Resurrection (89 page)

“Chrissy,”
one of them said, a boy apparently, with a hissing sound like air leaking from a tire.
“We know you’re here. We can smell you.”

Chrissy felt nettles in her stomach, piercing and sharp. They knew she was hiding. Not that someone was hiding in general but her specifically. What did that mean? Jesus, what did that mean?

“Chrissy, Chrissy, Chrissy, come out and play,”
the voice said.

It was joined by another that came from a mouth filled with vomit:
“Chrissy, Chrissy, Chrissy. We can feel you…we can smell you
.
Are you playing hide-and-seek? Do you like games?”

Still more voices, all of them thick and oozing and awful, in unison now:
“Chrisssssseeeee…Chrisssssseeeee…Chrisssssseeeee…”

All of them were the voices of boys, wet and slopping, but boys all the same. What did that mean?

The terror that swept through her and settled into her was solid, physical, palpable. Her heart was hammering and her breath was coming in short, sharp bursts. Her skin felt so tight, she thought she would literally burst open. And inside, it felt like her stomach was pulling up into her chest, making her feel woozy and nauseous like she had when she was little and got car sick. Alona held onto her tightly. She would not let her go. And that was a good thing, because if she had Chrissy would have bolted right out the door and right into the waiting arms of those…monstrosities.

One of them was paused right outside the door, the one with the hissing voice that seemed barely audible above the buzzing of the flies.
“Chrissy pissy, you better come out. Grimshanks wants to play with you. He said we have to find you. We’re having a party for you. He wants to do to you what he did to us. Chrissy, tell me where you are.”

Then the vomit-voiced one:
“Chrissy, Chrissy, Chrissy…where is sweet little Chrissy? I can hear your heart beating.”

And then the others in unison again:
“Chrissseee…Chrisseee…CHRISSSSSEEEEE…CHRISSSSSEEEEE…”

She couldn’t take it anymore.

She simply could not.

She’d been through a lot and seen things she even now could not honestly believe, but this was beyond even the horror of that fucking clown. This was beyond anything her mind could contain and accept. Those hideous voices, wavering and eldritch and hissing…it was tearing her apart on the inside. Getting into her head and filling her brain with a suffocating, blind madness. She had to run. She had to do something. Even diving out that window and breaking bones below was better than listening to this insanity.

The door slammed open and hit the wall, chunks of plaster and chips of paint raining to the floor. Chrissy gasped. She could not help herself. She gasped and what was standing in the doorway heard her.

But what was it exactly?

A boy, yes, what had once been a boy. Twelve or thirteen, no more than that at the time of his death. He was naked, his torso dark with filth and dirt, caked leaves and fuzzy growths of some morbid fungi that seemed to flutter as he breathed. His hair was blonde and ratty, hanging over his face in greasy coils. You could not see more than that, because it was covered in hundreds of fat bluebottle flies crowding in to feed on what was beneath. He held his hands out like somebody playing blind man’s bluff, feeling in the air, looking for something to touch.

“I can smell you, Chrissy,”
he said in his hissing, windy voice.
“Grimshanks says we have to bring you back. Bring you back to play. You’ve been bad and he wants to play with you. It won’t be nice, Chrissy.”
He took a few steps into the room, searching with his hands.
“It won’t be very nice at all. But you won’t be alone. We’ll be with you. I’ll hold your hand, Chrissy, while he does those terrible things to you. I’ll hold it tight so you won’t be alone. Alone the way we were when he brought us into that cellar and did those awful things to us day after day before he slit our throats and buried us in the dirt.”

Chrissy made another sound and his head craned in her general direction. This was not a gasp, but a whining sound in her throat as she tried to suppress the scream that scratched to get out. But Chrissy knew now. She knew why they were all boys. Why they were naked.
Grimshanks’ victims.
Yes, these were the boys he had kidnapped and taken down into his basement to torture and violate as he himself was once tortured and violated.

Another boy stepped into the room, equally as filthy and rotting and flyblown. But his lower torso was clean and white. You could plainly see the black and jagged ruts from a knife where he had been disemboweled by the clown. And lower down…nothing. Grimshanks had emasculated him completely.

And now she knew why they weren’t zeroing in on them: they were blind.

All of them were blind as maybe she had suspected all along.

Both of them in the room had no eyes and the other three waiting outside the door had none either. Just black, mutilated pits where their eyes had been. They had not been removed carefully either, but gouged out savagely with something like a butcher knife that opened the sockets in hacked star-like shapes.

This was the one with the voice of vomit:
“Chrissy? Quit playing games! You’ll only make him angry!”
He sniffed the air with the maggoty channel where his nose had once been.
“She’s here…she’s close…I can smell her hot little cunt…”

“Find her…feel her out…she’s here…she’s here…”

The others outside the door were fly-covered, too, just buzzing husks, oozing with slime. They stood out there like Yuletide carolers, their ruined mouths whispering her name again and again:
“Chrissseee…Chrissseee…Chrissseee…”

They were all in the room now, moving about with outstretched hands. Flies lit off them and crawled up the walls, buzzed over Chrissy and Alona’s heads. They crawled over their arms and hands. One of them settled onto the tip of Chrissy’s nose, rubbing its forelegs together, seeming to be looking right into her eyes. The tickling of it was maddening.

“Chrissy, we can’t see you,”
hissing-voice said.
“Grimshanks cut out our eyes so we couldn’t watch what he did to us. He does not like to be watched. But he’ll let you watch when he starts cutting between your legs…”

29

This was the house of the dead.

That’s what the orphanage was.

As soon as Mitch and the others got through the front door and into the lobby, the dead came swarming out to meet them in numbers. The sun was poised to set and this is what brought them out, perhaps.

