Resurrection (56 page)

Oates and Neiderhauser backed-up.

The zombies kept coming.

And then behind them, a half a dozen others came out of the shadows, ruined faces appraising the men with guns and seeing absolutely no reason not to lunch on them. One of them, a woman in a bathrobe, pointed at them and hissed, black syrup running from her mouth.

“Retreat,” Oates heard himself say.

Neiderhauser and he struggled through the water to the buildings. Behind them, the zombies came forward, moving slowly like they had all the time in the world and they probably did. When it came to eating people, you had to savor the anticipation and the hunt. They just came on, pale and grinning, eyes black and wet. A few of them made hissing sounds and one of them might have been humming. It was hard to say. They came after Oates and Neiderhauser like a spider came after the prey caught in its web…no malice or hatred, just mindless instinctual imperatives guiding them.

There was a narrow three-story flophouse hotel wedged in-between a take-out rib counter and a dry cleaning outfit. Neiderhauser went up the steps and out of the water. The door was open. Oates followed him inside and they threw the deadbolt on the door.

“Christ, what now?” Neiderhauser said.

Outside, they could hear the splashing sounds as the dead moved out of the water and up the steps. They stood outside the door bringing their smell with them

flat and toxic like stagnant ponds that had been poisoned out. Hands began to slap and knock at the door. Some of those hands made sounds like wet sponges.

“That’ll hold ‘em for awhile,” Oates said, trying to catch his breath.

It wasn’t the exertion, he knew that much. He stayed in shape and could outrun guys half his age. No, this was something else. Something that was taking him inch by inch and making him want to fold up. He was figuring it was fear, it was terror, and probably something beyond that, maybe hysteria wanting to set in. The dead walking. The dead walking. Oh my Christ, what the hell was this all about?

“Sarge?” Neiderhauser said.

Oates snapped out of it. No, he could not unravel. Not now. Not just yet. Maybe when he was safe in bed with Angela he could have a breakdown, but that was later. Much later. Now he had to get his feet under him. He had to think of Neiderhauser who would die quickly and horribly without him.

“I’m okay,” Oates said. “Just fucking age sneaking up on me.”

They panned their lights around, saw a sofa and a couple chairs, a TV set. A desk with keys hanging behind it. The place smelled old and mildewed. Much of that was the water, of course, but Oates was thinking this place hadn’t smelled real good to begin with. It was just a shitty little hole-in-the-wall hotel where they rented rooms by the hour, no doubt. The sort of place you took your secretary on your lunch hour to screw her or the neighbor’s wife, some eighteen-year old hooker you picked up. The place was dirty and smarmy and you could come here with your girl and violently fuck, do all those things you didn’t dare ask your wife to do.

“We should make for the roof,” Oates said. “It’s our best chance. We see a chopper come by, we can signal it with our lights.”

They moved past the desk, their lights bobbing, and to a little staircase around the corner. And that’s about as far as they got.

A girl was standing up on the fifth step.

Just a little ragged thing maybe six- or seven-years old with pigtails, dressed in the tattered remains of what almost looked like a party dress. But if it had been pink with a bow and sequins, now it was just drab and dirty. A shroud. Her face was swollen and gray, threaded with what might have been bits of lichen or fungi. Her eyes were colorless and gelid-looking, like they might pop if you poked them with a pin. She smiled down at them and black water ran from the corners of her mouth.

Neiderhauser made a gagging sound. The stink coming off of her was appalling, like dank river bottoms and rotting weeds.

“You better get the fuck out of my way,” Oates heard himself say, his voice sounding distant as if it belonged to someone else.

The girl’s smile deepened and she opened her mouth, dark clods of something like graveyard soil falling out and dropping to her feet. There was a black line of suturing at her throat and Oates figured she must have died violently, the coroner or undertaker having to sew her head back on. There was something in her hair, something busy and crawling. Ants. Large black ants were nesting in her hair and maybe in the skull beneath. They began to crawl down her face, eight or ten of them. A few more came up her neck out of her dress. She did not seem to notice.

