Resurrection (96 page)

Somebody screamed and Mitch was pretty sure it was himself.

Though they couldn’t see outside because it blocked the windows, they did not doubt its colossal bulk. For the walls were creaking as was the entire orphanage. That thing could maybe have swallowed it alive.

“What the fuck?” Tommy said.

As it came into the room, it fell over the worms and vacuumed them right up into its mass. Whatever it was, it would absorb and assimilate anything that it came into contact with. Anything of flesh and blood.

“It looks…it looks like that thing in the pit,” Mitch said. “At the base.”

And it did. That quivering mass of shapeless flesh that Osbourne had shown them. That massive undulating horror that they had grown from Weerden’s tissue. Perhaps it was that very thing, Mitch thought. When the dam broke, it probably flattened Fort Providence like everything else. The base would have been right in its path. The research compound there was probably stripped away and this horror was set loose, to devour and consume and engorge itself. Maybe this wasn’t that thing, but it was something pretty damn close.

“A fucking blastema,” Tommy said.

It poured into the classroom, massing in front of the windows. It did not flood forward and overwhelm Mitch and the others. Instead, it began to grow, to divide, to do something. White pulsing tendrils emerged from the mass and began snaking over the floor, up the walls, spreading over the ceiling like albino rootlets as seen via time-lapse photography. Yes, the walls, the ceiling, the floor was thick with them. But before any of those seeking growths reached Mitch and the others, something else happened. It looked like the thing was germinating. All those great pustules and lumps and cancerous looking mounds began to split open and out came…people. Or parts of them. Perfectly white hands erupted and clutched at the empty air. Arms came out, fingers wiggling at their ends. And then faces. A hundred faces, a thousand faces. So many albino faces that they crowded in for space. All of them were a ghastly white like the walking dead themselves. All were hairless. Most were fetal and unformed. None had eyes, just contorted, gasping mouths. And everyone of those mouths began to scream with the high, agonized wailing of the damned.

More limbs sprouted.

Not just faces now, but entire heads.

And then entire bodies, marble-white mockeries of men, women, children, even infants. They began to emerge from the central crawling mass, screeching and moaning, trying to pull themselves free with their hands. They were not just white, but perforated with tiny holes and grotesque nodules that popped and spilled that black blood. Their skins were set with a pale green and blue vein tracery. More of them sprouted all the time. Some growing from the bellies of the previous or sheering others asunder as they flowered with a moist, ripping sound.
Bodies divided into
two and three and four, single heads split into twos and threes with sprays of gray slime. Faces were overrun by other faces. Embryonic things like mutant babies emerged. Multi-headed things. Things with dozens of limbs. All of them connected to the central mass.

And all along the flowing, rippling mass of tissue, more things were born and more and more and more. A forest of reaching hands and thrashing limbs and sightless screaming faces.

It surged forward and Mitch pushed the others toward the doorway.

Better to face off against the dead than be absorbed by this hideous mutation, to be pulled in by those hands and feel those puckered mouths on your own. Tommy threw open the door, the sound of those screaming mouths just absolutely deafening. Mitch knew they would not escape. There was just no way. And out in the corridor, more of that surging tissue was rolling in their direction with a million faces.

Not worms and not water, but something else. A violent lashing storm as if the heavens had been split open and the orphanage and everything for miles around it was deluged in its blood. It poured and poured, hammering down so loudly that Mitch could not hear what Tommy was saying.

But then he didn’t have to.

He could smell what it was: the yellow rain. The same sharp, acrid stink that Tommy and he had smelled when the rain killed those cops outside the Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus.

Tommy jumped up and down. “VVK!” he shouted. “IT’S THE VVK!”

Deke and Chrissy had no idea what the hell he was talking about. They were dumbfounded and confused. Was this a good development or a bad one? Yes, they were stunned and horrified and just beside themselves, but mostly they were dumfounded. The smell was so bad, the air so thick with the pungent odor of that toxic chemical rain, that the lot of then could barely breathe. Their eyes watered and their stomachs heaved. Holding onto one another, they staggered away down the corridor.

But they could all see the effect the yellow rain had: the fleshy mass was retreating. It was pulling itself back outside and that was the very worst thing it could have done. It thrashed and pounded and rolled and surged, those voices screeching and then it was gone. Out into the rain.

Through the open front door of the orphanage, Mitch and Tommy and Deke and Chrissy saw it happen.

Saw the reign of the mutant dead come to a crashing end.

They couldn’t see what happened to the mass of tissue, but what happened to the dead was all too apparent. There were hundreds of them out there, from the bottom of the orphanage porch out into the courtyard and to the woods themselves, all lit in that phantasmal yellow illumination of the rain itself. They were all twisting and screaming and falling, contorting madly on the ground. Their skins scorched and blistered, ran like superheated wax, popping and sizzling, running from the polished white bone beneath. Eyes bleached and fell in. Flesh bubbled. Limbs curled up. An oily brown smoke rose into the night. And out there, for a few impossible moments like something from a Halloween cartoon, there were hundreds of skeletons dancing a grisly jig out in the rain, then they simply collapsed into a sea of bones and carrion.

And then nothing moved.

Nothing at all.

The rain faded to a drizzle and then ended.

One of the undead made it up the steps and fell to the cracked tiled floor. But only one. Weerden. He was blackened and blistered, squirming in his death throes like a dying, blackened worm. His hands clawed out, his mouth roared. Things like great whipping red tentacles rose from his remains and snapped at the air and then crumbled away. And then there was an eruption of that viscous black blood that pooled around him. Worms boiled out of his skeleton. Then a buzzing, whirling tornado of flies and beetles and roaches, thousands of them spinning in a frenzied cyclonic storm…and then they too fell into the smoking, steaming mass of corruption. Weerden’s flesh clung to his jerking skeleton and his skull rose up, screaming and then fell into the liquitious, bubbling stew of charnel waste.