“Holy cock-knocking Christ,” Hubb said and it began.

The zombies were not stupid. They seemed to understand tactics of a sort. They could have leaped on Mitch and the others when they came through the front door, just took them violently there by surprise. But they did not. They waited until Mitch’s crew got into the lobby and then they came out, catching that little group in a pincer encirclement like soldiers surrounding and containing an enemy unit. They sealed the gaps. Mitch’s crew was right in the middle of a pack of them. They poured out of corridors and rooms, surrounded them, got behind them, too, so there was no escape out the door.

This is how it ended.

At least, the zombies thought so.

They came no closer, but held their ranks, ready to push in and crush the intruders. And what a motley crew they were. Yes, bloated and white and dripping, corpses from rivers and quarry deeps and bogs. Their faces were oozing and soft and pulpy, riven with worms and cloaked in flies. Some had eyes. Some barely had faces. They all seemed to be melting like wax figurines, ropes and runnels and threads of white and gray flesh hanging from their faces and hands and fingers. Red looping worms slid from eye sockets and hung from mouths and slithered from honeycombed breasts and swollen throats. That black juice ran from nostrils and lips and holes bored into puffy faces. Fat green leeches hung from the undersides of arms, pulsing and flaccid. Faces were furry with grave mold and spongy with decomposition. Every last bit of those creatures was infested and wriggling and moving.

“Give ‘em hell!” Hubb shouted and that’s how it began.

Mitch felt utterly useless with his Remington, being that he had no rock salt shells like the others. But he brought it up and worked the pump, punching holes through that advancing swarm of carrion. When his shells ran out, he started throwing salt and that did wonders.

But not like the rock salt shells.

Nothing could match the destruction those wrought. The impact of the salt was devastating. When it hit one of them, hundreds of salt pellets would drill right through those moist fungal hides and the zombies would let out a wailing, inhuman screech as they literally boiled and burned up from the inside out. And this within what seemed seconds. It was like an incendiary grenade had been detonated inside them.

The zombies poured forward and the defenders just kept shooting and shooting. The first wave fell into a writhing mass of putrescence, smoking and steaming and popping. But the others just came right over the top of them and with that many, there was just no way they could be held back. As the melting, hissing corpses on the floor piled up into a hip-deep charnel stew of worms and shuddering flesh and that repulsive stench of mass graves, the others clawed and leaped and crept forward and in such sheer numbers it quickly became pandemonium.

The defenders had to fall back and there was nothing to fall back to but into that stew of corpses and more vicious zombies. They needed time to reload, time to organize an effective front…but there was no such time. They had to retreat right through the dead and their lines were severed. But they were not beaten, because out came the road flares and the zombies did not like them.

Mitch had used up his bag of salt and had lost his rifle after successfully using it as a club to bash zombie heads. Now all he had was a flare. He shoved into the face of a dead thing, kicked another out of his way, effectively punching a hole through the zombie army and making it to the other side. Hubb Sadler was with him and Knucker. The flares were what got them through and kept the dead at arm’s length. They managed to get into one of the corridors where the fighting would be easier. Hardy James almost made it, but a throng of the dead engulfed him and he drowned beneath their numbers.

And Knucker, who was, in Hubb’s own words, “the toughest piece of ass-kicking broad this side of Annie fucking Oakley,” actually cried out and burst into tears as the sight of Hardy being buried alive in that carrion. She went down on one knee as the dead surged after them, reloading her 12 gauge with a sort of calm and care that was surprising. She might have been out in the woods come bird season. For she was no less careless, no more rushed, no less relaxed.

But she was not calm and she was not relaxed. Tears running from her eyes at the sight of her old friend and verbal combatant dying in such a horrible way, she was filled with zeal and rage and the need for payback.

And what she did next was suicidal.

“Knucker!” Hubb called out. “Get your fucking ass back here! Get back here!”

But she was beyond listening to him. Beyond listening to anyone but her own twisted rage. Hardy had been her friend. She had known him since he was a kid. And she did not take that sort of longevity and loyalty lightly. As Hubb and Mitch pulled back, she came forward to meet the grave herds. She started shooting, dropping them one by one, pushing them back until she reached the remains of her friend and by then she’d used every last round. She popped a road flare and jammed it into faces and throats and got a hand on Hardy’s ankle and dragged him back a good ten feet with two ghouls hanging off him before one of the dead, one of the Catholic school girls, leaped on her and vomited a gout of that black juice in her face that instantly blinded her, burning her and bringing her to her knees.

Mitch rushed in with Hubb’s shotgun and blasted five of them out of the way, ducking beneath sprays of that acidic black slime. He pulled Knucker away from the zombies and Hubb limped in to help, a road flare in each fist. They got Knucker away, even brought her shotgun back with them, but that was about all they could do for her because she was already dead. Mitch stripped her vest off her as the dead came for another assault.

Tommy and Deke were separated from the others. Deke threw salt until there was none left and Tommy pumped off round after round. The dead pushed them towards the stairs and by then, they had no idea if the others were even alive. The only thing that saved their bacon was that Hot Tamale was tossing a few of her gas bombs. They exploded against the walls and floors, spraying fire in every direction. This is what drove the dead back and allowed Tommy and Deke to make a not so orderly retreat up the stairs.

Yes, sheer pandemonium.

All over the orphanage, windows were breaking and doors being torn off hinges. Rain and wind blew in along with a foul stink of poisoned tidal pools and things rotting in gutters. Footsteps were heard. Dragging sounds. A raving and a shrieking and a whispering. Peals of disjointed laughter. The walls shook and mirrors shattered. The dead poured in from outside, from closets and cellars and hiding places in a shadowy throng bent on destruction and violence and murder. They were insane, all of them, driven into some wild feeding frenzy.