Neiderhauser brought up his weapon, then brought it back down again. “I…I can’t do this shit, Sarge.” He turned away, sobbing. “I can’t do this.”

“Well, you better learn to.”

There was a pool of black water settling onto the fifth step where she stood, a little stream of it running like spilled ink down to the fourth and third. Though she was dead, she was breathing, her chest rising and falling, a clogged sound coming from her throat as if her lungs were full of fluid. And they probably were.

“Hey, mister,” she said in a bubbling, thick voice. “Have you seen my mommy? I’ve been looking for her, but she’s not anywhere.”

Oates felt the need to giggle neurotically. What the hell was this all about? Where the hell was it going to end? “Your mother’s dead, honey. Just like you. She’s dead.”

The smile faded some and was replaced by an almost confused look. That grayish pallor whitened, those eyes filled with a blackness. “That’s not very nice. Why don’t you be nice? Don’t you
want
to be nice?”

Oates was just staring at her, thinking that this little thing had died young and would never really, truly age another day. There was something infinitely horrifying about that. She would always be like this until the meat dropped from her bones. A little corpse-white thing filled with ants forever looking for her mother.

“You should be nice,” the girl said. “Angela is always nice.”

Oates felt something shatter inside him. He wanted to scream and rage or maybe just cry, drop to his knees and bawl like he hadn’t since he was twelve and found his dog crushed on the road, panting out its last pathetic breaths. He stared at that little girl and she stared back and it was funny…funny but she didn’t smell like a waterlogged corpse now and her skin was pink and her eyes clear and green. There was no morbid growth on her face. She was eight-years old. Just eight-years old. And that was disturbing because Angela had had a miscarriage eight years before and this could have been his daughter. She even looked like Angela around the jawline and mouth.

“Sarge…” Neiderhauser said.

Oates ignored him. He didn’t know and couldn’t know. The girl started coming down the steps and her dress was pretty and bright. She smelled of peaches and warm August fields. Her hands came out and she wanted Oates to hold her and he wanted that, too. He was going to go to her. He wanted nothing more. And at the last possible moment, he saw she was drooling and that her teeth were gray and crumbling


Then Neiderhauser grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back. He’d actually been up on the second step and he did not remember doing so. He missed the landing and fell on his ass.

“Why don’t you be nice?” the girl said. “Angela’s always nice. She’s very nice to other men when you’re gone. She likes them to shove their dicks in her. She likes it when she has one in her cunt and one in her ass and one in her

”

“Shut up!” Oates said. “You shut the hell up!”

And that little girl he’d almost touched started to laugh. As she did so, black water ran from her mouth. Ants crawled out of her hair and out of her nostrils and her laughter became booming and male in timber.
“You stupid cockless little fuck,”
that deep baritone said.
“Don’t you think I know you? Don’t you think I know all about you?”

Oates was shaking his head violently side to side. “You don’t know me, you don’t know anything!”

That laughter again. The girl opened her mouth wide, wriggling things and black silt raining out. She put first her fingers and then her whole hand into her mouth, sliding it down into her throat. Then she withdrew it inch by inch and she had a crucifix in her fingers, a dirty chain coming out of her mouth link by link.
“Your mother was buried with this!”
the thing said to him.
“I know all about you, Henry Oates! I know that your mother died giving birth to you and she was happy when death took her, because she was tired of that farm and tired of raising you little brats while your father beat on her! I know that your first handjob was from your older sister Lynn! But why not? For it ran in the family! Your grandfather got drunk every Thursday at the Legion Hall and when he got home, he raped your mother! He did it every week until she was fifteen! You didn’t know that? You didn’t know that she bore him two children that died at birth just as you should have? No, you didn’t know, just like you didn’t know that Angela is getting fucked right now! That she’s taking it up the ass and squealing and begging for more! Ask her about it! Ask her about the pictures of her and that other girl out on the internet! Ask her!”

