Resurrection (94 page)

What he had been all those years before, a nonentity named Edward Shears, had been pulled out in bleeding handfuls by those two deviant clowns that had forever blighted him, disemboweled his soul, and gutted his mind of all but an echo of who and what he was. But no matter. Anything that was left faded when he died. What was in him now, cremating and curling up like dead worms, were blasphemous and nameless things that had been waiting long and patient in ethereal mansions of cosmic depravity and anti-human degeneration. And at the moment of his death, Edward’s death, they had come out of crevices and dark spaces and shadowy graves of nonexistence, descending upon him, picking away at his carcass and filling themselves on all that he was and would never be again.

Like emotions, they were hot and cold, passionate and disinterested, predatory and calculating…but one thing they were not was compassionate or remotely human. They took what Grimshanks had been and multiplied it geometrically.

And now, they too, were dying…if things like them could really know death.

Disembodied, noxious spirits that had been born in seething pits of black mud and the screaming wastes of hell. They came as one, they came as a thousand…they were legion. And that’s the same way they left. Vomiting out of the clown’s skull in a pillar of black waste that became decay and then ash and then nothing.

“Here’s what it feels like, you stinking rotten piece of shit!” Tommy said and worked the pump on the 12 gauge and put two more rounds of rock salt into the remains of Grimshanks.

All that was left was a writhing, wormy pool of liquid flesh that bubbled and blistered, tried to fashion itself into hands and faces and forms that quickly melted away and drained off the yellowed skeleton below. It squirmed and flowed and wriggled, then it went up in a blaze of twisting greasy smoke and became a heap of bones blown by charnel ashes.

And that was how Grimshanks died.

And how Eddie Shears was finally set free.

37

It had been silent for a time and Mitch was not liking that.

Then, again, he wasn’t liking any of this.

Oh, it had been a good plan they’d had, in theory. Come up here, rescue Chrissy

if she was even alive

and get the hell out. And now that had all fallen apart. Chrissy was most likely dead and who knew about the rest? He’d heard some shooting earlier, so maybe Tommy was still alive, but then again, maybe not.

Now Mitch was trapped in this fucking classroom with Hubb Sadler who looked like he was just about down to his last breath. They had a couple shotguns, some road flares, about thirty rounds of rock salt and that was about it. Yes, there was reason to worry. And the greatest reason of all was the silence which was just overwhelming. It had stopped raining now. The wind wasn’t even blowing.

Nothing but that heavy, impossible silence.

Over in the corner, Hubb was breathing hard, his face lined and strained looking like maybe he’d already had a good heart attack and was expecting another. “Funny how life kicks you right in the nuts, eh, Mitch?” he said. “You ain’t got it tough enough, goddamn life kicks you right in the mother-humping rocks and says, how’s that feel you, you silly ass-fucking lump of goatshit? How you like them apples now that I’ve shoved ‘em up your ass?”

Mitch wasn’t even really paying attention. “Yeah,” was all he could manage.

He had his ear to the door, listening to the unnatural quiet out there. It was a smooth and almost liquid sort of silence that just did not sound right. But then…

“Wait,” he said. “Somebody’s coming.”

Hubb just grunted.

Footsteps. Several pairs of them were coming down the corridor. But they didn’t sound soggy and dragging like those of the dead things, they sounded oddly quick and light.

They paused outside the door.

Mitch barely breathed.

A fist pounded on the door and he brought up his shotgun.

Then a voice: “Mitch? Mitch, you in there?”

Tommy? Holy H. Jesus! Mitch pulled the lock open and as he did so, he was wondering if he’d just made a real big mistake. What if Tommy was one of
them
now? Wouldn’t that be a real ass-kicker? But the way Mitch was feeling, what did it matter? If Chrissy was dead and Tommy was one of the living dead, his world wasn’t worth a damn anyway.

Mitch pulled open the door and Tommy was standing there. His hat was gone. His raincoat missing. His shirt and pants were torn and filthy like he’d wiped out a barn with them. A real bad odor came off him. His face was peppered with red marks that might have been burns or bites. There had to be some kind of story there.