He was dead.

They were all dead.

And outside, the sky was clear and the stars were out.

Everyone was speechless. Everyone but Tommy. He just whistled low in his throat and said, “Mother…
fucker.”

44

Dawn.

They didn’t dare go out until the sun came up and it was the finest, most perfect sunrise any of them had ever seen. It lit the world with golden light and they felt the warmth on their faces for the first time in God knows how long.

Deke kissed Chrissy.

Tommy kissed Chrissy.

Mitch kissed Chrissy.

Then Tommy grabbed him and planted a wet one on his cheek. “I love you, man,” he said.

“Knock it off,” Mitch said, giggling happily like a child.

Together they stepped out onto the porch.

Dear God.

For as far as the eye could see, the world was a great noxious ooze of putrescence and carrion and bones. A steam of gassy decomposition rising up from it. A livid carpet of rotting flesh. And birds. Hundreds and hundreds of birds. Gulls and vultures and buzzards and ravens. And flies, of course. All of Mother Nature’s carrion eaters had assembled and were hard at work.

“Do we have to walk through that?” Chrissy said.

“Yeah, Mitch, she’s got her new shoes on,” Tommy said.

Everyone laughed.

But they didn’t have to walk because they could hear the helicopters coming.

RESURRECTION

1

Witcham was a disaster area.

Even the governor declared it so.

And there was no doubt of that. It was a sea of mud and silt and bodies. Entire neighborhoods were gone. Buildings and homes washed away. Hillsides were missing. Structures that had stood a hundred and fifty years were pulverized. It took weeks and weeks for the water to drain away into the swollen Black River which spilled into the Great Lakes themselves. And when the water was finally gone, wreckage. A rawboned cadaver of a town washed by a few feeble streams of contaminated water and smeared with silt and run-off and tons of debris and refuse. The black mud that had been deposited over the city was five feet deep in places. Areas of the city were absolute bogs that would never dry up on their own. Homes that still stood were filled with mud and sewage and all manners of rotting garbage and detritus.

And above all, there were corpses.

Thousands and thousands of them in every possible state of decay. The media was all over that, but not CNN or ABC or NBC or even the underground press itself ever, ever mentioned that many of the bodies had been walking around as zombies. That was left out of every report and the people of Witcham, those glassy-eyed survivors whose heads were supplied with a lifetime of nightmares, never mentioned what they saw. As far as the world at large was concerned, Witcham had flooded through torrential rains and then the Black Lake Reservoir had burst its dam and devastated the city.

That was it.

D-Mort was brought in. D-Mort, the Disaster Mortuary Response Team. A branch of the federal government, they were responsible for cataloging the dead following airplane crashes and mass disasters of any kind. They came in force with a team of pathologists and coroners, forensic anthropologists and undertakers. It was nearly impossible, under the circumstances, to identify the cadavers and parts thereof they found. But they did their job and it took months. D-Mort are notoriously close-mouthed about what they have seen and what it is they do, and they were no less secretive about Witcham. They gathered up the dead and placed them in huge makeshift morgues and began the gruesome business of setting things to right. Many were reburied, but many were not. And whatever they learned and whatever they decided was unfit for traditional burial and what it was they shoveled into the mouths of incinerators, they never spoke of.

Many who’d lived through the horror of Witcham and many who returned, denied the lurid tales that made the rounds. Just as the traditional press did. Of all those who had survived the death of the city, none of them wished to discuss more than what was reported in the press.

But what they said in private was a different matter.

Lou Darin returned to the city and spent his years denying that anything other than an ordinary flood had taken the town. He was not alone. Many refused to believe what they had seen and what they had lived through. It was simply beyond belief.

Some had no choice but to believe.

Chuck Bittner was one of these.

It took him weeks and weeks to track down the apartment building where Mrs. Crowley had lived. The building was empty, of course. It was marked for demolition and had been for months before the flooding. He had to sneak inside. He had to see that flat where the old witch had lived. He had to prove to himself that such a place existed.

It did.

What he found were empty, dusty rooms that had not been lived in for years. But the layout was familiar, too familiar. Maybe the furniture was gone. All the cozy accoutrements that had baited in he and the other kids that night they’d escaped from that clown were missing, but there was no doubt in Chuck’s mind that he stood in the house of the child-eating witch.

And that was proved positive when he saw something scratched into the wall there. Names. The names of the children:

Brian Summers.

Tara Boyle.

Mark Tobin.

And beneath that, in the same gouged and spidery hand:

September 27

On this date I did et three children and found them pleasing

Chuck ran out of there then. It was just too much. All of it came rushing back into his head and as he ran from the building, he thought he heard the shrill cackling of the old witch following behind him.

2

For Mitch and Tommy and Deke and Chrissy, there were a lot of long nights trying to pull their lives together. Nothing would be the same again. But they accepted that. Tommy had had no family but his sister Bonnie and she had been out of town when the disaster struck. Mitch had lost his wife and Chrissy had lost her mother and all of her closest friends. Deke had lost his parents. No one who survived the blackness Witcham had been plunged into came out of it without loss, without scars and wounds and suffering. It was the nature of the beast. But for all of it, there was a beauty and a serenity to surviving. To being able to see the sun and smell clean air again. And mostly, to be dry and know that the dead were once again, just the dead.