Oates let out a scream, jumped to his feet and opened up on that little girl on full auto. The bullets punched into her and she exploded like a jellyfish in spray of slime and black blood and gray tissue. She burst and splashed them with her filth. Then there was nothing but bones on the stairs and a skull bouncing its way down.

Oates fell to the floor, his head filled with a screeching white noise.

And from somewhere very far away, he could hear Neiderhauser talking to him, yelling at him, trying to make contact. But there was no contact because the lines were down and what coherence was left in Oates by that point told him that those lines probably would never come up again. At least that’s what he thought, but he underestimated the resiliency of the human mind and its innate gift for reorienting itself to new circumstances. It got shaken for a time, but it overcame.

Neiderhauser was sitting on the floor with him, his eyes looking like holes somebody had drilled into his face. Oates had seen guys in the war aging rapidly because of what they saw, but he’d never seen a face like that before.

“What that thing said…did you hear what it said?” Oates mumbled.

“It said for you to be nice, that’s all it said.”

“Nothing else?”

Neiderhauser shook his head.

Jesus, it had all been in his mind then. But he didn’t believe for one minute he’d imagined any of it. That thing had told him those awful truths, it knew things it could not possibly know, only it hadn’t said them out loud. Just in his head. Or maybe he was just crazy.

But that was okay, because they were both crazy now. Crazies in a crazy city. It almost made sense.

Getting up, Oates said, “C’mon, let’s make that roof.”

8

Harry Teal kept hoping he was going to wake up and it would be like one of those movies where they say, oh, it was only a dream. That’s all it was. He was hoping he would wake up from some fever he’d picked up handling the stiffs out in the mortuary maybe. Wake up in his cell with the hacks banging on the bars with their sticks. But he knew it wasn’t going to happen; it was all true. He
had
been out in the prison cemetery with the others, digging up all those muddy graves, and he
had
seen the dead rise and he
had
hid in the mortuary with Jacky Kripp and the others. It was all true. Ugly and brutal and just impossible, but it was true, all right.

“I got plans, Harry,” Jacky Kripp said. “And I’m counting on you to be with me. Are you with me? Are you part of what I am?”

“Sure, sure.”

“No, I mean are you
really
with me?”

Harry told him that he’d been with him since his first week at Slayhoke and that hadn’t changed. Of course, it
had
changed, now that they were free, but that wasn’t something you told Jacky Kripp. He liked killing people too much.

It was just the two of them now.

When the dead assaulted the prison and utter pandemonium broke out, they’d waited it out in the mortuary. Then, on Jacky’s orders, they’d made a break for it, got a truck and drove right through the front gates. No problem. There was no one in the towers. All the guards were dead and being eaten. They lost Mo Borden, though. Big, ugly Mo. He’d held off the zombies while they got in the truck. Mo could have killed any man at Slayhoke, taken on two or three at a time, but he wasn’t up to the living dead. And when a dozen of them fell on him, he was buried alive. When they hit Witcham, Roland Smythe ran off and they never saw him again.

“Ain’t that just the way with guys like that?” Jacky Kripp said. “You do ‘em good, you hand feed those motherfuckers and take ‘em under your wing, soon as they learn to fly, they take off. It don’t surprise me none. Roland weren’t nothing but a fucking jig.”

“I thought he was your friend?”

“Yeah, so what? A jig’s a jig, right? Fuckers turn on you soon as they can. I run into that prick again, you know what I’m gonna do to him?”

Harry sighed. “Kill him?”

“Kill him?” Kripp thought that was funny. “You watch too much TV, Harry. You guys always think people like me go around killing. Not so. See, what I’d do is break that fucker’s kneecaps with a baseball bat and then I’d shove the big end up his ass, leave it there. Then that black prick would just
wish
he was dead.”