But at least he was still normal.

“C’mon already, get the hell outta the way so we can get in,” Tommy said.

We?

Oh yes, Tommy came in, smelling like he’d been dancing a jig at a morgue, and behind him…Deke and Chrissy.

Chrissy?

Oh yes,
Chrissy.

Dumbfounded, surprised, floored with happiness, Mitch just stood there while she came to him, melted into his arms. She fit right in there, felt perfect as she’d always felt perfect ever since she’d been a child. She was sobbing, shaking, and Mitch was, too. He could barely catch his breath. It had started yesterday morning…or was it afternoon?…when he’d gone out to look for her. When Lily had started to worry. And now…Christ, he could not even wrap his brain around what was happening.

“Are you okay, baby?” he finally managed.

“I am now,” she said.

“Me, too.”

They just stood there looking at each other and finally Chrissy wiped her eyes, said, “What about Mom?”

Mitch shook his head. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry…”

38

An hour later, things were still silent in the orphanage. They could still smell the odor of smoke, so they figured parts of the building were still burning. And if that fanned itself into a three-alarm blaze, there was going to be trouble. Real trouble. Because maybe they did not know where the legions of the dead were, but they were not kidding themselves that they had simply gone away. They were out there, somewhere. But for now, there was nothing but the five of them to do but wait.

And wait.

After Chrissy got over the initial shock of her mother’s death, there was plenty to say. Plenty of stories to be swapped. And listening to them, they all sounded equally as insane. Mitch knew he had Tommy to thank for Chrissy’s life. God willing, there’d be time later to thank him properly.

He was over at the row of windows now. All of them were boarded, but you could see easily enough between them.

“You better get over here,” Tommy said.

Mitch did. He peered out there. The rain had not started again. There were stars out in the sky and a huge full moon had risen over Witcham, turning night to a surreal, almost luminous sort of day. Mitch could see the grass out there, the road coming in. The trees behind. But he wasn’t paying much attention to any of that.

“Shit,” he said.

The dead were out there. And not just twenty or thirty, but
hundreds.
An immense wall of them standing out there waiting at the edge of the orphanage grounds. Mitch could see that their numbers went on and on, as far as he could see. The road leading through the woods was thick with them. They were all congregating here. Perhaps every last one of them.

Everyone was at the boarded windows now.

“What do they want?” Chrissy said. “Why are they just standing there?”

“They know we got to come out sooner or later,” Hubb said. “You smell that smoke, honey? Goddamn place is burning. Sooner or later, that fire is going to force us out.”

Mitch did not say anything.

There was nothing to say. The dead had vacated the orphanage for reasons known only to themselves. Now they were gathered out there in an army along with what must have been hundreds if not thousands of others, just waiting for the right moment. And that bothered him. Were they this organized? Or were they of some weird communal mind like on a science fiction movie? Or, and worse, had somebody managed to gather them together like this? A leader or something.

“What do you think?” Mitch finally said.

“I’d say we better make ready…I think they’re coming,” Tommy told him.

They were.

They were marching at the orphanage, moving slowly, not breaking ranks. And as the first wave neared, wave after wave after wave pushed in to take their places. And out front, interestingly enough, a single form leading the way.

“Who the hell’s that?” Deke said.

He was moving faster than the others and it wasn’t long before everyone in the classroom could see him just fine. He came within twenty feet of the building and stopped. Stopped dead.

Chrissy swallowed. “He…he was in the chapel.”

“Oh boy,” Tommy said. “You recognize that ugly face, Mitch?”

Mitch did and he didn’t. Who the hell was this? A tall man, almost regal in some way, dressed in a long black coat that might have been hide with a graying shroud beneath, soiled and dirty and set with spreading stains. His face was a leathery skull, the eyes huge, a brilliant yellow like alien moons. That face…yes, Mitch had seen it somewhere. Despite the apparent mummification, he had seen it somewhere before.

Yes, Fort Providence.

