercy, for her daughter to stop this.

Helen was unable to speak, but she found she could still scream. She screamed as Karen stood over her and brought the trowel down, plunging the grimy metal into her chest. She screamed as Karen withdrew the tool and struck again, and again, and again, splattering Helen’s blood across her face and onto the walls and all over Karen’s dress which Helen had made for her last Easter. She screamed until she could scream no more ...

... and still Karen brought the trowel down again, and again, and again.

Upstairs, Ben and Barbra were not fairing a great deal better. The dead were swarming over the front of the house, threatening to crash their way in through sheer weight of numbers. To make matters worse, the gaps in the window were now sufficient enough that Ben was in serious danger of getting
bitten
, forcing him to fall back, literally, so that he could regroup and approach the window from a safer angle. At least the window started at waist-height — if Ben failed here, those uncoordinated things would still have some difficulty getting through it more than one at a time. But if they lost the barricade at the front door ...

Barbra was more than making up for her hours of useless catatonia. She fought like a woman possessed, keeping pressure against the barricade in spite of the octopus of arms that grabbed at her, and slapping and pounding at those grasping hands wherever she could. "No! No!" she cried over and over, but it did not come out lost or defenseless. She was terrified to be sure, but there was also wrath in her tone — Ben would not have been surprised if
she
 had started biting at
them
.

But then the strength of her verbal denials began to slip. Against her best efforts, the loose door that Ben and Cooper had nailed across the entrance cracked and snapped as it was wrenched from its bonds. With one final "No!" from Barbra, it twisted free and fell, taking half of the smaller lumber with it. Once this barrier was gone, the front door itself gave up the ghost.

Then Barbra locked her gaze on one particular dead man and froze.

The first thing Barbra registered were those familiar driving gloves as a hand snaked in to close on the doorframe. Then she saw his face, still blood-streaked and now a sickly pallor. Her eyes bulged and she screamed so loud it overwhelmed everything else. "
NO! GET OUT!!!
"

Johnny did not listen. But then, he had never listened to his sister.

Barbra stared at him, praying,
pleading
for some spark of recognition. At any moment Johnny would remember her face, her voice, and go away. He wouldn’t hurt her — he had died
protecting
her!

Johnny stretched out that gloved hand, reaching for her.

"No," she implored him. "No!" Then, when his fingers clamped down on her collar just below her throat, she screamed, "
NO! JOHNNY, NO!
"

Ben saw it happening and, abandoning his own lost battle, rushed to help her.

"
No! No!
" Barbra cried as Johnny wrapped his arms around her. "
Help me!
" She beat at his shoulders, his neck, his face, all to no avail.

Ben reached for her, but her brother was already turning away, dragging her outside — for a moment, it stemmed the flow of the dead trying to get into the house, but that didn’t protect Ben from all those grasping hands as he tried to get to Barbra, to save her. He couldn’t fire the rifle, not at these close quarters, not without risking hitting her, so he used it as a club, tried to bash his way to her.

"Help me!" Barbra’s voice was getting weaker, little more than sobs now. "Oh, help me. Help me ..."

And Johnny carried her into the arms of the waiting dead.

Ben tried and tried, and nearly died himself for his efforts. They were pawing at his face now — he had to retreat or risk having his eyes scratched out. Many of them were distracted by the feast Barbra’s brother had brought out onto the porch, but there were plenty more to take their place.

Then the window gave way, and they were coming into the house through there as well.

Ben backed away, toward the cellar door — much as it burned to admit it, Cooper had been right all along. The house was lost.

He didn’t see Karen stalking up behind him, and when she grabbed his arm, she missed sinking her teeth into his wrist by mere inches. He grappled with the little girl as she clawed at his face, her dead eyes glistening in the dim light, her teeth gnashing and her gory, fetid breath wafting up to repulse him.

He finally dropped the rifle against the piano long enough to pick her up and throw her away from him — she landed halfway onto the sofa and wasted no time getting back to her feet and coming at him again.

Ben seized the rifle and backed into the cellar entrance, slamming the door before the dead little girl could reach him. She collided with the door and shoved at it, trying to get through to him, to finish what she started. Ben leaned against it, shoving into place the crossbars Tom and Cooper had assembled as fast as he could.

The dead funneled into the house through the door and window — their prey was no longer in sight, yet they were driven by inertia, looking all around, searching every which way for the flesh they craved, the warm meat.

One particular dead man, whom Barbra would have identified as the man from the cemetery, spotted the little girl, saw her pushing against the cellar door. Somewhere in the chaos, he had ended up with the table leg, Ben’s old torch, and as he knocked aside chairs crossing the room, he dragged it behind him. When he reached the cellar entrance, he heaved it over his shoulder and started slamming it against the door.

This drew the attention of many of the others, and soon the dead were bottlenecked at the cellar door, writhing and shoving and beating to get through. They were the embodiment of mob mentality: New dead men and women entered the house, saw the commotion, and joined in — some pounded the walls, or even each other, with their fists; others experimented with whatever tools were close at hand; one of them even started rocking the piano, slamming it against the wall.

The cellar door was quaking on its hinges as Ben slid crossbar after crossbar into place — hell, the entire wall was shaking! The door was as secure as he could possibly make it, and still it threatened to collapse.

Maybe
he
had been right all along, but not about staying in the cellar versus protecting the house. It was something he had said to Cooper, something flippant, when the little bulldog had described how those things would eventually show up by the hundreds — Ben had remarked, "Well, if there’re
that
 many, they’ll probably get us
wherever
we are."

That certainly looked to be the case now.

There was nothing more he could do — the door, the
wall,
would either stand or it wouldn’t. Holding a vigil at the top of the stairs would accomplish nothing, so he collected the rifle and climbed down the stairs.

Then he saw Harry Cooper, gazing with blank eyes up at the ceiling, his right arm a bloody stump. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that — he had, after all, shot the man himself — but he
was
troubled when he turned his head away only to find Helen Cooper lying near the far wall, a trowel sticking up from her butchered chest.

He had hated Cooper, but he had liked Helen. And now, just like all the others, here they both were in the much-vaunted cellar, dead.

Dead
.

That notion, and what it entailed, had only the briefest of moments to sink in for Ben ... and then Cooper was sitting up.

Ben stepped forward, cocked the rifle, took aim. Strangely, he found it
more
difficult to shoot the man now than when he had been alive upstairs. But in the end, that didn’t change anything. It had to be done.

Ben shot Cooper in the face. And then, for good measure, he shot him twice more.

He turned away, leaning against a pillar and pressing his forehead against his wrist. His adrenaline flow was slowing, and he found he was more exhausted than he had ever been in his whole life — his muscles quivered, his bones ached, his eyes stung ...

But he couldn’t rest. Not yet.

Straightening, he stared at Helen Cooper, still lying where he had first seen her.

Maybe it would be different with her. She was lying with the back of her head against a box — maybe she had damaged something when she had fallen, maybe her brain was already too ...

Helen’s eyes opened.

Ben cocked the rifle.

It had to be done.

So Ben shot the lovely woman in the head, shot her because she was dead and about to get up and eat him.

The tears which wracked his body were sudden and intense. Choking with sobs, Ben threw the rifle across the cellar, then assaulted the makeshift cot where Karen had died, knocking the blankets and door and sawhorses asunder. He stood in the middle of the room, covering his face, wishing it were over, wishing
he
were dead if that’s what it took to escape this nightmare ...