In that pit of slithering matter that Osbourne had shown them that had been grown from the finger bone of that German warlock. All those heads and faces rising from it and all of them looking exactly the same.

“Alardus Weerden,” he said.

“Who’s that?” Deke wanted to know.

But there was no time to explain any of it.

Weerden had something in his hand. A mask. He pulled it over his face. Yes, a death mask, stripped from a corpse. The scalp still intact with flowing black hair. Weerden did not move. He stayed put as the dead thronged forward like soldier ants, massing and malefic and creeping. Tommy ordered everyone away from those windows.

But Mitch did not move.

He was transfixed by what he was seeing. The dead. The walking dead of Witcham, grotesquely bloodless and rotting and infested by vermin. His eyes saw them, took them in, looking over that advancing charnel wall of death. Yes, inside he recoiled, but he was no less fascinated by what he was seeing. Skull faces and waxen faces and oozing faces and faces that moved on the bones beneath. Fishlike, blubbery mouths sucking in air and exhaling corpse gas. Fungous things and leprous things, mottled and perforated and leaking a black silt. They came forward with hands raised and fingers hooked. This was it. A human wave attack of the inhuman.

He pulled away just as the siege began.

They hit the outside of the orphanage with a great thud as if they thought they could walk right through walls. They were hissing and gibbering and making slobbering,
wet sounds.

“Here we go,” Tommy said.

Hands came through the windows, shattering what glass was left in them. Fingers snaked around boards, pulling and pulling. Fists hammered and voices screeched and shadows wavered. There were raving, insane shrieks, the sound of fingers and teeth tearing at the planks. There were five windows lining the outside wall of the classroom and they were alive, alive with pale hands wrenching and twisting and clawing. Skeletal hands and gray hands and white hands set with numerous dripping black sores. Some fingers were webbed together and some had flesh hanging from them in ribbons and others were throbbing with the motion of the worms that burrowed beneath their skins.

So many white and wriggling fingers that it looked like a nest of slinking maggots in busy, industrious action.

Boards broke, others were yanked free of the nails that held them.

Eyeless faces swam in, faces that were made of dozens of converging white sacs like the floats of jellyfish. Faces that were melted wax and writhing carpets of flesh. A white face that was speckled with mold leered at Mitch with oyster-gray eyes, gouts of black blood hanging from its mouth. Another pushed in next to it, this one like a watercolor painting that had run…everything oozing from the bone beneath in a fungoid mass threaded with red worms.

Mitch and others had fallen back, but now they came forward, not with their guns, but with roadflares. They popped the caps and brought the flames to bear on the evil dead. The flames ate into hands and blackened fingers and vaporized eyes, the room filling with a thick and oily smoke of cremated flesh.

But there were always more faces and more hands.

The dead were pressing in in vast numbers and the boards were all snapping, breaking free. Bloated and fleshy hands looked for something to grab. Scabrous faces screamed and howled. More and more faces all the time, most of them ruined and puffy from immersion in the water.

The flares were just not enough.

The shotguns came out now and the night turned into a thunderstorm of shrieking voices and booming guns. Triggers were jerked and pumps worked, the muzzle flashes blinding and the chamber explosions deafening in the confines of the classroom. It was a blazing, hammering, flashing storm of pyrotechnics.

And the dead felt the sting of the rock salt.

They began to dissolve and steam and sizzle, faces sliding from skulls and hands withering. They fell into slops of mucus and flesh and jittering bones. But more came and more after that and soon enough, they had made it into the classroom over the remains of the others.

It was war to the knife now.

39

Mitch dropped three zombies and battered at the face of a fourth. He saw one fall apart at his feet and keep moving, a creeping plexus of meat that dragged its bones behind it like it was trying to free itself of them. He hopped away from it and right into the arms of three others. They threw him down and he brought his shotgun up, blasting two of them away that almost comically smashed into each other as they began to burn, melting into one another and fusing together, falling in a skittering, slimy heap. Smoking and steaming, they tried to pull away from each other but were tangled in each other’s anatomies.